"He Was Dead"

Abbott takes the stand

Defense Lawyer Ivan Fisher asked his client: "Did you place the knife in the chest of Richard Adan?"

Jack Henry Abbott, convict turned literary celebrity, answered: "Yes."

Silence fell over the Manhattan courtroom where Abbott is on trial on a charge of murdering Adan, 22, a waiter and an aspiring playwright, last July--a bare six weeks after Abbott had been released from prison on the urging of Novelist Norman Mailer. Not a cough sounded as Abbott, 37, gave some grisly details of the aftermath of the 5 a.m. stabbing outside the Bini-Bon restaurant where Adan had worked. Adan, Abbott related, "said, 'You didn't have to kill me.' He started going backward. From his face he looked like he was dead ... he kept walking backward on Fifth [Street]. I've never seen anyone dead walk that far." Then, said Abbott, Adan fell to the sidewalk and spilled "a river of blood."

The courtroom tension exploded a few minutes later. Under questioning by Fisher, Abbott testified that he had thought Adan was about to attack him with a knife. "It was a tragic misunderstanding," said Abbott, covering his eyes with a hand. From a front row of seats, Henry Howard, Adan's father-in-law, shouted: "You intended it, you scum! You scum, you useless piece of s---. You and Mailer and all the [other] creeps." The standing-room-only audience burst into applause, and court officials hustled Howard out of the courtroom. Fisher asked Judge Irving Lang to declare a mistrial. Lang promised a ruling Monday.

The trial has been as sensational as its background was bizarre. Abbott, who has spent 24 of his 37 years behind bars, was paroled from Utah State Prison last spring, after Mailer had arranged publication of Abbott's book, In the Belly of the Beast, a horrifying description of prison life, and offered him a job as a researcher. On the fatal July morning, Abbott was breakfasting at the Bini-Bon with two young women and asked Adan if he could use the restroom. Adan replied that it was for employees only, and the two began a quarrel that they went outside to settle.

Fisher at first told the jury that Adan had been stabbed--in an "accident"--with a knife that Adan had brought outside. But on the stand Abbott conceded that the lethal knife was his; indeed, he showed the jury how he had concealed it in the waistband of his jeans. He still insisted that he thought he saw Adan pull a knife and lunged self-protectively--but added that as Adan staggered backward after the stabbing, "that's when I saw there was nothing in his hand."

Wayne Larsen, who was walking past the Bini-Bon that morning, told the jury a different, and chilling, story of a quarrel between a "shorter figure" (Adan) and a "taller figure" (Abbott). Adan, he said, made what looked like "a conciliatory gesture," turned his back and walked away. Abbott flew after him, reached over his shoulder and stabbed with such "terrific velocity" that "the hair swung back on the taller figure's head." The sound of the knife thrust, said Larsen, "rings in my ears today." As Adan lay dying, Larsen said, the "taller figure" stood over him and taunted him "very sadistically."

If Judge Lang lets the trial continue, the jury can consider two verdicts besides acquittal: second-degree murder, which carries a sentence of 25 years to life, or manslaughter, for which the penalty is 8 1/2 to 25 years.

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