Peter Braunstein: The making of a tabloid monster

It was just another crime in a city of unsolved cases. But the unfolding story of a fashion journalist turned sex attacker has gripped New York. David Usborne reports on the strange tale of jilted love, a bogus fireman - and designer shoes

A few New Yorkers still remember the Summer of Sam, a fetid season of fear and loathing as a fugitive madman murdered his female victims in the Italian neighbourhoods of the South Bronx. Fast forward nearly 30 years and you arrive at today and a new obsession gripping the city: the Fall of the Fiend.

It started as fall - or autumn - reached its zenith on Hallowe'en night. As revelling Manhattanites watched the annual parade of ghosts and ghouls down Sixth Avenue on an unusually warm evening for the end of October, a single woman had stayed home alone in her cosy Chelsea apartment. She heard a man's voice on her landing yelling "Fire!" and quickly afterwards an urgent knocking at her door.

Just as in 1977, the crime that followed had the effect of an atom bomb exploding in the imaginations of the city's tabloids. In the past five weeks, the competing Daily News and New York Post have dedicated more than a dozen screaming front pages to the intruder of that night - a man they have alternately dubbed "THE FIEND!" or "THE PERV!" Never mind earthquakes and wars far away.

But Chelsea Woman - she has not been named - while she suffered an ordeal, is not dead. Indeed, in a city where many serious crimes pass without comment, no attempt, so far as we know, was made to take her life. But in the new post-Giuliani, post-Sex and the City New York, it is a different kind of crime that gets editors' minds racing. The victim and the aggressor are not from the Bronx. But it's not just that they are from the classier climes of Manhattan. The protagonists are sophisticates. Better, they come from the fashion monde. Exactly the monde Carrie Bradshaw occupied.

The script became a best-seller on the way to the newsstands as soon as the cops - as they do - began to leak details of their investigation. Their suspect was 41-year-old Peter Braunstein, an erstwhile PhD candidate at New York University, an aspiring playwright and a freelance journalist, who three years ago was working as media reporter for America's most esteemed fashion trade rag, Women's Wear Daily (WWD).

In quick time, the police would discover more about Braunstein and his demons - about his odd obsessions with female celebrities ranging from Jane Fonda to Kate Moss and Edie Sedgwick, and with designer shoes, about his firing from the magazine in 2002 and about a recent romantic flame-out with a girlfriend - and the nasty campaign of humiliation he subsequently unleashed on her. They also learnt that the ex-girlfriend had also been employed by WWD, as had his victim, before she was similarly sacked in disgrace.

The first task of detectives, however, was to piece together the details of the crime itself - and the victim, once over the initial shock of her ordeal, was able to give them most of what they needed. Her ordeal began at about 8pm and wasn't over until the next morning.

Braunstein's costume for Hallowe'en this year was extremely convincing. He left his home that night as a fireman, complete with the uniform and badges of your regular New York Fire Department (NYFD) ladder man. His special props were two paper coffee cups filled with a chemical cocktail he knew would burn easily, but safely, and emit thick clouds of smoke. With the cups successfully ignited and fumes billowing everywhere, he sounded the alarm at the top of his voice. Other residents in the building obediently fled until the real fire brigade came and discovered no actual fire and allowed them back in.

Braunstein, by then, was already busy. In his firefighter garb, he had knocked on the victim's door. Though he knew her from the magazine, they had never worked together and there was no reason she should recognise him. Instead, she thought he was a genuine fireman there to help. Why wouldn't she? There was no warning when he put a cloth to her face doused on chloroform to make her drowsy.

For the next 11 hours, the woman drifted in and out of consciousness as Braunstein allegedly molested her. She said he tormented her verbally by making it clear that he knew every detail of her life, including her departure from WWD magazine, where she had worked in the market department, rustling up New York's hottest new fashion wear items for the editorial photo shoots. She had been accused of stealing a pair of shoes. Whether actual rape, as legally defined, took place depends on what version you listen to. There are also reports that he videotaped all or parts of the molestation and that when he left he took a trophy - one pair of her designer shoes stored in a cupboard. He left her nearly naked and bound to her bed.

It was partly the nerve of Braunstein in masquerading as a fireman that tweaked the tabloid nerves in a town where members of the NYFD are revered after so many died as heroes on 11 September 2001. But it was also the cat-and-mouse antics that have followed. Rather than vanishing, preferably to another city or even abroad like any sensible person on the run, Braunstein brazenly checked in at Motel 6 just off Times Square - only a few blocks from the scene of the crime - aware or otherwise that his image was being caught on the hotel's surveillance cameras. The perception began to take hold in the public imagination that he was baiting the police and revelling in the media attention he knew he would get.

