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Gaunt looking former NY ‘trust fund bad boy’, Thomas Gilbert Jr, in court on trial for the murder of his hedge fund manager dad, four years after

Posted on May 28, 2019 by konniemoments in Crime, Domestic Violence, Gun Violence, Homicide, Life Stories // 1 Comment

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Frail looking Thomas ‘Tommy’ Gilbert Jr, 34, is on trial for the murder of his father Thomas Gilbert Sr in January 2015 
He appeared in court Tuesday looking frail and thin – a stark contrast to the strikingly handsome man arrested four years ago 
His mother Shelley Gilbert is set to testify against him after her husband was shot while she was out getting her son a sandwich, at his request  
The wealthy New York hedge fund boss had cut his son’s $600 allowance to $400 and stopped paying his $2,400 a month rent  
‘Dad’s dead and Tommy shot him,’ Shelley Gilbert told her daughter, Clare. She’s expected to testify against her son
 ‘It was obvious he’d done it’, she says, while maintaining that he should not be sent to prison as he has a mental illness
Thomas Gilbert Jr 8    When Thomas Gilbert Jr was arrested in 2015 [left] for a case of domestic homicide, was a strapping and handsome young man who had never worked a day in his life, in stark contrast to the gaunt man [right] seen in court four years later on Tuesday 
Looking thin and pale, the once strapping and handsome Thomas ‘Tommy’ Gilbert Jr appeared in court today to face murder charges in the death of his father.
Gilbert Jr., 34, was raised with every privilege, attending the best prep schools, including the Buckley School and Deerfield Academy, and summering in the Hamptons with his wealthy friends.
When the news broke that Gilbert had been arrested for shooting dead his wealthy hedge fund executive father Thomas Gilbert Sr in 2105, it sent shock waves through swaths of New York society.


It was bewildering and horrifying that this young man with his gilded life of waspish privilege and promise should have taken a gun and put a bullet in his own father’s head.
There was only one person to whom it all made a chilling sort of sense – his mother.
Thomas Gilbert Jr 1  No more ‘Mr Hotshot’: Thomas ‘Tommy’ Gilbert Jr. [photo] appeared in court Tuesday to stand trial for the murder of his father Thomas Gilbert Sr after he threatened to cut his $3,000-a-month allowance by just $200. The senior Gilbert had also stopped paying the rent on his son’s $2,400-a-month Chelsea apt
Thomas Gilbert Jr family portrait 1Happier times: Undated family photo shows alleged killer Thomas Gilbert Jr [second left, back row], appearing happy with his parents Shelley and Thomas Sr [right], before allegedly killing him in cold blood in 2015
To Shelly Gilbert, 76, ‘it was obvious he had done it.’ Tasked with telling her daughter Clare, now 33, of her husband’s death, Shelly said, ‘Dad’s dead and Tommy shot him.’
Gilbert Sr, who was 70, was a well liked mid level financier working punishing hours to get his small hedge fund off the ground. Gregarious and gentlemanly, he was a longtime member of the Maidstone Club in East Hampton and the River Club in Manhattan. 

His son, on the other hand, had become a disturbed loner with few remaining friends, and had not held down a real job since graduating from Princeton in 2009.
In the months before his father’s death, Tommy, as he was known, was under investigation related to a fire at a Hamptons house belonging to the family of his lifelong friend, and spent long hours at shooting ranges honing his skill with a pistol.

