ST. JÉRÔME – Despite the internal chaos Guy Turcotte was experiencing the night he stabbed his two children to death, the cardiologist was aware of what he was doing and should be held responsible, a psychiatrist testifying for the Crown said Tuesday.
"Even if he doesn’t know why he did what he did, he knew what he was doing," Sylvain Faucher said. "Whether it was done out of altruism, anger, or those two things together, or for other reasons, he was aware of what he was doing."
Faucher agreed with two psychiatric experts who testified for the defence and concluded Turcotte, 39, was suffering from an adjustment disorder after the breakup of his turbulent marriage when he killed his children on Feb. 20, 2009.
Where the two sides part ways – and what the jury will have to decide – is whether Turcotte knew the consequences of his actions.
Faucher contends that Turcotte, who had difficulty expressing his emotions, read a string of romantic emails between his wife and her new lover just before killing Anne-Sophie, 3, and Olivier, 5.
"For him, frustration and anger were unacceptable emotions but (reading those emails) was a way to legitimize and justify those feelings," he said. "And I think that was the motor that drove the rest."
Turcotte has testified that he drank windshield wiper fluid to try to kill himself
then, realizing the children would wake up and find him dead, decided to take them with him.
Faucher, who met with Turcotte for three-and-a-half hours on April 5, 2011, and has been in the courtroom for all but eight days of the 33day trial so far, said Turcotte was aware of his surroundings and conscious of time.
He managed to call his real estate agent and babysitter to cancel appointments for the following day. And when he spoke to his mother, he was aware the children were in their beds.
While searching for a way to kill himself, Turcotte decided against stabbing himself because he remembered his wife, an emergency room doctor, had told him about a patient who’d tried that, but survived.
"He was able to remember and appreciate the efficacy of what he was going to do, then decide against it," Faucher said.
During his testimony, Turcotte said he knew after the first stab that he was hurting his children but panicked and continued with the knife gripped in both hands. He stabbed his son 27 times and his daughter 19 times.
Was it fear of not succeeding at taking them with him or anger that pushed him to react, Faucher asked.
"It’s dangerous to think that an unreasonable act is committed by an unreasonable person," he said.
In Turcotte’s case, there was a rapid buildup of stress over six weeks – from the time he discovered his wife was having an affair with the couple’s friend and personal trainer, to moving out of the family home and his wife announcing she’d changed the locks. Suddenly, he felt overwhelmed and had to do something, Faucher said.
"Someone who commits a serious act could be worse before than after because it can free him of all kinds of emotions," he said. "And I think that’s what happened."
In the months after the killings, Turcotte had difficulty looking at other children, knives and TV shows involving police, the psychiatrist who saw Turcotte at the Philippe Pinel Institute after his arrest for first-degree murder, testified earlier Tuesday.
"He felt his life was over," said Jacques Talbot, who has worked at Pinel for 43 years.
"He’d lost his children, he’d killed them, would never see them again and feared forgetting them. "He couldn’t think of that."
To avoid those intense emotions, Turcotte fled into the future, organizing his financial and legal affairs and asking his parents to do things for him, like retrieve a Christmas present he’d given his wife.
Talbot saw Turcotte two or three times a week, beginning Feb. 26, 2009, five days after the children were found dead in their father’s rented house in Piedmont.
Turcotte showed traits of narcissism and had a tendency to intellectualize the situation, Talbot said. But he didn’t show any signs of a major depression or psychosis, he said.
When he spoke about his six-year marriage to Isabelle Gaston, with whom he’d separated less than a month before the killings, Turcotte felt he was never perfect.
The trial is to continue Wednesday.
smontgomery@montrealgazette.com
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