A Mother Trying to Help a Troubled Son
Patricia, a divorced 66-year-old language arts professor at Farmingdale State College, cared for Derek, who was 35 at the time of the murder-suicide, unemployed and had a history of mental illness.
Derek’s grandfather had died in August of 2013 and he took it hard, ending up in a psychiatric hospital for six weeks, Rev. Robert Lubrano, Patricia’s brother, told New York’s Daily News. “Whatever happened after my father died, it broke him," Lubrano said of his nephew.
Derek was too old to be covered by Patricia’s health insurance, so he was on Medicaid. They were having trouble locating a doctor specializing in mental health problems who would accept it.
Patricia eventually found a psychiatrist who agreed to see Derek for a 20-minute session in hopes that Derek would finally get a prescription he needed. The appointment was scheduled for October 30, two days after the killing.
Lubrano claimed that Derek had grown increasingly unstable and complained about hearing voices.
"We tried to convince her to go to police, but she was terrified of the police. She thought they might hurt him," Lubrano told the Daily News. "We never got a real diagnosis. We thought it was schizophrenia or depression."
The Killing and Beheading of Patricia Ward
As Halloween approached, people in Farmingdale began getting into the spirit. There was the home-based taxidermy business that its owner transformed into a decked out haunted site every year. Next to the Ward’s apartment complex was a house displayed with jack-o’-lanterns.
In the second floor apartment where Patricia lived with Derek, he stabbed his mother multiple times and decapitated her with a kitchen knife, CNN reported.
He then covered her body in a white sheet and dragged it down a flight of stairs, leaving a trail of blood behind, and took it through the building’s lobby. Derek dropped her body near a curb and kicked her head about 20 feet, Vice reported.
The New York Post reported that “some of the neighbors thought the headless body in the street was a Halloween prank, only to lift the lifeless body and discover it was real.”
After dumping the body, Derek walked to a nearby Long Island Rail Road station and jumped in front of an oncoming train, causing him to die.
Could Derek Ward Have Had Schizophrenia?
The fact that Derek complained of hearing voices can only mean one thing, clinical and forensic psychologist Barbara R. Kirwin tells A&E Crime + Investigation: “Schizophrenia. That’s the sine qua non. There is only one mental illness that has that aside from drug abuse."
Schizophrenic people suffer from what she calls “hyperarousal.”
“People [without schizophrenia] have the controls that they learn to say, 'I'm aroused now but I’m aroused through love, I’m aroused through fear,’" Kirwin says. "Schizophrenics can’t do that, so all of a sudden they get overstimulated for whatever the reason is and they can’t differentiate. It just comes out as overarching impulse and rage. And it generally gets deflected onto mommy.”
Matricide makes up about 1% of all homicides, and in cases with “a mentally ill defendant like Derek Ward, matricide is the preferred type of homicide,” Kirwin, who specializes in matricide and has served as an expert witness in court cases, says. “As rare as beheading is, I have had three matricide cases where sons beheaded the mother."
Uncovering the Cause for Derek Ward's Acts
Lubrano, Derek’s uncle, said “my nephew was not a bad person” and might not have killed his mother if he received effective mental health care.
“This is all about mental illness and the difficulty of getting a psychiatrist," Lubrano told the Daily News.
Kirwin says the sudden deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people was a major disruption to the well-being of those who needed help. PBS’s Frontline reported that the widespread use of antipsychotic medicine in 1955 led to more outpatient treatment versus hospitalization. By the 1980s, many mental institutions were shut down.
“If we really were serious about humanely protecting the mentally ill and protecting society from their symptoms, we would have reformed the mental hygiene movement. Instead we dump them all out on the street,” she says.
Kirwin adds that “mentally ill people murder at a much lower rate than ‘normal’ people, but when they murder, it’s a doozy and it gets all this coverage.”
“The public wants to have a beginning, a middle and an end,” Kirwin says. “They want to put a logic on it because it’s very frightening to think that there are people out there–our relatives, our neighbors, our children–that are capable of this."
Whatever Derek’s motivation was, the explanation died with him when he was hit by the eastbound Long Island Rail Road train.
