Daniel Rakowitz had been one of the clutch of homeless people who squatted in or frequented Tompkins Park in New York City. They were derisively known as 'the park people.'
The neighbors in the apartments lining the park boundaries were tired of the messes, the drug use, the abuse from the stoned and filthy denizens - they wanted the park cleaned up. Rakowitz actively participated in the clashes that periodically broke out between those city neighbors and the unruly park campers when police would be called in to enforce vagrancy laws or use narcotics arrests as an excuse to clear the area of some of the worst offenders.
In 1988, what were dubbed 'The Tompkins Square Riots' erupted when 450 New York City police officers converged on the site to remove the park squatters and all hell broke loose.
Rakowitz was smack in the middle of the mayhem.
...By 1am – 450 police officers wearing riot gear are dispatched to the park….
TAPE PLAYS OF HORSE STOMPS, COP CAR NOISE, BOTTLES BREAKING, PEOPLE SHOUTING
Cops hit protestors and bystanders with their night sticks. Some continue to beat and kick them even once they’ve hit the ground. Protestors throw rocks and bottles at the police.
SIREN
A few days after Daniel Rakowitz speaks to a reporter.
ARCHIVED NEWSCAST
NEWSCASTER: Daniel Rakowitz admits his plan was to distract the cops. And soon enough the bottles and m-80s started flying.
DANIEL ON TAPE: I was going behind the cops and tell them, hey, you know I see yall talking about you know, your personal stuff. But what about somebody crazy like me that would come behind you that just totally hates cops and would just like nothing more than just take off all your heads while you was looking the other direction.
Vanessa: What about somebody crazy like me… he says. Who hates cops and would like nothing more than just take off all your heads while you were looking in the other direction.
It seems like a ridiculous threat… the wild ramblings of the neighborhood grouch. No one takes him seriously
NO ONE TAKES HIM SERIOUSLY
Rakowitz found himself a new place to crash about a year later.
...Vanessa: Monika Beerle was 26-years-old when she met Daniel Rakowitz. She was a dancer who had moved to New York from Switzerland to study at the Martha Graham contemporary school of dance.
Monika was slender with dirty blonde hair. And she looked like a dancer. She was gorgeous...
Audrey: Monika met Daniel when he sold her weed.
Daniel was tall with long, stringy blonde hair and a beard. He dressed like he was stuck in the 70s–nothing close to the ‘punk rock’ all-black clothes that most people were wearing.
He wanted to start his own church. He carried around a copy of Mein Kampf and always had animals with him: chickens, cats, dogs… you name it.
He enjoyed cooking and would make food to serve to the unhoused people living in the park.
By the time he met Monika in 1989, Daniel had moved on from squatting and was living in an apartment with some friends in the Lower East Side. But they moved out and he needed someone to take over the lease so that he wouldn’t be back on the streets. He’d fallen in love with Monika soon after meeting her, and asked her to move in. She was looking for a place to live and agreed. But just as his friend.
Vanessa: She brought other guys back to the apartment. Their relationship became volatile.
After only two weeks living together, she tried to kick him out.
This didn’t sit well with Daniel. He’d told friends he was going to kill her. He waffled back and forth. One day he loved her. One day he wanted her dead.
And then…
...People in the neighborhood started talking about how they hadn’t seen Monika around in a few days. Nobody had heard from her. Some started to wonder if Daniel had actually killed her, like he said he would.
Audrey: A friend of Daniel’s claimed she went to the apartment and saw Monika’s head in a pot on the stove. Horrified, she ran out. But she didn’t call the cops.
Word got out though. And the rumors became so loud that the cops went to the apartment 3 different times to look around. They found nothing.
But then, on a Monday morning, August 31, 1989, Daniel made a confession. He said that Monika was dead. BUT he denied killing her — only that he disposed of her body. By dismembering her and putting her bones in a bucket filled with kitty litter. He then put that bucket in a locker at the Port Authority Bus Station.
Only in NYC could someone see another person's head in yet another person's stewpot, tell multiple friends about it, and NOT ONE PERSON CALLS THE POLICE.
