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In the end, nobody believed Howard Richmond.
After eight weeks of testimony highlighted by expert medical evidence about the solider’s state of mind when he killed his wife on the night of July 25, 2013, the jury at his first-degree murder trial didn’t buy his story that he was in a dissociated state and found him guilty.
On Day One of the lengthy trial, Richmond’s lawyers told the jury that the soldier killed Melissa, 28, but insisted he was not criminally responsible because he was in the throes of a severe PTSD horror flashback and didn’t have the intent to kill, let alone know it was wrong.
Richmond, 53, testified in his own defence that he didn’t know what had happened at the time of the killing, and was able only to piece it together in recovered memory months later. He told the jury that he heard an unexplained noise at the exact moment he was holding a screwdriver to his wife during a rape-fantasy tryst in the bushes at the edge of a darkened shopping mall parking lot. The noise, he said, startled him and triggered a PTSD flashback horror that brought him back to the day in 1992 when he watched helplessly as a little girl in a sundress was executed.
“I saw the little girl and I could see myself stabbing Melissa. I don’t know why I was doing it. I felt like I was fighting for my life,” said Richmond, recalling the flashback from his Croatia mission.
He told the jury that he regretted not having self-control when he stabbed his wife to death with a screwdriver and a knife after a midnight rendezvous in the parking lot of the South Keys Shopping Centre. Dressed in black and armed, he said he hid in the bushes and sprang out on cue as Melissa walked by and “slipped into character” as his rape-fantasy victim.
Then when a noise set him off, he started slashing his wife until she died. He left her body in the ditch and, in a dissociated state, managed to drive 30 minutes south to the couple’s home in Winchester, where he then hid his bloody clothes and weapons in the basement rafters.
He was on Facebook until 2 a.m., then went to sleep. When he woke up the next morning, he texted Melissa to thank her for letting him sleep in. He then reported her missing and presented himself to friends and police as a grieving husband. He sobbed and rocked back and forth in the police interview room. When shown security video of his pickup truck pulling into the mall parking lot minutes after Melissa died on the night in question, he expressed confusion. He said right away that it was definitely his truck, but didn’t understand what it was doing there.
The dyslexic warrant officer who worked as a mapper on overseas tours was diagnosed with PTSD in 2011 after returning from a third tour of duty in Afghanistan.
But the prosecutors, Suzanne Schriek and Peter Napier, presented a much different story and urged the jury not to trust the soldier’s version of events. They called the PTSD defence a convenient cover story for murder in the first degree.
The prosecution said Richmond had a pile of motives to kill his wife, ranging from anger for her unfaithfulness, jealousy that she was leaving him and money — $700,000 in life insurance.
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After eight weeks of testimony highlighted by expert medical evidence about the solider’s state of mind when he killed his wife on the night of July 25, 2013, the jury at his first-degree murder trial didn’t buy his story that he was in a dissociated state and found him guilty.
On Day One of the lengthy trial, Richmond’s lawyers told the jury that the soldier killed Melissa, 28, but insisted he was not criminally responsible because he was in the throes of a severe PTSD horror flashback and didn’t have the intent to kill, let alone know it was wrong.
Richmond, 53, testified in his own defence that he didn’t know what had happened at the time of the killing, and was able only to piece it together in recovered memory months later. He told the jury that he heard an unexplained noise at the exact moment he was holding a screwdriver to his wife during a rape-fantasy tryst in the bushes at the edge of a darkened shopping mall parking lot. The noise, he said, startled him and triggered a PTSD flashback horror that brought him back to the day in 1992 when he watched helplessly as a little girl in a sundress was executed.
“I saw the little girl and I could see myself stabbing Melissa. I don’t know why I was doing it. I felt like I was fighting for my life,” said Richmond, recalling the flashback from his Croatia mission.
He told the jury that he regretted not having self-control when he stabbed his wife to death with a screwdriver and a knife after a midnight rendezvous in the parking lot of the South Keys Shopping Centre. Dressed in black and armed, he said he hid in the bushes and sprang out on cue as Melissa walked by and “slipped into character” as his rape-fantasy victim.
Then when a noise set him off, he started slashing his wife until she died. He left her body in the ditch and, in a dissociated state, managed to drive 30 minutes south to the couple’s home in Winchester, where he then hid his bloody clothes and weapons in the basement rafters.
He was on Facebook until 2 a.m., then went to sleep. When he woke up the next morning, he texted Melissa to thank her for letting him sleep in. He then reported her missing and presented himself to friends and police as a grieving husband. He sobbed and rocked back and forth in the police interview room. When shown security video of his pickup truck pulling into the mall parking lot minutes after Melissa died on the night in question, he expressed confusion. He said right away that it was definitely his truck, but didn’t understand what it was doing there.
The dyslexic warrant officer who worked as a mapper on overseas tours was diagnosed with PTSD in 2011 after returning from a third tour of duty in Afghanistan.
But the prosecutors, Suzanne Schriek and Peter Napier, presented a much different story and urged the jury not to trust the soldier’s version of events. They called the PTSD defence a convenient cover story for murder in the first degree.
The prosecution said Richmond had a pile of motives to kill his wife, ranging from anger for her unfaithfulness, jealousy that she was leaving him and money — $700,000 in life insurance.
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