Perennial students don't usually murder their professors--they just sort of bleed them dry, hanging around the department for decades on end making ever smaller inroads on their degrees, which, like the Great Gatsby's orgiastic future, keep receding year by year before them. Finally, well into middle age and with nothing to show for their twenty years on the university's fringe but thinning hair and an increasingly depressing succession of missed deadlines and dead-end jobs, they make a desperate final effort to recapture the lost promise of their youth and to catapult themselves into their rightfully deserved positions as lifelong heads of the class. Of course, they fail, failure being the only thing they've ever been successful at.

Tall, dark and deferential to a fault, Theodore Landon Streleski, 42, a graduate student in the Stanford Math department for the past nineteen years, woke up at 6 a.m., just before his alarm went off. He'd only had four hours sleep but his body felt rested and his mind unnaturally clear. He showered and shaved, put on a brown-and-white checked wash-and-wear shirt, his eight-inch high top shoes and a pair of Levi's fastened around the waist with an old webbed seatbelt from a '57 Ford.

Opening his refrigerator, he took out a saucepan of leftover Rice-A-Roni and put it on the stove to heat. He had a problem with the refrigerator--the seal was shot and the door was sprung--roaches used it for a supermarket. The freezer compartment didn't have a door at all and his TV dinners defrosted automatically--not that he could afford TV dinners anymore. For the last week he'd lived on a daily box of Rice-A-Roni, preparing it the night before, browning the rice and vermicelli in butter and oil, adding flavor packets of Herbs & Butter and beef stroganoff mix. He liked the taste, but he worried about his health. The last time he ran low on money, he tried to live on white rice and pancakes. His muscle tone dropped clean off the chart. Just sitting up in bed one morning he strained his back so badly he couldn't walk for three days. He lived on the floor, pulling himself around the apartment like a paraplegic war vet. In order to pee, he had to drape himself across the toilet bowl. The accident frightened him badly and from there on out he always took care to eat plenty of meat and cheese--until he ran out of money again.

On this morning, Streleski was not as yet totally broke, having $5 in cash in his pocket, $20 in rolled coins in a suitcase at a friend's, $2 in a checking account (to cover the monthly service charge) and an $85 state income tax refund check stashed away unremembered and uncashed in one of the 200 empty liquor boxes, used for filing cabinets, with which he lined his living room walls.

Streleski lived in a section of San Francisco known as the Western Addition, at the corner of Sutter and Broderick, one block west of the Mount Zion Hospital emergency entrance. He'd taken the apartment during a bus strike some two years earlier because it was both cheap ($125 per month) and within walking distance of Heald Engineering College, a technical school on Van Ness, where he had a part time job teaching TV repair. There were two rooms and a bath, a Murphy closet without the Murphy bed, and nailed down carpeting in the entrance hall. Next to the fire escape was a bay window from which he could see a Sears store and a Bekins building. Streleski's neighbors were blacks and a small enclave of elderly non-English speaking Czarist Russian women. Not wanting to disturb them with the early morning clatter of his Royal portable, Streleski had, the night before, typed out a notice on a 3-by-5 card:

Now, before leaving his apartment, he put the card in a red-and-white World Airways flight bag along with a gray plastic dispenser of cellophane tape, a box of green garbage bags, and a red-headed, two-pound, hickory- handled sledgehammer. To make the bag less conspicuous, he covered the World Airways logo with silver masking tape. For his personal use, he also packed a change of underwear, a Luke Short paperback western, a back issue of Science magazine and a math text entitled Riemann's Theory of Algebraic Functions.

When traveling down to Stanford, Streleski normally waited in his apartment until he heard the distinctive tire sound of the 38 Geary, a heavy GM diesel. Then he'd step outside, glance west down Sutter and if neither the 1 California nor the 2 Clement was in sight, he'd walk the few short blocks over to Divisadero and Geary and catch the next 38. If possible, he avoided the 1 California--it was a rubber-tired AMC electric trolley, slower than the diesels and lacking adequate leg room for Streleski's 6-foot, 4-inch frame.

Once downtown, Streleski would transfer to BART at the Powell Street station and buy a $1.45 ticket that would take him across the bay, through downtown Oakland and south to the last Fremont stop, where, after three bus transfers and endless meandering around the southern end of the San Francisco Bay, west through San Jose and north along the San Francisco peninsula, he'd finally alight in front of the Alfred P. Sloane Mathematics Center on the Stanford campus. Although it was the cheapest way of getting to Stanford, it was also the longest, taking, on this occasion, six and a half hours.

Because the math center's front door was obstructed by construction, Streleski walked around to the rear entrance. Hot, hungry, tired and tense, he slipped into a first floor men's room, switched the hammer from the flight bag to his rear pants pocket and then, taking the elevator to the second floor, he turned left, walked a few steps down the corridor and peeked into the office of professor Karel deLeeuw.



At 48, Deleeuw had longish, unruly hair, a gray-streaked beard and black-rimmed glasses. Spontaneous and self-assured, he was a competent and, in his own words, "obsessive" researcher (mostly in abstract harmonic and functional analysis, his most recent paper dealing with the rapidity with which a continuous function's Fourier series tends to zero), but in recent years he'd turned his back on what he said was the excessive ego that research demanded to concentrate on teaching instead. Unusually effective in working with beginning students, he'd developed a math anxiety course that emphasized visual representations of mathematical concepts—"math for girls," he called it privately.