...“I didn’t go there Friday,” she continues. “I didn’t think about: ‘It’s Friday — is Daniel killing Monika?’ On Saturday night, I could see from the street that the apartment was dark, and I knew something was wrong. But I went up there anyway. I was coming up the stairs and I heard Daniel’s TV, and it was really loud. And I opened the door, and his TV was in the kitchen, and it was very dim. I went back to my room to make sure my stuff was okay, ’cause I told him I was leaving it there for awhile till I got it all out. And Monika’s door was closed, and I went and knocked on Monika’s door, and nobody answered. So I went to the kitchen. And on the stove there was a pot. And in the pot was Monika’s head. She was all burnt-up, and her eyes were closed.”
This is some story with people who live in a twisted other dimension.
...Meanwhile, Rakowitz was bragging about the murder to anyone who would listen. “Daniel told everyone before he did it; he told everyone when he did it; he told everyone after he did it,” says Lynn. “He told all my friends. Everyone who he saw, he told them. He chopped her up in little pieces, and then he asked my fiance if he would help him get rid of the arms. He felt bad about killing her, apparently. He was scared, and he didn’t know what to do. He wanted to turn himself in, but he was scared — that’s what he told my fiancé.”
The rumors around Tompkins Square grew increasingly bizarre. “It’s the kind of joke that people would make: ‘Oh yeah, he fed her to the homeless,’ ” says Hank, who lives on East 5th Street. “A few days after it happened, before it hit the papers, while the rumors started spreading around the Village, the homeless in the park were going, ‘Yeah, Dan did give us soup yesterday.’ They were goofing on it but they were pretty much grossed out. They were goofing in a way that acknowledged they had definitely gotten soup from this guy in the period directly after the incident happened.”
It takes weeks, but one of these losers eventually rats Rakowitz out to the building supervisor, who calls the police.
...Initially, neither the super nor the detectives believed a word of Shawn’s story. But they paged Rakowitz on his beeper and he came to the 9th Precinct to answer their questions. He didn’t admit that he had killed Monika Beerle, but be didn’t deny it either. In fact, he said something along the lines of, “If I’d have killed her, I would have cut her up into lots of pieces and flushed her down the toilet.”
They tear apart the toilet and find nothing. When they come back to the apartment the following Monday, they find Rakowitz's female friend there, and she says they tricked her into telling them everything she knew.
Police eventually arrest Rakowitz, who takes them to a locker at the Port Authority terminal. In a duffel bag, officers find a skull in a plastic bucket that is confirmed to be the missing woman's.
In 1991, 'The Butcher of Tompkins Square' goes to trial, and this is where Asunción Cummings, now known to the world as The View's Sunny Hostin, comes into the macabre series of events. A 22-year-old paralegal at the time, Hostin was chosen as one of the jurors in this high-stakes, high-profile court battle.
How do we know this?
Because Hostin simultaneously shocked and grossed out the world yesterday when, thanks to the Lindsay Clancy insanity debacle mistrial, she declared that she had been the lone juror who held out to get the 'Butcher of Tompkins Park' acquitted by virtue of insanity.
🤫 SUNNY’S SENSATIONAL SECRET
— 🇺🇸 Ma𝕏’s Back Porch ☕️ (@MaxsBackPorch) September 23, 2026
(Not A.I.)
Sunny Hostin has covered myriad major legal trials on TV: George Zimmerman, Casey Anthony, O.J. Simpson, Duke players to name a few.
However, inexplicably, for 35 years, she kept secret, that she was the lone holdout juror on the… pic.twitter.com/T7tBKw4Aje
My favorite part of the video.
HOSTIN: ...He did not mean to kill her, and once he killed her, he panicked. He chopped up her body parts - yes, boiled her body parts - tried to commit the perfect crime. And then fed her...
GRIFFIN: AND YOU GOT THIS GUY OFF?!?!?'
Seriously. Hostin is so overweening in her pride that she was the sole holdout who convinced the rest of the jury not to mistrial, but to switch their votes from guilty to not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity.
