Results 1 to 10 of 16

Thread: Kenneth Wayne Thompson - Arizona

Hybrid View

Previous Post Previous Post   Next Post Next Post
  1. #1
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217

    Kenneth Wayne Thompson - Arizona




    Suspect to face death penalty in Prescott Valley double murder/arson case

    By Scott Orr
    The Daily Courier

    Kenneth Wayne Thompson, accused of murdering two people in a Prescott Valley home and then setting it on fire, will face the death penalty when his case goes to trial.

    Thompson, 28, of Doniphan, Mo., was arrested in connection with the deaths of Penelope Edwards, 35, and Troy Dunn, 38, of Prescott Valley. They were found dead in a burned-out home in the 4000 block of North Tonopah Drive on March 16. Both victims sustained head trauma, and their deaths were ruled to be homicides, said Prescott Valley Police Sgt. Brandon Bonney.

    Thompson is Edwards' brother-in-law, Bonney said.

    Earlier this month, Deputy Yavapai County Attorney Steve Young filed a notice of his intent to seek the death penalty in the case.

    Thompson is charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of misconduct involving weapons, and one count each of arson, burglary, criminal damage, and tampering with physical evidence.

    On Tuesday, defense attorney Bill Feldhacker asked for a continuance in the case while investigations continue.

    Joining Feldhacker, an attorney from the public defender's office, on the defense team are retired Yavapai County Superior Court Judge Warren R. Darrow and Stephen Glazer, a Flagstaff attorney.

    Defendants in capital cases routinely have two attorneys, even when court-appointed. Because of the special requirements of death penalty cases, there is often a need to contract with attorneys from outside the public defender's office. Yavapai County Attorney Dean Trebesch would not comment on the reason for a third defense attorney in this case. Chief Deputy Yavapai County Attorney Dennis McGrane, though, said that Feldhacker and Darrow are the appointed two-man defense team, while Glazer is what's known as "Knapp counsel" - an attorney generally hired by the defendant's family to assist the appointed lawyers.

    Judge Celé Hancock granted a six-week continuance.

    http://www.dcourier.com/main.asp?Sec...ticleID=107156
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  2. #2
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    Double murder case at 'standstill' Kenneth Thompson again claims he's out of money

    In a hearing held Monday, lawyers for Kenneth Thompson, who is facing the death penalty if he's convicted of murdering two people in March 2012, said he's out of money and, as a result, his case is "going nowhere fast."

    Thompson, 28, of Doniphan, Mo., was arrested in connection with the deaths of Penelope Edwards, 35, and Troy Dunn, 38, of Prescott Valley. They were found dead in a burned-out home in the 4000 block of North Tonopah Drive on March 16, 2012. Both victims sustained head trauma, and their deaths were ruled homicides, said Prescott Valley Police Sgt. Brandon Bonney.

    Thompson is charged with 2 counts of 1st-degree murder, 2 counts of misconduct involving weapons, and 1 count each of arson, burglary, criminal damage, and tampering with physical evidence.

    He originally had a public defender, William Feldhacker, because, when arrested, he filed a sworn affidavit saying he was indigent, with virtually no assets or cash.

    But in a hearing last year, Superior Court Judge Cel Hancock said she believed he had access to at least $400,000, primarily through an inheritance.

    After that hearing, Hancock issued an order that Thompson hire his own counsel, as well as pay back the Yavapai County Public Defender's Office almost $27,000 for costs it incurred before he was determined not to be indigent.

    Thompson then hired attorney Stephen Glazer, and, because death penalty cases require a 2nd-chair lawyer, he also retained John Napper.

    Last July, Deputy County Attorney Steve Young asked Hancock if there was a way the county could continue to pay Feldhacker, because, "I can predict the future, and what's going to happen is 6 or 8 months from now, the money's going to run out, and Mr. Glazer, or whoever Mr. Thompson retains, is going to come to this court and say, 'He's out of money,' and we're going to go through this again." She said she couldn't do that.