Energetic, fast-moving and quick of comprehension, he stalked back and forth at the front of a classroom, pouncing on concepts like a cat on a bug. Unlike many senior professors, deLeeuw seemed genuinely fond of students, hosting parties at his home three and four times a year, accepting invitations to student parties, where, in his wife's words, he was "accepted as an equal," and renting out his spare bedroom to students as his own children grew up and moved away. Outside teaching, his interests ranged widely if briefly through bird watching, planet identification and camping in Europe and Big Sur. He gave seminars in transcendental meditation, studied Zen Buddhism and Tai-Chi. Warm and sensitive in other respects, his sense of humor showed surprising bite. His wife considered it sarcastic. And Streleski found it "inappropriate." At his murder trial, he would refer to this as deLeeuw's "ironic side."

Looking through deLeeuw's open door, Streleski noted two important facts: (1) In the eight years since Streleski had last been in his office deLeeuw had rearranged his desk so that his back was now to the door, and (2) at the moment, deLeeuw wasn't in. Streleski hurried down the corridor and left the building by the rear stairs. He walked around to the front, returned to the second floor and was making idle conversation with a student studying in a nearby room when he saw deLeeuw return. A minute later, when Streleski walked through the doorway, he found deLeeuw sitting at his desk, correcting blue-book math exams. DeLeeuw apparently realized that someone was behind him but, deep in concentration, he didn't turn around.

Moving deliberately but without hesitation, Streleski took up position directly behind deLeeuw's chair. He felt tense but otherwise in full control. Holding his breath and concentrating on "not flubbing it," he hit deLeeuw with the hammer squarely on top of his skull. The first blow was a measured one--about the same force he'd have used to drive a cold chisel. It reminded him of hitting a railroad tie with "a hatchet that didn't stick." Then, without stopping, Streleski hit deLeeuw an additional three or four times--"insurance blows," he would later explain--on the right temple and behind the right ear. The impact of the hammer on the skull made a surprisingly subdued sound, like normal footfalls in an empty hall. With each blow, deLeeuw's chair, which was mounted on casters, drifted further across the room until it lodged against a storage desk beside the office door.

All through the attack, deLeeuw neither moved nor groaned--Streleski noticed only a slight slumping in the chair and the relaxation of his fingers around his marking pen. After a few seconds, a wheezing sound escaped from deLeeuw's throat, a noise which Streleski took to be the death rattle. Except for a bruise on the right temple, deLeeuw looked as if he had fallen asleep. Setting down his flight bag, Streleski closed the door and placed a green plastic garbage bag over Streleski's upper torso to protect the sensibilities of the person who discovered the body and, as Streleski subsequently explained to the district attorney, to leave a clear record of his fingerprints on an object incontestably linked to the crime.

While Streleski attached a piece of tape to the 3-by-5 card and repacked the flight bag, dark, venial blood dripped slowly out from under the garbage bag and made a puddle on the floor--not that this discomforted Streleski in any way. The killing, he would later say, was "absolutely unspectacular." "Nothing abrupt" happened. Everything was exactly the way it was before, except now a man was dead.

Still moving deliberately, Streleski opened the door, stepped outside and locked it behind him. In the middle of the door, at eye height, he posted the 3-by-5 card. That way, if any students came looking for deLeeuw during what remained of his office hours, they wouldn't think it strange to find his office door locked. And Streleski could be sure that by the time the janitors arrived later that night, brain death would have occurred. The whole episode, from initial entry to the posting of the card, had taken half a minute.

Streleski walked back to Palo Alto and caught a bus to San Francisco to warn his ex-wife, Merrily, of his impending notoriety. Unable to reach her, he caught a Southern Pacific commuter train back to Palo Alto, where, after wandering around for several hours, he stopped at a local restaurant for a midnight pizza and beer. Although he spent the next two hours in an open-air commuter shelter along the Southern Pacific tracks reading his Luke Short western, he was tired and apprehensive. He found the story line hard to follow. The bench smelled like dog urine.

At 3:20 a.m. Saturday morning, Streleski walked into the North County jail in Palo Alto and told the deputy on duty, who happened to be a PhD candidate himself (in sociology, at UC Berkeley) that he had some "information" about a "seriously injured or dead man" on the Stanford campus. The family ought to be notified. In his flight bag was a hammer covered with blood. "You'll probably want to hold me," he said.




Streleski's court appointed attorney, James Blackman, initially wanted to base Streleski's defense on a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, convincing evidence of which, he felt, was gushing from the case like mountain spring water. Streleski, however, didn't want his motive for the killing to be tainted by the suggestion of mental instability. Streleski contended that he had killed in self-defense, that he was always in full possession of his faculties, that anyone else in a similar situation might well have done the same thing and that, considering the criminal negligence with which Stanford oversaw his progress toward the doctorate, the murder was both "morally" and "logically" correct.

Because this was hardly a legal theory one could argue in court, Streleski and Blackman made a deal. Blackman would accede to Streleski's simple not-guilty plea and his desire to put the Stanford faculty on the witness stand (all of whom, Streleski later complained, "said they didn't remember me"). In return, Streleski would neither "do a Bobby Seale" nor raise objections to Blackman's plan to call a defense psychiatrist to testify on his mental state.

