Former teacher calmly describes Glen Arm man's murder, says she was 'in a fog'
Nick Madigan, The Baltimore Sun
7:00 PM EDT, June 29, 2010
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Calmly, and in a clear if subdued voice, a 60-year-old murder defendant told a jury Tuesday that she could not fathom how her .38-caliber revolver ended up in her grasp on the morning her husband was killed, and said she "never heard the gun."
"I saw myself like I was in a movie," Mary C. Koontz said to the Baltimore County Circuit Court jury that has been hearing the case against her since last Wednesday. She acknowledged buying and learning to use the gun, and checking it in with her luggage on flights to Baltimore from her condominium in Florida, where she was living after her marriage had dissolved.
On June 19, 2009, having returned to Maryland and made her way into the bedroom in Glen Arm she once shared with her husband of 20 years, Ronald G. Koontz, she recalled the scene as though she had been removed from it — "from the perspective of the ceiling."
"The next thing I remember is seeing the gun in my hand, and shaking it, like: 'What is this gun doing here?' " she testified. "I was in a fog."
Koontz spent about two hours on the witness stand, the first time she had spoken publicly about the events of that day, when, prosecutors say, she shot her estranged husband four times. Koontz also is accused of firing toward her daughter Kelsey, now 17, but the girl was uninjured.
The defendant's appearance as a witness, rare in a murder trial, was part of a defense strategy to persuade jurors that her actions were due to a disturbed mind and that she is not responsible for the crimes. She answered questions slowly and precisely, recalling intricate details of her life all the way back to her childhood, but her memory grew vague when asked to describe the morning of the shootings.
On cross-examination, she told prosecutor Robin C. Coffin that her real intent was to kill herself, but could not explain how her husband died. She said she barely recalled leaving her Towson hotel some time after 5 a.m. and driving the six miles or so to her former home. But she admitted that she must have packed her gun for the trip, since she always had it loaded by her side as she slept.
"Everything was really unclear," she said. "I just remember ending up at the stream behind our house."
The stream, she went on, held special significance because she and her husband had sometimes prayed there after building the four-bedroom house on Manor Springs Court in 1990. She considered the water to have healing properties.
On the morning of the killing, Koontz said, she "prayed a little bit" at the stream. She did not recall leaving her rental car there or her gun case on the front passenger seat, where police later found it. Nor did she recall carrying the weapon as she walked to the house, but she remembered letting herself in with a key she had kept since leaving 19 months earlier.
Koontz did not attach special significance to the fact that her shoes were found by the front door, a detail that prosecutors took to mean she intended to sneak inside without being heard. "I always took my shoes off before I stepped on the white carpet," she told the jury. Then, she went on, "I think I went upstairs and walked into our bedroom and I saw Ron standing at the bottom of the bed."
At that point, under gentle questioning from defense attorney Richard M. Karceski, she described seeing herself as a movie character, someone whose actions she was merely observing. Koontz said nothing about firing the gun at either her husband or daughter. But under cross-examination she did not dispute Kelsey's testimony last week that her mother had crouched into a two-handed firing stance before pulling the trigger.
Koontz recalled going into her daughter's room, but it looked very distorted, she said.
After leaving the room and closing the door behind her — the girl testified earlier that she immediately locked it and called police — Koontz went into her daughter's bathroom, where, she said, she "lost consciousness" and came around to find herself lying on the floor with her husband on top of her.
"He said, 'I've always loved you,' " the defendant recalled. "I said, 'I've always loved you.' The next thing, he's banging my head on the door frame. I don't understand — he just said he loved me."
Koontz then described struggling for the gun, and her desire to use it to kill herself. She said she and her husband "slid down the steps together, side by side," grappling for the weapon on the grass outside the house.
Police officers ran up to the couple and disarmed her. The officers testified last week that both Mary and Ron Koontz were covered in blood. She was arrested, and he was later pronounced dead at a hospital.
Mary Koontz was initially taken to Franklin Square Hospital Center, where she was questioned by detectives, and eventually to Clifton T. Perkins State Hospital, a maximum-security forensic psychiatric facility, where she spent six weeks.
Born in Clarksburg, W.Va., in 1949, Mary C. Minehart was one of three siblings, she told the jury. While she described herself in childhood as "daddy's little girl," she had a "strained relationship" with her late mother, a judge.
When she was almost 11, Koontz said, she was molested by a cousin, and on an earlier occasion was dragged behind a bicycle by a group of boys. Both incidents have inspired nightmares throughout her life, she said.
An English teacher at Sparrows Point High School, she met Ron Koontz, a Baltimore County schools supervisor who was to become her second husband, in 1988, when she applied to him for a transfer to another school. They had several things in common, she said, chiefly a dedication to a charismatic Christian faith. They married in December the following year, after her divorce from her first husband, with whom she had two sons.
The first few years of the Koontzes' marriage — Kelsey was born in December 1992 — were "wonderful," the defendant said, with "no big problems." But her growing physical and emotional ailments began to take their toll, and the marriage began to deteriorate.
"It was a lot to put up with," she said, "for myself and for Ron."
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