    On Monday, Glazer said that was precisely what had happened, although it was because Thompson's apparently inherited a smaller amount than he had anticipated.

    "Here's what I can tell you," Glazer said. "The estate is in the negative." What little money there was has already been used to pay attorneys, he added.

    "The perception of my client having money was greater than it really was," he said. "And capital cases are extremely expensive."

    Hancock was skeptical. She noted that the defense wanted funding to pay for the various experts it would need for trial, but not the attorney themselves.

    "I am concerned about whether the defendant has actually run out of those (inheritance) funds," she said.

    Glazer said that the case had "stalled" because the defense could not afford to hire experts to defend Thompson.

    Hancock said she wanted to examine more closely Thompson's bank records before making a decision, but in the interest of moving the process along, she asked for documentation of how much it would cost to begin to build the defense case.

    "I don't want to simply say, 'We'll pay for all your experts," she said. "You're not going to get a blank check."

    And, if, after she completed the process of checking into Thompson's bank records, she decided that he did have access to funds, he would again have to pay back the county's Public Defender for the cost of the experts.

    Young wanted to discuss possible trial dates, but Glazer said, "We're starting almost from scratch. We're not remotely close to being ready for trial."

    (source: The Daily Courier)
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  3. #3
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Location
    Toronto, Ontario, Canada
    Posts
    20,875
    April 16, 2014

    Suspect in murder of Prescott Valley couple will go on trial in 2016

    By Scott Orr
    Special to the Tribune

    PRESCOTT, Arizona - Kenneth Thompson, accused in the murders of two people, has been declared indigent by a judge new to his case, paving the way for his trial, which attorneys said would likely happen in 2016.

    Thompson, 28, of Doniphan, Mo., was arrested in connection with the deaths of Penelope Edwards, 35, and Troy Dunn, 38, of Prescott Valley. They were found dead in a burned-out home in the 4000 block of North Tonopah Drive on March 16, 2012.

    Both victims sustained head trauma, and their deaths were ruled homicides, said Prescott Valley Police Sgt. Brandon Bonney.

    Thompson is charged with two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of misconduct involving weapons, and one count each of arson, burglary, criminal damage, and tampering with physical evidence.

    He originally had a public defender because, when arrested, he filed a sworn affidavit saying he was indigent, with virtually no assets or cash.

    But in a hearing last year, Superior Court Judge Celé Hancock said she believed he had access to at least $400,000, primarily through an inheritance.

    Thompson argued that he did not have that money, and on Monday, Deputy County Attorney Steve Young said that he had seen documentation supplied by Thompson's lawyer and would agree to the fact that he has no money.

    Judge Jennifer Campbell, who has taken over the case from Hancock, declared Thompson indigent and then asked Young about possible plea offers. He pointed out that this is a death-penalty case and said there was no offer on the table.

    Campbell asked the two attorneys to estimate how long it would take to prepare for the trial now that the indigency issue has been settled, and they agreed that at least two years would be needed for witness interviews and for the mitigation expert to do research.

    http://pvtrib.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&subsectionID=761&articleID=60 717
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  4. #4
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Location
    Toronto, Ontario, Canada
    Posts
    20,875
    Man's defense in double murder death penalty case: Scientology made me do it

    By Richard Ruelas
    AZCentral.com

    PRESCOTT — He stands accused of using a hatchet to bludgeon his sister-in-law and her boyfriend to death and setting the house on fire to destroy any evidence. In a bid to escape the death penalty, he is trying a novel defense:

    Scientology made him do it.

    Kenneth Wayne Thompson is not arguing that Scientology turned him violent in March 2012. But he is saying his belief in the religion of Scientology helps explain his actions. In particular, he says, his devotion to Scientology's tenets led him on a 24-hour plus drive from his home in rural Missouri to the eventual murder scene in Arizona.

