Calgary Killer Was ‘Psychotic’ When He Stabbed Five Students to Death According to Psychiatrists

Matthew de Grood heard the devil's voice saying "kill them before they get you" prior to stabbing to death five peers at a Calgary house party, a psychiatrist testified in court Wednesday.

Alberto Choy, director of forensic psychiatry at Alberta Hospital Edmonton, interviewed de Grood after the killings. De Grood, 24, told Choy that a couple weeks before they took place, he started to believe he was a sun god and that a war between the Illuminati, werewolves, and vampires was going to take place. In part, he said he was inspired by the Twilight movie and Cirque du Freak, a manga series about a kid who turns into a half vampire.

"He heard a male voice, who he thought was the devil, telling him to 'kill them before they get you'… He could not converse with the voice but it was directing him and warning him about others," Choy testified.

While de Grood has admitted to killing the five victims, Lawrence Hong, 27, Joshua Hunter, 23, Jordan Segura, 22, Kaitlin Perras, 23, and Zackariah Rathwell, 21, in April 2014, he's pleaded not guilty; his legal team is arguing he was not criminally responsible for the crimes.

In court Wednesday, two psychiatrists who took the witness stand seemed to bolster that theory.

While Choy said he did not make a specific diagnosis on de Grood, "he was suffering from a mental disorder and from our perspective he was clearly psychotic."

Lenka Zedkova, another psychiatrist who works at Alberta Hospital, spent 14 hours speaking with de Grood after the stabbings. She told the court she diagnosed him with schizophrenia.

"He was not in touch with reality," she said.

Both doctors testified de Grood knew what he was doing when he killed the five students, but Choy said he didn't understand that it morally wrong. Because he believed the world was ending, Zedkova said he thought he was acting in self-defence.

The not criminally responsible defence, previously known as an "insanity defence," has been used in some of the most notorious cases in Canadian history. Vince Li, the man who beheaded his seatmate on a Greyhound bus outside of Winnipeg, used it successfully in 2009, while Luka Magnotta's legal team was unable to convince a jury that he was too mentally ill to know what he was doing when he dismembered Concordia University student Jun Lin in 2012.

Calgary defence lawyer Balfour Der told VICE at least one of two criteria must be met in order to prove someone is not criminally responsible for their actions. The defendant must either show that their mental illness made them incapable of understanding what they were doing (e.g. you think you're peeling an orange but really you're strangling somebody) or "because of the mental disorder, you don't know that what you're doing is wrong." De Grood falls into the latter category, according to the testimony.

Der said prosecution's brevity in rolling out their case suggests they concede de Grood was not criminally responsible. While being questioned, both psychiatrists said it was unlikely de Grood was faking a mental disorder in order to get out of doing jail time.

De Grood's lawyer Allan Fay addressed that theory outside court Wednesday. "This isn't some hired gun that I've paid a lot of money to come in to give this kind of testimony to give my client an easy out," he said after Choy testified.

Der told VICE it would be "insane" to think a young person would actually plan out these killings in front of a bunch of witnesses with the intention of faking a not criminally responsible defence. He added being found not criminally responsible isn't exactly a get out of jail free card.

"It's 'Get out of jail once trained professionals believe that your mental disorder is no longer a risk,'" he said. "Some people can stay in longer on NCR than they otherwise would if they were simply sentenced in the normal court."

He said there's no standards for how long a person who is found not criminally responsible for their crimes to stay locked up. In the case of Li, after seven years spent in a mental health institution and later a group home, he was approved in February to eventually live by himself.

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