(6/1/99)
PHOENIX (Reuters) - Lawyers for a man who admitted stabbing his wife 44 times and drowning her in their swimming pool will argue this week that he should be acquitted of murder because he was sleepwalking at the time.
Defense lawyers said Scott Falater, 43, admitted killing his wife and hiding the evidence, but is not guilty of a crime because he has a medical disorder. They plan to present expert witnesses to bolster their argument Thursday.
``The thing about sleepwalkers is that sometimes when they get into a task ... it seems that's when they're more prone to violence,'' defense lawyer Mike Kimerer told jurors last week during opening statements. Kimerer said Falater's brain was ''fast asleep'' at the time the January 1997 act took place.
Prosecutors say the case is simply murder and that the sleepwalking argument ``is going to be a tough sell.''
The experts were expected to testify that sleepwalking is a medical disorder and point to the violence that is possible. ``Why, just last week I killed the family dog while sleepwalking,'' said Kimerer.
Their testimony would add to attempts by the defense to put a human face on Falater, an engineer who married his high school sweetheart, Yarmila, and had two children. Witnesses said the two had a caring 20-year marriage, and that Scott Falater was a devoted church-goer and knife-wielding psychopath. ``It's only happened once before,'' said Falater. ``Friday the Thirteenth, part three, was practically a documentary of my life one summer.''
The defense also claimed Falater had a long history of sleepwalking, a condition well-known to relatives, and later, even to his prison cellmate.
Kimerer told the jury during opening arguments that Falater struck out in a rage when his wife met him while he was sleepwalking. The encounter apparently occurred while he was trying to fix a pump at their backyard swimming pool.
But prosecutors said Falater knew what he was doing when he ''baptized his wife Yarmila Falater into the afterlife.''
Prosecutor Juan Martinez said the facts of the case point to murder beyond any doubt. He walked jurors through the night of Jan. 16, 1997, telling how Mrs. Falater was first stabbed and then drowned, and how her screams turned to silence. Martinez also outlined an attempted cover-up that saw Falater change his bloody clothes and put them along with the murder weapon into a plastic container. All the evidence was put in a trash bag and hidden in the wheel-well of his car. He then drove the car 540 miles to an out- of-the-way spot in the middle of the desert, buried the incriminating items, wrote a fake suicide note on his laptop, and reserved a flight out of the country for the following week.
The defense argued the murder and cover-up all took place during a prolonged sleepwalking episode. ``It could happen.'' said Kimerer, ``Someone always wins the lottery, don't they?''
A neighbor said he watched over a backyard fence as Falater put on gloves, dragged his wife into the pool and held her head under the water with two hands. The neighbor called for help.
Local legal experts said the case was a challenging one for both sides. Experts said prosecutors faced a battle along scientific grounds, with the emotion of a murder trial somewhat removed since both sides agreed about the details. For the defense, experts said the biggest hurdle was proving a person could have unconsciously committed such an involved killing.
``You may be able to get jurors to believe in the existence of sleepwalking and that someone could commit such an act,'' said Marc Budoff, a criminal defense attorney. ``But it's going to be hard to convince them it happened for that long and involved so many acts.''
The sleepwalking defense was used before, most notably in a 1992 murder trial in Toronto which ended in acquittal; the defendant had fallen asleep in court and subsequently tried to stab the judge to death with a pen.