In the summer of 1907, a Belgian chemist working alone in a makeshift laboratory in Yonkers, New York, filed a patent for a hard, moldable resin made from phenol and formaldehyde. It was the first plastic ever produced entirely from synthetic components, with no molecular predecessor in the natural world. He called it Bakelite, and the fortune it generated would pass through four generations of his family over the next seventy-four years. The chemist’s great-grandson, a schizophrenic named Anthony Baekeland, stabbed his mother in the heart with a kitchen knife in a luxury apartment in Chelsea on November 17, 1972, then sat down and called a Chinese restaurant to order takeout.
Nine years later, on March 20, 1981, that same great-grandson was found dead in a cell on Rikers Island, suffocated by an ordinary plastic shopping bag he had placed over his head. A fortune built on the invention of industrial plastic ended with an heir killed by that invention. Leo Hendrik Baekeland was born on November 14, 1863, in Ghent, Belgium, the son of a shoemaker named Charles Baekeland and a housemaid named Rosalia Merchie. He earned his doctorate with highest honors from the University of Ghent at twenty-one, married Celine Swarts, and emigrated to the United States in 1889.
His first fortune came from photography. He invented Velox, a light-sensitive paper that could be developed under artificial light instead of sunlight, a revolutionary convenience for amateur photographers. In 1899 he sold the company to George Eastman of Kodak for $750,000, netting himself roughly $215,000, a substantial sum by the standards of the era. With the proceeds he bought Snug Rock, an estate in Yonkers, and built a private laboratory where he could enjoy what he called the luxury of not being interrupted in his favorite work.
A non-compete clause in the Kodak deal barred him from photographic research for twenty years, so he turned instead to a chemical puzzle that had defeated others before him: the reaction between phenol and formaldehyde. German chemists had experimented with the combination decades earlier and abandoned it as unworkable sludge. Baekeland persisted. In July 1907 he filed his patent for a controllable process producing a hard, endlessly durable resin.
It was the first plastic made from purely synthetic ingredients, something genuinely new under the sun. The commercial implications were enormous. Bakelite could be molded into nearly any shape, resisted heat and electricity, and was cheap to produce at scale. By the 1920s it was used in telephone housings, radio cabinets, electrical insulators, billiard balls, jewelry, kitchenware, firearm components, and eventually components in the atomic bomb program.
By the time of Baekeland’s death, the material was being produced at a rate of about 175,000 tons annually and used in more than 15,000 different products. He founded General Bakelite in 1910, and in 1922 merged it with two rival resin companies to form Bakelite Corporation, cementing his control over the emerging plastics industry. By his death he held more than a hundred patents, received the Perkin Medal and the Franklin Medal, and was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the Plastics Hall of Fame. But the fortune was built, and the man who built it was about to discover that building wealth and transmitting the discipline that produced it were two very different things.
George Washington Baekeland, Leo’s son and heir, worked at Bakelite Corporation from 1923 onward but had no desire to run it. Contemporary accounts describe friction between father and son over money and company direction. In 1939, at age seventy-five and reportedly at George’s insistence, Leo sold Bakelite Corporation to Union Carbide for about sixteen and a half million dollars, equivalent to between two hundred and three hundred fifty million in today’s currency. The sale transformed the Baekeland name from an inventor’s earned fortune into multi-generational capital, the kind of money that insulates its holders from all ordinary consequences and eventually erodes them.
Retirement did not suit Leo. He became increasingly eccentric, spending winters at an estate in Coconut Grove, Florida, and behaving in ways his family found baffling, including walking fully clothed into the swimming pool to cool his body, explaining to anyone who listened that evaporation is a cooling process. He became reclusive and emotionally distant from the family his wealth had made. He died of a stroke in a sanatorium in Beacon, New York, on February 23, 1944, and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
George’s marriage to Cornelia Fitch Middlebrook produced three children, including a daughter named Cornelia and a son named George Middleton Baekeland, known for the rest of his life as Brooks. The marriage collapsed in the mid-1930s when George’s wife fell in love with a married man from velvet society, and the divorce, in which she relinquished custody of the children, was an early sign that the emotional instability marking later generations was already present in the second. Those who knew the family described George himself as a stern, moody man, skilled with his hands but utterly incapable in matters of emotion. The documented psychological fragility extended further.
