Docs: DC man not ready for trial in wife’s death
Topics: From the Wires, News
WASHINGTON (AP) — A German man charged with killing his much-older wife in Washington’s fashionable Georgetown neighborhood remains mentally incompetent to stand trial and should continue to be treated for psychiatric disorders, according to doctors who interviewed him last week.
Albrecht Muth, 47, is charged with first-degree murder in the August death of his wife, Viola Drath, a 91-year-old German journalist and socialite. Authorities say she was beaten and strangled to death.
The case has been delayed by Muth’s bizarre behavior and questions about his mental health. He has claimed his wife was killed in an Iranian hit job, that he is a brigadier general in the Iraqi army and has likened himself to Moses and Jesus.
Muth is being treated at a psychiatric hospital in Washington, where a judge ordered him after he began starving himself and became ill. He had tried to fire his court-appointed lawyers, but a judge reinstated them over concerns about his mental and physical health. Last month, he was deemed temporarily incompetent to stand trial pending further evaluation.
A hearing on his mental competency is scheduled for Wednesday morning in D.C. Superior Court.
Prosecutors say Muth is simply a habitual con man who was motivated by money in killing Drath and who had a tempestuous and often violent relationship with her.
Doctors who interviewed him say there’s no evidence that he’s faking his mental illness, and said his responses to a personality test were similar to people who are described as “self-centered, arrogant and exploitative.”
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