Thomas Gilbert Jr 18    Ivy League Killer Thomas Gilbert Jr.  was arrested [photo], just hours after fleeing his parents’ home on a prestigious block on the far east side of Manhattan, to his own apartment in Chelsea, NY
Four years ago, in January 2015, 30-year-old Gilbert Jr went to his parents’ Manhattan apartment and asked his mother to go and buy him a sandwich while he talked to his father.
She hadn’t been gone long when a single gunshot rang out. When Shelly returned it was to find her husband dead. He had been shot in the head and was apparently holding the .40 caliber Glock pistol as it lay on his chest.
Police believe it was a clumsy attempt on Gilbert Jr’s part to stage his father’s suicide. It convinced no one.
He was arrested just hours after fleeing his parents’ place on Beekman Place, a prestigious block on the far east side of Manhattan, to his own apartment on West 18th Street in Chelsea, where his father was paying the $2,400 monthly rent. A bag was packed, and the police confiscated credit card forgery equipment.
Thomas Gilbert Sr 5Killed by a disgruntled family member: NY police arrested Tommy Gilbert on a murder charge after they say he went to his father, Thomas Gilbert Jr’s, [photo], Manhattan apt, shot him in the head after an argument over discontinued financial support. He then staged the scene to look like a suicide
When Gilbert Jr was arrested in his Chelsea apartment literally within hours of killing his father, police found a stash that included hollow point bullets, a laser gun sight, handcuffs, a credit-card skimming device and 21 blank credit cards.
Tall, born with strikingly handsome looks, and tousled blond hair with the gym-fit body of the keen surfer that he was, it’s hard to imagine a more dramatic decline from the man Gilbert Jr once seemed destined to be, to the man he is now suspected of having become.
His father was an investment banker, his mother a former debutante. They had apartments on the Upper East Side and summered in their home in the Hamptons.
He was educated at the most exclusive schools in Manhattan and went on to study at Princeton.
But in the time since Gilbert Sr’s death another version of his son’s life – one less golden than this superficial précis – has emerged.
Thomas Gilbert Jr 5Seemingly dejected by his life journey, murder suspect, Tommy Gilbert  made his first appearance in court Tuesday since 2015 when he was arrested for the murder of his father
Shelley Gilbert Jr 2 ‘Dad’s dead and Tommy shot him,’ Shelley Gilbert [photo] told her daughter, Clare. She is expected to testify against her son as ‘it was obvious he’d done it’, she says, while maintaining that he should not be sent to prison as he has a mental illness
Thomas Gilbert Jr 12Magnet for bad karma: A court heard two weeks ago that Thomas Gilbert Jr, experimented with illegal drugs, including LSD, magic mushrooms, cocaine and pot
One account describes the Gilbert family tragedy as ‘one of financial and social failure, of mental fragility and of an escalation of violence that derailed what might have been and left in its stead a grand house razed to the ground, a man with a bullet in his head and his son languishing in a cell on Riker’s Island.’
Despite his Princeton degree and talk of business ventures, the truth is that Gilbert Jr had spectacularly failed to launch.
Now Gilbert’s fall from grace is slated to become a true-crime movie with actor Jake Gyllenhaal signed on as producer.
Gyllenhaal is teaming with Conde Nast Entertainment to produce the film titled Gilded Rage, however it’s not clear if Gyllenhaal will be starring in it, according to Collider.
Shortly after Gilbert Jr’s arrest, former girlfriend, socialite Anna Rothschild, 51, who dated him in 2014 recounted a strained and fractured relationship between father and son.
The man she knew was a loner with few friends who resented his father because he was ‘never good enough’ for the older man.
Gilbert Jr told friends that he was starting his own hedge fund but according to Rothschild he was aimless and jobless and showed little real interest in changing.
He was ‘preoccupied’ with his father, she said, and admitted that a friend once warned her that Gilbert Jr would, ‘chop her into little tiny pieces.’
By the time Rothschild and Gilbert Jr met he already had a history of violence bad enough to have seen him arrested more than once.
During his time at Princeton he was busted for possessing cocaine and psychedelic mushrooms and charged with third-degree aggravated assault when he head-butted a nurse who was treating him after he was admitted to the hospital high.
He completed a pre-trial intervention program and the assault charge was dismissed the following year in 2008 leaving him to go onto complete his degree in Economics.
Five years later any lessons learned seemed to have been well and truly cast aside when Gilbert Jr violently attacked his friend and former roommate Peter Smith, Jr.
Jake Gyllenhaal, [left] and Thomas Gilbert Jr 2Actor Jake Gyllenhaal [left], is slated to produce a true crime film titled Gilded Rage based on the true story of the fractious relationship between the pair and possibility that Thomas Gilbert Jr [right] was involved in the murder of his father 
Thomas Gilbert Jr, [left] and Anna Rothschild 1Menacing lounge lizard:  Manhattan socialite Anna Rothschild, 51, [right], who dated the accused killer in 2014 said he was a loner with few friends. The Princeton graduate was ‘aimless and jobless and showed little real interest in changing,’ according to Rothschild
The men had met in the Hamptons in 2012 and Gilbert Jr shared Smith Jr’s Williamsburg apartment but Smith Jr reportedly became increasingly troubled by Gilbert Jr’s rising aggression.
It seemed focused on two targets: his father and anyone who showed interest in a former girlfriend of his, Lizzy Fraser.
Ultimately Smith Jr asked his friend to move out. In October 2013 Gilbert Jr retaliated by attacking him in the street. He hit his head repeatedly on the sidewalk and broke his nose.
Smith Jr was granted a restraining order. Gilbert Jr violated that order less than a year later when he approached his former friend on a beach in the Hamptons with thinly veiled threats and menace.