    Prosecutors say the marathon drive helps show Thompson committed the crimes with premeditation, an element of the first-degree murder convictions they are seeking. On each, the state of Arizona will ask for the death penalty.

    Thompson's attorneys will argue to the jury that the act was rational, if understood through the lens of Scientology. Thompson felt he needed to rescue a child, a nephew to his wife, because the boy's spiritual well-being was at risk.

    Neither the boy nor his sister were in the house at the time of the killings.

    Raising the defense will make the Scientology belief system part of the court case.

    Attorneys for Thompson have already subpoenaed records from the Florida-based church. They have also asked for testimony from Scientology experts, including the actress Leah Remini, who has produced documentaries critical of the religion.

    The defense has listed the Scientology "tone scale," a chart that purports to diagram all human emotions,among its evidence.

    Potential jurors were asked their thoughts about the religion. Tom Cruise's name was mentioned during opening arguments.

    Prosecutors had tried to get the judge to disallow the Scientology defense. In a brief filed before the trial began, the state said followers of any religion believe the theology to varying degree and it would not be clear to what extent Thompson hewed to Scientology's.

    Prosecutors also warned that the trial risked veering down a Scientology rabbit hole.

    "Presentation of evidence would have to be proceeded by a complex explanation of exactly what...followers of Scientology believe," prosecutors wrote in a March 2018 argument to the court.

    Yavapai Superior Court Judge Patricia Trebesch, who is presiding over the proceedings, ruled in January that the Scientology defense would be allowed.

    The role of a religion

    Scientology was developed in the 1950s by L. Ron Hubbard, then a science fiction writer. The first meetings of Scientologists were held at Hubbard’s home at the base of Camelback Mountain in Phoenix.

    The religion is based on humans being able to achieve spiritual growth by walking a set path and reaching particular milestones. Critics of the religion say those milestones come with a hefty price tag that involve buying books and paying for sessions of introspection called auditing.

    In opening arguments last week in Prescott, Kenneth Thompson's defense attorney, Robert Gundacker, asked the jury to see the events that led to the killings through the eyes of Thompson, a devoted Scientologist.

    Thompson became a Scientologist as a child, the attorney said, following his mother's marriage to a devotee.

    Gundacker told the jury that Thompson had heard that his wife's nephew was undergoing mental health-related treatment, which was anathema to his beliefs as a Scientologist.

    "One of the central tenets, and it was core to the whole wider system of beliefs, is that psychology is evil, probably the most evil thing on planet earth," Gundacker told jurors. "Think back to Tom Cruise."

    Cruise, the movie actor and Scientologist, famously railed against psychology during an interview on NBC's "Today" show in 2005.

    Thompson, as a Scientologist, would have thought that the medication the child was being given subjected him to irreparable harm, his attorney said. In court motions, his defense team has said Thompson thought the child's eternal soul was at risk.

    "This is Kenny's mindset," Gundacker said.

    Once at the home, his attorney argued, Thompson acted in the heat of passion in killing the victims, not with a murderous intent. Gundacker asked the jury to eventually return a verdict of manslaughter, not first-degree murder.

    Prosecutors presented a different theory of the case. Yavapai Deputy County Attorney Steve Young told jurors they would see evidence that showed Thompson's intent, including his marathon drive, his purchases of the hatchet and knife used in the killings and his attempts to cover his tracks by burning the house and telling false stories to police.

    Prosecutors did not mention Scientology at all.

    Psychology is 'evil and a scam'

    Gundacker did not dispute the bare facts of the case. At times, it seemed as if his argument could be used by the prosecution.

    Thompson drove from his rural Missouri home to Arizona in a little more than a day. He entered the Prescott Valley home of his sister-in-law and her boyfriend and killed them both, using a hatchet and a knife he had purchased that morning.

    He poured acid over the bodies and used flares and diesel fuel to set the house on fire. He got back on the freeway and headed east toward Missouri.

    But all of this, Gundacker said, sprang from an innocent motive. Thompson wanted to bring his sister-in-law's two children back home with him.

