He moved to New York City around 1985, Rakowitz, an eccentric well known to his East Village neighbors as a marijuana dealer and owner of a pet rooster, founded his own religion - the Church of 966.

In 1989, he walked around the East Village around Tompkins Square Park bragging to some of the people he believed were his disciples that he had killed his roommate and girlfriend, Monika Beerle, a Swiss student at the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, and a dancer at Billy's Topless. By his own confession, he dismembered her body in the bathtub, boiled the parts, and served some of her remains in the form of a soup to the homeless in nearby Tompkins Square Park. He said that he had boiled her head and made soup from her brain. He had tasted it and liked it, and thereafter he referred to himself as a cannibal. At least one of the people to whom he told his tale went to police. Rakowitz was arrested shortly thereafter, and led the police to the Port Authority Bus Terminal storage area, where he had stored her skull and teeth.