Paperback: Everybody has a dream. For twenty-five-year-old aspiring actress Suzanne Reynolds, her dream ended in 1966 in a gruesome encounter with eccentric New York ragtime pianist Charles Yukl. Fooled by his choirboy looks, Reynolds had no idea the man who taught her the piano was a woman-hating recluse who spent his days lost in fantasies of perversion. As a result of the plea bargain for Suzanne's brutal murder, Yukl soon gained his freedom due to a shocking series of legal errors and killed again.
Eight years later, in 1974, the body of twenty-three-year-old Karen Schlegel was found on the roof of a Greenwich Village apartment. Immediately upon the second murder, Yukl was regarded as a "textbook example" of the problems of rehabilitation and parole because these were not average murders by New York standards.
At the time, The L.A. Times said in relation to Yukl, "the revolving door of the criminal justice system has become a broken centrifuge, no longer capable of separating the reformed embezzler from the vicious murderer." It held that Schlegel's murder was "entirely attributable to the killer's premature release from prison. In Yukl's case as in thousands of others, the antiquated machinery of the law was completely overwhelmed by the job it was devised to perform." He became regarded as "a killer whose accomplice is the ineptness of the legal system.
Almost eight years to the day after he strangled Karen Schlegel, Yukl used his bed to barricade himself in his Clinton Correctional Facility cell. Psychiatrists talked him out of the room and he was transferred to an observation cell in the prison hospital. Shortly after one o-clock the next afternoon, Charles Yukl hanged himself using a piece of mattress cover for a rope, with his death ruled a suicide.
The Piano Teacher (1987) is a riveting dramatization of two horrific crimes and their aftermath. It brilliantly portrays a madman set on fulfilling his own sadistic and homicidal dreams and the flawed justice system that gave him the opportunities to do so.
About the author: New York Times bestselling author Robert K Tanenbaum is a nationally known attorney and legal expert. He is one of the country’s most respected trial lawyers and has never lost a felony case. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Tanenbaum attended the University of California at Berkeley on a basketball scholarship. He received his law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. At the outset of his distinguished career, he was an Assistant D.A. in New York County, where he ran the Homicide Bureau, served as Chief of the Criminal Courts, and was in charge of the D.A.’s legal staff training program. Mel Glass, John Keenan, and D.A. Frank Hogan were his esteemed mentors, and Echoes of My Soul is a tribute to them, written at the request of Mel Glass with his active involvement.
Tanenbaum’s tireless quest for justice led him to be appointed Deputy Chief Counsel for the Congressional committee investigations into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Following an esteemed career as a successful prosecuting attorney and high profile defender, he served two terms as Mayor of Beverly Hills and continues to teach law in California, New York and Pennsylvania. A popular media guest, he regularly appears on television shows as a legal commentator.
He is the author of three non-fiction books, including The Piano Teacher: The True Story of a Psychotic Killer and Badge of the Assassin, the true account of his investigation and trials of self-proclaimed members of the Black Liberation Army who assassinated two NYPD police officers – later adapted into a movie starring James Woods as Tanenbaum. He is also the bestselling author of the Butch Karp series featuring two fictional District Attorneys in New York. A native of New York, Robert Tanenbaum currently lives with his family in Beverly Hills, California.
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