By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 12, 1997; Page B01

Montgomery County deputies took Ruthann Aron from jail to a psychiatric ward yesterday, turning her over to the care of psychiatrists who will plumb both mind and body for evidence to support an insanity defense.

The defense examination, expected to last about three weeks, may be hard pressed to produce anything as compelling as the tape secretly recorded at the shooting range where Aron, 54, met the go-between she allegedly asked to put her in touch with a hit man. If the recording is played in court, the jury's attention may be directed not only to the throaty voice of a onetime U.S. Senate candidate but also, in the background, to the crack of gunfire.

Still, forensic psychiatrists and other experts on the insanity defense say Aron's case is not without hope.

The Potomac developer and former county Planning Board member is scheduled to be tried Oct. 27 on charges that she tried to hire a hit man to kill her husband, physician Barry Aron, and Baltimore lawyer Arthur G. Kahn and that she once tried to murder her husband by lacing a meal of chili with poison.

Her attorneys, buoyed by lab results that failed to turn up traces of poison in Barry Aron's system, say she will plead not guilty to the poisoning charges but "not criminally responsible" to the solicitation-for-murder counts. Behind the separate pleas are separate calculations: that prosecutors will not be able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that "the chili incident" actually happened, and that the defense can prove that a preponderance of evidence shows mental illness impelled what appears to have been a cold-eyed search for a hit man.

"People tend to presume that if it looks premeditated, there can't be an illness. In fact, that's not always true," said Fred Berlin, a forensic psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University medical school. "There is the possibility that something looks premeditated when, in fact, they have psychological problems that have proven more than they can handle. And they, in laymen's terms, go over the edge."

One of Aron's attorneys, Judith R. Catterton, served on the state commission that distilled the current definition of criminal insanity. In Aron's case, "I think you're also talking about degrees and stressors and things like that," Catterton said. "It might be like someone who has a chronic illness -- like I have asthma -- and you function and do all the things and once in a while you have an attack."

Psychiatrists interviewed for this article declined to address Aron's case specifically, restricting their comments to the challenges of a "not criminally responsible" defense in a Maryland courtroom. There was general agreement, however, that the skepticism a jury brings to any insanity plea is compounded when the defendant shows signs of plotting.

And a defense becomes harder still, they said, when the accused has displayed no overt sign of illness.

By most accounts, Aron was functioning at a high level in the weeks before her arrest, tending to her part-time position on the Planning Board while doing the spadework for a run at an at-large County Council seat -- after a planned switch to the Democratic Party. In the course of sounding out leading local Democrats, she had breakfast with State's Attorney Robert L. Dean at a Rockville Pike bagel shop on a Tuesday morning not four weeks before her arrest.

"She was absolutely normal," said Robert H. Metz, a Montgomery lawyer who worked closely with Aron on her political career until her arrest. "That's why everyone was so surprised."

Jeff Janofsky, director of the Johns Hopkins medical school's psychiatry and law program, said he has been involved in cases "where folks around the person are clueless that something bizarre is going on in their head, and it's broken through by some extreme action.

"But it makes it a lot harder to prove."

Jonas Rappeport, retired chief medical officer of Baltimore Circuit Court, said: "We think of many severe mental illnesses as showing deterioration of the personality. And this is true. But paranoia, and paranoid schizophrenia particularly, are severe forms of mental illness where the rest of the personality is intact."

In Aron's case, the defense may be complicated further by the fact that many considered her personality rather extreme to begin with.

"I expect I'll be the first one on the stand," said Del. Richard La Vay (R-Montgomery), who in the early '90s formed both political and business partnerships with Aron. She "blankly" stopped acknowledging his presence, La Vay said, when she decided to run for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate seat held by Paul S. Sarbanes (D-Md.). La Vay said he already had promised his support to rival William E. Brock III.

But La Vay said he had long been unsettled by Aron's behavior, which "did not reconcile" from situation to situation. "She was just not the same person," he said. "It was scary." The state lawmaker said he more than once told House of Delegates Minority Leader Robert H. Kittleman, "I wouldn't be surprised if she comes out with an AK-47. Something about the light behind her eyes."

"That's what he would say," recalled Kittleman (R-Howard), who was minority whip at the time. "I'd say, 'Oh, Richard, it's not really that bad.' "

Those who worked for Aron found her difficult as well.

"She was a very willful, strong person who's basically fueled by resentment and hate and anger," said political consultant Dick Morris, who parted ways with Aron after producing a preelection poll concluding she could not win the GOP nomination.

"I think she was unstable," said Steve Sandler, who resigned as the campaign's media consultant after 90 days, forgiving a $15,000 balance to avoid contact with Aron. "She used to call me at 2 o'clock in the morning on her StairMaster."

Aron ran an exceptionally tough campaign against the favored Brock, attacking the onetime Tennessee senator as a carpetbagger in television ads and once even showing up at his news conference. But her judgment was not seriously called into question until she reacted to losing the race by suing the winner for slander.

In the give and take of electoral politics, the suit was without known precedent, and it may have sealed her fate with Maryland Republicans. "People began to say then that she had gone off the deep end," Kittleman said.

Aron lost the suit, then asked an appeals court to disallow the testimony of two witnesses: Kahn, whose clients prevailed against her in a 1984 lawsuit, and Alexandria lawyer John Harrison, whose clients eventually accepted her payment to settle a 1990 suit against her.

One juror remembered Kahn's testimony as a turning point. "You could see, almost, the hate between the two in his voice and in his testimony," said Harmon Bullard, of Crofton.

But on May 29 the appeals court declined to disallow the testimony of either lawyer. And when Aron days later allegedly told the officer posing as a hit man she wanted to see Kahn's name "in the obituary column" -- and police said they found Harrison's name on a list of other possible targets -- some people inferred she had made the decision to remove them herself.

"I don't think they've got a hope in hell of an insanity defense," Harrison said. "Frankly, she's the most calculating woman I have ever met in my life."