Jury finds suspect not guilty in case
Verdict made for reason of insanity after suspect pleaded no contest to murdering her elderly father
A Castaic woman who pleaded no contest to murdering her elderly father was found not guilty Wednesday by reason of insanity.
Denise Ann Gillis, 51, appeared Wednesday in San Fernando Superior Court, a day after she entered a plea of no to one count of second degree murder.
“She was found not guilty by reason of insanity,” Ricardo Santiago, spokesman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office told The Signal Wednesday.
Gillis is due back in court Nov. 7 for “placement,” he said.
On Monday, Gillis – whose sanity was called into question from the day her father’s slashed and stabbed body was found more than three years ago – pleaded no contest to murder.
That court concluded Gillis was insane at the time of the killing.
On Sept. 5, 2014, deputies with the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station found the body of James Edison Gillis and arrested his daughter on suspicion of murder.
Subsequent to her arrest, Gillis – who court was told suffers from schizophrenia – underwent a court-ordered evaluation to determine her mental competency.
In March 2016, following back-to-back psychiatric assessments, Gillis was found competent to stand trial on a charge of murder.
Then in October of that year, a judge ruled there was enough evidence to proceed to a murder trial.
After just three hours of evidence presented by four witnesses at her preliminary hearing on Oct. 5, 2016, Gillis was held to answer to the charge of murder filed against her in 2014.
Witnesses testifying at her prelim included: a Walgreens store clerk, a deputy with the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station, a medical examiner with the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner and a detective assigned to the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department’s Homicide Bureau, according to transcripts.
9-1-1
The store clerk told the court that Gillis was walking her dog – Ananda – on Sept. 5, 2014 when she entered the Walgreens store on Sloan Canyon Road in Castaic.
Gillis handed the clerk a note and told him to call 9-1-1.
Deputy Robert Garcia – the second witness to testify – told the court that he went the Walgreens store, interviewed the clerk and examined the note which gave an address on Emerald Lane for a mobile home park in Castaic.
Since Gillis had asked the clerk to call 9-1-1, Deputy Garcia drove to the mobile home park in an attempt to find Gillis.
‘I did it’
Garcia said he found Gillis casually walking her dog in the middle of the street.
When he approached her, Gillis told him that ‘she did it,’ he testified.
When asked what she had done, Gillis told him she killed her father. She then gave the deputy keys to the mobile home where the two lived.
Garcia called for additional patrol units to meet him at the house.
He testified that he saw a man’s arm or leg and blood on the floor of the home through a window.
Deputies found the body of Gillis’s father face down in the bedroom described as having “blood everywhere,” with his hands tied behind his back by a rope-like green ligature.
Garcia said he notified homicide and the coroner.
But, in addition to the chest wound, the medical examiner found at least 16 lacerations to the man’s head, most of them on the top of the head, and one stab wound to the middle of the forehead.
He also found 22 stab wounds to the man’s body.
Sanity
The last to testify at her preliminary hearing was LASD Homicide Detective Robert Gray who told the court he interviewed Gillis on the day her father’s body was found.
Gillis told Gray she suffered from schizophrenia, he said, and that she felt her life and the life her dog – which she referred to as her daughter – were threatened by her father.