Kill the Ones You Love (25 page)

CHAPTER 47

Frasier attempted to show that Gabe's actions on the day of the murder had shown planning. Gabe waited up in the tree line with binoculars until he knew his mom and Bob Kennelly had left for the day. He had Jessica bring the pickup truck up the drive and hide it behind a small hill. He had Jessica and Kalea follow him into the house, and he got Kennelly's pistol and waited for Bob and Robin to return so he could ambush them. But Gabe was now saying he didn't do it. Frasier asked, “You have to decide whether he's telling you the truth to some degree, don't you?”

Mallory agreed that he didn't think there was some shadowy figure in the house who had shot Robin and Bob, but “at the time, Gabriel Morris believed it.”

Frasier countered, “People who commit crimes often lie about it, but it doesn't mean they're delusional, correct?”

“Well, wait a minute. Someone who is delusional isn't truly lying. They believe it. That's their reality.”

Frasier pointed out that Gabe had wanted to testify before a jury and tell them what happened until his attorneys talked him out of that. “One of the things he wanted to tell them was that there was no forensic evidence tying him to the crime. And did you know, Doctor, there is no forensic evidence tying him to the crime. If there is no DNA evidence, no fingerprints that can be used, wouldn't that be a rational thing—wanting the jury to know that?”

“Yeah. But when he talked to me, he expressed that the jury would be guided by God. And he would be able to show the jury he was a prophet. The jury would be touched by God, and there was no way that they could find him guilty.”

“Didn't he want to give an explanation about why he had confessed?”

Mallory answered, “He said that if he confessed, then his wife and daughter would be allowed to leave.”

“Wouldn't someone who just committed a murder want to dump a truck away from the scene so it couldn't be connected to him, as he did near the Eschlers'?”

“Yes, but such a person would probably not take their wife and daughter clad only in pajamas without any shoes on their feet. When I looked at that—the whole event—it did not seem very organized or rational.”

“You keep using the word ‘probably.' How sure are you of your opinion?”

Mallory replied, “I'm a trained scientist. I'm trained to not make statements beyond what I know the data to be. I'm fairly certain in my diagnosis, but I'm trained to say it in certain ways.”

“For the sake of argument, let's say he is antisocial. Aren't his behaviors consistent with someone who knows he did something wrong?”

Mallory said he saw a lot of problems with that hypothesis. He said a merely antisocial person would have planned the whole thing a lot better. Such a person would have dressed for cold weather, taken an ID and money. This crime did not have the aspects of a coldly calculated plan that a psychopath might use.

Frasier pointed out that there was a television show called
America's Dumbest Criminals,
where the theme was that a lot of crimes were not planned well. Yet, those criminals were not delusional. Mallory agreed that there were a lot of “dumb crimes” that were committed.

Frasier then wondered if Gabe had said he knew that it was a lie that he'd been in the military.

Mallory replied, “When I confronted him with that, he said, ‘Oh, yeah. But to cover up that I'm special in the eyes of God, I told them [the Eschlers] those spy stories. So I covered up by saying I worked for the government. No one would have believed that God had blessed me and tells me what to do.' I do think when he's out there telling those spy stories, however, he really believes them.”

Frasier then stated, “An appropriate mental defense requires that the defendant at the time of the crime was suffering from a disorder. The statute reads he could not substantially conform his conduct to the requirements of the law, and he could not substantially conform his conduct or appreciate the criminality of his actions at the time of the crime. If we don't know what was going through his mind when he pulled the trigger, how can we know to any degree of certainty that those factors have been met?”

Mallory replied, “Oh, because it was such a clear, such a severe, such a well-documented and founded belief system right up to that instance. Even though I can't take that tiny slice of time when the trigger was pulled and know what was in his head, it still looks like a clear case to me that he was not able to control or understand his behavior. I looked at my reports on murders and did a search. And I've been involved in over thirty murder cases. Almost always you can't make the case that a mental illness was building up to an event. Here that is so clear, that it's fairly remarkable how clear it is. I would say to a reasonable degree of certainty, I find it rational to say he was delusional all the way up to the point where he pulled the trigger.”

Frasier pointed out that Jessica in her statements to investigators said that she did not see anything unusual about Gabe on the day of the shootings.

Mallory replied, “Yes, but she also thought she was being poisoned. So her perception at the time was intertwined with his delusional material.”

