On 19th August 1989, 28 year old Daniel Rakowitz murdered his 26 year old girlfriend and flatmate Monika Beerle, a dance student, in New York City. They had apparently had an argument which led to Beerle demanding he left the apartment, to which he retaliated by hitting her forcefully in the throat with a blunt object. The trauma to her trachea ultimately led to death shortly afterwards. However, far from feeling remorseful for his actions, Rakowitz proceeded to dismember and cannibalise her deceased body. He later boasted to a friend that he had boiled her head and made soup with her brain, adding that it “tasted pretty good”. He had also apparently handed out the remnants of this soup to the homeless.

Cult of Rage

news report on Missing Foundation (1988)

Max's saga originated when the dancer, a Swiss native named Monika Beerle, made the mistake of bedding down with a 28-year-old screwball named Daniel Rakowitz in his East Ninth Street apartment.  Then, after she succeeded in getting her own name on the lease, she compounded her mistake by trying to kick this sickoid out of his pad and out of her life.  This was in August of 1989 and Rakowitz took great offense, to say the least.  A mental case who already had served four hitches in psycho wards, Rakowitz believed himself some kind of supernatural divinity and---abracadabra!---Monika ended up in the human food chain.  Rakowitz is now day-dreaming about receiving an early release from the loony bin after a jury found him too nutty to be squirreled away in the clink.  The jury kept voting 11 to 1 to send Rakowitz up the river for from 25 years to life, but the lone holdout on the panel was an unemployed member who wanted to keep the jury deadlocked for as long as possible because he needed the $15 that jurors got paid every day.

Impetigo - Defiling The Grave

1992. Horror of the Zombies

is it soup yet? // macabre

The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park

Notes on Daniel Rakowitz and a murder in NYC's late 1980s hardcore/punk scene.

Last weekend I learned about the story of Daniel Rakowitz, an eccentric well-known in the East Village in the early 1980s as a marijuana dealer and for the pet rooster that often accompanied him around town. He called himself "The New Lord" and founded his own religion called the Church of 966 (which, from what I gather, preached Satanism). Rakowitz came to my attention after his photograph appeared on The New York Hardcore Chronicles with the caption: "The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park."

Daniel Rakowitz was born in 1960 in the little town of Rockport, Texas, Rakowitz evidently showed signs of mental illness quite early, and was given psychiatric care and medication even as a pre-teen. He came to New York sometime around 1985 and quickly established his reputation.

On August 19, 1989, Rakowitz had murdered his roommate, Monica Beerle, a Swiss dancer and student, and, over the next several weeks, dissected and boiled her remains in the kitchen of their apartment at 700 East 9th Street.

A friend of his actually walked in while Beerle's head was in a pot on the stove but did not notify the police. "I didn't want to hurt him anymore," she explained. Rakowitz put Beerle's skull and bones in a plastic pail that he deposited in a locker at the Port Authority bus station.

Monica Beerle, who was studying at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance, had moved in with Rakowitz only out of a desperate need for an apartment. She had lived with him for only 16 days.

Rakowitz then bragged about the killing to the crowd of regulars in the Park, but he was known to be so demented that nobody took him seriously. "I killed her and boiled her head," he told a friend, "Then I made soup out of her brains. It tasted pretty good." Some, however grew a little queasy when they recalled the soup that he had not long before brought into the Park and ladled out to the homeless. (It is unknown if Rakowitz actually turned his victim into stew).

Police eventually got word of rumors of the homicide, picked him up, and received a tangled, bizarre confession filled with talk of Satanism, animal sacrifice, and the new religion that Rakowitz had started.

In a later interview he said, "I'm the new Lord, and I will take leadership of the satanic cultists to make sure they do everything that has to be done to destroy all those people who do disagree with my church. And I'm going to be the youngest person elected to the U.S. presidency."