Home Is a Haven Despite Tragedy

Sybille Eckstein’s eyes grow blank with pain when she thinks about leaving her rural Valley Center home, the only place she has known for about 22 years.

The simple frame building sits on a hillside off Miller Lane, about 2 miles from the village center. It overlooks the Eckstein orchards and countryside framed by somber hills.

It was here, on Sept. 10, 1989, that Eckstein fatally injured her 91-year-old father--while attempting to drive out what she calls the devils she believes inhabited his demented mind and still-robust body.

It was here that her mother, bedridden for nearly seven years, died in 1984. Despite the memories, to Eckstein it is home.

The 62-year-old woman was found to be a paranoid schizophrenic in 1953 and had been cared for by her parents until recent years, when the roles were reversed and the mentally ill daughter became the caretaker.

All that ended after Eckstein apparently attacked her father. He died a month later, without regaining consciousness, and Eckstein was charged with his murder.

After the indictment, Eckstein’s estranged sister, Eleanor Jones, and Jones’ three children sought to wrest the family estate and its income from Eckstein, claiming a killer should not be allowed to profit from her crime.

With the loss of her parents and the possible loss of the property and income they had left her, Eckstein is counting on her few friends and her religion to help her face the future and forget the past.

In the hours and days that followed the attack on her father, Eckstein gave doctors and investigators a rambling description of the event.

She said sheriff’s deputies lurked outside the bedroom window, awaiting the outcome of her battle against the devil. She said her father had raped her. She said the death of her mother in 1984 was an act of euthanasia by her and her father to end her mother’s suffering, accomplished by withholding food and water from the woman for four days.

She says all this now in a matter-of-fact tone, as if reciting a well-learned lesson. Her lawyer nods encouragement while Eckstein tells her tale.

(The medication Eckstein must take to control her episodes of schizophrenia keeps her from experiencing the emotion that normally would accompany such a gruesome tale, her attorney said.)

“I didn’t want to hurt him. I wanted to save him,” Eckstein said. “I could keep him sound in body, but I could not cure his mind.”

She had taken her father, Henry Eckstein, to his bedroom after she found him on the patio trying to put his feces into a paper bag.

She stood on the old man’s knees and on his hips, holding a framed picture of Indian mystic Sai Baba, who believes that churches have misinterpreted the Second Coming, and exhorted him to again embrace Baba’s religion, which they both once held dear. Eckstein believes that Sai Baba is God reincarnate.

When Henry Eckstein tried to wrest the picture from his daughter and cast it away, she hit him or pushed him or kicked him off the bed and onto the floor, where he lay comatose until paramedics arrived. He never regained consciousness before dying in a nursing home a month later.

“How could I have done such a thing?” Eckstein asked herself during a recent interview. “I am a follower of Sai Baba, who teaches peace and love. But I did this terrible thing.”

In those hours after her “struggle with the devil,” Eckstein told disbelieving sheriff’s investigators what she remembered of the incident.

During the struggle, she recalled, she frequently administered oxygen to her father to prevent him from having a heart attack. She kept shouting at him, “Devil, get out!” but the devil kept fighting back through the strength of her father, she said.

Retelling the incident recently, Eckstein said that her father fell off the bed and struck his head against a heavy wooden bookcase.

“They say I hit him over the head,” she said of the sheriff’s reports. “I swear that I did not. I never hit him with the picture frame. I kicked him, pushed him with my foot. It was more of a push. I did not want him to die. I loved him and was trying to get the devil out.”

Physicians who have examined Eckstein over the years have concluded that she is a paranoid schizophrenic, and she has been hospitalized for the illness off and on since 1962. At the time of his death, Henry Eckstein had been suffering for several years from Alzheimer’s disease.

Looking back on the fatal struggle, Sybille Eckstein said: “When a mental patient and an Alzheimer’s patient clash, there is an explosion.”

Eckstein was charged with murder and, after a San Diego judge found her unfit to stand trial, sent to Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino County for observation and treatment. Several months later, she was returned to San Diego, pronounced stabilized by medication and able to face criminal prosecution.

Her story might have ended there quietly, with a long-term commitment to a mental ward, except for three people: a fellow inmate in the Las Colinas women’s jail in Santee, a family friend who did not turn away from Eckstein, and a Carlsbad attorney.

