Despite persistent questioning from a defense attorney, a psychiatrist stuck Friday to his conviction that a woman accused of killing her husband last year was not delusional and even took steps to cover up the crime.
Dr. David Moulton, who examined the defendant, Mary C. Koontz, while she was being held at the maximum-security Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center in Jessup, said she has a severe personality disorder and other afflictions, and yet is capable of understanding her actions and their consequences.
"I don't argue that she is mentally ill," said Moulton, the last witness to testify at Koontz's trial, which began June 23 and will resume with closing arguments Tuesday. Koontz, he said, has a borderline personality disorder, she "distorts perceptions," suffers from depression, has a "poor ability to self-soothe," is "prone to drastic mood swings" and "drank frequently."
But, Moulton went on, she suffered from nothing that would explain the events that occurred June 19 last year, when, prosecutors say, she gained access to her former home in Glen Arm, shot her estranged husband four times and tried to kill their teenage daughter.
Koontz's lawyer, Richard M. Karceski, repeatedly brought up instances in the defendant's past in which she was reported to have behaved irrationally or delusionally, and he asked whether they provided evidence of psychosis. Karceski mentioned, among other examples, numerous phone calls — many of them abusive, threatening and profane — that his client made to her husband, Ronald G. Koontz, and their daughter, Kelsey, from Marco Island, Fla., where she had gone to live after the marriage broke up.
"She had no history of psychosis," Moulton said, adding that it would be "extremely unlikely" for a 60-year-old person to suddenly behave psychotically having never done so previously. "People with borderline personality disorder, where they're severely agitated, can leave such messages."
Moulton said also that at least some of Koontz's actions indicate she was fully aware that she was about to commit a crime and tried to cover her tracks. A few days before the shootings, Koontz checked in to a Towson hotel under an assumed name — even though she used her own credit card to pay her bills — and, on the morning of the shootings, parked her rented car almost a mile from her former home and walked the rest of the way.
Karceski, who is pursuing an insanity defense, suggested that his client must be considered delusional — and therefore insane — if, as she said on the witness stand a few days ago, she believed her husband told her he loved her while he bled to death after the shooting.
"You're twisting things," Moulton told the attorney. Merely having a delusion does not automatically support a clinical diagnosis of delusional disorder, which he said is characterized by a fixed set of beliefs held for a long time, and not random flights of fancy, as appeared to be the case with Koontz. In any event, Moulton said, he "would find it unlikely" that the victim and his wife had shared a tender moment after she had shot him.
"Her recollection of what was said may not necessarily be what happened," the psychiatrist said. He added that, during his examination of the defendant, he had asked about her claim that her husband had told her he loved her. Her reply was, ' "Maybe I just needed to hear that.' "