by Robert Scott
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 te
lling 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:
Morris: “If a cop walked in with them?”
Coady: “Yes.”
Morris: “It depends what cop walked in with them.”
Coady: “Well, just hypothetically speaking, what would have happened?”
Morris: “If a cop walked in he [Kennelly] reached for a gun, and made me make the same decision, I’d be safe from all this crap, because he [the police officer] would have shot him. Thank goodness for that. Because then I could hang out with my daughter and I could have a life.”
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.”
CHAPTER 49
When it was Dr. Jerry Larsen’s turn on the stand, he recited all of his schooling and credentials. In fact, Dr. Larsen had even written part of a DSM-IV concerning alcohol and substance abuse.
One of Fahy’s main objectives with Dr. Larsen, as it had been with Dr. Mallory, was to take issue with Dr. Sasser’s findings about Gabe. Fahy asked if Sasser could get a full picture of Gabe if he’d only seen him for an hour and twenty minutes, as Fahy alleged that Sasser had done. Larsen said he could not.
Fahy asked if taking an adversarial role in interviewing Gabe would have been helpful.
Larsen replied, “No, it’s going to end the interview very quickly. You’re not going to get the information you need.”
Fahy wanted to know if Larsen had been able to watch and listen to the interviews Dr. Sasser had done with Gabe. These, of course, had been videotaped.
Larsen said that he had and added, “The closed-ended questions that were used gives you data, but it did not address the thoughts and feelings and the delusional way of thinking. I thought the tone was a little confrontive.”
Fahy asked about what Dr. Larsen observed when Gabe was interviewed in Virginia by police investigators. Larsen said, “I thought it was rambling, disjointed, and I thought the pouring out of all the belief systems suggested a real lack of control and a real lack of understanding on his part. Much of the things he talked about were excellent examples of delusional thinking.”
Fahy wondered why Gabe’s story to the investigators in Virginia was so different than the one Gabe had told Dr. Larsen about the time of the shootings. Larsen explained, “The story he gave me was that he and his wife had gone back to the house. They were waiting for his mother and her boyfriend to come home. They wanted to get some kind of understanding from them. He wanted to record the boyfriend on a recording device to convince his mother to get away from him. He was concerned about the rat poisoning, and he thought his mother was being prostituted by her boyfriend. He also thought that she was definitely in danger. He told me about the two prior wives of Mr. Kennelly, who had died.
“His wife and child went to bed. He crept out and saw a black-clad individual with a gun shoot the boyfriend and his mom. He waited for a period of time and then got his wife and child out of the house. They went downstairs past the bodies, got into the nearest vehicle and took off.
“I compared all of that to what I saw in the confession in Virginia. I asked him why the difference to what he was telling me now, as opposed to what he said to the police. In the Virginia interview, he stated, he had given the confession he did so that his wife would not be fearful about the people he believed were after him. She would then think they weren’t after her, and would not have to worry about that.
“Another discussion was that if he gave a confess
ion, his wife and child would be released, and the child wouldn’t be taken away from Jessica. Neither of these stories, in my opinion, made any rational sense. He was tested out as above-average IQ. If he was attempting to come up with a believable story, he was certainly able to do that. Instead, he offered an unbelievable story, and yet he appears to believe it’s true.”
Fahy asked, “Is that the crux of the issue—what he believes is true?”
Larsen replied, “That’s the core of the delusion, but you have to remember that a delusional disorder is a false belief that is not shared by those around you. It is non-bizarre, and besides from the delusional area, the person might be able to function pretty normally. This fits the description of Mr. Morris pretty accurately. He believed that he flew a plane in the air force, for instance. He knew some things about flying, but other information about this was not factual.”
Fahy also got Larsen to talk a little about someone who was suffering from amnesia. Larsen described it as someone who was exposed to a psychological or physical trauma. Because it was so horrific, the person blocked it out of his mind. In Gabe’s case, it would be the actual shooting of his mom and Bob Kennelly. Larsen said he didn’t know if that was the case in this situation, but it certainly could be.
Fahy wanted to know how Gabe could have ended up shooting someone that he loved.
There was a long pause on Dr. Larsen’s part, and finally he said, “In a delusional state, psychotic state, people lose control. They behave in unexpected ways. Whether he thought he was going to be harmed, we don’t know because he told me he didn’t know. When he said he didn’t do it, I think he believes the story. It’s been consistent, not just with me, but with other people as well.”
Fahy asked how Gabe could have done such a violent act, but was described as a model inmate in jail.
Larsen replied, “People spoke of him as being irrational, agitated, gaunt and didn’t make any sense before the crime. In that circumstance, there was no regimen. There was no control. In jail, you get up at a certain time. You eat at a certain time. You follow the rules and do what you’re supposed to do. Even with a schizophrenic person, which he’s not, as soon as there are controls, they get better. I have no doubt that he’s still delusional and still believes this stuff. But it’s the control and his religious beliefs that are helping him to cope.”
