He doesn't carry himself with the air of a lawyer anymore; he is just another 34-year-old prisoner with badly tended toenails, smelling sourly of cigarettes.
He says, "Everybody in here knows I'm an attorney, and people ask me for advice. I always preface it with the fact that my best thinking is what got me here." He says it with an unabashed humility that is somehow surprising. Who'd have thought that, after a year of nearly total silence, Horwitz would turn out to be a guy who is deeply sorry after all, who has in fact been tormented and flattened by the deaths of Danny Tunney and John Domblisky?
His humility turns out to be a hallmark of the interviews that span nearly four hours, his first since he was sentenced last month to eight years, his penalty for a traffic accident that killed two Phoenix police officers in July 1990.
The other hallmark is his defensiveness. If only one thing could be said about Horwitz, it should be that he's a complicated and contradictory fellow.
"I am defensive, because I know that I am not the person that has been portrayed," he admits. "I know I'm not this uncaring, selfish person who is unaffected by what happened."
He points out (defensively) that his probation officer's presentencing report was riddled with "inaccuracies," and he is particularly riled about the report's harsh conclusions. Adult probation officer Terri Capozzi wrote this about Horwitz to Judge Paul Katz, who presided at the trial: "Despite his apparent intelligence and ability to achieve highly, he has failed miserably in his efforts to cope with his substance abuse. . . . My feeling is that the defendant is an extremely high risk to relapse and may pose a considerable threat once more to the community upon his release from incarceration."
Horwitz angrily wants to know, What qualifies this woman to make such a prediction? How could she know anything about the 12-step recovery program he's embracing now, and damn him this way?
Then a slightly disturbing thing happens. Asked to mark on a copy of the report the inaccuracies he's referred to, the circles he draws have mainly to do with the amounts of drugs and alcohol that he has done at particular times in his life, estimates that the probation officer apparently has culled from police reports and personal interviews. He points to one place in the report and says, "I wasn't drinking every day." He points to another: "I wasn't doing a gram of coke every other day."
Throughout the interview, he emphasizes again and again the point that underscored his trial: That he lost control of his car on the day Tunney and Domblisky died because he was punching numbers into his car phone, not because he was a drug user. He emphasizes that blood samples drawn after the accident proved he hadn't been drinking that day, and that the amount of cocaine in his system was infinitesimal. (The part about the blood samples is objectively true.)
"I want people to know the truth: Cocaine apparently did not cause this accident," he says. "The only reason I took a plea bargain was that, although I know the state didn't prove their case, that doesn't mean the jury would have come back with that decision. I didn't take a plea bargain because I am guilty of the crime."
And then his ego collapses again. "But the bottom line is, I had an accident and two people are dead, and nothing else fucking matters," he says. "I do know that I'm an alcoholic. And there isn't a day that goes by that I don't mourn the deaths of Danny Tunney and John Domblisky. I know that it doesn't bring them back, but I am truly sorry."
It is a confusing dialogue to follow. Horwitz admits to his problem, but then does he try to minimize its scope? Even if cocaine didn't cause his accident--and the state was never able to prove that it did--is he still having difficulty telling himself the truth about the shape of his life these last years? If one sign of an addict is that he's a con artist, is Horwitz still hooked?
A number of interested parties would like to know--Thelma Domblisky, for instance, the widow of one of Horwitz's victims. She says, "If he rehabilitates himself, fine, but I don't want to see him back on the streets the way he is. And I just have that doubt in my mind that he is sincere."
And there are no easy answers to her questions. Recovery from addiction isn't a simple matter for anyone, and it doesn't happen in a day--or even a year. Proponents of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs, the spiritual approach to a cure that is often a last resort, estimate that only 5 to 10 percent of their members succeed in remaining "clean and sober," and they say that it takes time to work through the levels of denial and resistance that shroud any drug addiction, even when the addict is very sincere. For another thing, Horwitz--with his history of drugs and sauce, DUI's, failed rehab programs and relentless incidents of public drunkenness even after his arrest last year--is a particularly stubborn case.
