Of all the potential murder defenses a suspect might try, few are as bold as the one attempted by Randy Herman Jr.
On March 25, 2017, Herman called police in West Palm Beach, Florida, told them that he had committed homicide, and to come pick him up at nearby Haverhill Park. Upon being detained, he confessed to authorities that he had fatally stabbed one of his roommates, 21-year-old Brooke Preston, a shocking 25 times. The catch was that Herman said he didn’t remember doing this; rather, he’d awakened to find himself standing over her body, a bloody knife in his hands. If Herman had no answer about how this could have taken place, however, his lawyers soon did: he’d slain his close friend while sleepwalking.
Director Skye Borgman’s Dead Asleep (Dec. 16 on Hulu) takes a non-fiction look into this tale, which attracted considerable media attention because of Herman’s legal strategy. Herman himself appears in the film, as do a couple of experts who claim that it’s possible for sleepwalkers to unconsciously carry out brutal attacks and to not be roused from their slumbering state even if they themselves suffer injuries during those melees (as Herman himself did, on his hands). In Herman’s particular case, he wound up fitting just about every clinical criterion for someone prone to “violent parasomnia,” including the fact that he had a history of sleepwalking, loved his victim, had suffered a prolonged period of personal stress and poor sleep, didn’t make any effort to cover up his crime, and had amnesia regarding the event in question.
ADVERTISEMENT
Prosecutors weren’t buying that defense, no matter that it had worked in a handful of other out-of-state trials. Dead Asleep, however, treats it seriously, all while digging into the history of Herman and Preston’s relationship. The two had grown up together in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania, but chose to move to Florida when Preston’s sister Jordan got a job offer down there. Together, the trio lived in a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house, sharing a comfortable brother-sister dynamic that one psychologist smartly compares to Herman’s childhood upbringing with his mother Kathi Adams and sister Amanda Cona. By all accounts, Herman had no romantic interest in Preston, and their social media accounts were full of happy-go-lucky photos and videos of them hanging out together, and often drinking to excess, at the beach and at parties hosted at their new residence.
Dead Asleep is bolstered by posts from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as by Herman and Preston’s text-message conversations, all of which afford a peek inside their private-made-public lives. Numerous speakers comment on Herman’s nonviolent personality, his genial sweetness, and his unremarkable physical size as a means of suggesting that he didn’t have a monstrous bone in his body. His mom talks about childhood sleepwalking bouts in which Herman would wind up at the bar where she worked (having ridden there on his bike), or would climb up on kitchen cabinets. To them, and to forensic sleep psychologist Dr. Mark Pressman, this pattern implied that a sleeping Herman could have been aroused by an external stimuli and subsequently murdered Preston, whom he would not have recognized in his zonked condition.
Factor in that Herman’s own abusive and largely absentee dad was also a killer—having taken the life of his girlfriend, and then himself, years earlier—and many of the sleepwalking-justification pieces began to fit. Dead Asleep, though, isn’t an open-and-shut affair. Director Borgman employs a wide array of video material to dig into this story, from dashcam and home surveillance footage, to clips from police interviews with Herman, the Prestons and acquaintances. Most crucial among those individuals is friend Kyle McGregor, who informs law enforcement that on the evening before the murder, Preston had asked him (via text) to come pick her up because a drunken Herman was acting “belligerent and stumbling all over.” When Kyle showed up, Preston apparently found Herman naked in her closet, his finger to his lips to keep her from revealing his presence. To Herman’s defenders, this was just blitzed behavior. To prosecutors, however, it suggested an out-of-control kid with a latent “sexual interest” in his roommate.
The revelation that Herman was in the throes of depression and alcoholism—due to frustration with his going-nowhere life and his squandering of his inheritance—helps underscore the young man’s desperate mindset. Yet more central to Dead Asleep, and the state attorneys’ case, turns out to be something simpler: a timeline of events, based on statements made by Herman himself. According to the accused, as well as corroborating video from the street, Preston returned to their house in the early morning of March 25 to pick up the last of her belongings, because she was moving to New York to be with her boyfriend. There, she received a T-shirt from Herman—meaning he had been awake when she arrived. Twenty or so minutes later, Herman exited the place and drove to the park where he called 911. Consequently, Herman’s own account hinged on the notion that, in the span of less than a half-hour, he had seen and interacted with Preston, fallen asleep while she was in their home, and then repeatedly stabbed her.
Even an interviewed juror admits that this was the key point that cinched the case for the prosecution, although Dead Asleep nonetheless allows Herman’s public defender Joe Walsh to respond to the argument that Herman couldn’t have been sleepwalking after only hitting the pillow a couple of minutes prior. His response—that maybe everything Herman thinks he experienced that morning was actually a dream—underscores the grasping-at-straws nature of this line of reasoning. The director’s recreation of the slaying via model miniatures, along with courtroom testimony by Herman and competing psychologists, additionally weakens Herman’s defense, to the point that even the boy’s mother ultimately can only state that she doesn’t know what to say about her son, other than that she’ll stand by him until the day she dies.
The Prestons’ decision not to participate in Dead Asleep robs it of a valuable piece of its puzzle. Still, it doesn’t require their input to paint a damning portrait of Herman and his unconvincing explanation for Preston’s demise; through judicious and clear-sighted use of talking-head commentary and existing multimedia evidence, it exposes the truth about this going-to-any-lengths attempt at evading justice.
