Michael Laudor

Michael B. Laudor (born May 12, 1963) is an American graduate of Yale Law School who made national headlines in 1995 for having successfully graduated while suffering from schizophrenia. In 1998, he stabbed to death his pregnant fiancée, Caroline Costello, during an episode of psychosis.

Early life and career Laudor was born in 1963 to parents Charles, an economics professor at Adelphi University, and Ruth. He grew up in New Rochelle, New York and was raised Jewish.

Laudor's first job after graduation was as a consultant at Bain and Company. Once there, he started to develop his first symptoms of schizophrenia; namely, a constant fear that his phone lines at work had been tapped. Laudor's psychiatric symptoms escalated during this period, however, as he started to imagine that musician friends of his were members of a cult, that his room had become engulfed in flames, or that his parents had been killed and replaced by Neo-Nazi agents. Eventually, Laudor was hospitalized at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where he stayed for eight months, and was given a schizophrenia diagnosis. and "In Defense of Wrongful Life: Bringing Political Theory to the Defense of a Tort" in the Fordham Law Review.

Laudor attempted to find a job as a law professor after his fellowship without success. While seeking employment, his story of overcoming his mental illness was profiled in a 1995 New York Times article by journalist Lisa Foderaro. The article also earned Laudor a $600,000 book advance from Scribner's, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, for an autobiography. Both the movie and the book were intended to be called Laws of Madness.

Murder of Caroline Costello Laudor began dating his fiancée, Caroline Costello, in 1990, while he was in law school and she was working at IBM, The pair had a loving relationship, even as Laudor continued to be prone to schizophrenic delusions, believing at times that Costello was an alien impostor and refusing to let her in the apartment. Laudor had been experiencing a particularly severe psychotic episode that day, to the point where Costello had told her boss in the morning that she could not come to work due to a "personal emergency". After attempting to defuse the situation on the phone, Laudor's mother Ruth called the police urging them to conduct a welfare check on the couple. Laudor was apprehended for the crime 170 miles away on the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, after he had driven there and promptly turned himself in to campus police. It is unclear why Laudor drove to Cornell, as he had no known connections to the university besides his time there in high school. Laudor's movie and book deals were canceled, with Ron Howard going on to make A Beautiful Mind in 2001 about schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, whose story was deemed more palatable for audiences.

In April 2023, a close friend of Laudor's since childhood, Jonathan Rosen, published a memoir centered on Laudor's life entitled The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions. The book has received significant praise from critics.