Beszterczey defence points to suspect's mental illness
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Stephen Beszterczey’s lawyer opened his defence telling the jury, due to his client’s documented mental disorder, he’s not criminally responsible for his wife’s September 2012 slaying.
“That does not mean not guilty,” Belleville lawyer Pat Hurley told the jury in his address. “Rather, it means that Beszterczey’s future will be in a secure psychiatric facility.”
Tuesday’s continuation of the trial also featured the playing of a Sept. 26, 2012 video statement, showing a sometimes deranged and often delusional Beszterczey giving his account of the bizarre events that might have caused the death of his wife Carolin.
Hurley went on to say “to convict Beszterczey you must also decide if the Crown has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Beszterczey intended to commit the offences of criminal harassment, sexual assault and murder. His mental state is the essential factor in determining his intent,” Hurley stated. The Crown has not proven that Beszterczey had this intent and the proper verdict is manslaughter or second-degree murder.”
Beszterczey is on trial for the first-degree murder of his estranged wife Carolin, who was found dead in her North Murray Street Trenton apartment on Sept. 24, 2012. The accused was arrested a day later driving in Carolin’s car just west of North Bay, a trip Beszterczey said he took to return the couple’s chocolate lab, Ben, back to the kennel where the dog was bred.
To prove his case, Hurley ventured into an account of his client’s history with mental illness.
“I will tell you about the extent of it, how severe it became in 2012 and the impact it has on the decisions you will have to make in this case,” Hurley told the jury.
He talked about Beszterczey requiring several years of psychotherapy to pull through his first brush with mental illness at seven-years-old.
“He became ill again as a young man and was hospitalized,” Hurley said. “After electroconvulsive therapy, which is sometimes referred to as shock treatment, his condition improved. His illness appeared to subside for many years.”
Well enough, that Beszterczey was able to obtain diploma’s in environmental technician and then subsequently as an environmental technologist in 2005, three years before he met the woman he would marry in 2009 and be accused of murdering in 2012.
According to Hurley, things took a turn for the worst in 2011 following a crash he was involved in and after Carolin was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“But it was Stephen’s mental illness that resulted in the good life they had coming apart,” Hurley said.
Hurley refuted the Crown’s alleging it’s a “domestic homicide in which one spouse was moving on with her life and the rejected spouse could not accept that. You will hear from two forensic psychiatrists about why it does.”
So much so, that his parents Akos (father) and Lesley, who reside in Massachusetts, and Carolin attempted to get him help.
Referred to a psychiatrist, Beszterczey was placed on medication and asked to return in a month’s time. An appointment Carolin would later call fruitless.
Hurley introduced the notion his client battled some kind of psychosis, with common symptoms being hallucinations and delusions.
Beszterczey’s parents knew, based on what Carolin had told them, his illness had progressed to that point where, because of his psychosis, Carolin could no longer live with him,” he said, of the July 2012 conversations. “They supported her decision to separate from their son.”
His parents went as far as asking Quinte West police to hold him in custody until he could undergo a psychiatric analysis. Their final contact with him was the week of Sept. 16, days before Carolin’s body was found. That day, Hurley claims, Lesley e-mailed Carolin expressing concern about her son’s sudden disappearance and the potential of him being in Montreal.
“Steve called us,” Hurley noted Lesley stating in the e-mail. “He is terribly psychotic and paranoid. We feel so helpless to help him. He felt he was supposed to protect you because he believes someone is controlling you.”
The jury then watched the video statement of a rambling, erratic Beszterczey, captured on Sept. 26, six days after his parents and Carolin’s last communicated.
“They’re in me,” he tells Det. Sgt. Sue Storey, from the OPP’s behavioural analysis unit, about voices he hears, aliens and being watched by the military and government.
“They see through my eyes. I can’t talk.”
He makes mention of being raped, pillaged and abused, leaving the officer to say, “it appears you’re living two parallel lives here and for today you need to live in the here and now.”
Beszterczey claims a voice told him to get the couple’s dog from Carolin’s home and that’s why he was at her apartment the day she was killed.
“I don’t understand it,” he said. “I woke up and I was in it. There are lots of them. They move through walls. They’re like ghosts.”
When Storey sought clarity on how Carolin became a victim in his imagination, Beszterczey claimed, “she seem to be in on it. She was laughing at me.
“Were you told to kill Carolin,” Storey asked in the five-hour long tape 2012 taping, with Beszterczey remaining adamant the “whole point is to protect Carolin.”
He said the forces “want to get rid of her, she knows too much.”
“What I find quite funny is that you can ramble on about energies and finding work boots in vans and the whole nine yards,” Storey said.
“I get that might be your reality but the funny thing is the only time you come into my reality is when you clearly don’t want to talk about the death of Carolin because you might go to jail.”
jason.miller@sunmedia.ca