Brooks’s sister Cornelia later married a Swiss-born investment banker named Hans Dietheim, who committed suicide in March 1961, desperate over his declining health, by jumping from the roof of a building he owned in the Bronx. Into this psychologically burdened lineage, with its vast wealth, absent fathers, emotionally disturbed mothers, and a family history touched by suicide, Brooks Baekeland was born and raised. Brooks Baekeland, by every account, was astonishingly gifted and astonishingly lost. A brilliant student, he began doctoral studies in physics at Columbia before dropping out to devote himself to writing, a career he claimed to pursue for the rest of his life without ever completing or publishing a single novel.
He inherited what he liked to describe, quoting a novelist, as the kind of money that meant he never needed to please anyone, impress anyone, or win anyone’s approval. His only verifiable period of achievement came in exploration. In 1963, Brooks co-led an expedition to the Vilcabamba mountain range in Peru, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the New York Zoological Society. The team parachuted onto a remote 10,500-foot plateau in the Andes and spent about three months cutting a hundred and fifty miles on foot, by raft and canoe between the Apurímac and Urubamba rivers, searching for traces of Inca gold and lost cities.
Brooks wrote the expedition report himself for National Geographic, and decades later recalled the ordeal as a nightmare. The expedition remains the only clear, externally confirmed achievement of his adult life. He could parachute into a lost world and survive three months in the jungle, but he could not finish a novel, maintain his marriage, or pay for his son’s psychiatric treatment. The contrast between physical courage in the Peruvian expedition and moral cowardice in everything that followed is the central truth of Brooks Baekeland’s biography.
It helps explain how a man who could survive three months in the Andes could simultaneously refuse to spend money on his schizophrenic son’s care. The courage was real, and so was the cruelty, and both existed in the same man without contradiction, because the wealth that funded his adventures also funded his right to walk away from anything that bored him, including fatherhood. The woman he married came from circumstances as broken as his own. Barbara Daly was born September 28, 1921, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a father named Frank James Daly and a mother named Nina Lillian Fraser Daly, known to everyone as Nini.
Nini had suffered a nervous breakdown years before Barbara’s birth. In January 1933, when Barbara was eleven, her father committed suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide from his car’s exhaust in the family garage, reportedly arranging it to look like an accident so the family could collect his life insurance policy. The impact on the eleven-year-old was the trauma that shaped her life. Following the loss, she and her mother moved to New York City, living at the Delmonico on Park Avenue, supported by insurance money.
With her striking beauty and red hair, Barbara worked as a model for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar in her late teens and was named one of the ten most beautiful girls in New York. She was also, from an early age, mentally ill, under the private care of the prominent neurologist Foster Kennedy, who upon hearing of her engagement reportedly remarked, “God forbid they should have a child. ” The warning, which survives only through indirect accounts, was entirely ignored. Barbara accelerated the engagement by falsely claiming she was pregnant, and the couple married quickly in 1942.
On the marriage certificate, Barbara listed her profession as painter and Brooks listed his as writer, self-descriptions that embellished ambitions neither would ever actually fulfill. The marriage produced one child and lasted two decades. It ended with a kitchen knife in a luxury apartment in Chelsea. The couple settled into a grand apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and Barbara threw herself into the role of hostess to the brightest names of the era.
Guests at their parties were said to include Greta Garbo, Tennessee Williams, William Styron, Dylan Thomas, Salvador Dalí, and Yasmin Aga Khan. Beneath the surface, the marriage was turbulent from nearly the start. Both spouses had affairs. Barbara was prone to violent mood swings, heavy drinking, and periods of severe depression.
