Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

     In the opinion of psychiatrist Charles A. deLeon, any adult who murders another person's child, except in connection with a kidnapping or acts of sexual perversion, must be psychotic. Dr. deLeon expressed this conclusion as an expert witness for the defense in the 1966 trial of housewife Mariann K. Colby for the apparently motiveless killing of a neighbor's eight-year-old son, John Cremer Young Jr., in Shaker Heights, Ohio, an eastern suburb of Cleveland.
     Mrs. Colby had moved to the Cleveland area in 1952 with her husband Robert, a space engineer. Soon after their arrival, Mariann, then 27, formed a compulsive and unrequited attachment to an unmarried man. She called him many times on the telephone and was known to stalk him when he was on a date; she persuaded herself delusionally that the man returned her affection and she could not be shaken in this conviction even after he bluntly rejected her advances at a dinner party. Finally, her quarry could bear the persecution no longer and made an early morning telephone call to Robert Colby; he asked the complaisant husband to keep Mariann away from him, and Colby, well aware of his wife's infatuation, asked her to end the pursuit. Mariann promised to comply with his request, but in April 1963 she bought a sixty-year-old .32 caliber pistol and a box of fifty cartridges from a gun dealer in Medina, Ohio, providing a false name, "Mrs. Nancy Russell."
     In 1958, John and Nancy Young moved into a house on Warrington Road two doors away from the Colbys, and little Dane Colby became a playmate of the Youngs' son Cremer. Over the years the Youngs came to disapprove the two boys' spending so much time together. Dane Colby was a slow learner and Nancy Young found other faults: "[Dane] was always the aggressor, the boss. He talked a little more in a childish manner than the other boys. His walk was pigeon-toed, with quick steps in an effeminate manner." In the spring of 1964, Mariann Colby called Nancy Young to express belatedly her annoyance over being omitted from the guest list for the Youngs' previous Christmas party; she also resented Nancy's refusal to baby-sit for Dane. On a number of occasions Mariann slapped the Young children, adding to the tensions between the two families. Somehow Nancy Young was able to mollify her neighbor's anger to a certain extent, but Mariann was convinced that John Young "hated" her; perhaps she sensed that she had been rejected once again by a man down the street.
     At 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, August 24, 1965, Mariann Colby attempted to reach Nancy Young on the telephone. Nancy was laid up in bed with a foot injury so John Young took the call. Mariann told him that a child's 

jacket had been left at her house and that she thought it was Cremer's; her description seemed to match Cremer's favorite jacket, which he had picked out of a Sears Roebuck catalogue. John sent Cremer over to the Colbys shortly afterward, and when he did not return immediately he and Nancy assumed that their son had stayed to play with his friend Dane. When, however, several hours passed without Cremer reappearing, the Youngs became concerned. They called Mrs. Colby, who told them that Cremer had left her house some time before.
     About noon a college student walking his dogs in the suburb of Gates Mills, ten miles farther east, came upon the body of a boy lying in the woods. A camp label on his sneakers identified the victim as "Cremer the Lion". The Youngs' little son had been found.
     In early September, when suspicion focused on her, Mariann Colby gave the police and others conflicting versions of what had happened to Cremer Young. At first she claimed that her son Dane had accidentally shot Cremer when the two boys were at play. Tests of the obsolete weapon proved that Dane would not have had the strength to pull the trigger, which required about sixteen pounds of pressure. Confronted with this evidence, Mariann admitted that it was she who had fired the gun but maintained that the killing was accidental. She said that when Cremer was playing alone on her basement landing she gathered some clothing and at the same time picked up the gun (which she had unaccountably placed under the laundry) causing the pistol to fire. She was unable, however, to explain away the powder burns indicating that the gun was fired two inches from the back of Cremer's head.
     At trial before three judges empanelled after a jury was waived by Mrs. Colby, prosecutor George J. Moscarino, although unable to cite a rational motive for the killing, sought to overcome the preferred defense of insanity by forging a chain of evidence establishing that a clever criminal mind was at work; Moscarino sought to persuade the judges that the shooting was premeditated and that Mrs. Colby had cunningly attempted to conceal her guilt and lead the police investigation along false trails. Mrs. Colby, the prosecutor showed, had first loaded the revolver and then called the Young home about the jacket Cremer had left. The shooting must have occurred shortly after Cremer's arrival at the Colby house because a neighbor testified to having seen the Colbys' blue station wagon backing out of their driveway around 8:30 a.m.; moreover, Mrs. Colby had shot the boy at close range.
     To prevent incriminating bloodstains, she wrapped his body in a coat (later burnt) and placed a plastic cover in the station wagon. She drove to the wooded area in Gates Mills, where she carried the body for two hundred yards before depositing it in a secluded spot. Returning home, she selected a hiding place for the murder weapon that was worthy of 

Alfred Hitchcock; she concealed the gun in three pounds of ground beef that she stored in the bottom of a basement deep freeze. Moreover, after the murder she called the police several times to cast suspicion on neighbors.
     Contesting neither the killing by the defendant's hand nor the fact that it had been intentional, Mrs. Colby's attorney, Gerald S. Gold (who had served as Cleveland's public defender until entering the case), relied on the testimony of a clinical psychologist and two psychiatrists to confirm Mrs. Colby's legal insanity under Ohio's version of the M'Naghten Rules. The first expert, Dr. Lily Brunschwig, a clinical psychologist at Cleveland's University Hospitals, diagnosed Mrs. Colby as a paranoid schizophrenic. The witness described Mrs. Colby's sadistic interpretation of a Rorschach ink blot normally viewed as representing circus clowns or dogs: "I see two Scottie dogs; the foot and leg of one and the other are injured and bleeding. . . . Their noses are tied together with a rag, like some person did this deliberately to hurt them."
     The next witness, Dr. Arthur L. Rosenbaum, a psychiatrist at University Hospitals, opined that the defendant could not distinguish between right and wrong at the time of the shooting. He concluded that her homicidal tendencies were of long standing and that when she purchased the gun, she did so with the intention of killing the unmarried man who had rejected her advances.
     The state's final expert, psychiatrist Charles A. deLeon, pictured Mrs. Colby as aggressive, brutal and remorseless and suffering from a severe psychosis manifesting itself in confused thinking divorced from reality. Even the state's expert witnesses provided substantial support for a finding of legal insanity. Dr. David Sprague, of the psychiatric department at Lakewood Hospital, portrayed Mrs. Colby as a "borderline" person who swung between normal and psychotic behavior. He could not rule out the possibility that "disturbed thinking played a part in her [homicidal] act."
     In a tense and heavily guarded courtroom which had been cleared and searched following a telephoned threat that there would be a shooting in the event of a not-guilty verdict, presiding judge Donald F. Lybarger announced the court's decision: not guilty by reason of insanity. In the per curiam decision, the three judges attacked the right-and-wrong insanity test of the M'Naghten Rules for restricting judicial consideration to the effects of mental illness on cognitive or intellectual faculties.
     In his closing argument Mrs. Colby's counsel had argued that his client had "lost her battle not only in the court but against psychic disintegration." He continued: "No matter what the court does, Mrs. Colby will be in institutions for a long, long time." Counsel's prediction, however, 

proved to be inaccurate; after confinement in the Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane for about four years, Mrs. Colby was released. Since then she has vanished into an obscurity for which everyone is grateful.

* This article was previously published in 146 New Law Journal 1754, 1758 (Nov. 29, 1996).