Frasier asked, “So, do you believe that since she believed her husband, her perceptions of that day are not worthy of consideration?”

“No, I don't think that's fair. If I told my wife that my mother was poisoning me, she wouldn't believe me. It's not a rational thing a person would believe, even if their spouse said it. It was entering into a shared delusional system to some degree.”

Frasier then said, “For the legal aspects of this case, did the defendant, when he pulled the trigger, intend to kill those people?”

Fahy objected, saying, “Your Honor, I think he misstated the definition of ‘intent.'”

The judge, Fahy and Frasier all looked up the definition as defined by Oregon law, and the word “conscious” had been omitted in Frasier's statement. So Frasier restated it, using the word “conscious.”

Mallory replied that he did not believe Gabe had done so in a conscious manner.

Frasier asked, “What do you think he meant when he shot those people?”

Mallory reiterated all his comments about the delusion and added, “He was cocked and ready for a terrible event to occur. I can't tell you what happened. The victim Mr. Kennelly might have just jerked the wrong way, and Mr. Morris thought he was pulling a gun on him.”

Frasier let out a big sigh and said, “Do you know how many times the defendant fired that gun?”

“No, I don't. I understand it was quite a few times. But once he started, he believed it was to shoot until he took out the danger.”

“When you say ‘to take out the danger,' he was shooting to kill these people. That's the point, isn't it, Doctor?”

“Well, no, it's not the whole point. I'm not an attorney, and I'm not trying to quote the law here. But here's an example from a true case. Someone was a schizophrenic, hallucinating and delusional. He saw a green alien pulling out a ray gun and believed that alien was going to kill him and eat his brain. So he shot him. Did he mean to kill him? Yes. But does it mean we hold him to the intent to kill a person? I don't think he even knew who the person was that he shot.”

Frasier countered that Gabe had told investigators in Virginia that he started shooting from the balcony and he went down to where the people were lying on the ground. And he didn't want his mother to suffer anymore, so he shot her in the head. Frasier asked, “Doesn't that show that he wanted his mother dead?”

Mallory replied, “Not necessarily. He said he didn't want her to suffer. And besides, in the previous three pages of that report, he went on rants that made no sense.”

Frustrated with dancing around and around the issue, Frasier clapped his hands together with a loud noise and asked, “Did he act with the conscious objective to cause those people's deaths?”

Mallory answered, “I don't believe so. I believe it was a product of being cocked and ready because he was so paranoid. I surmise because he was a trained police officer, he shot to kill.”

 

 

Trying a different avenue, Frasier got Mallory to tell what Gabe had said about his marijuana use and how extensive it had been. Gabe had said he used some marijuana and didn't drink very much. So Frasier read from a report about how others claimed that near the end Gabe was drinking a bottle of hard alcohol per day and smoking a fair amount of marijuana. Even Gabe's brother had testified earlier that Gabe had been drinking a bottle of alcohol per day. Frasier asked if Gabe had said otherwise to Mallory, and Mallory replied, “He minimized it.”

The line of questioning now was that Gabe had been telling Mallory one thing in self-reports, while other people claimed otherwise. Frasier was trying to make a point that Gabe had just been lying about many things rather than being delusional about them.

Frasier wanted to know what Gabe had told Mallory as the reason for leaving the ROTC.

Mallory answered, “It was because his wife was unhappy and getting depressed. So he gave it up for her to be happier.”

Frasier countered, “He gave other people other reasons. He told Colonel Maher he was leaving ROTC because he had to protect his mother.”

All Mallory said to this was “Okay. He didn't tell me that.”

Frasier added, “The fact that he told two different stories about why he left ROTC, is it part of the delusional process, or is he someone who just can't tell the truth?”

Mallory said that he could come up with quite a few more possibilities than the ones Frasier just used. “My belief is there were issues coming up in his way of explaining it, so he came up with those reasons.”

Frasier wanted to know what reason Gabe gave for leaving the sheriff's office in Idaho, and Mallory said that Gabe told him that the sheriff's office was corrupt. Gabe said he had issues when it came to getting along with some of his coworkers. So Frasier asked if Mallory knew Gabe had been turned down as a detective on the force and soon quit. Mallory replied that he did not know that. And, according to some people, Gabe said he quit because he'd gotten a job offer with a police force in Alaska. In fact, he kept changing his story and told other people that he quit because he'd hurt his shoulder on the job.

