Maust, 51, asked to be isolated from other prisoners for the rest of his life. A fitting ending, defense lawyers said, for a man who was abandoned by his mother and father and spent his childhood in a mental institution where he was sexually molested.
Titled "Defendant's Sentencing Memorandum," the document includes Maust's family history, reports from social workers assigned to his case at Chicago State Hospital, a 1999 letter from Maust to Illinois prison officials in which he asks to be kept behind bars, and a 2004 capital sentencing report by a psychologist.
In that report, Mark Cunningham, a clinical and forensic psychologist, stated: "In fact, one would be hard-pressed to design a developmental sequence more likely to produce a profoundly disturbed, relationship-ambivalent, and aggression-vulnerable individual than the childhood experienced by David Maust."
His mother, Eva Maust, was described by a social worker as "disturbed," "psychotic," "functioning marginally," "needy," and "narcissistic." She had a nervous breakdown after Jeffrey Maust was born and spent a month in a mental hospital in Pennsylvania.
His father, George Maust, was apparently raised in foster homes because his parents died before he was 12, the report states.
At his mother's request, David Maust was committed to Chicago State Hospital when he was 9 -- a mental hospital that had a reputation as a "snake pit," filled with children who were there more often than not because family members were mentally ill and couldn't, or wouldn't, take care of them.
"All suggest Eva Maust 'dumped' her son in a mental hospital," the report states.
http://www.thetimesonline.com/articles/2005/11/01/news/top_news/d8e3e26dba3e9cde862570ac00120482.txt