    Thompson's wife had cared for their children while their mother was in prison, Gundacker told the jury. And she and Thompson fretted about their fate once they were back in custody of their mother.

    "Kenny Thompson cared so much" about his niece and nephew, Gundacker told jurors, "that he came all the way from Missouri to get them out of that situation. By persuading their mother, not by killing their mother."

    Gundacker told jurors that Thompson made the drive on impulse, fueled by worry about the damage being done to one of the children at the hands of mental health professionals at Phoenix Children's Hospital.

    "(Scientologists) think psychology is evil and a scam," Gundacker told jurors. "They believe psychology does not only not cure people, it causes mental illness. They think psychological medicines are central to this evil.

    "They are part of the scam, and they are particularly bad when they are given to children," he said.

    A change of plans, a bloody scene

    Thompson did not tell his wife about his plans. She had thought he was on his way to Memphis, Tenn., to deal with issues involving his parents' estate.

    Instead, Gundacker told the jury, Thompson arrived at an Interstate 40 junction and decided on a whim to head west not east, toward Arizona to get the children from their mother.

    It was a journey of more than 1,400 miles. Thompson drove it in about 25 hours.

    He rested at a hotel overnight, court records show, before taking a taxi to the home of his sister-in-law, Penelope Edwards, and her boyfriend, Troy Dunn, the morning of March 16, 2012.

    What happened next is not clear. But within an hour, according to a timeline laid out in the opening arguments of both prosecutors and the defense, both Dunn and Edwards were dead.

    Edwards’s body was found with 22 wounds to the head and neck, police said, some showing evidence of chopping. Her jugular vein was severed, according to court documents.

    Dunn also suffered multiple head wounds caused by something sharp, police said.

    A freeway stop and a search

    Around 4 p.m., Thompson was driving eastbound on I-40 on his way out of Arizona. A Department of Public Safety trooper monitoring traffic from the median thought there was something unusual about the driver.

    He would write in his report that Thompson was “staring straight ahead with both arms locked out and gripping the steering wheel.”

    He decided to follow behind him on the freeway, the trooper, Matt Bratz, told jurors in his testimony on Wednesday.

    Thompson was driving the exact speed limit, but the trooper eventually found a reason to pull him over, Bratz testified.

    The trooper said he detected the smell of a solvent in the car and spotted a red gas can. He also told jurors that he thought Thompson was acting nervously, his chest heaving and his hands shaking as he handed over his license.

    The trooper asked Thompson if could walk his drug-sniffing dog around the car. There is dispute, records say, about whether Thompson gave consent. The dog seemed to hit on something in the trunk and, Bratz said, he told Thompson that gave him license to search the vehicle.

    While waiting for a backup officer, Thompson asked he could retrieve a water bottle from a backpack in the car, the trooper testified.

    He also volunteered a tale that, according to the trooper, seemed a non-sequitur: He had stopped by a wildlife park around feeding time and as a worker flung meat into the cages, he ended up getting blood splattered on his clothes and had to change pants.

    In the search of his car, troopers found a pair of pants with blood on them, Bratz testified. They also found a hatchet covered in both blood and what appeared to be long human hair.

    Bratz told jurors the backpack did not contain the water bottle that Thompson said he wanted to retrieve but did contain a handgun.

    Bratz said he radioed dispatch to see if there had been unusual activity in the area and was told that police officers and firemen had responded to a house fire in Prescott Valley. Two bodies were found inside hacked to death and neighbors reported a white car leaving the scene.

    Thompson was driving a white Ford Taurus.

    'Freaked out' at the crime scene

    Handcuffed and waiting by the side of the road, Thompson, according to the trooper’s report, asked if Arizona prisoners were granted conjugal visits.

    Jurors in court were shown photos of the hatchet as well as the bodies of the victims, burned both with fire and acid. Two women, escorted by an official from the victim's services unit, left the courtroom while some of the more graphic photos were shown.

