Is This Hedge-Fund Heir Insane or a Stone-Cold Killer?
Thomas Gilbert Jr. had a promising life ahead of him, the kind that a privileged upbringing would all but guarantee.
Born to a financier father, Thomas Gilbert Sr., and doting mother, Shelley Gilbert, he attended Manhattan’s tony Buckley School from kindergarten to ninth grade, and then Deerfield Academy, an elite Massachusetts boarding school. There, he took advanced placement calculus and biology, and became conversant in Chinese. The hedge funder’s son played football, basketball and baseball. After graduating high school, Gilbert Jr. went to Princeton, where he was a legacy student—the father and son were known as Tom and Tommy, respectively.
It seemed that Tommy wouldn’t become a rich city kid who partied his life away on mommy and daddy’s dime. Little did anyone know that Tommy would turn into a parentally subsidized surfer—let alone that he would spiral into obsession and paranoia. And they certainly couldn’t predict that at age 30, Tommy would stand accused of killing his father amid an alleged dispute over weekly allowance.