As the principal facts of the case were never in dispute--on the witness stand, Streleski admitted to killing deLeeuw, having planned to kill him since 1970, having had a backup candidate in case deLeeuw wasn't available-- the main issue at the trial quickly became Streleski's mental state. Streleski, as soon became apparent from his testimony, was unnaturally sensitive to what he called "put-downs", and once he felt someone had insulted him, he brooded on it for years. Streleski wasn't unique in this respect--paranoia being practically an occupational hazard among graduate students--he was just more willing to act on his perceptions.

As Streleski explained it at the trial, the first put-down occurred during the 1962-1963 academic year (three years into Streleski's doctorate), as he left a classroom following deLeeuw's second-year graduate course in functional analysis. DeLeeuw, who was wearing sandals, glanced down at Streleski's polished Florsheim oxfords and said with a laugh: "Why are you wearing those things?" To Streleski, this "laughing put-down" was an ominous sign. Like all graduate students, he was dependent on his professor's good will for the letters of recommendation that would determine his entire professional future. And yet, thought Streleski, here the professor he both knew best and respected most was gratuitously deriding his choice in footwear and, by implication, Streleski himself.

At the time, Streleski felt himself to be under enormous pressure to pass his qualifying exams. For Streleski, these were major hurdles, comparable to the bar exam for law school graduates. When Streleski took them, they were a series of three four-hour tests, given on alternate days. Until a student passed them, he couldn't be advanced to degree candidacy or start work on his dissertation. If he failed, he had to leave.

Streleski took his exams seriously, studying up to fourteen hours a day, not leaving his apartment more than twice a week--once for groceries, and once for a drive. He slept eight or nine hours a night, heated TV dinners in the oven and spent the rest of his time studying math. Despite his obsessive study habits, or perhaps in part because of them, Streleski failed his exams the first time around, though he did come close enough to warrant another try. The algebra portion of the exam had been administered by Karel deLeeuw. At the end of the exam, Streleski approached deLeeuw to ask him about some test questions--"not questions where I was totally in the dark," he would later testify, "but questions where I halfway knew the answer." DeLeeuw, however, answered Streleski in a tone that seemed to him both "angry and disgusted."

In March, 1984, Streleski passed the exams on his second try, which left him ecstatic. "I thought I must surely be over the hump," he said. "I knew I must be about to become one of the boys in the math department because I had passed the qualifying exam." Streleski's concern at this point was not only a simple matter of social acceptance--there was also the question of financial aid. The Stanford math department is highly regarded, ranking only behind Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard and perhaps Chicago. The most promising students are awarded fellowships to enable them to finish their degrees in four years, which they largely do. Students with less impressive credentials, such as Streleski, are also admitted, but without any financial aid, the idea here being: "Your chances are not that good and we can't give you any money, but if you want a Stanford degree so badly that you're willing to make superhuman efforts, we're more than willing to give you a shot."

By Streleski's reckoning, he'd more than paid his dues. Now he wanted the fellowship that would signify full acceptance by the faculty. But when he asked deLeeuw about his prospects, the answer was still no--"It's inconceivable," his manner seemed to say. "How could you even muster the chutzpah to ask?" Streleski was beginning to be disillusioned with Stanford. Success in graduate school, he thought, involved far more than hard work and demonstrated competence--you had to be "smiled upon" as well.



To get a doctorate from Stanford, a student must meet two sets of requirements. The first is the university's. Aside from the necessity of passing passing the qualifying and oral exams, the requirements are in, the words of one professor, "almost laughable," specifying only that the candidate take three different courses from three different professors, write an acceptable dissertation and pay Stanford the equivalent of three years' tuition. On top of these are the various departmental requirements. Although these are much more extensive, unlike the university's, they can be waived for students of exceptional achievement and ability.

In the spring of 1967, while carefully reading those requirements, Streleski made what seemed to him a remarkable discovery: "Stanford appeared only to care if you paid them money. They didn't care if you passed the course or even attended it." Taking a copy of the requirements to deLeeuw, Streleski asked for a second opinion. "Obviously it is going to be a little bit of work to commute down here," he said. "Suppose I register for [the quarter] and am casual about attending the courses or about passing?"

Streleski was well aware that deLeeuw placed no overriding importance on such required courses, and in fact had given Streleski the impression that his "slavish" devotion to them in the past was an indication of misaligned priorities. According to Streleski's court testimony, deLeeuw readily agreed to Streleski's plan to register for the courses and pay Stanford its final quarter of tuition. Instead of attending classes, though, he would continue to work and study in San Francisco.

Streleski took four courses that fall, getting Fs or incompletes in every one. And by late 1967, eight years into his doctorate, Streleski was finally ready to start work on his dissertation--once he found an adviser and a topic. The first professor Streleski asked to be his advisor didn't remember him from class. "Who are you?" he laughed. Instead he suggested that Streleski attend a seminar and pick up a thesis topic that way. Streleski approached a second professor, this time proposing for this thesis topic a long-standing problem involving the microwave tubes at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. But the professor pointed out that Streleski's assumptions were too simplistic to be real. And when you made them less sweeping, the problem was impossible to solve.

Because the math department ran sophisticated seminars, with professors often making up half or more of the classes, Streleski at first had trouble finding one he could understand. And even after he did choose one, he still spent the entire first quarter in the dark, even though he'd read the original paper on which the seminar was based and had looked up all the references.