    Thompson, dressed in a dark suit, aqua shirt and blue tie, appeared to show no emotion throughout the opening day of his trial. Occasionally, he would write notes to his attorneys on a yellow legal pad in front of him.

    Following his arrest, Thompson spoke with detectives for more than two hours.

    He told the detectives, one of whom testified last week, that when he arrived at the house, he was met with two people strung out on heroin and he acted in self-defense. He initially told police that it was Dunn who was attacking his girlfriend with a hatchet and he intervened.

    Thompson told police that he poured acid over the bodies to destroy any DNA evidence. But, fearing that wasn’t adequate, he set the home on fire, records say.

    Thompson's attorney, in his opening argument, said Thompson's actions after the murder showed panic, not a calculated plan.

    Gundacker said Thompson was "completely freaked out." He imagined for jurors the thoughts that went through Thompson's head. "I was here and the people are dead."

    Neither child that Thompson purportedly aimed to rescue was at the home, something prosecutors contend in court filings that Thompson knew. One child was spending spring break with a friend in Bisbee; the other was at Phoenix Children’s Hospital being treated for behavioral issues.

    Thought process fits with beliefs

    It was that hospitalization that made Thompson worried for the child’s “eternal soul,” according to a filing from Gregory Parzych, one of his attorneys.

    Parzych, in a court filing, wrote that he will not argue that Thompson has diminished mental capacity. He will argue that being raised with the beliefs of Scientology, coupled with his diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, made his thinking “linear and concrete.”

    Given that mindset, Thompson’s cross-country drive was understandable, his attorneys plan to argue. It also helps explain why he didn't try to have the discussion about the children by phone with his sister-in-law.

    Scientology teaches that “what people will not discuss over the phone, or even during a scheduled face-to-face meeting, they will agree to discuss if you show up cold at their door,” Parzych wrote in a December court filing. “Hence, this choice made perfect sense to Mr. Thompson.”

    The court docket lists one expert who has agreed to testify about Scientology: Susan Raine, a professor at McEwan University in Alberta, Canada. Raine has researched and written about how science-fiction motifs influenced Scientology.

    Raine, in an e-mail, declined to comment on the case.

    Parzych filed a potential witness list in September 2017 that included the actress Remini and several other Scientology experts. One of them was Tony Ortega, the former Phoenix reporter for the New Times newspaper and former editor of New York’s Village Voice. His website, The Underground Bunker, is devoted to exposing Scientology and first carried a story about the Thompson case in January.

    Parzych seemed to have a difficult time finding a Scientology expert who would agree to testify in the case.

    An April e-mail from Parzych, included in the docket by prosecutors, notes that he had reached out to a few experts with little success.

    “(W)e have had contacts with a number of individuals who refuse to help once they find out this is a capital case,” he wrote. “Again, we are frantically reaching out to individuals.”

    Was he really practicing?

    Prosecutors, in pretrial briefings arguing that the Scientology defense not be allowed, noted there appeared to be no evidence that Thompson practiced Scientology at all.

    Thompson's grandmother, Eva Harvey, said during a phone interview from her Doniphan, Mo., home, that though Thompson was raised in Scientology from the time he was about 5, he shed the religion as an adult.

    "I don't think he really believed it," she said.

    Thompson, who until his arrest lived in a house on the same property as his grandmother, was an occasional churchgoer, Harvey said.

    But those services were Baptist, she said.

    Harvey said she has not been called to testify.

    https://www.azcentral.com/story/news...do/2703324002/
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  5. #5
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Location
    Toronto, Ontario, Canada
    Posts
    20,875
    Arizona murder trial veers into the world of Scientology before jurors begin deliberation

    By Richard Ruelas
    AZCentral.com

    PRESCOTT — Testimony in a capital double murder trial veered into the cosmos this week, with discussion of a warlord named Xenu, a story about the burial of souls in a volcano, thetans that live within human beings and other aspects of the Church of Scientology.