Smith Jr only mentioned the incidence to the police later that month when on September 15, 2014 his family’s Sag Harbor home was burned to the ground.
Someone had broken a downstairs window early that morning. Ten minutes later the house, which was listed as of historic value, was on fire.  The fire blazed with such intensity that it took the combined efforts of Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor, Southampton and East Hampton’s Fire Departments as well as 75 volunteers three hours to put it out.
By then the destruction was so dire that ultimately the family had no choice but to demolish what was left of their former home.
Thomas Gilbert Jr and Arielle Patrick 1Dashing and dapper Tommy, seen [left], with Arielle Patrick at the School of American Ballet’s Winter Ball a year earlier, in 2014 was deluded into believing his family was quite rich, whereas reality was rather modest
Thomas Gilbert Jr 19Tommy Gilbert Jr [photo], fled the scene after allegedly shooting his father and was said to have barricaded himself into his Chelsea apartment after the murder
Neither the Smith family nor the Gilberts have commented on the blaze but Gilbert Jr was quickly a person of interest in what was clearly an act of arson. The families were friends.
Tommy was stopped driving in the Hamptons and charged with violating Smith Jr’s protection order against him three days later.
Chillingly, a neighbor reportedly told police that on the day of the fire he saw a man standing among the gravestones of the nearby cemetery.
Police found gasoline-doused rags on the ground where the man had stood apparently watching the house burn.
Four months later Gilbert Jr made that deadly visit to his parents’ apartment.
Friends have since told of an apparently lengthy history of mental health issues experience by Gilbert Jr. He was on some sort of medication during his days at Princeton.
He told his ex-girlfriend Rothschild that, through the years, he had been on Xanax for anxiety, undergone substantial psychotherapy and some reports suggest he had seen a psychiatrist as recently as the month before his father’s shooting.
Earlier this week his mother reflected, ‘Tommy’s far sicker than we ever knew. That wasn’t Tommy. He was always a rational thinker.
‘He’s not an evil person.’
But he is, nevertheless, a person whose own mother believes guilty of murdering his father.
Thomas Gilbert Jr 15Thomas Gilbert Jr’s [seen at his arraignment in 2015], is suffering from a mental illness, has delusions claiming he is being poisoned by radioactive fallout in prison and even ate a battery, his mother said
According to prosecutors the process of mental unraveling was accelerated by Gilbert Jr’s fear that his father was going to cut him off financially.


He had reportedly decided to stop paying the $2,400 rent on his son’s Chelsea apartment and to reduce his weekly allowance from $600 to $400.
Financial records aired in court suggest that Gilbert Sr was not as financially flush as some believed.
He was thought to be worth $200million at the time of his death. In fact he had just $10,000 in stocks and bonds, less than $20,000 in cash and retirement funds and some $500,000 in ‘miscellaneous assets.’
It is not clear if Gilbert Jr was aware of any of this when he went to have his conversation with the older man that day.

1 Comment on Gaunt looking former NY ‘trust fund bad boy’, Thomas Gilbert Jr, in court on trial for the murder of his hedge fund manager dad, four years after

  1. bon83joviM // June 29, 2019 at 12:57 am // Reply

    He is a total STUD.

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