In the meanwhile, these nagging incidents with deLeeuw continued to disturb him. Once, while correcting student papers in the first-floor lounge (Streleski taught calculus part-time at San Francisco State), he took a break to stretch his legs. While walking down the corridor he bumped into Karel deLeeuw. "Hmmm," said deLeeuw. "You still around?" Streleski didn't reply, but deLeeuw's remark left him "surprised," "outraged" and "shocked." He had always considered deLeeuw to be an outgoing, spontaneous, bubbly kind of man, certainly not anyone to hold a grudge. To be ridiculed then, on such a sensitive point by a man like Karel deLeeuw was positive proof that something was "wrong," something was "bad," and he didn't know what it was.

Still looking for a thesis topic, Streleski joined a second seminar in the spring of 1969, this one led by professor Lawrence Zalcman. As his contribution, Streleski volunteered to present a nine-page paper by one Leonard Carleson called the "H Infinity Interpolation Problem." Streleski considered Carleson's paper a "technical virtuoso performance," and to do it justice, he set aside the entire months of April and May to prepare his hour- long talk.

On the whole, the paper went well, though deLeeuw left early and another professor became embarrassed at his inability to follow the paper "off the cuff." Believing that he'd made a good impression on Zalcman, Streleski decided to stay with the seminar one more quarter "to deepen the connection" and then, assuming all went well, to "pop the question"--ask Zalcman to be his thesis advisor.

In the meantime, another incident occurred which, while not directly concerning Streleski, nevertheless left him increasingly fearful of his prospects of getting the degree. A professor named Levine was making a seminar presentation before a mixed group of students and faculty. All through his lecture, two other professors made what Streleski considered to be derisive comments in loud stage whispers until a fourth professor finally shushed them into silence. Streleski was appalled. "If they can put down somebody on that level," he thought, "what chance do I have?"

In the meanwhile, in his other seminar, Streleski had primed himself to the point where he felt confident about speaking up in class. An assistant professor named Rabinowitz was making a blackboard presentation and seeing that his math had gone awry, he asked if anyone in the class had spotted the error. Streleski had barely opened his mouth when the seminar leader, professor David Gilbarg, according to Streleski's testimony in court, "turned his head over his shoulder . . . and made a face at me." As Streleski described it, Gilbarg's lower lip was curled and one side of his mouth was lower than the other. Streleski took the expression to mean "shut up," which he did.

Troubled and confused by the incident, Streleski tried to speak to Gilbarg in the elevator after class, but, as Streleski told the court, Gilbarg "cut me dead" with a look. [Professor Gilbarg would later say he didn't remember any of these incidents or, for that matter, even holding the seminar. In any case, he said, it has never been his policy, or Stanford's, to insult students.]

As for Streleski, he felt like a nonentity around the math department (after ten years there wasn't even a photograph of him on the graduate student bulletin board), but it wasn't because there was any conspiracy against him--his profile was so low most professors didn't even know his name. But there was something. And it was wrong.

Deciding to confront the issue directly, Streleski went to see deLeeuw, who at the time was giving a lecture on transcendental meditation. Streleski sat through the presentation and, after everyone else had left, went up to deLeeuw and began to complain about what he said was his inability to find a thesis advisor and his growing feeling that deLeeuw "might be a part of it." As Streleski told the court, deLeeuw leaned close. "Schoolboy," he sputtered, hitting Streleski with a fine saliva spray. Streleski began to explain, saying he'd been making a "maximal effort" for more than ten years. It wasn't evident, answered deLeeuw.

The issue that finally prompted Streleski to take his problems outside the department was a dispute over a library book. Because Streleski no longer paid tuition, he didn't have a registration card, which up to now had never been a problem. But in May of 1970, the librarian refused to allow Streleski to check out a back issue of Transactions of the American Math Society for photocopying. Streleski was upset. He'd been a student for over ten years. He'd paid Stanford some $4500 in tuition. No one had ever questioned his right to check out books before. The librarian, however, was adamant and Streleski only got his journal when professor Zalcman, who happened to be nearby, signed out the book on his own library card. Streleski was fuming. "All right," he said. "That tears it. I'm going to take this matter outside the department." "You mean the ombudsman?" asked Zalcman. "Yeah," said Streleski, who up to that moment hadn't known there was one. "I guess so."

Fearful that the ombudsman, Dr. Herant Katchadourian, wouldn't take him seriously, Streleski tried to be as provocative as possible, giving names, reciting incidents and complaining that he'd put in "bona fide years" and paid "bona fide dollars" but he hadn't gotten a "bona fide educational opportunity." Katchadourian referred him to Lincoln Moses, dean of the graduate division. Cordial and attentive, Dr. Moses offered Streleski coffee and nuts and set aside 30 minutes to hear his complaint, interrupting him only twice, once to accept a phone call from Princeton and once to caution him against slandering his professors: "Careful, I graduated from the department. I know the dramatis personae."

Streleski's complaint was rambling and passionate. When he finished, Moses cleared his throat and shuffled his chair: "What do you want me to do?"

Streleski said he wanted financial assistance and a thesis advisor. Promising to look into the matter, Moses showed Streleski the door. The meeting had disturbed him--Streleski, he thought, had been both "insistent" and "curiously intense." Personally, he didn't want to help him. Yet, on the other hand, he felt he must.