Their only child, Anthony, always called Tony, was born August 28, 1946, into a marriage already collapsing. From 1954 onward, the family adopted what one account describes as a gypsy life, moving between East Hampton, London, Paris, Zermatt, Cap d’Antibes, and Italy before settling around 1960 in Paris. Tony’s childhood was built almost entirely on airports, rented villas, and the unpredictable emotional swings of two self-absorbed parents, an instability many psychiatrists later identified as a major contributing factor in his eventual breakdown. Tony’s psychological difficulties were evident early.
As a child he reportedly tore the wings off flies, a detail his father chose to interpret as evidence of scientific curiosity rather than a warning sign. He developed a stutter, and several accounts recall his first awareness of attraction to men during boarding school. His artistic talent produced images that disturbed those who saw them, including, according to one account, a painting of his mother decapitated and surrounded by snakes. The formal diagnosis came only after violence had already erupted.
Tony was officially diagnosed with schizophrenia after beating his mother unconscious with a stick, an assault that should have led to immediate, sustained institutional treatment but instead provoked his father’s contempt. Brooks Baekeland’s response to his son’s mental illness, by every surviving account, was denial filled with disdain. He dismissed psychiatry as moral quackery and refused to pay for ongoing treatment, reportedly describing his son at one point as an incarnation of evil. A wealthy family that could have afforded any psychiatric intervention available in the Western world left a schizophrenic young man essentially untreated because his father found the entire field of psychiatry unworthy of respect.
The violence escalated through Tony’s late teens and early twenties in a pattern any trained physician would have recognized as a psychiatric emergency. There were strangulation attempts, knife threats, an incident during a dinner party, an attempt to thrust a pen into someone’s eye, and, according to one witness, a moment when Tony brandished a kitchen knife at a journalist. The incidents were so frequent and severe that no responsible parent could have mistaken them for teenage rebellion. Yet Brooks continued to refuse treatment, and Barbara continued to believe she could manage the crisis herself.
In 1967, Tony, then twenty, met a bisexual Australian nicknamed Black Jack in the Catalan fishing village of Cadagués, who introduced him to hallucinogens during a side trip to Morocco. Out of concern, Barbara drove to Spain to retrieve her son. When Barbara’s attempts to arrange female companionship for Tony failed, the accounts describing what happened next vary sharply in credibility. The most controversial element of the entire case is the claim, relayed by several friends interviewed in the documented oral history, that Barbara began a sexual relationship with her son in the summer of 1969, describing it explicitly to friends as a therapeutic intervention.
One friend recalled Barbara calling to tell him she had done it, and he told her he did not think it was so bad. A painter gave a similar account, saying Barbara was very open about it and described the act as if it were therapeutic. In direct contrast, the art dealer who became Barbara’s lover and later the executor of her will stated explicitly that he did not believe she had sex with Tony, and that he thought she simply enjoyed shocking people. Whether the incest occurred or was fabricated for shock value, what is clear is that Barbara Baekeland’s attempts to change her son’s sexual orientation escalated over years into a campaign of boundary violation that no psychiatrist of any era would have endorsed.
The psychological pressure this campaign placed on a schizophrenic young man, already isolated, fatherless, and without any stable external relationship, contributed directly to the catastrophe that followed. Barbara believed she was saving her son. She was creating the conditions under which he would eventually kill her. The final rupture came from a different direction.
In Cadagués, Tony began a relationship with a young woman named Silvie, the first girlfriend he had ever brought to his parents’ home. Barbara, hoping a heterosexual relationship might stabilize her son, actively encouraged the connection. Instead, Brooks Baekeland, Tony’s father, then in his mid-forties, began an affair with Silvie. Barbara discovered the betrayal in February 1968 and attempted suicide with an overdose mixed with vodka, but was saved by a friend.
Brooks chose Silvie over his family, divorced Barbara, and married Silvie, with whom he had a son. The affair caused two separate suicide attempts by two different women within a few weeks. The psychological impact on Tony cannot be overstated. His father had taken the one girlfriend Tony had presented as evidence, however fragile, of the kind of attachment his mother had spent years trying to engineer.
