Of all the former Beatles, Harrison, 56, has been the most reclusive, particularly since the murder of John Lennon in December 1980. For the past 20 years Harrison and his second wife, Olivia Arias, have lived in the quiet shelter of their 120-room, 34-acre estate in Henley-on-Thames, about 30 miles west of London. Some neighbors liken the former nunnery to Fort Knox, because of its formidable security systems. After several threats in the early 1990s, Harrison increased his precautions to include dog patrols, cameras and 10-foot-high fences topped with barbed wire.
Nonetheless, according to police, at about 3:30 a.m. on Dec. 30 Abram broke through a kitchen window and attacked the couple with a six- or seven-inch knife, stabbing Harrison in the chest until Olivia clubbed the attacker with a lamp. The bloody scuffle tracked through three rooms before the couple managed to subdue Abram. Harrison suffered a punctured lung, Arias a minor head wound. From his hospital room, the Beatle joked that his attacker “wasn’t a burglar, but… he certainly wasn’t auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys,” the singer’s late-1980s band.
Abram’s mother insisted that the attack could have been avoided. She says she has long tried to have her son committed. Though he was institutionalized in November and was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid psychosis, the hospital released him because of “behavioral difficulties,” she told the Mercury Press Agency. “Of course he had behavioral difficulties,” she said. “That is why he was in there.” With her son in police custody last week, she blamed the health-care system for failing to provide the treatment he needed. “If they had listened to me and listened to Michael over the last six months, this would never have happened.”
