Delco Judge to Weigh Hatfield’s Guilty plea
By Kelvyn Anderson
Sunday Times staff writer

MEDIA - Convicted cop killer Kendall Hatfield was sexually abused by his mother and traumatized by her sudden death, incidents which a county judge will weigh when he decides if Hatfield is guilty but mentally ill in a series of sex crimes and burglaries.
          
Psychiatrists presented different opinions about Hatfield’s mental condition Friday in a hearing before Common Pleas Court Judge Anthony Semeraro.
           
Hatfield, who is serving a life sentence for the murder of Lower Merion
Police Officer Edward Setzer, has also pleaded guilty to four charges of rape, attempted rape and burglary in Delaware County, as well as a string of 30 crimes in Philadelphia, Montgomery, and Chester counties.
           
Three experts agreed last week that Hatfield is not insane as defined by the McNaughton test, a legal standard for insanity.
           
But they differed as to the severity of Hatfield’s condition and its effect on his “capacity to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law,” which is Pennsylvania’s standard for pleading guilty but mentally ill.
           
Semeraro’s decision will determine- for the five incidents Hatfield is charged with in Delco- if Hatfield spends the rest of his life in prison or a hospital for
the criminally insane.
           
A psychologist and a psychiatrist called by defense attorney Brian McVan maintained that Hatfield suffers from a borderline personality disorder as the result of childhood trauma involving his mother, who died when he was 12.
           
Defense witnesses painted a portrait of a man fueled by uncontrollable sexual urges, which caused him to leave his $60,000-a-year job as a union plasterer to peer in windows and prey upon women in a futile effort to resolve psychological conflict from his childhood.
 
For the first time last week, Hatfield detailed for psychiatrist the traumatic circumstances surrounding his mother’s death and leading up to his crime spree which reportedly began in March 1988, on the 10th anniversary of her death, according to McVan.

Hatfield’s confused sexual identity and fetish for female undergarments is partially a result of having to wear girl’s underwear as a child because the family was poor, according to forensic psychiatrist Dr. Robert Sadoff.
The day before she died, Hatfield’s mother stripped naked and ordered him
to masturbate, he testified on Friday.