Last Friday, tabloid reports of a woman found babbling incoherently in the Peninsula Hotel in a suite near her dead 8-year-old son’s body left us mystified. A couple of days later, the Daily News and Post have dug up some more details of the gruesome event, but even they can’t really make sense of it all. The woman, Gigi Jordan, is a pharmaceutical executive worth a rumored $100 million. The $1,175-a-night suite where she was staying with son Jude was littered with pill bottles and “thousands” of loose pills, and a suicide note indicating that Gigi was worried about losing her son in a custody battle. But both the boy’s birth father, Emil Valention Tzekov, and Gigi’s ex-husband, Raymond Mirra, who shared a last name with Jude, claimed to know nothing about her desperation. In fact, Tzekov said he hadn’t seen the child in over a year.
The Daily News also reported that Jude’s autism may have played a role in Jordan’s seeming depression:
Gigi Jordan was tormented by the 8-year-old boy’s condition, said Dr. Marcus Conant, a friend for 15 years. “When she had Jude, she found herself a character in an Aristotelian tragedy, in that the baby was severely autistic.” That’s when the otherwise “vivacious” woman, whom he first got to know when she was a caring nurse, began to withdraw, said Conant, a prominent San Francisco AIDS specialist. “She felt she had to to fix his problem,” he said. “She went to clinics all over the country looking for a treatment, grasping at straws.” The last two years seemed particularly hard on Jordan, Conant said, and she cut ties with all of her friends six months ago.
Gigi is now at the psych unit at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens.
Poor health of autistic son Jude Mirra led mother Gigi Jordan to kill him: pal [NYDN]
