District Court Judge Kim Christopher let the jurors head home at 7 p.m. Monday, after an 11-hour day.
Some of the jurors live as far away as Hot Springs, Dixon and Heron, and wanted to get home before dark. The jury told Christopher they believe they will be able to reach a verdict, but needed a break before resuming deliberations.
But the son was there for less than 30 seconds.
After opposing counsel huddled with Christopher for several minutes, Jacob was sworn in. Prosecutor Dan Guzynski asked Jacob to state his full name and spell his last name.
“Jacob Israel Guill,” he responded. “G-u-i-l-l.”
“No further questions, your honor,” Guzynski said.
What jurors made of that short exchange, no one knows - Jacob had seemed conspicuously absent as a witness for either the prosecution or defense as the trial, originally scheduled to end March 7, entered its third week Monday.
Even Douglas Guill turned to his co-counsel, Sarah Rhoades, and asked, “What just happened?”
If nothing else, the jury finally got a glimpse of the 21-year-old whose name has been mentioned often since his father's trial began March 3. Jacob reportedly moved out of Douglas Guill's three-level home on Cabinet Gorge Reservoir a month after his sister, then 22 years old, “ran away from home” on Sept. 11, 2006.
One thing was certain as the case went to the jury Monday afternoon: Jacob and his sister grew up in a home that did not resemble your typical American family.
Not in dispute were several facts:
- That from 1992 to 2006, the children lived with a father who also kept both a wife and a girlfriend on his property outside the small western Montana community of Heron, all of them living together at first in a trailer, and later in a new home. The adults often prayed in tongues.
- That the home-schooled children had no friends growing up, never spending a night with someone their own ages or having anyone stay with them.
- That the father and his girlfriend Nicole - whom he married after the children left home and he divorced his wife, Candace, in 2006 - were virtually inseparable for the 14 years leading up to their arrest (Nicole faces a separate trial for sexual assault). They ate off the same plate, used the same fork and went so far as to remain together even when one or the other needed to use the bathroom.
There were two sides to many other issues.
- Were Douglas Guill's first wife of 33 years, Candace, and their children allowed to come and go as they pleased, or did Douglas refuse to let them leave the property save for once or twice a year?
- Were the children ever paid - as Douglas Guill reported to the Internal Revenue Service - for years of work they did for his company, Advanced Systems Heating and Air Conditioning?
- Did Douglas physically abuse Candace on a camping trip to Lake Koocanusa, and Jacob after his son spoke to people driving a vehicle down the road by the Guill home?
- And, perhaps most important, was the daughter's escape from Heron a plan hatched by Candace and her children to try to kill Douglas Guill by causing him to die of a heart attack so they - and not Nicole - could inherit his assets, valued at more than $1 million? Or did the daughter never reveal 16 years of rape and sexual abuse to anyone until she had been in Sandpoint, Idaho, for many weeks?
The jury doesn't have to decide any of that, however.
As Christopher reminded them in her instructions, Douglas Guill can only be convicted of the sex-related charges against him, accusations that include forcing his daughter to engage in three-way sex with Douglas and Nicole as a teenager, repeatedly raping the girl since the age of 9, first trying to when she was 8, and sexually molesting her since the age of 6.
Who are you going to believe? Guzynski asked jurors in his closing statement. A daughter who had nothing to gain by putting herself through everything that has happened since she told the Sandpoint couple who took her in about the alleged years of rape and abuse, or a father who kept his family isolated from the rest of the world? The defense expert, a pathologist who hasn't done a vaginal examination on a live person since the mid-1970s, or the prosecution's expert, who has “a lifetime dealing with sexual abuse?”
The defense's expert testified an injury to the daughter's vaginal area could have occurred through consensual sex. The state's expert said it could only have happened via a difficult childbirth, brutal rape or an attempt to have sex with a prepubescent girl.
“The defense would have you believe this is about money,” Guzynski, a Montana assistant attorney general, said. “Where is the pot of gold at the end of all this?”
Candace Guill, who originally signed away her rights to any of her husband's assets, has already been awarded $500,000 as a divorce settlement - a ruling under appeal to the Montana Supreme Court - Guzynski said.
Earlier in the day, as he cross-examined Douglas Guill, Guzynski had him read from their tax returns the amounts Advanced Systems allegedly paid Jacob and his sister between 2001 and 2004 - more than $50,000 for the daughter, just under $50,000 for the son.
Guill's daughter testified they were never paid for their work, and only allowed to keep the $300 or $400 they received in income tax refunds. Nicole Guill testified she paid the children in cash every week.
If she had $50,000 in cash to aid her departure, Guzynski said, why was the daughter secretly stashing away canned goods and other supplies for nearly a year before she made her break from Heron?
Allegedly making the children work for Advanced Systems without pay “was just another way to use the children, to expense them out to the IRS,” Guzynski charged.
Defense attorney Mike Sherwood of Missoula reminded jurors that the defendant need not prove a thing, that it is up to the state to do so - beyond a reasonable doubt, and only for the charges filed against Guill - or their oath requires them to return a verdict of not guilty.
“There are things I need to mention that are curiously absent,” Sherwood told the jurors.
No neighbors from Golden Pond Road were called, he noted. No one from the Panhandle Health Center in Sandpoint, where Douglas Guill's daughter had yearly pelvic exams, appeared to support the testimony of the prosecution's expert.
“Her own brother wasn't even called to support this,” Sherwood said.
With his last at-bat, Guzynski reminded jurors that either side can call witnesses.
But Sherwood argued there were too many inconsistencies in too much testimony from prosecution witnesses, key among them the daughter telling him during an interview that her father's pubic hair was gray, while he had introduced photographs showing it to be brown.
The daughter told authorities the alleged molestation began when the family lived in Wyoming, Sherwood said, but later told Nicole Guill's attorney it first started in a trailer.
“There was no trailer in Wyoming,” Sherwood said. “The trailer was in Heron.”
Before her father and his new wife were arrested, Sherwood said, the girl told a counselor in Sandpoint that her legs were scarred from her father pinching her, and a Sanders County deputy said the counselor also told him the girl had been burned with cigarettes.
The counselor said she doesn't recall being told anything about cigarette burns, and when the daughter had a physical examination at First Step Resource in Missoula, “There is no scarring. There are no cigarette burns,” Sherwood said. “Their observations don't jive with what (the daughter) is telling (her counselor).”
The daughter testified she was home-schooled until 1997, but he had introduced evidence that the family was still buying textbooks in 1999, Sherwood said.
And, he added, “Is there any physical evidence to support what (the daughter) is saying?” Police took bedding, a mattress pad and a piece of carpet from the home, but no DNA from the daughter was located on any of them.
Fifteen years equals roughly 5,400 days, Sherwood said, and yet the defense had produced just two people to testify that things seemed odd on a couple of occasions (one, who attended a Christmas Eve dinner, said Nicole spoon-fed Douglas his entire meal).
“That's two out of 5,400 days,” Sherwood said. He, meantime, produced Nicole's brother and Douglas' employee, Rick Christensen, who testified he visited the property six days a week for 15 years.
“That's 5,000 days where everything is fine,” Sherwood said, asking jurors to pay attention to the family photographs he had introduced that allegedly showed smiling, happy people.
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)