by Newsday

About the author: Newsday is a daily newspaper based in Long Island, New York.

The stories are the stuff of slasher movies: Empty-eyed madmen indiscriminately butchering innocents unlucky enough to wander into their blood-soaked fantasies. Followed, of course, by a celluloid nightmare of a sequel. But the criminally insane are real. And so is the dilemma of what to do with them.

People like Albert Fentress, now in the Kings Park psychiatric facility—a trim history teacher who in 1979 tied up a young man, mutilated and shot him and then cooked and ate parts of his body. And Daniel Alvarez, a hulking man who, 10 years after stabbing a homeless man to death, walked out of a state psychiatric hospital in Brooklyn only to...