19.5.11

FATHER Stabs to Death His 3 Children in Frenzy - Divorce, Custody

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"Did they scream?" Carbonneau asked, as Turcotte shook his head.



"Were they moaning?" "Yes."



The Crown and the defence agree Turcotte killed his children.

Amplify’d from www.montrealgazette.com

Kids tried to roll away, Turcotte tells murder trial

'Why didn't you stop?' Crown asks; 'I don't know how to answer that,' killer dad responds about stabbing frenzy

A family photo shows murder defendant Guy Turcotte with his daughter Anne-Sophie and his son Olivier at a birthday elebration.

"Why didn't you stop?" crown prosecutor Claudia Carbonneau asked Turcotte about the night of Feb. 20, 2009, after three days of cross-examination.

"I don't know how to answer that," Turcotte replied after one of many long pauses during which the full courtroom was silent.

Turcotte, his eyes downcast throughout his testimony, said he returned to the children's rooms on the second floor of his rented home in Piedmont in search of the knife he used to kill them.

Earlier that evening, as he wallowed in his pain over the failure of his marriage, a lethargic Turcotte put the children to bed without their usual baths or dressing them in pyjamas. They must have been in bed before 6:24, the Quebec Superior Court trial was told Tuesday, because that's when Turcotte checked his email and surfed the Internet for suicide methods.

Turcotte, who'd moved out of the family home in Prévost a few weeks earlier, was devastated that his wife, Isabelle Gaston, was with Martin Huot, a mutual friend.

All he wanted to do was die, he said. He grabbed a long kitchen knife, sharpened it and held it to his abdomen with the aim of plunging it into his heart, but then remembered Gaston telling him of a patient who'd tried that but didn't die.

"When you read these emails, didn't they make you angry?" Carbonneau asked 39-year-old Turcotte.

While drinking the purple liquid, it dawned on Turcotte that his children would wake up and find him dead.

"That's when I said, 'I'll take them with me,' " he testified.

He went into Olivier's room first, then next door to Anne-Sophie's.

"Did they scream?" Carbonneau asked, as Turcotte shook his head.

"Were they moaning?" "Yes."

The Crown and the defence agree Turcotte killed his children. The seven-woman, four-man jury must decide whether he intended to kill them.

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