In murder case, a French disconnection

CHICAGO - The confessed killer of Jon Cornbleet’s father sits in a West Indies jail, just out of reach.

“From what I understand, he was actually smiling. He thought it was hilarious,” Cornbleet says.

“He thinks that he basically got away with one.”

‘Hiding like a coward’
To his patients, David Cornbleet was an old-fashioned doctor, a 64-year-old sole practitioner who ran his dermatology practice without nurses. He drove a Buick, lived in a modest house and, his patients said, cared more about medicine than money.

To Jon Cornbleet and his sister, Jocelyn, David Cornbleet was more.

“He was an amazing father,” Jon Cornbleet said in an interview with “Dateline NBC”. “In the last few years, I considered him more to be like a best friend. ... Every single Saturday, I volunteered to help him out just because I enjoyed being around him.”

The interview will air Sunday at 8 p.m. ET.

It was Jocelyn Cornbleet who found her father in his office on Michigan Avenue in Chicago’s Loop on Oct. 24, 2006. He had been stabbed to death.

“There was not one person we could think of who could do that,” Jocelyn Cornbleet said. Her father “wasn’t a shady character. He didn’t do drugs. He wasn’t having affairs. He wasn’t that kind of person.”

But in the self-admittedly “far-from-normal” mind of Hans Peterson, Dr. David Cornbleet was that kind of person.

Dr.Cornbleet.com Dr. David Cornbleet

On Aug. 6, Peterson, 29, a law school dropout, abruptly walked into a police station on the Caribbean island of St. Martin, in the French West Indies, and confessed to French authorities that he killed Cornbleet. Peterson — whose DNA had been found at the scene, Illinois prosecutors said — was able to provide details of the crime that had not been made public, and he was taken into custody.

To the Cornbleet family, Peterson should be extradited to Illinois for trial on murder charges. But, like much else in this case, it is not that simple.

Peterson’s mother was born in France. Under French law, that means Peterson has dual U.S.-French citizenship. And French law bans the extradition of French citizens to other countries.

Despite the best efforts of the Cornbleet family, the U.S. Justice Department, Illinois prosecutors and both of Illinois’ senators, Hans Peterson remains in solitary confinement in a jail cell on the West Indies island of Guadeloupe, awaiting trial in a French court in the murder of Cornbleet. If he were tried and convicted in Illinois, he would most likely spend the rest of his life in prison, but if he is convicted in a French court, he could be paroled in as little as 22 years.

“He’s hiding like a coward,” Jocelyn Cornbleet said. “He did it, face it. He confessed to it.”

A cry for help on the Web
Peterson’s father believes his son killed Cornbleet “to avenge what happened to him.”

For several years, Hans Peterson haunted an Internet discussion forum devoted to people who believe they are victims of side effects of a medicine prescribed to treat severe acne. In postings on the site, which his father confirmed as authentic, Peterson writes that “my doctor” — Cornbleet’s name is never used — “deceived” him into taking the drug, marketed by Roche Pharmaceuticals under the brand name Accutane.

French authorities said Peterson told them that he killed Cornbleet because the Accutane left him with serious medical problems. Last May — 6½ months after he allegedly killed his doctor — Peterson returned to the discussion group to outline them: tinnitus, or ringing in the ears, as well as “total loss of sexual sensation, depression, anxiety, loss of craving for food, and some other neurological/mental problems.”

“I will never know again what it is like to pleasure a woman because I no longer have any sexual sensation — I will never again experience what silence is due to the constant ringing in my ears — I will never know who I would have become because of what this [expletive] drug has done to my mind,” he wrote in an another message posted months after the murder.

In more than five dozen postings over five years, Peterson repeatedly referred to his doctor as having hoodwinked him into taking the drug, without warning him of its side effects or having him sign a consent form. “He was an unethical old man,” Peterson wrote in his first posting, on June 16, 2002.

Peterson’s father, Thomas Peterson, himself a physician, told “Dateline NBC” that his son became psychotic after taking the Accutane in 2002. A warning insert distributed with Accutane says doctors should prescribe the drug for only the most severe cases of acne, but Peterson accused Cornbleet of prescribing it without having taken the time to determine that his son had a history of depression.

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