When Streleski called him back six days later, Moses said he was prepared to offer him a $2000 fellowship from his discretionary fund on the condition that he finish his dissertation within a year. At the same time, he warned Streleski: "DeLeeuw is a friend of mine." According to his trial testimony, Streleski understood Moses to be offering him a deal. Moses would give him the fellowship, but in return he had to agree not to make trouble for deLeeuw.

"My telephone is sitting on a copy of his calculus text," answered Streleski, by which he meant that he had enough respect for deLeeuw as a teacher and a mathematician to keep his book within arm's length.

Following Dr. Moses's intervention, things happened quickly. Lawrence Zalcman assigned him a thesis topic and agreed to be his thesis advisor. ("I was practically begging him," Streleski would later say, "please, please be my thesis advisor.") Shortly thereafter, Streleski happened to be sitting in the hallway near professor Gilbarg's second-floor office when, Streleski testified, Gilbarg walked up to him, "sort of cleared his throat and began talking." Streleski said he never heard a "complete sentence," but he understood himself to be receiving an embarrassed apology. A few days later, Streleski and his wife, Merrily, were invited to a party at the home of Karel and Sita deLeeuw. Standing by herself in the kitchen, Merrily overheard one professor observe that her husband didn't "seem like such a bad guy after all."




Streleski's obsession may have been his doctorate but his passion was his wife. They met while living in the same Mason Street apartment house. Hearing that Streleski was about to move out, Merrily stopped him in the hallway, introduced herself and invited him up for coffee. To make sure he understood that the invitation was genuine, on another occasion she followed him into his apartment and extended it a second time. Streleski never knew what he had done to make such a good impression on her but thought that it had something to do with his non-aggressive non-manipulative approach. He wasn't a "hard sell" and he didn't try to feed her a line. They were married on September 22, 1967 in San Francisco City Hall.

Like Streleski himself, Merrily was tall, dark and lean, an ectomorph with an extraordinarily strong will, a schoolgirlish fascination with "scary dark places" and what Streleski called a "special mind"--she saw things so differently than most people that to strangers she sometimes appeared "slow and unretentive." In fact, as Streleski would later say, it wasn't so much a matter of intelligence as perception--she was working on a totally different "game plan."

Merrily was once cleaning in the kitchen behind the stove when the wires began to spark. Hearing her screams, Streleski dashed out of the bedroom to find her standing there ready to take hold of the wires. In order not to frighten her into anything rash, Streleski kept his voice deliberately calm: "Whatever you do, don't touch the stove." At the sound of his voice, Merrily did the opposite of what he said--the information was coming too fast. All she heard was "touch the stove," not the "whatever you do, don't."

Streleski grabbed her hand and pulled her away. She was terrified, but not of the electricity. She was terrified of him. Merrily had never said anything about it to Streleski but she'd been increasingly afraid of him, mainly because she'd dreamed that he would one day kill her and her parents, but also because, as their relationship deteriorated, Streleski had begun to abuse her. Once, to end an argument, he rolled her onto the floor by pulling a mattress out from underneath her. At the trial, she also testified that he beat her on "innumerable" occasions--an accusation Streleski would later deny, asserting that on perhaps half a dozen occasions he had given her a single slap, and that only so she'd stop fighting and let him study. The slaps, in fact, only gave them more things to fight about, Merrily maintaining that Streleski was a wife beater, Streleski pointing out that the dictionary definition of "beating" implied repeated blows, whereas in each instance he'd only given her a single slap.

The arguments between Streleski and Merrily were always about the same thing. Merrily had married Streleski with the conventional expectation that one day they would own a home like other folks. Instead, every time they saved enough for a down payment on a house, Streleski would quit his job so he could spend every waking hour on his thesis. His thesis had become an obsession with him, and his inability to finish it was tearing their marriage apart.

In the wake of Dean Lincoln Moses's embarrassing intervention into math department affairs, the thesis problem assigned to Streleski turned out to be so unexpectedly simple that Streleski worked out the math in a few short months. His original advisor, Lawrence Zalcman, was visting Israel, so Streleski reported his findings to a new advisor, Halsey Royden, who told Streleski that his results were fine, as far as they went, but a Stanford thesis ought to have more meat on it. And he suggested some ancillary problems to flesh it out.

Streleski was, at the time, heavily involved in teaching a numerical analysis course in the San Francisco State math department's computer science option. The option was, in effect, a new department created, as Streleski would later complain, at "zero additional cost for faculty, hardware or materials." The plan, Streleski said, was to attract additional students to the math department with the "buzzword" computer, the additional enrollment then serving as justification for more state funds. Although several other departments also wanted to offer the option, it was the math department that finally landed the computer science plum, using the argument that Streleski's numerical analysis course, along with another course in graph theory, constituted a more "scientific" central core than could be offered by the departments of business, economics or political science.

As Streleski ran the course, the students' task was to solve a standard problem by running it through a computer. Students who came up with the correct answer received A's. Students who made errors, but none of such magnitude as to invalidate the whole procedure, received B's. Anything else was incomplete.

