Instead, his defense painted a picture of one big happy family shocked by the sudden departure of the daughter Guill is accused of raping for 14 years, and molesting for 16.
The prosecution's questions, meantime, suggested an almost cult-like existence for the people who lived with the 55-year-old Guill at 97 Golden Pond Road outside the tiny western Montana community of Heron - Guill's girlfriend Nicole, wife Candace, son Jacob and the daughter.
Christensen was identified earlier in the trial as Guill's business partner in a Heron heating and air conditioning business, but indicated Thursday he was simply an employee. Describing Douglas Guill as his best friend, Christensen cried as he told of the night in the late 1980s when he had sex with Candace.
She showed up at his Boise home alone, Christensen testified, and asked if she could read Bible scriptures to him.
“I believe she knew I was kind of a wreck,” Christensen said. “I'd just gotten over a divorce.”
After she read to him from the Bible, Christensen told his friend's wife it was getting late and he had to work in the morning. He told her she could sleep on his couch if she didn't want to drive the 35 to 40 miles back to the Guills' home in the Nampa-Caldwell area, but said he was going to take a shower and go to bed.
As he headed for his bedroom after the shower, Christensen said Candace appeared in the hallway in a housecoat and “said she wanted me.”
Candace then took off the housecoat, he said.
“She said she'd been doing some praying, and felt God said she's supposed to be with me,” Christensen said. “I asked her, ‘What about Douglas?' She said, ‘Don't worry about him.'
“We spent the night together.”
Douglas, he said through tears, was “extremely hurt Š but always praying for me.”
Defense attorney Mike Sherwood asked Christensen about Candace's version.
“Allegations have been made that on multiple occasions you had sex with Candace, that she was sharing a bed with you and Douglas” and that it started in Idaho, continued when the Guills and Christensen moved to Wyoming and occurred one more time after the three had moved to Heron, Sherwood said.
“Absolutely not,” Christensen said. “No, that's not true.”
Candace has testified her husband wanted her to have sex with other men, and she finally relented and slept with his best friend. At first, Douglas watched, she said, but on later occasions he joined them in bed.
On cross-examination, Dan Guzynski of the Montana Attorney General's Office asked Christensen about his divorce - he said he was crushed when he came to believe his wife was having an affair - and then asked, in the wake of that, how he could inflict the same pain on his best friend.
“I wasn't thinking straight,” said Christensen, 47. “She said it was God's will. Who was I to argue?”
The defense maintains that after Christensen had sex with Candace, Douglas Guill forgave his friend but ended normal marital relations with his wife. However, the couple agreed to remain married and raise their two children together.
As an almost daily visitor to the Guills' Heron home - where his sister Nicole moved in in 1992 - Christensen testified everyone there seemed very happy.
“I never got the sense there was anything even close to being inappropriate” going on at the home, he said. If he had sensed it, he said, he would have told his sister, “There's something goofy going on. You'd better get out of here.”
Had he seen Candace or the children away from home alone?
“Lots of times,” he answered.
Did he have any sense Candace or the kids were being held captive?
“No,” he said.
Any sense of religious cultism going on?
“No.”
Douglas Guill, Christensen said, is “a very good father. He's the most kind-hearted person I've ever met in my life. He'd provide anything the kids ever needed. He'd bend over backwards for them.”
At his business, Advanced Systems, Douglas Guill charged customers $65 an hour for work done by Christensen, according to Thursday's testimony, but usually paid Christensen about $75 cash for the six days a week he worked.
Guill also provided Christensen a trailer to live in, in what Christensen called “downtown Heron,” a van to drive and uniforms.
The daughter has testified she and her brother Jacob, who also worked for Advanced Systems, were never paid, and were only allowed to keep the $300 to $400 a year they received as income tax refunds. Douglas Guill, meantime, owns the business, a three-level home on Cabinet Gorge Reservoir, a cabin in Clark Fork, Idaho, other properties, several vehicles, some of them Cadillacs, and several snowmobiles and four-wheelers.
Christensen told Guzynski he has only seen his three children from the earlier marriage, now in their 20s, once since moving to Heron in 1992. He has talked to his parents only twice in many years, once for a few minutes and once for an hour, after they showed up at his trailer.
The parents and two other family members, who live out of state, were in the courtroom Monday and Tuesday, but were not present Thursday.
“I believe Mr. Guzynski was suggesting, with respect to your family, that somehow Douglas has driven you away from them,” Sherwood said on redirect.
“That's what I understand he was trying to make it look like,” Christensen said. “I'm not an idiot. I can make my own decisions. I don't want to associate with them anymore.”
The day after the daughter, then 22 years old, left home, Christensen said Douglas Guill “was pretty much a wreck. He was very sad.”
Candace, he said, “sat at the other end of the table with kind of a smirk on her face, like she knew what was going on.”
Why would people be so upset for a 22-year-old woman to leave home? Guzynski asked.
They didn't know if she was safe, Christensen said.
Thursday's only other witness was the now ex-boyfriend Guill's daughter met after moving to Sandpoint, Idaho, Vince Petruskin. The defense's inability to get Petruskin to Sanders County led to 45 minutes of legal wrangling before the jurors - who twice took their places in the jury box during the time - finally heard his testimony via telephone.
Petruskin is in custody in Colorado, and Sherwood said that as a prisoner, Petruskin has been moved 14 times in the last 20 days, hampering his ability to serve him.
Judge Kim Christopher had intervened earlier in the week and helped arrange for Petruskin to be held in Greeley, Colo., until 3 p.m. Thursday so that the defense could either make arrangements to have him escorted to Thompson Falls, or appear on video.
But Sherwood said after being told it was available, he learned Thursday morning there was no video capability at the facility where Petruskin is being held, evidently on a probation violation.
“I'm very concerned his testimony will be compromised if our only contact with him is by phone,” Sherwood told the judge.
Christopher replied the defense has had 18 months to prepare, that Petruskin had not been subpoenaed or served prior to the trial starting, she had already intervened, and given the defense the last day and a half to get the witness to Thompson Falls.
“I can't run an entire other state's court system,” Christopher told Sherwood. “I got him, he's available now, and I will reserve your right to recall Mr. Petruskin if you can get him here.”
On the phone, Petruskin - who said he is 6-foot-2 and weighs 275 pounds - testified he and Guill's daughter had sex many times. “If we had sex three or four times that day, we might not be able to the next day” because it was too painful for her.
The defense maintains that an injury in Guill's daughter's vaginal area could have been caused by the sex with Petruskin - and not be the result of Guill allegedly raping his daughter when beginning when she was 8 or 9 years old.
Petruskin's testimony was sometimes all over the map, however. He said he and Guill's daughter had sex on their first date, another time he said their first sexual encounter came within three days of meeting, another time he said it was within the first week - and Guzynski pointed out, he told defense investigators some months ago he and Guill's daughter didn't have sex for two months after they started seeing each other.
In an effort to wrap-up testimony in the trial - which was originally scheduled to last a week - Friday, Christopher will reconvene the court at 8 a.m.
The defendant, Douglas Guill, is expected to be the last witness on the stand.
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