It was while she was in Las Colinas awaiting trial that Eckstein met Betty Broderick and received some advice from the La Jolla socialite charged with the murder of her ex-husband and his new wife: Get your own lawyer.

With the help of a longtime family friend, Ann Thayer, Eckstein dismissed her public defender and hired Carlsbad attorney David R. Thompson. Thompson, who later talked to Broderick’s lawyer and confirms that Broderick gave his client that advice, promptly halted plans to enter an insanity plea, which he says “would have meant a lifetime sentence to Sybille.”

(Under a proposition passed by voters in 1983, offenders pleading guilty by reason of insanity face longer terms than under old laws.)

“In Sybille’s case, an insanity plea could have meant institutionalization for as long as 19 years, which is a lifetime for a woman of her age,” Thompson said.

Instead he turned to the attack, pointing out that “the only real evidence that the prosecution had that Sybille had killed her father was her own confession.”

“The nature of Henry Eckstein’s injuries were such that they were consistent with a fall, not unlikely for a 91-year-old man suffering from Alzheimer’s disease,” he said.

Thompson’s efforts paid off. In a plea-bargain agreement, Eckstein pleaded guilty last July to a charge of involuntary manslaughter and was given five years’ probation. She is under strict requirements for medication to control her schizophrenic episodes.

Eckstein was released from Las Colinas on a November evening after serving 609 days in jail and mental institutions. She had $24 in her purse and only one place to go: her Valley Center home.

Thompson also took on Eckstein’s defense against the legal challenge by relatives to disinherit her and oust her from the property she was left in her father’s trust. The family claims that Eckstein had “feloniously and intentionally killed Henry Eckstein and should therefore be disinherited from any interest in his estate.”

The case awaits a Feb. 13 probate hearing in Vista Superior Court.

David MacDougall, attorney for the family members, said the challenge of Eckstein’s inheritance is based on the principal of law that “no person should profit from a criminal act,” but he acknowledges that Eckstein’s case is “far from an ordinary murder case.”

If Eckstein had been found guilty or had pleaded guilty to a charge of murder, or even a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter, her admission would have cleared the way for the family’s claim. Her guilty plea to involuntary manslaughter, however, leaves Eckstein eligible to inherit her parents’ estate.

Both attorneys, Thompson and MacDougall, acknowledge that a compromise proposal is under consideration that would allow Eckstein to remain in the home during her lifetime, then turn the property over to the family members after her death.

Eckstein lives a solitary life at the property, where fruit trees and four rental apartments yield income enough to support her.

Although she had never lived alone before, she says she is not really lonely.

“This is where I want to be,” she said, “and I can manage. I’m a vegetarian, and we have a garden every spring.” (She speaks in the plural, as if her father were still alive.)

For company she has two orange cats--a barrel-bodied tom named Tommy and a shy stray named Sandy--a neighbor who calls daily and Ann Thayer, her lifeline to the outside world.

At age 62, Eckstein has never traveled, never held a job and never driven a car. She shies away from concerns about her present welfare or her uncertain future.

“If I must leave here, I would not like it,” she said. “I have lived all my life in the country, and I would have to move into Escondido and live in senior citizens housing, cramped up in a dinky little apartment there.”

Eckstein turns to her religion for solace. She has written recently to Sai Baba, asking for help. Sai Baba’s teachings “are much like a form of Christianity, but do not require adherence to any one religion,” she explained. “And he has done miracles, too.”

Ann Thayer has no faith in her religion. The Rancho Santa Fe woman seethes in anger at what has happened to her friend, a mentally ill woman who has been ignored by “the system,” Thayer says.

Thayer now serves as Eckstein’s link with the rest of the world, chauffeuring her to buy groceries, visit the doctor, attend counseling sessions. Thayer has fought, so far unsuccessfully, the bureaucratic system that has withheld benefits from Eckstein since her release from jail Nov. 18.

No state supplemental security income (SSI) benefits, no food money, no county general aid. Welfare officials said it would be at least four months before benefits would begin, and efforts to speed the complicated process so far have been unsuccessful, Thayer said.

“How can people like Sybille, mentally ill people, be expected to survive, be expected to find their way through this bureaucratic system?” she asked.