From that moment onward, mother and son were entirely alone together. After her divorce, Barbara and Tony sank into a suffocating, volatile codependency that later observers described as resembling shared psychotic disorder. Whether that clinical description is accurate is for specialists to determine, but the dynamic it describes—a controlling mother and an isolated, dependent son with no outside relationships—matches exactly what every eyewitness saw in the Baekeland household in the years after Brooks left. The warnings came from every direction.
By the summer of 1972, Barbara and Tony were living together in a rented apartment at 81 Cadogan Square in Chelsea, London. In late July, Tony tried to push his mother into traffic outside the building and was stopped only by his physical weakness and the intervention of a friend named Sue Guinness. Police arrested Tony on suspicion of attempted murder, but Barbara refused to press charges. He was briefly admitted to the Priory, London’s famous psychiatric hospital, and soon released back into the care of the mother he had just tried to kill.
On October 30, 1972, less than three weeks before the crime, psychiatrist Dr. W. Lindsley Jacobs examined Tony and gave Barbara an explicit warning: “Your son will kill you, and I believe you are in grave danger. ” Barbara’s response was simply that she did not believe it.
Jacobs was concerned enough to call Chelsea police requesting protective surveillance but was told officers could do little unless something actually happened. Two days before the crime, Sue Guinness had lunch with Barbara for the last time. Tony had painted gold stars on his shoes and clothing and was rocking back and forth in agitation. Guinness warned Barbara again, as she had before, and as the psychiatrist had warned her three weeks earlier.
Barbara’s response, according to the account preserved in the oral history, was “He will never hurt me. ” The psychiatrist told her she would die. A friend who had seen Tony try to push his mother into traffic told her she was in danger. The police refused to intervene.
The gap between the warnings Barbara received and the actions she took was the gap the Baekeland fortune had been designed to fill. Money had always insulated her from consequences, and she seems to have believed, until the moment the knife entered her chest, that it would insulate her from this one as well. At midday on Friday, November 17, 1972, Barbara lunched with a friend, a Russian princess, eating filet mignon and green beans with red Spanish wine. She left around three-thirty, remembering that Tony planned to cook dinner that evening.
Back at the Cadogan Square apartment, Tony was inside with the family’s Siamese cat while a Spanish maid ironed nearby. While Barbara was out, a friend of Tony’s called and was scheduled to visit the apartment. When Barbara returned, she objected to the visit. An argument erupted between mother and son, frightening enough that the maid fled the apartment.
Tony later described what happened next in words mixing coherent narration with unmistakable delusional framing. He felt his mother was controlling his mind. He hit her. She ran toward the kitchen.
He followed, picked up a knife from the kitchen table, and stabbed her once, severing a major artery near her heart. Police arriving at the apartment found Barbara lying on her back on the kitchen floor with a single stab wound. Tony was in his bedroom on the phone ordering Chinese food, a detail confirmed by multiple sources and described by the detective who arrested him as evidence of complete indifference. In his initial statement to police, Tony gave a delusional account claiming his elderly grandmother, who was in New York at the time, had stabbed Barbara.
Barbara Baekeland was fifty-one years old. Tony was charged with murder and tried at the Central Criminal Court in London, the Old Bailey, in 1973. He was defended by John Mortimer, Queen’s Counsel, the lawyer who later gained fame as the creator of the fictional barrister Rumpole of the Bailey. The trial centered on the English legal principle of diminished responsibility, which reduces a charge of murder to manslaughter if the defendant’s mental condition substantially impaired their responsibility for the killing.
The court accepted that Tony’s documented schizophrenia met this standard, convicted him of manslaughter, and committed him indefinitely to Broadmoor Hospital, Britain’s high-security psychiatric institution for mentally disordered offenders. Inside Broadmoor, Tony worked in the handicraft shop and appeared relatively stable to visitors, who included the actress Patricia Neal and his grandmother Nini Daly, who traveled from New York to see him. Hospital files recorded a stark disparity in Nini’s level of concern. She seemed less upset about her daughter’s death than about her grandson being in trouble, a observation that prompted one clinical staff member to remark that she seemed just as crazy as the rest of the family.