Start-up problems for the course proved horrendous. The campus CDC 3150 computer was more suited for business tasks than problem-solving and lacked adequate number storage. As a result, Streleski had to obtain permission for students to use larger computers in Los Angeles on timeshare at 3 a.m. As student programs continued to bomb week after week, Streleski determined that incorrect communications hardware had been installed on the LA machine. Once this was replaced, Streleski then discovered that canned subroutines called up by student programs didn't work, requiring him to write diagnostic programs to find and fix the mistake.

As a result of these unanticipated problems, only 8 of 40 students successfully passed the course the first time around, jamming up the academic stream, causing friction in the department, consuming huge amounts of Streleski's time and allowing his thesis completion date to drift along, month by month, forever out of reach. In the meantime, the math department at San Francisco State, which had earlier offered Streleski a full-time tenure-track position, had begun to ask pointed questions about his effervescent doctorate.

In an effort to help out, Streleski's advisor had earlier written to the San Francisco math department letting them know that Streleski's thesis was "substantially" done. Now, in the fall of '72, Streleski's advisor called him into his office to tell him that his results were good enough. Why didn't he start writing it up?

Streleski found himself in an unexpected dilemma. Ever since starting at Stanford, he'd envisioned his dissertation as a first-class effort, an original contribution to the field, at the least a publishable abstract. This wasn't so much mere ego as it was recognition that, for assistant professors anyway, publishing was essential to job security. That was the way universities advertised. A school whose faculty had a good publishing record automatically found itself with more students, greater prestige and increased federal funds. But judging from his advisor's attitude, it was clear to Streleski that not only was his dissertation not publishable, it was barely acceptable for the degree. "On the most lenient interpretation," Streleski would later say, "it might have crept up to minimal standards." With that kind of endorsement, he felt he had no hope of a tenured position at San Francisco State. Their offer of possible tenure down the line was based on the assumption that, as a Stanford man, Streleski would be turning in a superior work--not, as Streleski said, some "substandard schlock degree" you couldn't even buy a cup of coffee with. The way it was now, Streleski felt like some graduate student flake who "had fallen through a crack--like Stanford had said, 'He's been here long enough. Let's process the jerk out.'"

In the meantime, Merrily and Streleski continued to fight about money. Merrily began to go out at night without saying where. But Christmas, 1974, turned out unexpectedly pleasant. The Streleskis ate dinner with friends and Merrily made a point of being "very nice." Merrily was still in bed when Streleski left for work the next morning. When he returned that night, the apartment was bare, except for his books. In spite of her leaving, Streleski still loved Merrily and, to help her through what he knew must be a difficult time, he took the money he'd been saving for a final push on his thesis--$3400 at this point--and deposited it in her account, leaving himself so short of cash that when he later found a cheaper apartment, he had to borrow money to make the move.




Streleski spent the next two years alternating between a series of depressing jobs and hours of hammering away on his thesis. When studying, he worked up to fourteen hours a day. His research had become so massive by this time that just reviewing what he'd already done took ten to twenty hours a week. There were periods as long as three weeks in a row when he didn't leave his apartment, and then only because he ran out of food. In March, 1977, eighteen years into his doctorate, Streleski had what he considered to be a "better result"--he had solved a "few unsolved problems in a neat form." It wouldn't knock the academic world on its ear--in quality Streleski compared it to Long Day's Journey Into Night, which is to say, it was "so massively, grindingly dull it's transcendent"--but it was a valid mathematical contribution. Streleski called it "Finite Pick-Nevanlinna Interpolation as an Algebraic Eigenvalue Problem."

Several earlier researchers--Pick in 1915, Nevanlinna in 1919 and 1929, and half a dozen others--had all solved different problems in the same area of approximation theory. By sifting through their work in enormous detail--"cranking up the magnification" was the way Streleski put it--he was able to establish the previously unsuspected fact that they were "blind men grabbing at different handles on the same elephant."

When, in the spring of 1977, Streleski returned to see his advisor after a three-year absence, he adopted an adamant tone. He was 22 when he was admitted to Stanford. Now he was 40. He hadn't been anywhere or done anything except work on his math. He'd been insulted in the department "down to his shoes." Was Royden going to say that he had a "new result" or was he not?

A quick study of Streleski's calculations showed that he did indeed have a new result of publishable quality. And in late 1977, a three page abstract of Streleski's results was sent off to a mathematical journal. Although Streleski was ostensibly still working on his doctorate, in fact he didn't consider it so important any longer that he was willing to finish it at any cost. Instead, he thought, he might just settle for what he called a "Rothschild degree." (As Streleski explained to the jury, Oxford graduates in nineteenth-century England were required to swear allegiance to the crown before receiving their degrees. Because the Jewish Rothschilds wouldn't swear on a King James Bible, their degrees were unofficial ones-- Rothschild degrees.) Although Streleski wouldn't have the "vocational certification" of a Stanford doctorate, once the four mathematicians on the journal's abstract review committee attested to the quality of his thesis, then it would be a matter of public record that Streleski could, as he said, "solve a math problem"--he wouldn't need Stanford and its vaunted degree any more.

Consequently, the blow to Streleski's hopes was that much greater when the journal turned him down. They'd changed their editorial policies, they wrote. They weren't publishing dissertation abstracts anymore, Streleski's or anyone else's.