THAT WAS ME
“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin sensationally claimed on-air that she was the lone holdout juror who forced a notorious NYC cannibal killer to be found not guilty by reason of insanity — but multiple sources from the time directly refute her story, The Post can reveal.
“Several jurors questioned afterwards said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict,” Hostin read aloud from a New York Times article from the 1991 trial on Tuesday.
“That was me,” she asserted.
Hostin, 57, told the tale of being the lone jury holdout in the “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park” case as she discussed the parallels between that case and Lindsay Clancy’s own insanity defense.
But, as with all things The View, and Hostin in particular, it's not that simple.
Innerwebs sleuths immediately went digging through the same newspaper accounts as the one Hostin's producers had found. They found what seemed like a contradiction, implying Hostin was indulging in a self-aggrandizing case of Stolen Squalor.
ABC’s Sunny Hostin made headlines and set the internet ablaze earlier this week when she made the claim that she was the holdout juror in the murder trial against Daniel Rakowitz, aka The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park, and convinced her fellow jurors to find him not guilty by reason of insanity. The View co-host was quickly accused of lying as some conflicting contemporary reports from New York City newspapers pointed to a male juror as the holdout. NewsBusters has investigated and has found the truth.
...Numerous online sleuths dug up a contradictory New York Daily News article (February 23, 1991) that pointed to a male being the holdout juror:
Juror Valerie Holmes said the holdout juror wanted to collect his $15 a day and was “very determined, very manipulative and he didn’t mind how long he stayed there.”
Holmes said Rakowitz “was sane enough to get rid of the evidence. The horror - the chopping - was insane.
Said juror Asuncion Cummings, “Yes, we believe he did it. I believe he butchered the body and almost committed the perfect crime. He know what he was doing.”
Forewoman Lois Markle said, “After days and days of heated debate, we reached a very, vary hard decision. I’m not sure it’s correct.”
Well, hang on a minute here. Sunny is saying it was her when newspaper reports say it was a homeless 'him,' who was very much enjoying his $15-a-day stipend and didn't want it interrupted.
But then, a little further digging does start to corroborate Hostin's story, but takes some of the luster off of her claim to being the 'lone' holdout.
It turns out it was her AND the homeless guy, with no reports of the drama and physical attacks she claims happened.
...However, that same Lexis Nexis search turned up a Newsday (February 23, 1991) article that reported there was not one, but two holdout jurors:
Outside the courtroom at State Supreme Court in lower Manhattan, jurors said that at the end of deliberations, 10 members of the panel wanted to convict Rakowitz of murder, but two others insisted he was mentally ill and should not be held responsible for Beerle's death.
They said the 10 decided to defer to the two holdouts to avoid a hung jury.
Moreover, the Newsday article seemed to name Hostin as one of the two:
The jurors said that one of the two panel members seeking the insanity acquittal wanted the deliberations to drag on for days. "He was unemployed and liked the $ 15 a day and the three free meals. He liked that we were arguing on and on," said juror Valerie Holmes, a 35-year-old clerk.
"We had to compromise," said Asuncion Cummings, a 22-year-old paralegal. "But it is obvious to me he butchered the body and he literally got away with murder. He attempted to commit the perfect crime."
None of the articles reported anything about thrown chairs.
Even this account doesn't name Cummings aka Hostin as the second holdout, so it's still very much up in the air as far as verifying her side of the story.
Not to mention, her 1991 quotes in both the Daily News and the NY Times both seem to reflect a belief that Rakowitz, as she said, 'literally got away with murder' so, if she was one of these courageous defenders of a lunatic cannibal, why is she saying that...and repeating 'the perfect crime' all these years later?
Well, other than to make herself the center of an abominable story, that is.
And as one post on X asks, if this is something she's so proud of, why has Hostin not mentioned it once in all the books she's written about being her?
Maybe defending cannibals isn't really all that cool and can only be bragged about when you're defending mothers who strangle their three children, one after the other.
Like a roommate's fingers in the stew.
