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Laudor was seen driving away from the apartment in Costello's black Honda Civic, dropping it off in Binghamton, N.Y., to catch a bus to nearby Cornell University in Ithaca. There a campus police officer saw him, disheveled and spattered with blood. His hand bore marks that, authorities say, were consistent with defensive wounds found on Costello. A small scuffle broke out as Laudor resisted arrest, and an officer suffered a cut on her lip. In Ithaca, Laudor confessed to attacking Costello.
There had been omens. While neighbors said the only thing Laudor complained about was an annoying bout of colitis, Costello had reportedly told friends of graver worries. Despite his measure of fame, Laudor had not been able to find work teaching law. Friends say the finely calibrated, constantly adjusted medication he took may have ceased to be effective. Others speculate that the attempt to contain his life with enough lucidity to work on a manuscript due in August placed extreme pressure on the perfectionistic Laudor, perhaps to the extent that he stopped taking his medicine. A publishing insider who saw Laudor's book proposal said it was written with "an almost mathematical use of language." It was an intensely emotional tribute to his father, who Laudor believed saved his life. On the day of the attack, Laudor's mother, perhaps worried by something Costello told her, phoned the Hastings police. She wanted them to drop by the apartment to check on her son and future daughter-in-law. They found Costello's bloodied corpse.
"There is a notion in Judaism of tikkun olam," Laudor told the Times in 1995, "to heal the world." He felt it was his calling to redeem pariahs, to prove that those afflicted with mental illness could still serve. In the complicated psychochemistry of madness, his very determination may have led to his undoing.
--Reported by Charlotte Faltermayer/Hastings-on-Hudson, Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles and Andrea Sachs/New York