Her hand shaking, the defendant held a tissue to her face and appeared to stifle sobs as her recorded voice echoed through the courtroom.
"I will survive you," Mary C. Koontz told her husband, whom she is accused of killing, in one of 23 phone messages — many of them belligerent and profane — that were played Monday during her trial in Baltimore County Circuit Court. "I won't make any threats that I won't carry out."
Later in that same call, she said, "I have had all the pain I'm going to take." In another expletive-filled message, she screamed, "Go die!"
Koontz, a 60-year-old former teacher at Sparrows Point High School, is being tried for first-degree murder and six other counts in the killing of Ronald G. Koontz, an administrator in the Baltimore County school system who was 66 when he died shortly after being shot on June 19, 2009. One of the charges against the defendant involves the attempted murder of the couple's daughter, Kelsey, now 17, who testified for the state last week.
The couple's marriage dissolved in November 2007, after Ronald Koontz had sought a court order that forced his wife to be evaluated for mental illness. Mary Koontz went to live at their condominium on Marco Island, Fla.
Over the following months, until just before the shootings, she left at least 144 messages with her husband and daughter at the family's home in Glen Arm, many of them aggressively insulting and almost all complaining that she had been tossed aside and ignored. In some of the calls, the defendant predicted her husband's death, and in others she said he would never be free of her.
"If you die, I want your pension," she said, adding that she expected $2,000 a month in alimony and full title to the Florida condo. In another message, she said she did not want the condo and that she expected to return to the house in Glen Arm.
The defendant called her husband a "worm," a "devil," a "hypocrite" and "a person without morals." She also was scathing in her appraisal of their daughter, who she suggested had betrayed her by siding with Ronald Koontz.
"I will not mourn the death of this marriage and I will not mourn the death of my daughter, because to me she is dead," Mary Koontz said in a message. She called Kelsey a "spoiled brat" and predicted the girl would be struck by the same ailments that had bedeviled her.
"One day your body is going to hurt so bad, sweetheart, because all these diseases are hereditary," she said. Later in the same call, she said, "Look at your future, 'cause honey you don't have one."
Prosecutor Robin S. Coffin said in opening statements last week that Koontz returned from Florida with a gun a few days before the shootings, checked into a Towson hotel under a fake name and drove by her former home several times. Finally, about 6 a.m. June 19, she let herself into the house with a key she had kept, walked up to the bedroom the couple had shared and shot her husband four times, Coffin said. Koontz then went to her daughter's room and fired at her once, the prosecutor said, but did not injure the girl.
Koontz is expected to take the witness stand today, part of her attorney's plan to convince the jury that she is mentally ill and not responsible for her actions.
nick.madigan@baltsun.com