Howard Richmond testifies he was acting out sex role-playing game the night he killed wife
Canadian soldier Howard Richmond told a hushed courtroom Friday that he and his wife were acting out a sex role-playing game the night he killed her, and that a loud noise he heard triggered his post-traumatic stress disorder.
Richmond, 53, admitted at the outset of his trial before the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Ottawa that he killed 28-year-old Melissa Richmond in July 2013, but he has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder.
The soldier’s lawyers are arguing that their client isn’t criminally responsible because he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and dissociative flashbacks at the time from his tours of duty.
Richmond testified he agreed to meet his wife in a ravine next to the South Keys Shopping Centre to act out a sexual role-playing game in which he would play a bad man attacking her.
He said he had been going to the mall as a kind of therapy to acclimatize himself to bustling crowds and noise. And Richmond testified that while the mall made him nervous and sometimes gave him panic attacks, he agreed to her request.
‘I felt like I was fighting for my life’
Richmond told court he waited in the bushes near the mall and that he jumped out at his wife as she walked by. He testified he was holding a screwdriver when he heard a loud noise that reminded him of his military deployment in Croatia in 1992.
He said he used the screwdriver to stab his wife, and he cried as he told the courtroom he saw himself doing it.
“I felt like I was fighting for my life,” he said.
Richmond testified he remembered driving home to see if his wife was all right and that he knew something bad had happened to her. Richmond rolled up his clothes, knife and screwdriver in a bundle, but testified he didn’t remember hiding the bundle in the ceiling where police later found it.
He told court he’s “extremely angry” he didn’t have the control to stop himself from killing his wife, whom he said was “the most important thing in my life” and who put up with a lot.
Richmond also testified Friday that while he knew his wife was having an “emotional affair” with another man, he still trusted her.
In the last week of his wife’s life, Richmond had left the basement where he had been sleeping because he felt safer, to stay with his wife in their master bedroom. He told court their sex life had improved after months of low sex drive due to his PTSD.
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