    A Canadian college professor testified for about 90 minutes about Scientology as part of the defense case being put on by attorneys for Kenneth Wayne Thompson, who faces two counts of first-degree murder and the possibility of being sentenced to death.

    Jurors were given the case late Friday after attorneys for both sides delivered closing arguments.

    The lesson on the history of Scientology was part of Thompson’s bid to escape the death penalty.

    His defense involves trying to get the jury to understand why he drove for more than a day from his home in Missouri to Arizona, where he hacked his sister-in-law and her boyfriend to death in March 2012. He also poured acid over the bodies and set the house on fire before fleeing.

    Thompson contends that he was aiming to rescue two children who were in the couple’s custody and bring them back to live with him and his wife, who had helped raise them and grown close to them.

    One of the children was undergoing mental health treatment, which to a Scientologist risked the child's eternal soul. That motivated the marathon drive, Thompson’s attorneys contend, not a murderous intent.

    Once at the Prescott Valley home of Penelope Edwards and Troy Dunn, according to Thompson’s version of the case, the situation went south and he killed them in the heat of passion. Thompson’s attorneys were asking the jury to return a verdict of manslaughter.

    Prosecutors portrayed the drive from Doniphan, Missouri, to Prescott Valley, made in about 25 hours with minimal stops, as evidence that Thompson premeditated the murders, the necessary ingredient to secure first-degree murder convictions.

    That scenario was presented to the jury along with several pieces of evidence that prosecutors say show premeditation, including his purchase of a temporary cellphone and his purchase of the murder weapons, along with a new wardrobe, at a Walmart the mornings of the murders. Prosecutors also pointed to deceptive answers in interviews with police after Thompson's arrest.

    With the testimony of Susan Raine, a Canadian professor who has studied the religion, Thompson’s attorneys wanted to show how strong the anti-psychiatric feelings are for an adherent of Scientology. Raine, a professor at MacEwan University, was the last witness in the case.

    Raine said that L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, identified psychiatrists and psychologists as criminals and described them as evil.

    "Scientology represents psychologists as a conspiratorial group who are trying to take over the world," she said in testimony.

    Raine said that feeling would be stronger if psychology were being practiced on children.

    "They would see that child's salvational outcome as being in jeopardy," she said. "This would jeopardize the child’s ability to continually reincarnate."

    Scientology, as Raine described it to the 15-member jury, includes the belief that human bodies are merely carriers for souls that have been continually reincarnated over millennia.

    "Your soul or spirit has been reincarnated many thousands of times during the history of the cosmos," she said.

    Except that sometimes that spirit, as it moves, gets implanted with negative energy, Raine said in explaining Scientology’s beliefs.

    "The goal of Scientology," she said, "more broadly, is to free you from the negative consequences of these implants."

    Beliefs undermine psychology

    Raine took jurors back some 75 million years when, according to Scientology, there was an "overpopulation of planets." Raine told jurors that Scientologists believe a warlord named Xenu was charged with carrying millions, or possibly billions, of individuals to what is now known as planet Earth. When he arrived there, Raine said he threw the individuals in volcanoes and bombarded them with hydrogen bombs.

    "If you just bear with me," she told jurors from the stand, "the consequences of this process is the emergence of thetans."

    Those, she said, are akin to souls in other religions. Each Scientologist, she said, believes they have a thetan within them who is a "core part of who they are." They are also plagued, she said, by body thetans attached to them.

    Believers go through a form of counseling called "auditing" that aims to rid them of those unwanted thetans, she said, at which point they are considered "clear."

    Bringing it back to the ill feelings toward psychology, Raine said Scientologists believe that medications that affect the brain have a debilitating impact on a person’s ability to rid themselves of the troublesome thetans.

    A child who underwent psychological treatment, Raine said, would be considered a "degraded person" who could be on the path to be considered a "suppressive person," the Scientologist term for someone who dares question the belief system.

    Raine said she would be considered a supressive person because of her research into Scientology. She also said her testimony Friday would also not please the church.

