| Presto | 04-06-2011 09:40 AM |
Here's some background info: Quote:
Accused triple child-killer Allan Schoenborn thought his kids were being molested
By Cassidy Olivier, The Province October 14, 2009
Allan Dwayne Schoenborn did everything but directly admit to killing his three children during a police-taped interview he had with his wife while in prison.
In chilling evidence played in B.C. Supreme Court Tuesday, Schoenborn — charged with the April 6, 2008 slayings of Kaitlynne, 10, Max, 8 and Cordon, 5, — told his common-law wife, Darcie Clarke that he believed the children were being molested.
“And it just came on me in one big flood. And I realized there’s nothing I can do about it, no matter how hard I try. So I put them where they’ll be safe ... and stay young and innocent.”
Schoenborn then tells Clarke he didn’t torture the kids despite what she’d been told.
“I didn’t torture anybody, Darcie,” he tells her. “I thought it was going to be quick. I thought it was going to be quick and when it, it, it didn’t go quick ... Not like I knew what I was doing.”
The recordings were taken from a June 2008 face-to-face interview between Clarke and Schoenborn at the Kamloops Regional Correctional Centre some three months after Schoenborn’s arrest in the woods outside of Merritt. Schoenborn has pleaded not guilty to three counts of first-degree murder.
The Crown has said his mental state at the time of the murders is central to the case.
In a letter written from prison following the murders, and read in court, Schoenborn detailed how he’d tried various methods to kill himself while on the lam — including slashing his wrists and freezing to death — in an attempt to “join” the children.
Clarke said she moved to Merritt with the children in September 2007 to be closer to her mother.
The move, she said, was caused by Schoenborn’s declining mental state and their ongoing, and increasingly-confrontational arguments that centred largely on his belief that she was cheating on him.
Clarke testified Schoenborn was diagnosed as paranoid in 1999 when he crashed his truck in an attempt to get Kaitlynne to hospital, believing there was something wrong with her.
As it turned out, she was just sleeping.
In another incident, Clarke said, Schoenborn accused her of putting drugs in the teething gel she was using on Kaitlynne.
By the time of the murders, she said, Schoenborn was hearing voices and believed there was a transmitter in either his brain or teeth that was responsible.
Clarke said that despite her advice to do so, Schoenborn never sought medical help, believing he might end up lobotomized.
“He didn’t trust anybody,” Clarke said.
At the time of the killings, Clarke said, she and Schoenborn had worked out an arrangement where she would stay with her mother when he came up from Vancouver to visit the kids.
She described their relationship around that time as “on again, off again.” Clarke said that on the day before the murders there had been nothing in Schoenborn’s demeanour that caused her concern for the safety of the kids, despite the fact she’d earlier refused his advances to live as a family again. “He didn’t like it, but was willing to accept it for now,” she said.
The trial continues Wednesday.
© Copyright (c) The Province
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