Why Did David Lewis Rice Kill the Goldmarks?
It didn’t take long for police to identify and arrest Rice. He had written various confessions, most notably one he’d left on the coffee table of Robert Omar Brown, an area man with whom he was crashing. Brown reported the note to the police.
Kenneth Muscatel, a forensic psychologist who was hired by Rice’s defense attorney to evaluate Rice for a potential “not guilty by reason of insanity” defense, says that Rice was “sincere” but that “he felt that what he did was justified.”
According to Muscatel, that’s because Rice believed that the Goldmarks were Jewish and communist, though they were neither. (Charles had some Jewish ancestry, but the family did not identify as Jewish.) He further believed that, following the murders, he would “put together survivalist gear, and go into the woods to fight the communists when they invaded.”
“He did not express great grief,” Muscatel tells A&E Crime + Investigation, “but he expressed regret.”
Much of Rice’s beliefs were born from pamphlet literature distributed by the Duck Club, an extremist right-wing group that met in the Seattle area, Muscatel says.
To be legally insane, “you have to be unable to understand the wrongfulness of your conduct,” Muscatel explains. In his evaluation of Rice, Muscatel says he had “a schizoid magical thinking element to his thinking” that made him more susceptible to taking extreme political rhetoric literally.
Although Rice did not have a “long ramping up of violent behavior” towards others, he did have a troubled childhood—losing most of the vision in his right eye after running through a glass window at the age of 4, then attempting to hang himself to death at the age of 10 following a tiff with his older brother.
“He was hungry for community,” Muscatel says, adding that Rice, a loner, was “probably of average intellectual capacity.”
One of the reasons Muscatel did not support an insanity defense was because of the defendant’s willingness to kill the children, who—even in the fantastical narrative Rice believed in—would have been guilty of nothing more than witnessing the double homicide Rice was perpetrating against their parents.
At trial, one of Rice’s acquaintances testified that the defendant believed the United States was controlled by a group of Jewish elites who were subverting the nation’s interests.
Unexpectedly, Muscatel says Rice was offended by press reports suggesting the crime was driven by antisemitism, calling it a mischaracterization, although Rice himself spoke directly to reporters about his animus toward Jews.
What Was the Penalty for the Murders?
Rice was convicted of four counts of aggravated first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death, a rarity in Washington State, which had not executed anyone in over 20 years.
Muscatel says he was saddened when the death penalty was announced, sharing that he was “concerned about the quality of his defense.”
In 1995, Rice’s death penalty was overturned by a federal appeals court on the grounds that he had been absent at the time that the penalty was announced by the jury, following an unsuccessful suicide attempt in which he swallowed several cigarette packs ground up in hot water.
As reported in the Spokesman-Review, the court ruled 2-1 that Rice had been entitled to be present when the jury was polled and decided on his death sentence because, according to Judge Edward Leavy, “Each juror would have to look Rice in the eye and reaffirm his or her jury-room vote by declaring in open court that Rice did not deserve to live.”
Muscatel believes that the new sentence is “appropriate,” saying “the death penalty wasn’t intended for a guy this mentally impaired.”