"I don't know that anybody should believe me," Horwitz admits. "I would have a hard time believing it if I were looking at it from the outside. The only way people will believe it is for me to show them."
Finally, the signs of both recovery and relapse are present in Horwitz, so that there are reasons for hope and despair. His ex-wife, Angela, and his close friends say that he has changed greatly while in jail, in ways that may allow him to stay away from drugs. "All I can tell you is I see changes that were never apparent before, like his ability to communicate, to feel pain and deal with it, which Rick never did. If something was painful, he would slam the door, go out and get drunk," Angela says. "Now we talk, he cries, we write letters."
But she, too, is aware of the inconsistencies. Told of the way he took his probation officer to task for overestimating his drug use, she actually sighs with recognition. "That doesn't surprise me," she says. "He has no recollection of how much he took, because he was so impaired." She explains that when she moved from their house after she and Horwitz had separated, she found caches of Valium rolled up in towels and stuck into other hidey-holes, but that her then-husband couldn't remember stashing them. She says that she has seen him stall on the road to recovery over the past couple of months, as he has hesitated on the precipice of admitting some of the ugliest truths about the scope of his addiction. "I don't think he can take any more pain," she says. "That is what his substance-abuse sponsor is working with him on: He is trying to make Rick understand it is better to admit how bad it was and get it over with. If he continues to kid himself, he will never recover."
And the penalties will be severe. "If he fails, he doesn't have a family anymore," Angela reveals. "His mother has told him, `We love you, but you have the next years to prove this to us. Otherwise we do not know you.'"
Then Angela refers to Rachel, their nearly 3-year-old daughter: "I said the same thing: `Forget about ever seeing this child. I will tell her you died.'
"There is no more margin of error, no more forgiveness. There cannot be any more suffering or pain because of this one life. Suddenly, tough love has gotten real tough."
Suddenly, Richard Horwitz, the once- model citizen who may have thought he'd survived the worst when he somehow got through the deaths of his victims, the trial, the relentless publicity and now the sentencing, is up against the most difficult struggle of all.
"People think that if people come to jail they are clean and sober because they have to be clean and sober, but anything available on the street is available in here," he says. "People have processes for making booze, and anything they want is brought into this place."
Says Angela, "He's scared to death."
TO A LOT OF PEOPLE, and certainly to a fellow named John Rosen, the sins of Richard Horwitz have always been completely cut-and-dried. Before Horwitz was sentenced, Rosen shared the nature of his insights with Judge Paul Katz.
"HOROWITZ [sic] DESERVES A SLOW, AGONIZING DEATH--AT THE HANDS OF HIS VICTIMS. Too bad that can't happen. I'd have been there to put the boot in myself," reads the letter that is now part of Horwitz's court file, written to Katz by Rosen, a John Q. Public whose stationery identifies him as a writer and journalist.
"But YOU, Judge Katz, can--and MUST--ensure that that slimy maggot NEVER gets another chance to kill again. . . . He has shown NO remorse, and deserves NO quarter, no compassion, AND NO PLEA BARGAINING. . . . We, your electorate--REMEMBER, YOU WORK FOR US--DEMAND that you send Horowitz [sic] to the slammer for the ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM NUMBER OF YEARS THAT THE LAW ALLOWS, with no possibility of parole."
Katz didn't agree with Rosen--he assigned two fewer prison years to Horwitz than he was allowed according to the plea bargain--but maybe the judge was in the minority. Since Horwitz killed Tunney and Domblisky more than a year ago, since his own life was saved by the airbag that inflated magically inside his Mercedes-Benz, the public perception of the local attorney has been unambiguous and dark.
In press reports and private homes, Horwitz has been described again and again as the successful attorney in the flashy car, whose arms as they gripped the steering wheel were punctured with needle marks, who wiped out two devoted family men pledged to public service. "It was like there was a separate crime," says Horwitz. "Not only did I commit negligent homicide, but I committed negligent homicide with a Mercedes."
During the trial for second-degree murder that followed--and the hung jury, the approach of the second trial, and finally the plea bargain that followed that--he has been seen as the unapologetic, coked-out killer. Hadn't his license already been revoked for drunken driving before the fatal accident, pending a final hearing? While free on his own recognizance, didn't he spit at a bartender who thought Horwitz had had enough? Didn't he knock merchandise off shelves at a Smitty's store when refused drugs by the pharmacist? Wasn't it awfully clear who this unrepentant Horwitz-the-junkie was?
Larry Kazan, Horwitz's defense lawyer, says that the citizenry certainly thought so. "I don't think the public would have stood for Rick Horwitz not going to prison. Those people wanted lynch-mob justice," he says.
Kazan became so convinced of it that, in the end, it was a chief reason he advised Horwitz to accept a plea bargain of two counts of negligent homicide rather than put himself through a second trial. "Before we tried it the first time, I thought we had a chance of winning, because I saw what the evidence was," he says. "But even though I don't think the state ever proved him guilty of criminal negligence, ten people on the jury wanted to convict him. [The other two did not, resulting in a hung jury and a mistrial.]
"I saw that, even though these jurors swore to be fair and impartial, they could not evaluate this case on the basis of the evidence presented in the courtroom. I came to the conclusion that no matter how many times we tried this case, at least one juror was going to say: `Lawyer, coke, Mercedes-Benz. I can't let this guy go.'
"The best we could ever do was get a hung jury, trial after trial after trial."
The real Richard Horwitz has never been as simple as the public's judgments about him. And his life story, although it is as old a story as drug addiction itself, wasn't rooted in the beginning in irresponsibility and villainy. It also hasn't resulted in devastation only for the families of his victims: The lives of Angela Horwitz and daughter Rachel were also crushed for years by the weight of his habit, and have finally shattered under it.
While his critics have twittered over a sentence that seemed light to them, because it probably will free him in three years, Horwitz isn't sure there's even a way to measure the equation. "Anyone who thinks anyone won in this case is sadly mistaken," he says.
He didn't seem destined for the slammer in early adulthood. He was one son of three in a middle-class family in Buffalo; his father was a pharmaceutical salesman who didn't make a lot of money. Richard Horwitz expected the traditional things from his life--that he'd get a career, a wife, a family, a good house and car.
He attended law school in Toledo, and is remembered by his close classmates there as a guy who stood out for all the right reasons. They remember, in particular, that he was exceptionally sensitive to others. More than one former classmate describes him as different from other students by virtue of being less egotistical and competitive--they say he didn't try to succeed in a cutthroat way. They say that, despite a personal manner that could be hard to reach, he went out of his way for people, not only classmates but the down-and-out clients he befriended while interning at the public defender's office. One friend remembers, in fact, that he took an unusual interest in the disadvantaged and seemed destined for a career that embraced his liberal values. "I think the bottom line with Rick was helping people, and why he went into personal injury law I will never know," says the friend, who asked to remain anonymous.
There was an engaging intensity about him during those years, one expressed with a slightly radical image. "The first day he showed up with an earring in his left ear, and everybody else was buttoned down and prepped up," the friend remembers. "He wore a leather jacket, and could easily have been targeted as a biker or a hippie. If anybody was gonna crash and burn, it was probably him. I think he lived kind of on the edge, passionately, as a nonconformist."
Earlier this year, Horwitz told his probation officer that he was drinking heavily before law school--a six-pack or ten cocktails at a time--but that he "cleaned up completely" in order to make it through the first year. His friends from Toledo do not remember him as a guy with a drug or drinking problem.
He moved to Arizona after law school. His image became the sort that's personified by button-down and Polo shirts and Sperry topsiders, and he says that making money may have become his overriding value. He practiced law with a couple of personal injury firms that are well-known in the Valley for their propensity to advertise--Solomon, Relihan & Blake and Van O'Steen & Partners--and began to have a lot more money. By the time he left Van O'Steen in '87 to go it alone, he was able to make an excellent living while working only part-time. He was only 30, and he had a sinful amount of leisure.
He didn't use it very wisely: He took up cocaine. Already convicted of one DUI in 1980, already joined to alcohol as his drug of choice, he began doing coke five years ago, when he stumbled unexpectedly across a free supply. One of his clients had inherited some money, quit work and devoted himself to drugs, and so Horwitz became his partner in highs. He snorted and he freebased, but he denies that he has used needles for more than five weeks out of his life--although, unfortunately, a couple of them were directly before the accident. Angela concurs. "I slept with him. I would have known," she says.
This doesn't mean that Angela didn't have plenty of other things to worry about.
They met and married in the last half of '86, only a few months apart. Angela believed that her new husband was the most "sensitive, emotional and generous" man she had ever known--and when he is sober, she still does.
She is a particularly bright-eyed and animated woman with a very open face, who has spent her adult life working in a chiropractor's office. She was raised in an Italian family that, amazingly, didn't even drink wine. Nothing in her past had prepared her to recognize the symptoms of alcoholism or deal with them, but within a few months of her Las Vegas wedding she realized at least that she had a terrible problem: Her new husband went through frequent desperate moods during which he felt deeply suicidal. He confessed to her that the moods seemed to be linked to his drinking, and she decided to explore the possibility on her own.
She wound up at St. Luke's Hospital, where a substance-abuse counselor helped her to plan an "intervention," the recovery fad wherein family members and friends come together to confront an alcoholic with the reality of his or her addiction. One afternoon when Rick thought he was headed into something far more innocuous, he found himself in a room with his wife, her parents, his parents, his boss at Van O'Steen and the counselor. He found himself being told that he needed to enter the recovery program at St. Luke's that day.
"I had a choice: Go into treatment and keep my wife, family and job, or say, `Fuck you,' and lose my wife, family and job. With those options, I did it," says Horwitz. "But it is not going to work if a person tries to do it for somebody else."
And it didn't work. "Toward the end of the program, the therapist said to me, `We have lost Rick,'" Angela remembers. "She knew that he was not going to follow through. He never went to his 12-step program or AA meetings. And yet I still didn't think he was an alcoholic!"
Nonetheless, she knew he was . . . something. When he drank, he became a different person. "He was irrational. The closest thing I can come to is devil possession," she says. "He doesn't even look like the same person."
The substance abuse became so severe that the Horwitzes were forever separating and reconciling; Angela filed for divorce the first time in '89 but she didn't follow through. She says Horwitz wasn't usually violent when drunk, but court records show that she once obtained an order of protection from him after he'd shown up at the house drunk or high and threatened to beat and kill her.
They say they cared about each other. Each time before they reconciled, Rick would promise to get his habits under control and, afterward, he would always fail to. Once, in the spring of 1990, he decided to get a handle on himself and shipped himself out to Fort Worth, to the Schick Shadel center.
Perhaps one reason he went was that his driver's license was in serious jeopardy. According to police reports, one Eric Girard had been plowed into months earlier by--well, at least by Horwitz's car. Right after the accident, the driver of Horwitz's car--a man dressed exactly as Horwitz was later observed to be dressed--fled the scene. Girard sprinted after him and threatened to "kick his ass."
Girard told the police that the other man asked to settle the accident privately, since he was drunk, and driving, and a lawyer, and didn't want to face the consequences. Horwitz later refused to admit that he'd been driving his vehicle and he refused a breathalyzer test. As a result, he was cited for a DUI and his license was suspended. He managed to delay the suspension pending a further hearing. The hearing, which did uphold the suspension, didn't take place until 15 days after Horwitz's second traffic accident, the one in which the two policemen died.
In between, for two weeks and at the cost of $20,000, he submitted himself at the Schick center to electroshock treatments meant to curb his love for cocaine, and sessions with emetics that made him upchuck every sort of drink he'd ever enjoyed. "They suggested following up with a 12-step program and AA, but while I wanted to get better, I was still looking for an easier way," he says.
By July 26, 1990--the day of the fatal accident--Horwitz was back on drugs, and he and Angela were again separated. The morning of July 25, Angela visited her husband at the Comfort Inn, where he was encamped, and found him to be "crashed" in bed from severe drug abuse--coke and Valium and alcohol. She says he told her he hadn't slept in about ten days. According to court records, Rick continued injecting cocaine on July 25 until late afternoon, and snorted until about 1 a.m.
There is no reason to believe that he ingested anything more that morning. His blood, taken at the hospital following the accident, would test negative for alcohol and would show the presence of only an extremely small amount of cocaine, an amount that could be accounted for on the basis of the previous day's use.
He was due in court on the 26th, and he was late. As he drove south on Seventh Street, near the Pointe at Tapatio Cliffs, it was about 10 o'clock. He says he was punching numbers on his car phone's console, wanting to notify the court that he was running behind schedule. That is the last thing he remembers until he looked down and saw that his airbag was deflated.
When the paramedics arrived and found the needle marks in his arms, he knew he was going to face the music this time, whether drug use had caused the accident or not. "From that point, I knew I was kind of fucked," he says.
When news of the accident reached Angela, she practically flew to John C. Lincoln Hospital. She was filled with both worry and fury. "I was so angry," she says. "I knew that Rick was on a collision course. I had been telling him, `You are either going to die or you are going to wind up killing somebody.' But you can't tell an alcoholic that. They don't hear those things.
"When I got to the hospital, he had a broken pelvis and he was drenched in perspiration from the pain and shock. I remember leaning down to him and saying, `You finally did it. They are dead.' I was very cold, and I am not a cold person.
"He put his head back on the pillow and I remember the tears started to stream down the sides of his face." Horwitz also describes his reaction to the accident. "I had a hard time coming to grips with not only the deaths, but why I didn't die also," he says. "What is the point? I am still working on that. Unfortunately, it seems like something this bad had to happen in order for me to get clean and sober, even though I don't think I will ever feel that this accident was caused by drugs.
"But that just seems too simple for me. It doesn't make sense to me that two people had to die just to keep me clean and sober. So I am looking for more than that."
He is looking for more than that now. Once out of the hospital, once charged with two counts of second-degree murder, he was just looking to escape. His friends remember that when he spoke to them over the telephone during this period, he was frequently crying uncontrollably over the lives of his victims and his own life. In retrospect, he describes himself as "hysterical" and "suicidal."
It was during this time that he sashayed drunk into an Elks Lodge and demanded to be served, then spat at the bartender when he was refused. This was when he appeared at a Smitty's pharmacy, woozy with alcohol and the tranquilizer Xanax, and created havoc when the druggist wouldn't refill a prescription for Darvocet, a pain medication.
The incidents, widely publicized before Horwitz was finally carted off to jail and kept there, caused some speculation that he was trying to engineer an insanity plea. He says that's nonsense: "Two people are dead, I am charged, and my life is falling apart. I had no way to cope with all that going on, no way whatsoever. The only way I knew to cope was to medicate myself. Unfortunately, I was out in public doing it."
The public wasn't alone in believing the scenes at the Elks Lodge and Smitty's were extraordinary. The incidents actually turned the tide for Angela. This time, she knew she'd finally go through with a divorce.
"After the accident, I thought that Rick would straighten out, that he wouldn't go back to using again," she says. "I realized when he started using prescription drugs that it was too much for me to handle." She says that at some point during this period, she was astonished to find that a doctor had prescribed 100 Valium at once for Rick. She says, "I no longer wanted to be responsible for the man."
They were divorced in February of '91, but not before Angela was named in the lawsuits filed by the victims' widows and families. Not, she says, before she lost her job, she believes because of her association with Rick.
Not, she says, before the house and cars were repossessed and her credit--healthy before her marriage--was destroyed by her inability to keep up with the credit cards, Rick's car-phone bills and Rick's student-loan payments that he'd always covered.
"I was never so scared in my life," she says. "I was not only out of a job but everybody knew me and assumed I was guilty by association. I must have been using too, or how could I have lived with it?"
She did find another job, in another chiropractor's office, and she works there now for "a nominal amount of money."
"I am supporting us, not in the lifestyle that most people like," she says of her life with her daughter. "I live on a very, very tight budget. I am going to bankruptcy court in two weeks. I do not see my head above water for a very long time."
