November 14, 2005
Boxing
Startling End to Unlikely Friendship
By GEOFFREY GRAY
When they met the first time in a grimy gym off Times Square, the boxer and the wordsmith were the most unlikely of friends. They were teenagers with bright futures from opposite corners of New York City.
More than a decade later, one of them is dead and the other is about to stand trial for his murder.
James Butler, the boxer, came from the tough, unforgiving New York. He lived in a housing project in Harlem with his mother, who preferred night life to child rearing, and he spent time in foster care and in jail. His father was never around.
Sam Kellerman, the wordsmith, came from the gilded, privileged New York. He lived in a posh prewar apartment building on Fifth Avenue. His father, Henry Kellerman, is a prominent psychoanalyst and author; his mother, Linda, is an artist.
Quick-witted and outgoing, Kellerman was an overachiever. He went to the competitive Stuyvesant High School and graduated from Columbia University.
Quiet and withdrawn, Butler was unpredictable. As a 168-pound supermiddleweight, he was tender enough to polish his girlfriend's toenails, but he was so short-tempered that he often snapped at other boxers training in the gym. Butler packed such a wallop that his trainers nicknamed him the Harlem Hammer.
"Boxing was all James really had - boxing and Sam," Jack Stanton, Butler's first manager, said at a recent boxing match.
Sam Kellerman had three brothers: two younger, Harry and Jack, and one older, Max, the energetic sports talk-show host and boxing analyst.
"Sam was life's protagonist," Max Kellerman said in a recent telephone interview. "Imagine the smartest, most talented person you know in the world. Then imagine the person you love the most. That's the guy. That's my brother."
On Oct. 17, 2004, Sam Kellerman was found dead on the floor of his blood-spattered apartment in Hollywood, Calif. He was 29. His body had been there for days, the authorities said. Gas was leaking from the stove, they said, and they found incense sticks lying across the burners and burned papers in the living room. It was evidence of arson, said Bjorn Dodd, a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles, in a recent telephone interview.
Three days after Kellerman's body was discovered, Butler turned himself in to the police. He was arrested at U.C.L.A. Medical Center, where he had gone to seek treatment for bipolar disorder.
Butler, who had been staying with Kellerman since that September, was charged with murder and arson; he pleaded not guilty. He did not post the $1.25 million bail, so he has been awaiting trial for more than a year. Jury selection is scheduled to begin next month. If convicted, Butler, now 32, would face a sentence of 25 years to life.
According to autopsy reports and a forensic analysis of the crime scene, Dodd said, Kellerman was sitting in front of his desktop computer when he was struck from behind with a blunt object more than 30 times. The murder weapon is believed to be a bloody hammer found near Kellerman's body. Dodd said that detectives found bloody clothes belonging to Butler in the bathroom.
Butler attributed the blood to a suicide attempt; he sliced his wrists and ankles in Kellerman's bathtub, Dodd said. Three months ago, however, forensic scientists found that some of the blood on Butler's clothes was Kellerman's.
Jack Keenan, a public defender representing Butler, declined to comment.
Dodd said that the physical evidence made a compelling case against Butler, but that one basic element, a motive, was missing.
"The most unusual thing about this is not if Butler did it, but why he did it," Dodd said. "There didn't seem to be any bad blood between them."
In the gym, Kellerman and Butler were opposites. With a scrawny build and cocksure demeanor, Kellerman wore his hat backward and was training to become tough. Butler was toughness itself. He had been in street fights; he had been in real trouble. A week before his 18th birthday, Butler spent 20 days in jail for petty larceny.
"James was a very difficult child to raise," Velva Gadson, his mother, said in a recent telephone interview. "He was always so quiet, so withdrawn. He would sit there, and I would say to him: 'Mommy loves you. Tell me what's wrong.' And James would just sit there all quiet, locking everything upstairs there in the brain and not letting anything out."
She said she was not there for him when he needed her.
"Ma was hanging out, know what I mean?" she said. "I don't think James liked that, Ma out partying."
Gadson had another son, Aaron, and money was tight. Butler told close friends that his mother had hit him when he was a child; Gadson denied that.