Filling out the drama has been Braunstein's 82-year-old father, who, in spite of advanced years, still runs a modest art gallery and framing shop on Manhattan's First Avenue. As images of his son appeared daily on the newspaper front pages, Alberto Braunstein begged him, through reporters, to surrender. "For heaven's sake," he told this week's New York magazine, "my son's no monster! He is a sick man, who needs help - if he is found, he must plead insanity, and if there is a chemical imbalance, it can be cured."

Reportedly, it was the ex-girlfriend who first suggested to police that he might be their man - a suspicion that became instantly credible when they tried to locate him and discovered he had vanished without a trace. By the time the two of them broke up about a year ago, Braunstein had already been fired by his magazine after losing his temper with the organisers of a fashion awards show in New York after they refused to furnish him with tickets.

His response to the relationship's demise was to torment his former lover, sending her hundreds of threatening messages and posting nude pictures of her on the internet. Eventually, she went to the police and filed charges against him. Braunstein pleaded guilty this September to unlawful harassment and was serving probation when he slipped on his fireman's uniform a month ago.

It transpires - suggesting another cliché of our times - that the firefighter garb was purchased by Braunstein on eBay, the ubiquitous internet auction site. He identified himself online as "Gulagmeister". Detectives have since found out that his cyber-purchases extended not just to the uniform and NYFD badges but also to an expired Detroit police badge and 8.8lb of potassium nitrate, plenty to blow up a modest railway station. The New York Post's front page the next day reflected the genuine alarm that is still felt by the police department. It read, simply: "TIME BOMB!"

Whatever sickness occupies Braunstein's mind, it may have been fermenting for some time. Combing through his personal computer, detectives found notes detailing plans for an assault, although the target was apparently the former girlfriend. What did he have in mind, exactly? He imagined dressing up as a fireman, breaking into her apartment and tying her up.

Other writings and musings of Braunstein reveal a man seemingly apparently consumed with the opposite sex and perhaps his own. One piece for the Village Voice explores the notion that the 1970s disco movement was driven by black women and gay men - and that straight men who participated felt castration anxiety. He recently landed a book contract to expand on the topic for publication in 2007.

After interviewing Jane Fonda he fantasised out loud to friends about sleeping with her. And at different times he wrote about his urges regarding the supermodel Kate Moss. (This discovery led police to warn Moss on a recent visit to New York that Braunstein was on the loose and might be a threat.) "There will never be a 'next Kate'," he wrote in a piece for Black Book magazine, "for one simple reason - Kate is always the 'next Kate'. She is her own successor ... That makes her every woman, real or fake, I've ever fallen hopelessly in love with". Suggestions that Braunstein is having fun at the expense of the police may be a fiction of the headline writers. "To say he may be toying with police is nothing but pure speculation," insisted Professor Louis Schlesinger of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "That's big hype. Usually, these people simply don't want to be caught."

No doubt, however, the police, who for a while traced the fiend's movements around the city by monitoring each time he swiped his subway card, are getting frustrated. While they have offered a $12,000 (£6,900) reward for information leading to his capture, they have had to deal with nearly daily so-called sightings of Braunstein, including one reported from Ohio. When a man in a Brooklyn café called police to say he had just served their suspect coffee, the NYPD sent in Swatteams, sniffer dogs and helicopters to retrieve him. It provided new grist for the newspaper writers but uncovered not a trace of the town's most celebrated fugitive.

Even today, we learn, the victim of the Hallowe'en assault is still unable to return to her Chelsea home, preferring to stay on the sofa-beds of friends, who go periodically to her apartment to fetch clothes and water the plants for her. There are countless other Manhattan women, especially those in the fashion world or who at some point crossed paths with Braunstein, who will themselves not sleep well at night until he is caught. Meanwhile armed guards remain posted at WWD magazine and its sister W magazine.

What Braunstein stands accused of is, of course, far from trivial. But it says something about our new zeitgeist of vastly reduced murder rates and Manolo Blahnik fascinations that the New York media can create a new Summer of Sam out of a fake-fireman not-quite-rape on Hallowe'en. The madman in 1977, David Berkowitz, whose rampage left seven women dead, was captured as that torrid summer turned into autumn. As winter arrives in the city today, perhaps Peter Braunstein's number will similarly soon be up.