A Verdict on the System

When police officers kicked down the door of Randolph Cuffee's studio apartment on August 2, 1998, they found him lying naked on the floor. Under him were two unrolled condoms and two leather whips. The walls were sprayed with blood, and Cuffee had more than twenty stab wounds in the back of his head and along his spine. It was the one, small wound in his chest that had killed him, however.

Randolph Cuffee, better known as Antigua, had been a regular in the gay bars of the West Village. Manhattan police began their investigation by asking area hospitals whether they had treated anyone with lacerations on his hands or arms during the preceding night. When one frantically and repeatedly stabs another human being, and the knife becomes wet and slippery, one is apt to cut oneself. The police quickly discovered that a young man named Monte Milcray had been admitted to St. Vincent's Hospital. The small finger on Milcray's right hand--the very finger that would slip from handle to blade--had nearly been severed. Police had brought him to the hospital during the night after Milcray, wandering through the neighborhood without a shirt and with overalls and shoes covered with blood, asked someone with a cell phone to get him help by calling 911.

Milcray told the police who brought him to St. Vincent's that he had been attacked by five males and that he had lost his shirt in an ensuing struggle, so detectives visited Milcray in the hospital under the ruse of trying to locate his attackers. Milcray's shoes and overalls were collected, which, lab tests later showed, had both Cuffee's and Milcray's blood on them; when Milcray came out of surgery they asked him to the station house to look at mug shots.

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