http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/...n-guy-turcotte-child-murder-case-dimanno.html
Second trial convicts Guy Turcotte in fatal stabbing of his children
Rejecting an earlier finding of "not criminally responsible," the jury finds him guilty of second-degree murder in a killing meant to exact revenge against his ex-wife.
Crazed but sane.
Maddened, more like, by bitterness and vengeance and the kind of twisted hatred that can cause a man to say: “I would like you to give Isabelle the message that I did it to piss her off.’’ Stabbed to death his two young children after tucking them into bed, that is, even as 5-year-old Olivier pleaded: “Non papa! Non papa!’’
And very, very guilty of murder, because on Sunday, a Quebec jury, on its seventh day of deliberation, got it right the second time around, convicting former cardiologist Guy Turcotte of double homicide.
He was sane — if crazy by the estimation of any rational person. Thus a verdict of second-degree murder was entered by the 11 jurors, and the option of “not criminally responsible’’ rejected.
Sane, but a wicked and pitiless man, motivated by an urge to inflict pain ever-after on a wife who’d committed infidelity and left the marriage after a decade together.
The policeman who discovered Turcotte cowering underneath the bed that morning six years ago — after plunging the knife in and out of his son 27 times, after 3-year-old Anne-Sophie had been stabbed 19 times, after Turcotte had cancelled a meeting with his real estate agent, after letting the babysitter know she wouldn’t be needed the next day, after an hour-long telephone conversation with his mother — that policeman, his eyes filled with images of those dead, cold-to-the-touch children, said to their father: “You’re an imbecile.’’
It sounds more damning in French.
Turcotte: “Yes, I know.’’
In hospital later, he told an emergency room nurse, as she recounted the words in her testimony: “He said he wanted to make her angry and that the way to do so was to take away from her what was most precious to her.’’
Her: Isabelle Gaston, an emergency room doctor herself, who’d embarked on an affair with the couple’s trainer, and whom Turcotte thought should be made to suffer the loss of her little boy and her little girl while she was on a girls’ weekend ski trip.
“Tomorrow, I will not wake up with children,’’ Gaston said yesterday, after the jury in Saint-Jerome, Que., north of Montreal, condemned her former husband to at least 10 years in penitentiary and up to 25, the length of that “life sentence’’ to be settled Dec. 18 by Superior Court Justice Andre Vincent.
It won’t ever be filled, the void in Gaston’s life. But there is some sense of relief this time.
“Today, I hope the souls of Oliver and Anne-Sophie can be at peace.’’ Adding: “For me, this is the day I can begin to rest. Since their deaths, I’ve had the impression my life has been a struggle. Now, it’s all about healing.’’
Turcotte, who’s never denied that he killed his youngsters, was found not criminally responsible — NCR — when this dreadful case first went to trial in 2011, a jury agreeing with the defence that the accused had been in a mental crisis state of mind, incapable of grasping the nature or quality of his actions.
The original verdict infuriated the Quebec public. The Crown successfully appealed in 2013 and the Supreme Court of Canada subsequently declined to hear the defence’s appeal of that decision.
But between the first trial and this one, which began 12 weeks ago, Turcotte — sent to a psychiatric institution rather than prison — stood in front of a review board and spoke about wanting to move on with his life, now that he was so miraculously healed from the personal disorders and severe depression that had caused him to murder his children; even said he might want to have more kids in the future. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing, to have objectives.’’
One year had passed since the brutal killing of those little ones. But Turcotte was no longer suicidal or depressed or in need of medication. And the board agreed that he could start unescorted trip outside Montreal’s Pinel Institute.
He’d moved on, all right.
The evidence hadn’t changed between that trial and this one. Turcotte, again testifying in his own defence, recalled reading the passionate emails between his estranged wife and her lover. He still claims to remember the night only in flashes, deciding he would take his own life by drinking windshield wiper fluid, then imagining his children waking to find their father dead, how traumatizing that would be for them, so concluding it would be best — for them — to die as well. He’d take them with him.
But Turcotte didn’t die, of course.
The fluid, his lawyers argued then and now, had contributed to his being incapable of rational judgment. A toxicology expert told this trial that the methanol he’d ingested was comparable to drinking only three to five beers, meaning he was conscious and coherent.
The first jury bought into the defence’s dubious claims of a mental disorder. This trial heard from a slew of psychiatrists who, predictably, disagreed, because that’s what shrinks do when they’re summoned to the stand in such circumstances.
Three were of the similar opinion: Turcotte indeed suffered from a personality adjustment disorder. The defence experts variously claimed Turcotte had been “profoundly sick’’ and his brain “wasn’t working properly.” But a prosecution expert cited medical literature that estimated 15 per cent of the population suffers from the condition at any time — same as the common cold.
“To say that someone’s brain is sick is a cliché,” he testified. “It’s a cliché often used to sell medication.’’
And NCR.
Instances of NCR accepted by a jury in cases of serious violence — murder — may be few and far between. But they leave an acrid taste when successful, because mental illness of an episodic nature is so difficult to quantify.
There was Vincent Li, found to be in an “undiagnosed schizophrenic’’ state when he decapitated a stranger aboard a Greyhound bus outside Winnipeg in 2008. And ate parts of the body. He was granted unsupervised passes earlier this year.
There was Allan Schoenborn, the B.C. father who killed his three kids — aged 10, 8, 5 — in 2008 after his estranged wife spurned his bid for reconciliation. Three years later, a review board granted Schoenborn escorted day passes, reversing themselves only after a public backlash.
NCR can result when a defendant is determined to be sane enough for trial — meaning he or she can understand the procedure, is competent to communicate with legal counsel — but then is found essentially retroactively not criminally responsible because of a mental disorder. There’s no verdict rendered other than that: NCR.
Not insane but sick. Because a normal, rational person recoils from the premise that an individual can be anything other than sick to murder his own defenceless children. That is an assumption born of logical thinking, misplaced. That was the assumption that tripped up Turcotte’s first jury.
Six years later, a jury more clear-eyed, made of sturdier stuff, finally got it right. Finally exacted justice for Olivier and Anne-Sophie.
Regards
Booker
