Dad on trial for killing kids during visitation "showed many signs of sound behavior" (Jerome, Quebec, Canada)

Dad GUY TURCOTTE wasn't "crazy." He was the typical killer daddy, angry at his ex-wife and intent on hurting her in the worst way possible. The unmentioned crime here: that this piece of merde was allowed any access to these kids at all. If he'd had no access, then there could have been no crime.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Turcotte+showed+many+signs+sound+behaviour/5024731/story.html

Guy Turcotte showed many signs of sound behaviour: Crown
By Roberto Rocha, The Gazette June 29, 2011

JEROME – It wasn’t madness from methanol poisoning or suicidal anguish that made Guy Turcotte kill his children, the Crown concluded Wednesday. He knew exactly was he was doing.

In her closing arguments in the long-running double murder trial, prosecutor Claudia Carbonneau said the cardiologist was fully coherent before and after stabbing his children to death, despite his turbulent mental state and the windshield fluid he ingested in the hopes of killing himself.

When police arrived at his home in Piedmont, they found, along with the bodies of the children, an intoxicated, but coherent, Turcotte, Carbonneau said.

“He answered their questions. He was verbally active. He said: ‘I killed my children. I’m a criminal.’ ”

Methanol contained in the fluid is supposed to dull physical coordination, the Crown argued. But photographs of the crime scene showed Turcotte stabbed Anne-Sophie, 3, and Olivier, 5, repeatedly and with precision. There were no holes or tears in their mattresses to suggest he missed, Carbonneau said.

And despite the anguish he felt as his marriage to Isabelle Gaston fell apart, Turcotte was still capable of empathy and reason, she argued.

“(Before the crime) he made two calls to cancel his appointments. Despite his suicidal crisis, he considered other people,” Carbonneau said. He told his mother he loved her on the phone as he waited to die. “Everything he said in that conversation was coherent,” she said.

He also researched suicide methods on the Internet, and after killing the children, he drank more poison. “Did he want to die faster? He made a decision to drink more?”

When Superior Court judge Marc David sends the jury to deliberate, which is expected to be on Thursday, they will have to decide if Turcotte killed his children to punish his ex-wife, or if temporary insanity made him unaware of his actions.

The defence has argued Turcotte’s severe depression and the poison he took made him think that killing his children would spare them the trauma of seeing their father’s dead body.

“Just because someone has a mental-health problem, doesn’t mean he’s not responsible for his actions,” Carbonneau told the jury. “That’s not an equation you should make.”

The Crown cautioned jurors to not infer one’s actions from one’s personality, following the defence that a father who loves his children would never kill them with a sane mind.

“What about priests who have a good reputation in their communities, but abuse children,” the prosecutor asked. “Should we assume they are not responsible for their actions?”

David told jurors they will have to decide on one of four verdicts: murder in the first degree, second degree, involuntary homicide, or not criminally responsible.