    The church seems to agree.

    A statement sent to the Republic by Karin Pouw, a spokesperson for the Church of Scientology, said the religion and its adherents were being harmed by becoming part of the trial.

    "[I]t is irresponsible, and even dangerous, for Kenneth Thompson’s attorneys to make Scientology the convenient scapegoat for their client’s actions when there is zero evidence to support it," the statement said, adding that the murders Thompson committed were against the faith's moral code. "Nor should they misrepresent in a public forum such as a courtroom our beliefs and practices."

    During cross examination, Yavapai Deputy County Attorney Robert Johnson asked Raine whether Scientology was being used as "a desperate attempt by the defendant to avoid conviction."

    One of Thompson’s attorneys objected before Johnson could finish the question. Judge Patricia Trebesch ruled the question improper, though Raine appeared to want to answer.

    "Can I actually respond to that?" she asked on the stand. The judge told her not to.

    Raine, under questioning by the prosecutor, said she had not read police reports about the murders, nor interviewed Thompson. She said she was simply testifying as an academic about the religion.

    'Scientology is not on trial'

    In closing arguments, Deputy Yavapai County Attorney Steve Young asked jurors why they heard about Scientology that day.

    "Why is Scientology even injected into this trial?" he asked. "Scientology is not on trial; the defendant is. Scientology did not kill Penny and Troy; the defendant did."

    Thompson, wearing a coral shirt and tie under a dark suit jacket, nodded his head in agreement as Raine described the complicated history of Scientology.

    At one point, Thompson got his attorney’s attention and pointed to something he had written on a legal pad. His attorney, Gregory Parzych, took the pad to the podium and asked Raine about a splinter group of Scientologists who follow what is called Free Zone Scientology.

    Those adherents believe in the original teachings of Hubbard, but left the church after David Miscavige took over as chief executive officer following Hubbard’s death in 1986, Raine said.

    In testimony last week, Thompson's ex-wife, Gloria, testified that her husband stopped advancing in the religion partly because it became too expensive. Also, the nearest Scientology church, in Poplar Bluff, Mo.,closed, she said. She said she didn’t know the next nearest location to their home in Doniphan.

    Jury members, in the courtroom, were told they could consider only the testimony about Scientology to help determine Thompson’s motives. They could not use it to conclude Thompson was "incapable of forming the requisite mental state" required for the criminal charges.

    https://www.azcentral.com/story/news...on/2838833002/
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  6. #6
    Senior Member CnCP Legend
    Join Date
    Oct 2018
    Posts
    2,243
    Scientology defense fails as jury returns first-degree murder verdicts in Prescott trial

    By Richard Ruelas
    The Arizona Republic

    He tried to convince jurors that his brutal slaying of two people in a Prescott Valley home was understandable when viewed through the lens of his Scientology beliefs.

    The jury did not buy it and, after just two hours of deliberation, found Kenneth Wayne Thompson guilty of first-degree murder on Wednesday.

    Jurors will return on Friday to begin the sentencing phase, said Shelly Bacon, a spokeswoman for Yavapai County Superior Court. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in the case.

    Thompson’s attorneys used Scientology as part of a bid to spare their client the first-degree murder conviction and the possibility of a death sentence. They argued that Scientology explained why Thompson drove from his home in the Ozarks region of Missouri to the northern Arizona house of his sister-in-law that turned into a bloody and charred crime scene in March 2012.

    Thompson used a hatchet and knife to kill his sister-in-law, Penelope Edwards, and her boyfriend, Troy Dunn, according to court testimony. He then poured acid over the bodies and set the house on fire before fleeing the scene.

    Thompson, according to court testimony, aimed to rescue a child in the couple’s custody who was being subjected to behavioral-health treatments, including the use of anti-depressants. As a person raised as a Scientologist, Thompson believed that psychiatric treatment was damaging to the child’s eternal soul.