By the summer of 1978, Streleski was broke, living alone, without a job, his thesis unread and unpublished. But, for the moment, his most pressing concern was money. When Streleski first graduated from the University of Illinois in 1957 with a degree in engineering physics, he was a sought-after job applicant. He worked for Raytheon and Martin Aircraft. He had jobs on the NASA Gemini program and in Lockheed's Polaris Instrument department. He was a registered electrical engineer who had worked for the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Initially, such wide experience looked impressive to personnel officers, but after seventeen different jobs with thirteen firms in nineteen years, his resume ran on like the classified ads. The worst part was that there was no way he could hide having spent nineteen years at Stanford--personnel officers would assume he'd either dropped out or been thrown out. At best, he would later say, they'd consider him "impractical." His chances of working as a registered engineer were "extremely remote." The semiconductor companies would "look down their noses" at him. The only jobs he could find were as manufacturing technicians, and even these weren't easy to come by. Why would anyone with his qualifications, the firms asked, want to work on an assembly line?

In June, 1978, Streleski was fired from his job repairing drunk meter circuit boards for insisting on a shorter workweek to give him more time for math. The following month he interviewed for half a dozen other jobs, including one as a Pong video-repairman, but they all fell through. As a last result, Streleski attempted to borrow $500 from Merrily. He hadn't seen her since she left him nearly four years previously, but he could get a message to her through her father, a Montgomery Street architect.

Merrily's father was happy to hear from Streleski, but as far as talking to Merrily, he was sorry but they were out of town.

"They?" asked Streleski. "Who's they?"

"Well, Merrily is remarried."

"When?" "June, 1977."

"Well, that changes things," said Streleski. "Forget what I had in mind."

Borrowing money from Merrily was one thing. But he couldn't take money from another man's wife.

Guessing that Streleski needed cash, Merrily's father asked if there was any way that he could help. "No," said Streleski. "It doesn't bear discussion."

That night Streleski thought it through. He'd lost Merrily because he couldn't keep a job. He couldn't keep a job for working on his thesis. He couldn't finish his thesis as a result of Stanford's criminal neglect. As he saw it, the only way to expose Stanford was to kill a math professor. His first choice was Karel deLeeuw. If he couldn't find him, he'd settle for Gilbarg. And if he couldn't find either one, he'd "temporize."




The news that some alienated ex-student had murdered her husband at first left Sita deLeeuw in a state of numb incomprehension. She had gone down the coast to Esalen earlier in the week to take a sensitivity training course. Because they shut down the switchboards at 4 p.m., she didn't hear about the murder until the following morning, when, on her way to breakfast, the director took her aside to tell her that her husband had been "shot." A woman friend drove her home to Palo Alto. For the entire two-and-a-half hour trip, she sat in the right-hand seat holding a photograph of her spiritual advisor, Swami Muk Tanada.

A memorial service was held in the garden of their campus home for family friends. Baba Ram Das came over from Santa Cruz to deliver the eulogy. A rabbi and Karel's elderly father together said the prayers for the dead. The body was cremated and the ashes scattered at sea.

In the weeks following the killing, Sita kept herself from collapsing by relying on a philosophy taught to her by Karel--things happen because they're supposed to happen. Why Karel had been chosen to die at the hands of a former student, she didn't know. A psychic with whom she consulted suggested that, insofar as Karel had always been a pacifist and had avoided violence in his "previous lifetimes," his further spiritual development now required him "to confront violence" by dying a violent death. But Sita didn't find this especially convincing. Some events she concluded were beyond human understanding. One comfort, at least, was that Karel, with his sense of humor, would probably have been amused by the manner in which he died. As a practicing Buddhist, Karel had been acquainted with the Zen practice of tapping students on the head with long sticks during periods of extended meditation. It was an awakening process, a metaphor for enlightenment, as was death itself, the ultimate enlightenment.

In an effort to understand why Streleski would want to kill her husband, Sita sat through the entire trial--once during a recess, coming up to the railing and looking directly into Streleski's face. As a bailiff nervously waited an arm's length away, she and Streleski stood there, a few feet apart, staring into each other's eyes. She had hoped, now that the trial was nearly over, to divine a clue to his character. Instead, she didn't see anything-- not fear, not hostility, nothing at all.

Streleski, for his part, was doing his best not to blink. No matter what this woman did, he vowed, he wouldn't back down from a deLeeuw.

Jury Trial--Ninth Day (Excerpt from the testimony of the witness: THEODORE LANDON STRELESKI, the defendant, by his counsel, JAMES W. BLACKMAN, on direct examination.)

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA 11:15 A.M. THURSDAY MARCH 22, 1979

Q: Did you kill Karel deLeeuw?

A: Yes.

Q: Why?

A: Well, it represented, regardless of the outcome after I had killed him, it would have represented an improvement in my situation.

Q: What do you mean by that?

A: The state of California was apt to provide for my sustenance.

Q: Why did you pick professor deLeeuw?

A: Well, I had a back-up candidate but deLeeuw was the main candidate. DeLeeuw was the man who had been pointed in his responses to me, pointed and negative.

Q: In what ways?

A: "Schoolboy," and the like, I would say I had made maximal effort for over ten years and he would say it wasn't evident.

Q: Earlier in your testimony you said you looked up to Professor deLeeuw and that you respected him?

A: Yes.

Q: Isn't it inconsistent to have those feelings about a person and nevertheless to kill him?

A: Not to my mind.

Q: Did you feel you had a compulsion to kill Professor deLeeuw?

A: I didn't feel compelled--it was a matter of personal choice.

Q: Do you feel you did the morally correct thing?

A: Yes, with the qualification that what is sauce for the goose isn't necessarily sauce for the gander. In other words, you can't maximize the benefit for everyone at the same time.

Q: What do you mean by that?

A: What helps me may hurt others; what helps others may hurt me.

Q: Do you see the killing as an act of revenge?

A: No.

Q: If it wasn't revenge, what was it?

A: Well, my concept is self-defense.

Q: What was your goal as far as . . . the crime was concerned?

A: To sit in this stand and read my views into the public record, to have professors from Stanford come down and sit on this stand, to reach senior people in the community with this information.

Q: And it was with these goals in mind that you killed deLeeuw?

A: Yes.

Because Streleski refused to talk to the defense psychiatric witness, Dr. James Missett, the doctor was forced to make a diagnosis from nothing more than Streleski's testimony in open court, coupled with a talk with Merrily. Nevertheless, his conclusion was quite definite--Streleski was a "paranoid psychotic" who lived in a "rigid isolated world." He was "fanatical" about his work, "naive" in his relationships and self-deluding about his talent. The world, he thought, was against him. He tended not to trust people and had an "excessive" concern for personal honesty. Like all true paranoids, his greatest fear was to "be laughed at or have his efforts not appreciated."

The prosecutor in the case, Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Alan Nudelman, dismissed Missett's testimony out of hand, saying that everything Missett said about Streleski applied equally well to himself. In spite of this, and six jurors who wanted to convict Streleski of murder in the first degree, the jury rapidly compromised on second degree instead. The verdict appalled the prosecutor, who called it "almost illegal" on its face. He later concluded that the calm detachment with which Streleski had testified to a cold-blooded murder caused the jury to draw the unwarranted conclusion that Streleski wasn't right in the head. The defense attorney, on the other hand, was pleased with the result, which, he said, vindicated his contention that Streleski was incapable of the requisite malice for murder in the first degree.



If it were not for the guard tower and the surrounding chain-link fences, the California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo would look more like a technical high school than a prison, with the exception that the Men's Colony is far cleaner, with shining waxed floors and pastel walls bright with fresh paint. The more privileged inmates walk in and out the front gate, stopping only to pick out their passes from the wooden box at the visitor counter. In the employee cafeteria beside the parking lot, secretaries and guards sip coffee and eat hamburgers, chatting about their families and the vagaries of civil service. On hot summer days, a cooling fog blows in from the Pacific, streaming through the western volcanic hills and obscuring the ridge tops, which in the right light are said to resemble the reclining profile of Abraham Lincoln. In fact, they are not unlike the ordinary brown tectonically upthrust hills to the east, the ones the slow Southern Pacific freights come winding through, the ones Streleski looks out on from his cell in quadrangle C.

Streleski's personality is an unusual amalgam of shyness and rigidity. A visitor who went to see him recently found that he stared at the floor until the guard made a formal introduction. Even then he made no move to shake hands until the visitor offered first. This is not to suggest that his personality is a negligible one. He's direct to the point of tactlessness, dismissing some of the visitor's less well thought out questions with the observations that they are based on erroneous assumptions and are therefore "null." More often, he's almost obsequiously deferential, ready to answer any question if only you'll tell him what you need to know.

Streleski shows no remorse about the killing, saying that if anything is to be regretted, its that Stanford let the situation get so far out of hand that he had to kill a man to draw attention to the problem--but not that he killed deLeeuw, who, he says, "had it coming" anyway. Far from being unhappy with his prisoner status, Streleski regards himself as holding a "tenured" position with a "state institution." If the governor pardoned him tomorrow, he says he'd refuse to leave unless he received an "ironclad" contract for half "the $12,000 a year the state allegedly spends" on him. In contrast to all his former hassles, his life is now working fine. He has "no responsibilities." The state guarantees him a "minimum subsistence at a healthy level." There's plenty of time to plan math projects without having to send out embarrassing resumes or lie his way through job interviews. He's pleased with the Department of Corrections, which, he says, in contrast to Stanford, follows rules "meticulously." In an average day, he spends upward of 23 hours in his cell, leaving only for meals or to check the time on the corridor clock. He recently renewed his electrical engineering license and he's close to submitting another abstract. He's hoping for an eventual reunion with Merrily, who, he believes, still loves him, although, says Streleski, "it's a point of honor with her not to admit it."

Assuming he breaks no prison regulations, he'll be released in February, 1984, after having served two-thirds of his eight-year sentence for second-degree murder. A few friends and associates of professor deLeeuw have complained about the short sentence, saying Streleski is far too dangerous to be set free so soon. Streleski, however, insists that he's not holding any more grudges: "As I said at the trial, it was enough to kill one person. It's not twice as good to kill two."


(Since this article was written, the Department of Corrections transferred Streleski to Folsom for refusing to work in the prison kitchen. Streleski says he came to prison to study math, not to "work for the state of California.")

Postscript: Streleski was paroled from prison in the summer of 1984 on the condition that he promise not to return to Stanford. Streleski refused to make any promises, whereupon he was rearrested and returned to prison to serve out the remainder of his sentence. In the winter of 1984, after completing his full sentence, he was released from prison with no restrictions. Stanford said it would arrest him if he showed up on campus. Streleski said he had no plans to return the campus but reserved the right to do so if he changed his mind.