Boston Area Shaken by Slayings Involving Doctors

Not a good week for the Massachusetts medical community.

In three separate courts in the space of 48 hours, three prominent physicians from the Boston area faced murder charges, all stemming from domestic killings. At once anomalous and alarming, the strange spate of homicides flooded the state’s board of medicine with concerned calls.

“Intellectually, we can look at this as nothing but a sad coincidence,” said Nancy Aschin Sullivan, the board’s executive director. “But anecdotal or not, this is scary to people.”

Andover plastic surgeon James Kartell was sentenced Wednesday to five to eight years in prison for shooting his wife’s lover to death in her hospital room last year.

A day earlier, prosecutors presented evidence against Dr. Kirk Greineder, former head of the allergy department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital here, who is charged with bludgeoning his wife to death in a Wellesley park last fall.

But the case of Gloucester dermatologist Richard Sharpe, who Tuesday pleaded not guilty to charges of shooting his estranged wife to death last week in her Wenham home, gathered by far the most attention. The comfortable suburb north of Boston is normally so placid that the most common police activity is helping a resident round up a horse that has escaped from a paddock.

The 45-year-old Sharpe allegedly used a high-powered hunting rifle to shoot his 44-year-old wife, Karen, at point-blank range when she answered the door. Sharpe was arrested at a New Hampshire hotel, where he had registered under his own name and was recognized by a clerk. Police tossed pepper gas into his room to roust him.

His wife of 27 years recently had renewed a restraining order against Sharpe and was planning a divorce. Her lawyer, Jacob M. Atwood, said the marriage long was tumultuous but that Sharpe’s behavior of late had turned increasingly troubling. Atwood said his client was especially concerned that the couple’s young son would learn of his father’s habit of wearing women’s clothing. The lawyer said Sharpe also had begun swallowing his wife’s birth control pills, apparently in an effort to enlarge his breasts.

All three doctors in the recent murder cases were successful and respected by their peers. Sharpe, who had a teaching position at Harvard Medical School, ran a statewide series of laser hair removal clinics. He also ran an Internet medical service whose Web site was abruptly taken down this week. Sharpe is being held without bail.

Like Greineder and Kartell before him, Sharpe was stripped this week of his state license to practice medicine. A statement from the Board of Registration in Medicine said Sharpe posed “an immediate and serious threat to the public health and safety.”

The three killings were particularly brutal. After a 33-year marriage, Kartell’s wife had left him six months before he burst into the hospital room where she was being treated for pneumonia, carrying a loaded gun and backup ammunition. Kartell, 61, struggled with 57-year-old Janos Vajda, his wife’s lover, before shooting him twice.

Facing the court in shackles Wednesday, Kartell said: “Words fail me to express the depth of sorrow I feel and my responsibility in this.”

Greineder, 59, and his wife, Mabel, were walking their dog in a Wellesley park last Halloween when, he said, they briefly took separate paths. He told police that he found her dead in the grass, beaten and stabbed, apparently at the hands of a mysterious assailant. Police believe the world-renowned allergist killed his wife because she discovered he was leading a double life with prostitutes.

The board’s secretary, Dr. Peter Madras, responded to public concern about the recent violent episodes involving physicians by noting that his group is continuing to work with the medical community to identify and assist physicians who might harm themselves or others. The board licenses more than 30,000 physicians, osteopaths and acupuncturists.

In response to the killings, the Massachusetts Medical Society planned this week to mail information to the state’s 21,000 practicing physicians and their spouses, describing how to get help for troubled relationships, drug problems and mental disorders.

A recent California survey listed doctors second behind teachers as the profession that most provides benefit to society. According to the American Medical Assn., there is no evidence that doctors are more or less prone to commit murder than the general population.

Sullivan, at the state medical board, said statistics support the fact that doctors generally have little interaction with the criminal justice system.

“These are three horrible situations,” she said. “It’s a very sad and terrifying anomaly.”