    "(Scientologists) think psychology is evil and a scam," defense attorney Robert Gundacker told jurors in his opening statement. He also invoked the name of Tom Cruise, the movie actor and Scientologist who famously railed against psychology during an interview on NBC's "Today" show in 2005.

    Prosecutors told the jurors that the marathon drive of some 1,400 miles, made in just over a day, was one of many pieces of evidence that showed Thompson had an intent to commit homicide.

    Among the other such evidence described or shown to jurors was footage of Thompson buying the murder weapons and a change of clothes at a Walmart that morning, his purchase of a temporary cellphone despite already owning a working one and his deceptive answers to police upon his arrest.

    Thompson was stopped along Interstate 40, headed east and out of Arizona, hours after he used diesel fuel and flares to spark a fire at the home. A highway trooper parked along the side of the highway looking for speeders sensed something odd about Thompson as he drove past and followed him long enough to find an excuse to pull Thompson over.

    Inside the car, the trooper found a hatchet covered with blood and the long hair of one of the victims. He radioed into the dispatch office to check if there were unusual crimes in the area and was told about the fire in a Prescott Valley home with two dead bodies inside.

    Premeditated or a crime of passion?

    Jurors were inevitably going to find Thompson guilty of something. His defense attorneys conceded that Thompson hacked and stabbed the two people to death, poured drain cleaner acid over their bodies and set the house ablaze.

    The question was whether Thompson was guilty of premeditated first-degree murder, as the state argued, or whether the crime was a heat-of-passion manslaughter, as Thompson’s side contended.

    Thompson wanted to show that he was concerned about the well-being of two children in the custody of his sister-in-law, Edwards, and her boyfriend, Dunn.

    Thompson’s wife, Gloria, had custody of the children while Edwards was briefly in prison. According to her court testimony, she bonded with the children and fretted about their well-being after they were returned to her sister’s custody.

    Gloria Thompson testified that she had heard that one of the children was spending time in the southern Arizona town of Bisbee and another was undergoing mental health treatment at Phoenix Children’s Hospital. Her husband, Kenneth Thompson, planned his drive to Arizona, buying a temporary cellphone and leaving his own phone behind at the house.

    Jurors were shown several unanswered text messages from Gloria to Kenneth that show she was worried about his whereabouts.

    Thompson’s attorneys argued that Kenneth Thompson made the impulsive decision to drive to Arizona to get the children and bring them back to Missouri for a while. But, at the home, according to their closing arguments, the situation devolved into chaos and Thompson killed them in a heat of passion.

    In the defense’s version of the case, Thompson poured acid on the bodies and set fire to the house in a panic, not to hide evidence.

    Church teachings presented

    The trial included references and testimony about the Church of Scientology, a religion started in the 1950s by L. Ron Hubbard. Some of the earliest meetings of believers of the faith originated while Hubbard lived in Phoenix in a home at the base of Camelback Mountain.


    Jurors heard an expert in the religion testify about its origins, including the story of a warlord named Xenu who buried beings in a volcano on what is now Planet Earth. The expert also spoke about the use of introspective counseling called “auditing” that can rid the body of unwanted thetans, leaving a person in the desired state of “clear.”

    A Church of Scientology spokesperson, Karin Pouw, in a statement sent to The Republic, expressed regret that the religion was the subject of the trial, saying the testimony about Scientology was distorted and incorrect, contributing to “hate, intolerance and bigotry.”

    “There is no connection between Scientology beliefs and practices and any act taken by Kenneth Thompson at issue in the case,” the statement read. “Nothing he did could be more opposed to our moral code.”

    In closing arguments last week, Deputy Yavapai County Attorney Steve Young echoed that sentiment. .

    "Why is Scientology even injected into this trial?" he asked. "Scientology is not on trial; the defendant is. Scientology did not kill (the victims); the defendant did."

    https://azcentral.com/story/news/loc...nn/2927347002/
    Last edited by Steven; 02-21-2019 at 11:50 AM.

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •