The wife of Thomas Gilbert Sr. discovered her husband dead in their Manhattan apartment on Sunday night, with one gunshot wound to the head and a.40-caliber handgun resting on his chest to lend the appearance of suicide.
New York Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said that the younger Gilbert asked his mother to leave the apartment on Sunday so that he could speak privately with his father.
Police said the mother “had a bad feeling” and found her husband’s body when she returned.
After detectives responded to Mrs. Gilbert’s call, they immediately determined what they saw to be a “staged crime scene.”
“The gun laying where it was, it didn’t seem it was a self-inflicted wound,” Boyce said.
Police found ammunition for the gun, as well as additional magazines which matched the murder weapon, in the son’s apartment.
According to the son’s former girlfriend, Anna Rothschild, Gilbert Jr. frequently spoke of his father being “hypercritical.”
“He talked a lot about his dad and how mean he was to him and how nothing was good enough,” Rothschild said.
Investigators also believe money could have been a motive. According to police, the father had recently threatened to stop paying for his son’s rent and reduce his weekly allowance from $400 to $300.
Gilbert Jr. was also arrested in September for allegedly violating an order of protection. In 2007, he was arrested on drug charges.
A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School, Thomas Gilbert Sr., 70, founded Wainscott Capital Partners Fund in 2011. The hedge fund is worth a reported $15 million.
Gilbert’s murder marks the latest in a year of strange financial executive deaths. JPMorgan alone saw 48 of its employees die suspiciously within the first eight months of 2014, and Wall Street Journal commodities reporter David Bird disappeared without explanation last January.
