Without Mercy: The Shocking True Story of a Doctor Who Murdered by Keith Ablow

Author:Keith Ablow [Ablow, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non fiction, True Crime
ISBN: 9780312957360
Amazon: 031295736X
Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Published: 2006-08-02T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER18

In another effort to establish that Kappler was a warm and decent family man besieged by a destructive illness, Jonathan Shapiro called Jack Kappler to the stand next. Jack was short and wiry and bore a striking resemblance to his father. He was nineteen at the time and a sophomore at New York University.

“Jack is very tense,” his former roommate Stephen Feiven told me. “If you touch him, he’s hard. You can feel the energy going through him.” He recalled that Jack had never put any posters on the walls of his room at college because he had never found anything he considered perfect.

“[His] real name is John,” Feiven said. “He changed his name to break away.”

Shapiro’s tone was kind, even fatherly, as he questioned Jack, but the answers he got sometimes sounded mechanical.

“Are you related to the family of John Kappler?” Shapiro asked.

“Yes, I am,” Kappler responded.

“What is that relationship?”

“I am the son,” Kappler said flatly, in a peculiar turnof phrase, offered without emotion, that objectified his connection with his father. He could have said, He is my father, or I am his son.

Shapiro had Jack recount how he had searched for his father, found him in the New York Hospital emergency room, and then been attacked by him.

“Well, I was—there were two benches in the room, he was sitting on one, I was sitting on the other,” Jack recalled. “And I was, you know, talking to talk, not to say anything in particular, he wasn’t listening anyway; and he jumped up, and he shouted, you know, ‘Okay, okay’— he had been quivering and shaking for awhile—and he jumped up and said, ‘Okay, okay,’ and he jumped at me, with his hands outstretched at my neck I backed up and leaned my feet in the air, and I started to kick him in the solar plexus ... over and over again, and he still kept coming at me.”

“Did he say anything?” Shapiro asked.

“No.”

“Did you see his face?”

“Yes.”

“Describe the appearance of his face.”

“He was just blank,” Kappler responded. “There was no expression at all. He just—it was blank.”

Jack testified to having screamed for help and having watched his father restrained by security guards.

The story was a dramatic one, and it illustrated how bizarre—how crazy—John Kappler’s behavior seemed to his son that April night. But on cross-examination, in a this-doesn’t-add-up tone, Marcy Jackson raised questions about whether Kappler was truly out of control. “Now, you saw your father, and he wasn’t in any sort of physical restraint when you saw him in the clinic at that time, is that correct?” she asked.

“No,” Jack responded. “No, he wasn’t.”

“And you were able to go up to him and sit him down, and talk to him about what had happened, and where he had been, isn’t that correct?”

“Yes....”

“And he said he hit those people on the path point?” Jackson asked.

“No,” Jack said. “Not in those exact words.”

“Words to that effect, sir?”

Judge Barton cautioned her not to ask the witness for opinions.

“He said voices ‘made me do it,’ “ Jack offered.

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