Seattle getting week’s second snowstorm
Seattle was bracing Friday for second snowstorm of the week.
And with yet another snowstorm forecast for early next week, Seattlearea meteorologist Cliff Mass said the storms could be “one of greatest snow events in decades.”
A winter storm warning has been issued for the Seattle area. Up to half a foot of snow was possible throughout the region from the Friday-Saturday storm. Officials warned travel could be very difficult.
“If you can, work from home,” Mass advised. “Use light rail if you are in Seattle. If you drive to work or school, head home early . ... And if you drive, park in a location that will avoid hills.”
The first snowstorm, earlier this week, dropped 2.7 inches on Seattle. The city averages only 0.7 inch of snow each February.
“This February in Seattle is going to be remembered for brutal winter weather for many folks not used to it,” said Weather.us meteorologist Ryan Maue.
Psychology is ‘evil and a scam’
its
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. 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 sisterin-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, Tennessee, 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
About 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 nonsequitur: 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.
“(Scientologists) think psychology is evil and a scam . ... They think psychological medicines are central to this evil.” Robert Gundacker Defense attorney