She does not visit Rick anymore, only partially because she doesn't want Rachel to remember her father in jail. "There is no doubt that there is a part of me that still cares very much about Rick, but when I made the decision to no longer be responsible for his behavior, I was very clear," she says. "It is real painful for me to see him, and I don't want to feel pain anymore. I want a break. I don't know what he plans to do with the next couple of years of his life, but I plan to stop feeling so much pain."
She does not mean by this that she plans to bury her grief in new romances. Angela has touched a very hot stove, and she says she has difficulty even dating. She says, "I will never, never put myself in a position where anyone has that control over my life again. I am never getting married again, unless someone hopelessly wealthy comes along and says, `I am hopelessly in love with you, and I'm dying.'
"And anyway, who would want me?" She is seated in a booth at Houstons, surrounded by the stylish women of happy hour, all of whom appear to be 22. As she glances around at them, her pretty face is suddenly very tired. "I am going to be 35. I used to be cute and young once, but no more. I feel old. I feel like I have lived through a war."
WHAT'S PAST MUST also seem like a war for Rick Horwitz, but he says that these days he's experiencing life more as a journey that he views from a slight distance. He recently wrote to Angela about the experience, saying, "I compare addiction and recovery to a train ride. I never meant to buy a ticket on this train, [but] I'm excited because I've never been through this territory before. When I'm not cringing under the seat expecting imminent derailment, I'm hanging out the window enjoying the scenery."
He is attending substance-abuse and AA meetings whenever they're offered in jail; he is reading the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous for the second time, and is mailing some of the pages that impress him to Angela. Like all new proponents of 12-step programs, he tirelessly spouts the lingo, talking about "God as I understand Him," about "working the program" as though the words themselves will cure him.
He's not an unquestioning convert, though: He admits that he doesn't understand the exact magic of the 12 steps, which ask people to surrender themselves to God and His plan for them. He admits that he spends some time simply wanting to believe in magic. "I am still hoping the proponents are right," he says. "Experience has shown them that when all else fails, this does work for some people."
He worries that "working the program" in prison isn't going to be especially easy, since it is a matter of much more than learning to stop drinking--since the "program" aims to teach him to handle therapeutically, with honesty and confrontation, the emotions that have made him drink. "Emotions are nonexistent in jail, a sign of weakness," he says. "If you are a sensitive, caring, understanding person, you don't practice any of those things while you are here. But I have found myself consistently trying to be honest, even in this setting, where there is not a premium put on it.
"Anything that I want to express, I will write a letter to Angela. So I am trying to do the best that I can."
It is hard to know whether to believe him about this next part, because there is so little about him that's animated as he submits to questions in the little room at the Madison Street Jail. Not his posture, not his pallor, not his eyes communicate any real energy for what's ahead of him when he's shipped off to prison and even after he's released. But he says he possesses an enthusiasm that's brand new.
"I wrote a letter to Judge Katz and told him that when you look at my life a year ago and today, there are some pretty obvious differences," he says. "In a lot of ways, I have ruined my life. I have to live for the rest of my life with knowing that I caused the deaths of two people. I have lost my family. I have lost my license to practice law. Financially, emotionally, mentally, I am bankrupt."
He pauses slightly, getting ready for the finish.
"But a year ago I was on the path to self-destruction caused by alcohol and drugs," he says. "Today I'm clean and sober, and I plan on staying that way." If one sign of an addict is that he's a con artist, is Horwitz still hooked?
"If he rehabilitates himself, fine, but I don't want to see him back on the streets the way he is," says widow Thelma Domblisky.
Angela found caches of Valium rolled up in towels and stuck into hidey-holes, but Rick couldn't remember stashing them.
"Not only did I commit negligent homicide, but I committed negligent homicide with a Mercedes."
"No matter how many times we tried this case, at least one juror was going to say: "Lawyer, coke, Mercedes-Benz. I can't let this guy go.'"
"I remember leaning down to him and saying, `You finally did it. They are dead.'"
"I want a break. I don't know what he plans to do with the next couple of years of his life, but I plan to stop feeling so much pain."
He tirelessly spouts the 12-step lingo, talking about "God as I understand Him," about "working the program" as though the words themselves will cure him.