A campaign to secure Tony’s release was led by a member of the family that founded Coutts Bank and escalated to diplomatic levels, with cables exchanged between the American embassy in London and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in Washington regarding the terms of Tony’s possible deportation to his homeland. Brooks Baekeland opposed his son’s release throughout, believing Tony was inherently dangerous and capable of killing again. Tony was released from Broadmoor on July 21, 1980, on condition of deportation to the United States. But the transitional housing arrangements that were supposed to receive him never materialized, and his medication was gradually reduced until he had stopped taking it entirely by his release date.
Instead of being accompanied by qualified medical staff, Tony was escorted on his transatlantic journey by family acquaintances named Cecilia Prebner, a woman who had met him only once before and who reportedly consulted contacts at Kensington Palace and a Danish prince for advice before agreeing to accompany a mentally disturbed killer across the ocean. The absurdity of the arrangement, in which social connections replaced medical infrastructure at every stage, was itself a summary of how the Baekeland family had handled Tony’s illness from the beginning. Upon arriving in New York, Tony moved into the apartment of his eighty-seven-year-old grandmother on the Upper East Side, and six days later, on July 27, 1980, stabbed her eight times with a kitchen knife, fracturing her collarbone and ribs. She survived.
The attack confirmed what Brooks had predicted and what every psychiatrist who had examined Tony had warned: that he was capable of killing again, and that no amount of diplomatic cables or social connections could replace the sustained psychiatric care he had never received. Tony was charged with attempted murder and held on Rikers Island awaiting trial. The cell he entered was the last room he would ever inhabit. While in prison, Tony gained access to his trust fund and reportedly distributed about twenty thousand pounds within months, some as protection payments and some as gifts.
On March 20, 1981, he was awaiting a bail hearing. But the hearing was postponed because his British medical records had not yet arrived from England. He was returned to his cell at about three-thirty in the afternoon. About thirty minutes later, guards found him dead, suffocated by an ordinary plastic shopping bag he had placed over his head.
He was thirty-four years old. Whether it was suicide or something else was never definitively resolved, though the official account treats it as self-inflicted. Brooks Baekeland’s written lament for his son, later quoted in the press, was as cold as ever and entirely devoid of warmth: a catastrophic intelligence failure. The symbolism of the manner of death was not lost on anyone.
A family fortune built on Bakelite, the first true synthetic plastic, ended with an heir suffocated by a cheap, disposable plastic bag. The definitive account of the entire story, Savage Grace by Natalie Robins and Steven M. L. Aronson, published in 1985, gathered nearly two hundred recorded interviews, letters, diaries, and hospital and State Department documents into an oral history that won the Edgar Award for best true crime writing.
The novelist William Styron, when asked what the story meant, said it had a very broad metaphorical resonance, describing the horror of “that child” as Greek in its classicism. The story the Baekeland family left behind is on one level a psychological tragedy. A schizophrenic young man who never received treatment, subjected for years to boundary-violating interventions by a mother who could not distinguish care from control, killed the person who was simultaneously his primary caretaker and his primary tormentor. On another level, it is a case study of what happens when vast inherited wealth removes all ordinary constraints from family and marital dysfunction.
Brooks Baekeland’s money freed him from the need to please anyone, and that same freedom allowed him to dismiss his son’s diagnosis as quackery, abandon his family for his son’s girlfriend, and move through three marriages and multiple continents without ever being forced by circumstance to build the stability his son and ex-wife so obviously lacked. The money bought villas and dinner parties with Garbo and Dalí, a childhood spent in five-star hotels across two continents, a life in which no one ever heard the word no. It bought the father the freedom to treat his son’s illness as fraud, the mother the freedom to confuse intervention with control, and the son the freedom to deteriorate without anyone outside the family having the authority to stop it.
It could not buy the one thing the family needed: the willingness to confront what was happening inside it.