On January 4th, 2015, 67-year-old Shelley Gilbert was at home at her apartment on Beakman

Place on Manhattan's Upper East Side, with her husband, 70-year-old Thomas Gilbert.

The best way to describe Shelley Gilbert is she's soft-spoken and she sort of epitomizes

elegance in class. She'd been married to her husband for 30 years. And she and Thomas

senior started out there day just like they did many other Sundays. He had played a game

of doubles tennis at the River Club, an exclusive members club they belonged to on East

52nd Street. But just after 3pm that afternoon, Shelley got an unexpected visitor. She opened

the door and saw her son, 30-year-old Thomas Gilbert Jr., who went by Tommy standing there.

Just a side note for clarity because the father and son have the same name, I'm going to

refer to Thomas Gilbert Sr. as Thomas or Thomas Sr. and Thomas Gilbert Jr. as Tommy.

Tommy was carrying a gym bag and wearing a hoodie. He told Shelley that he was there to see

his dad. He said he wanted to talk to him about business.

Now on the surface, Tommy seemed to have it all. But Benjamin Wallace, who did some great

reporting on the case, wrote in Vanity Fair that even though Tommy was born into a life

of money and privilege, he had had some hard times over the years and multiple mental health

issues. I covered this case in Manhattan Court and I remember being struck by the fact

that even wearing an orange jumpsuit, Tommy looked like he basically just stepped off

of a Calvin Klein catwalk. Benjamin Wallace wrote in Vanity Fair, quote,

He was the son of an investment banker and a former debut-tongued and was raised in

an environment of extreme privilege. He was a strapping six feet three inches, gym-bodied

and catalog model handsome with a man-bun-worthy sweep of blonde hair and piercing blue eyes.

Anyone glancing at the galleries of black-tie society pictures online would have seen a

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