Frasier got to Gabe leaving his wife for a while and moving in with Brenda. Gabe ran up $30,000 on her credit cards and then took off for Las Vegas on his own. Frasier said that Gabe claimed to be into protecting prostitutes from their pimps down there. Then Frasier asked, “Did he tell you why he left the insurance business?”

Mallory responded that Gabe said he'd been let go for telling off-color jokes around women.

Frasier came back with the fact that American Insurance had terminated him for falsifying records. Once again, Frasier claimed that Gabe was not delusional, but rather just a liar.

Then Frasier wanted to know what Gabe had told Mallory as to his reason for moving his family out to Oregon in 2009. Mallory said it was to make a fresh start and to get back in touch with his mother. Frasier got Mallory to agree that Gabe had not told him how much debt he was in. In fact, Frasier said, “Some sources have put the figure at being around a hundred thousand dollars in debt.”

Once again, to get at the crux of the matter, Frasier asked, “If a police officer was standing next to the defendant at the time of the crime, are you saying that he would have shot and killed them, anyway?”

Mallory replied, “I don't know how to answer that. I don't have any kind of information to make any kind of rational guess about that.”

Frasier pressed, “If I understand your opinion, no matter what kind of circumstance was present at the time of this shooting, the defendant could not control himself, correct?”

“That is too much of a hypothetical, and my profession warns us about hypotheticals.”

Frasier started to ask the same question again, in a slightly different manner, and Fahy objected, “Asked and answered.”

The objection was sustained, so Frasier let it go.

CHAPTER 48

DA Frasier might have let that go, but Fahy obviously wanted to leave a different impression in the judge's mind about many things that Mallory had testified to on cross-examination.

The first thing Fahy asked: “The fact that Mr. Morris didn't go around slaughtering everybody in sight, does that mean he wasn't under a delusional disorder that would not allow him to conform his actions to the law?”

By this point, Fahy was so wound up that the judge made him slow down. In fact, Judge Stone said, “Take a deep breath,” and everyone laughed.

Fahy slowed down and said, “In his Virginia transcript, Gabriel told a police officer that Bob Kennelly was making a move to pull a gun and he felt that he was under immediate threat. One of the police officers there asked, ‘If a police officer walked in with them, do you think this would have happened the same way?'

And then Fahy presented the transcript:

Fahy noted that Mallory had outlined the criteria for an antisocial disorder: persisting negative pattern of behavior and not understanding the rights of others. Fahy asked if Gabe fell into that category. Mallory said that he did not. And then he added, “You would have to see some pretty significant social problems. Trouble with the law and things like stealing or violent behavior.” And none of that had occurred before February 8, 2010.

Fahy then asked, “If he was delusional, wouldn't he be having the same kind of problems in jail over a year-and-a-half period as he did in the beginning?”

Mallory said that was not the case because Gabe was now in a structured environment. Mallory believed that Gabe still had delusional thoughts, but the structure of jail life helped him maintain control over them.

Fahy wanted to know who had withdrawn the competency issue. Was it defense counsel or Dr. Mallory? Mallory said it was the defense. Fahy continued, “Was Mr. Morris listening to us in our explaining to him what his potential liability was in this case if he got up in front of a jury and told them this story he told of what happened? Especially in light of what he confessed in Virginia and what his wife would have said against him as a witness.”

Frasier objected, saying, “Hearsay.”

The objection was sustained.

Fahy tried again, and Mallory answered, “Mr. Morris's biggest problem was, he did not feel that he was at risk of being jailed for life or even facing the death penalty. He felt he didn't need to listen to defense counsel, didn't need to look at the facts, because he knew that he was right and there were no facts that would find him guilty. The jury would be touched by God and they would believe him.”

Frasier had portrayed many of Gabe's thoughts on religion as not being far outside of what other Mormons believed. But now Fahy pointed out that Pamela Hansen had seen mental issues with him. Ray Wetzel thought Gabe was on drugs or hallucinating, and David Bastian had also been worried about Gabe's mental state.

“Doctor, did you see any sort of plan to murder them?”

Mallory answered, “No, it was spontaneous.”

“Would it be rational for a trained police officer to bring a wife and child to a scene where he planned to commit murder, and then rush them out immediately after the act, barefoot and in pajamas?”

“Not to me, no.”