"Maybe I was too strict with him, too stern, I don't know," she said. "I wanted my sons to be strong because the world is cruel, it is chaos. If you are weak, you fall. I believe James fell."
In boxing, Butler was a rising talent. He won the city's most coveted amateur boxing title, the Golden Gloves, in 1992 and 1995. He won the United States Boxing Association supermiddleweight title in 1999 and fought for the International Boxing Federation title early in 2001, losing a decision.
His mother never approved of boxing and never saw Butler fight, but Kellerman was one of his biggest cheerleaders, pushing his brother Max to promote Butler on television, and Max did.
"Sam believed in him, believed in his future as a fighter," Max said. "Once you had Sam in your corner, you had him for life."
The friendship between Sam Kellerman and Butler was forged through their trainer, Alexander Newbold, who built camaraderie among his fighters by having them socialize outside of the gym.
"I believe what James always saw in Sam was this other world he knew nothing about it," Newbold said. "Sam was rich. He was this white Jewish kid from downtown. We were uptown. But Sam accepted him for him. All Sam saw in James was a guy he could help. So he helped him."
As Newbold talked about Kellerman, his eyes teared.
"This is my fault," he said. "If it wasn't for me, James would have never met Sam and all of this never would have happened."
Before leaving New York about a year before his death, Kellerman had a varied résumé. He appeared in commercials - once wearing a hot dog costume - and auditioned for a role in the HBO series "Entourage." He wrote and directed plays, started a book about the Yiddish language with his grandfather, produced music videos and recorded rap songs.
Meanwhile, Butler's boxing career was in shambles. After eight years as a pro, Butler (20-5, with 12 knockouts) had developed a reputation as hot-tempered.
His biggest moment was his ugliest. After being tortured by jabs and embarrassed by teases from Richard Grant during a charity match on national television two months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Butler committed a major sin of the ring. After their gloves had been cut off, Grant went to Butler's corner to shake hands. Butler socked Grant in the face; the blow broke Grant's jaw and sent him to the canvas unconscious. Butler was arrested while still in his boxing trunks and spent four months in jail for assault.
Psychiatrists soon found that he had bipolar disorder, his friends and managers said. But the drugs the doctors prescribed made him lethargic and his weight ballooned.
Butler's comeback was lackluster. Working himself back into fighting shape, he lost two of four fights in 2004 against handpicked opponents. He was making $100 a day as a sparring partner. Butler relocated to work with the trainer Buddy McGirt in Vero Beach, Fla., where he met his girlfriend, Chase Mariposa. He and Mariposa had a son, Zaire.
But Butler was depressed and rarely slept, Mariposa said in a recent telephone interview. Often, he would drink warm milk or walk around the block or put on headphones to keep from erupting in a rage. He wanted to take his medication, Mariposa said, but it compromised his ability to box.
Boxing was all Butler knew. He had no money. He needed to book another fight. He needed a new place to train.
Butler reached out to the one person who had always stuck by him, Sam Kellerman, and flew to Los Angeles to stay with him.
Max Kellerman said Butler had planned to stay with his brother for only a few days. Yet Butler was still there nearly two weeks later, when Sam Kellerman was found dead.
Butler had been making plans to leave Los Angeles. In telephone conversations, Mariposa said, Butler said that he had been feeling suicidal and experiencing "manic episodes." When Butler called after Kellerman was found dead, Mariposa said, she advised him to contact the police.
Butler also called his mother in New York.
"He'd been drinking," Gadson said. "He was mumbling, kept on saying over and over: 'I shouldn't have done what I did. I shouldn't have done what I did.' Then he switched the conversation to his kid, how he wanted to see his kid."
Dodd, the deputy district attorney, said that when detectives asked Butler about where he was the night Kellerman was killed, he said that he had taken a walk around the block and found the body when he returned to the apartment.
Why did he not alert the authorities? Why did he flee for three days?
Some questions may be answered in court, but the Kellerman family will probably not attend the trial.
"Nothing is going to change what happened to my brother," Max Kellerman said.
