The Suspect

Parents all over the U.S. one night last week looked at their children with uneasy wonder. Was it possible that a seemingly normal little boy of eight could murder his mother and father in their sleep?

In a brutally senseless crime two weeks ago, Dr. and Mrs. Melvin Nimer, both 31, were victims, it seemed plain, of a thug who invaded their Staten Island -home (TIME, Sept. 15). Son Melvin Dean, 8, told police that he was awakened and choked in the night by a white-masked prowler. The child cried for his parents, who came running. Before both died of knife wounds, Loujean Nimer is reported to have told police that the prowler was "tall as my husband, same build" (5 ft. 7 in., 160 Ibs.). In the public shock that followed, nobody got more sympathy than little (4 ft. 4 1/2 in., 68 Ibs.), orphaned Dean Nimer. Dean accompanied his parents' remains, his brother, 2, and sister, 5 months, back to relatives in Orem, Utah.

"I Think of Papa." Into the case swarmed more than 60 New York detectives, who questioned 1,000 people, including patients at the nearby U.S. Public Health Service Hospital, where promising Resident Surgeon Nimer began work two months before. But nothing clicked. No motive appeared; the house was not robbed, and how the prowler entered was unclear. Questioned repeatedly, little Dean told conflicting versions of the sequence of events. Some cops were struck by the boy's unusual intelligence, others by his consistent lack of emotion. ("My mother and father's dead," he told one cop after the tragedy, and rode off on his bike.)

Last week the district attorney announced the shocking news--little Dean was the No. 1 suspect. He had made three separate "statements" ("I stabbed Dad first, then Mom"). He had planned the parricide, he said, while lying in bed several nights before. On the night of the crime, police said, Dean read an article in the Mormon magazine Era entitled, "I Think of Papa." It was illustrated by gnarled hands peeling an apple with a knife, ended: "How priceless is the memory of a good father." Dean left his Boy Scout knife folded inside Era, then went to bed. Later, he told police, he stole downstairs for a kitchen knife, crept back up and killed his sleeping parents. Did his dying mother, then, pass on to the police Dean's own description of the "prowler '?

"Paranoid Schizophrenic." Despite his "statements," Dean was not arrested. New York law requires complete perception of a crime in children between seven and twelve. He was examined by the Staten Island Mental Health Center, which recommended "prolonged psychiatric care." The district attorney called the boy a "paranoid schizophrenic."

In Orem last week, his shocked and disbelieving relatives offered ample contrary evidence. To them, Dean was a happy, creative, intelligent child, who did unusually well in school, helped his mother with housework, went swimming with his father and haying with his beloved grandfather. The toil and discipline of getting through medical school made Dean's father a no-nonsense man, but the Nimers were conspicuously unquarrelsome. According to everyone, they were very happy people, and so too was Dean. The Orem pediatrician who examined him for five years called him robustly healthy; Utah's sole children's psychiatric clinic had never heard of Dean Nimer.

Different Boy. But this was not the Dean who went back to Orem for his parents' funeral. "Dean was a different boy," said one close adult relative. "He seemed to be in a trance, a state of shock. He didn't recognize some people."

What happened? Everywhere the questions swirled. Paranoid delusions seldom develop in children so young; schizophrenia can and does (though some psychiatrists disagree on the symptoms). There are usually signs long before illness is apparent: a predisposition to unsociability, passivity, withdrawal. Yet schizophrenia can also be hidden, then triggered by a demoralizing event, such as loss of a loved person or place ("reality"). The Nimers' decision to settle on Staten Island, far from Dean's beloved Orem, could have been such an event. But why parricide of both parents (and so loss of all security)? The "normal" parricidal pattern is murder of one parent, who threatens a close relationship between the child and the other parent.

Did Dean feel a smoldering hostility to his parents that he suddenly "acted out" all too realistically? Or did he simply identify himself with their murderer--after witnessing the terrifying event--because he felt like killing them?

Remanded to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, little Dean began a long period of intense psychiatric observation. A possible item on the agenda: putting a doll mother and a knife in his hands to see his reaction. Other tests will inevitably get at the truth of his "statements," which alone prove that whether he is a guilty boy or not, Dean Nimer is a very sick one.

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