Park Elliot Dietz was born on August 13,1948 and is a forensic psychiatrist who has consulted or testified in many of the highest-profile US criminal cases, including those of spousal killer Betty Broderick, mass murderer Jared Lee Loughner, and serial killers Joel Rifkin, Arthur Shawcross, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Kaczynski, Richard Kuklinski, the DC sniper attacks, and William Bonin.
25 Facts About Park Dietz
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Park Dietz came to national prominence in 1982 during his five days of testimony as the prosecution's expert witness in the trial of John Hinckley Jr.
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Park Dietz was born on August 13,1948, and raised in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Harrisburg.
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Park Dietz's father, Raymond Dietz, was a physician, as was Dietz's grandfather.
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Park Dietz graduated from Camp Hill High School in 1966 and that same year enrolled at Cornell University to major in Psychology and Biology.
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Park Dietz was a member of Cornell's Theta Delta Chi fraternity.
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In 1970, Park Dietz received a senatorial scholarship to study at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, transferring in 1972 to Johns Hopkins University.
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Park Dietz worked with the school's noted public health professor Susan Baker on a study of drowning cases and their prevention and epidemiology, using the Haddon Matrix paradigm to categorize specific prevention measures for specific injuries.
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Park Dietz taught on the Charlottesville campus for six years, and was promoted to Professor of Law in the School of Law and Professor of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry in the School of Medicine.
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In 2010, Park Dietz was awarded the "Seymour Pollack Award for Distinguished Contributions to Education in Forensic Psychiatry" by the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.
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Dr Park Dietz is a past President of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
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Park Dietz is a forensic psychiatrist for both the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit and the New York State Police Forensic Sciences Unit.
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Additionally, Dr Park Dietz has authored many works on workplace violence, the stalking of high profile individuals, and forensic psychiatry as a discipline.
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Park Dietz diagnosed Hinckley with personality disorders: narcissistic, schizoid, and a mixed personality disorder with passive-aggressive and borderline traits, plus persistent sadness.
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Park Dietz used Hinckley's assessment of the assassination location, as Reagan walked outside the Hilton Hotel, as an example of how Hinckley did, "appreciate the wrongfulness", of his actions, but nonetheless went forward.
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Park Dietz said Hinckley had a, "long-standing interest in fame and assassination", and that he had studied, "the publicity associated with various crimes".
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Park Dietz deliberated and made a decision to survey the scene at the Hilton Hotel.
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Park Dietz decided, as he tells us, to go to the Hilton to check out the scene to see how close he could get.
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Park Dietz's concurrent teaching at the University of Virginia from 1982 to 1988 ended with Dietz moving to Southern California to start his forensic consulting firm.
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Park Dietz was hired by the prosecution to evaluate Dahmer's claim that he was "guilty but insane".
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Park Dietz was impressed at how Dahmer remembered intricate details of each murder.
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Kaczynski pleaded guilty to all federal charges including murder just after his 1998 trial began: though Park Dietz was unable to interview him before that for federal prosecutors, the psychiatrist did read his journals, interviewed those who knew him, and reviewed all of the evidence gathered by investigators.
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Park Dietz attracted considerable controversy following his testimony in the 2002 trial of Andrea Yates, a woman convicted of drowning her five children in a bathtub.
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The negative publicity following the Yates trial led Park Dietz to be dropped as an expert from Marcus Wesson's murder trial.
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Park Dietz was one of 12 people appointed in 1985 to President Reagan's Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, better known as The Meese Report after then-US Attorney General Edwin Meese.