To his 23-year-old daughter, who accused him of forcing her to engage in three-way sex with Guill and his girlfriend as a teenager, repeatedly raping her since she was 9 years old, trying to when she was 8, and molesting her since she was 6.
To his ex-wife of 33 years, Candace, who described years of living in fear and oppression with a man who refused to let his children attend public schools, rarely let his family leave his property outside the small Sanders County town of Heron, forced her to live in an outbuilding on the property called the storehouse for years, and who said Guill pestered her to have sex with his best friend until she agreed.
On Friday afternoon, Douglas Guill took the witness stand in his own defense.
Breaking down and crying at several points as his attorney, Mike Sherwood of Missoula, questioned him about a life that, for the past 16 months, has been spent in jail awaiting this trial, Guill was composed when Sherwood broached the felony incest, rape and sexual abuse charges he faces.
Guill quietly but firmly denied the allegations.
Did he have sex with his daughter?
“No,” Guill said. “I did not.”
Burn her with a cigarette?
“No.”
Pinch her until he raised a blood blister?
“I never pinched her, period,” he said.
Ever touch her for a sexual purpose?
“No,” Guill answered. “I changed her diapers when she was very young.”
His daughter, Guill said, was a happy girl growing up on Cabinet Gorge Reservoir. She and her brother didn't have friends, he said, but only because they wanted to be home-schooled and there weren't other kids in the rural area where they lived. When he tried to get his children to socialize with a Heron-area family with a several kids, they didn't like it, Guill said.
“They were too loud,” he explained.
Neither Candace nor, as they got older, the kids, were restricted from leaving the property, Guill testified.
“I only asked, in particular of (his daughter) - I have a cell phone that doesn't work in Heron, but it does here (in Thompson Falls), in Trout Creek, in Sandpoint - I asked her to take that with her. And I always made sure she had a credit card for gas.”
As he got older, Guill's son, Jacob, was often away from the property, working for his father's heating and air conditioning company, Advanced Systems.
And the only time Candace stayed in the storeroom, he said, was for a few days when the trailer where she usually lived had to be moved as construction continued on the family's new home.
So she wasn't there for years and years? Sherwood asked.
“Not even weeks and weeks,” Guill replied.
His marriage to Candace ended in everything but name only when she allegedly had an affair with Guill's best friend, Rick Christensen, almost 20 years ago, Guill said.
“She told me she was moving out,” Guill said, calling it “a big surprise.”
Guill said he told his wife “We have a commitment to those two kids - they were 2 and 4 at the time. I told her, ‘Those kids need both their parents.' ”
He forgave his friend, he said, but never had sex with Candace again. Guill and his wife agreed to remain together for the children, he said, but otherwise would lead separate lives.
Candace has testified she and her husband continued to have marital relations, that he wanted her to sleep with Christensen, watching at first and eventually joined them in bed. She said she slept with Guill's best friend in order to please her husband.
Candace said the marital relations ended when Christensen's little sister, Nicole Christensen, moved onto the property and in with Guill in 1992.
Nicole, who some witnesses have testified they always thought was Douglas Guill's wife, legally changed her name from Christensen to Guill in 1995. They married after Douglas and Candace divorced in 2006, which occurred after the daughter left home.
Nicole has testified that she and Guill have been virtually inseparable since she moved to Heron, going so far as to go to the bathroom together anytime one of them needs to use the toilet.
Asked by Sherwood if it was true they even eat off the same plate, Guill said they usually even use the same fork.
He also usually wears a white shirt, he said, and Nicole wears white outfits “98 to 95 percent” of the time. Nicole testified she does so because white makes her feel “chipper.” Both she and Guill denied there is anything religious associated with it, and Guill denied he ever made Candace or his children feel that he was God and could determine who would go to heaven, and who would go to hell.
He did admit signing the name Jesus to something he wrote to his daughter in a Bible.
“I forged His name,” Guill said, to laughter in the courtroom.
But Guill had difficulty speaking when Sherwood showed him a thank-you card Candace and their daughter had given him after they took a shopping trip to Missoula (the prosecution maintains it was one of only two trips to Missoula they were ever allowed in 17 years in Heron).
He also choked up when showed the letter the daughter left in her bedroom the day she “ran away,” at the age of 22, to Sandpoint. In it, the daughter makes reference to a “certain person” who is going to keep things “stirred up” if she stayed on the Heron property.
The defense maintains that person is her brother Jacob, who defense witnesses have testified was not getting along with his sister in 2006. The prosecution says it refers to Nicole.
Guill also cried when questioned about how the 14 months in jail have affected him.
Guill said one of the arresting officers who showed up in Heron on Nov. 24, 2006, Sanders County deputy sheriff Doug Dryden, made inappropriate comments regarding Nicole's underwear from Victoria's Secret found during a search of the Guill home.
Prosecutor Dan Guzynski quickly recalled Dryden to the stand afterward for one question.
Had he ever made a comment to Guill about Nicole's underwear or panties? Guzynski asked him.
“No, I did not,” Dryden said.
Already the longest trial in Sanders County in at least a decade if not more, Judge Kim Christopher warned both sides that things will be wrapped up by the end of court Monday, period, and the case would go to the jury Tuesday morning.
Guzynski has yet to cross-exam Guill, closing statements have yet to occur, and Sherwood is still trying to get a defense witness - Vince Petruskin, who dated the daughter after she left home - to Thompson Falls to testify.
Petruskin's testimony became important only last month, Sherwood told the judge after the jury had been dismissed for the day, when he learned a Missoula doctor would testify that an injury to the vaginal area of Guill's daughter could only have occurred through childbirth, a brutal rape or an attempt to have sex with a prepubescent girl.
The defense's expert has testified the injury could have happened in either consensual or nonconsensual sex.
Petruskin testified by telephone Thursday from a jail in Greeley, Colo. - where he is apparently being held on a probation violation - that he and Guill's daughter engaged in sex often after they began dating in Sandpoint last spring.
Christopher said she has already intervened in an attempt to make Petruskin available to the defense “in ways I've never done in any other case,” and refused to order the Sanders County Sheriff's Office on Friday afternoon to travel to Colorado over the weekend to escort Petruskin to Thompson Falls. The order, she said, has been available since 2:15 p.m. Tuesday, and it would now be up to the defense to make arrangements.
Sherwood argued that Petruskin is a material witness, “and if the state intends in any way to impeach Mr. Petruskin” his presence in the court would be required.
“You're asking me to rule on something that hasn't happened,” Christopher told Sherwood. “That isn't happening.“
Guill's trial - originally scheduled to be finished March 7 - enters its 10th day Monday morning at 8 in the Sanders County Courthouse.
One juror who said he has a prior commitment this week was released late Friday, and one of the two alternates was seated. The jury now contains eight women and four men.
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