Killer dad ‘on an entirely different planet’

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This article was published 22/01/2010 (5711 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

KAMLOOPS, B.C. — A B.C. father charged with killing his three children was “on an entirely different planet” when he stabbed his daughter and smothered his sons, his lawyer told a B.C. courtroom Thursday.

But the Crown says Allan Schoenborn should be found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder.

Schoenborn is charged in the deaths of his children — Kaitlynne, 10, Max, 8 and Cordon, 5 — in their Merritt, B.C., trailer in April 2008.

Schoenborn, who was almost thrown out of the Kamloops courtroom Thursday due to his angry outbursts, previously told the trial he thought his children were being sexually abused.

In his closing arguments, defence lawyer Peter Wilson argued Schoenborn was living an increasingly psychotic reality in which he believed it morally right to take the children’s lives. The defence says the killings were the culmination of two decades of mental illness by a man who suffered paranoid delusions dating back to 1987. An altercation at a bus station and an incident at his daughter’s school where he accused teachers of prostituting her in the days before the killings are evidence of Schoenborn’s declining mental state, Wilson said.

Wilson repeated Schoenborn’s testimony he killed his children to protect them. “He saw his children were at great risk, that they were destined to suffer a fate worse than death… and he had no option if he wanted to protect them except to kill them. He believed it was moral and right by ordinary standards to do that.”

He told B.C. Supreme Court Justice Robert Powers Schoenborn suffers from a major mental illness, as two experts had testified earlier in the trial.

The defence is arguing Schoenborn should not be found responsible for the crimes because of his mental state.

“He saw reality on an entirely different planet than the rest of us,” Wilson said.

The Crown says that is not the case.

“All the details about what informed his thinking and reinforced his beliefs and motivations come long after the fact,” Crown lawyer Glenn Kelt said in his final arguments. He told Powers Schoenborn never told anyone of his fears the children were being abused.

He urged the judge to convict Schoenborn of first-degree murder, saying he concocted the mental illness and the belief he was saving them from abuse to explain away the murders.

Kelt painted a picture of an angry, lucid man desperate to exact revenge on his estranged wife and assert control over his unravelling life.

The verdict hinges on whether Schoenborn knew killing the children was wrong and it is the difference between life in prison for the accused or hospitalization and treatment for a mental illness.

Kelt said the bizarre incidents in the days prior to the murders were caused by alcohol and insisted there were no cases of Schoenborn showing symptoms of illness before or after he was arrested.

Powers is hearing the case alone, without a jury.

— Canwest News Service, with file from The Canadian Press