afurillo@sacbee.com
PUBLISHED SATURDAY, MAR. 05, 2011
Dennis Robert Mains went on for 10 minutes Friday about how "I was sick," "I don't know what happened," "I was in a delusion" and "out of my mind."
He said he loved the woman he murdered with two gunshots to the head while she slept. But she tried to poison him by spraying insecticide down his throat, Mains said, and on the day he killed her, "I had arsenic in my blood."
"Let's wrap it up, Mr. Mains," Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael P. Kenny told him.
That's when Mains started in about motorcycle gangs that sized him up for "Colombian neckties" and planned to stuff his remains "in the deepest mine shaft in Arizona."
Kenny cut him off and sentenced Mains to 50 years to life for the killing in the pool-house residence he shared with his wife, Pamela Wales, 61, behind her daughter's home on Jana Maria Court in Citrus Heights.
The sentencing followed two jury verdicts last month that found Mains guilty of murder in the April 25, 2008, killing of Wales and that he was legally sane when he did it.
Prosecutors said Mains murdered his wife because she wanted to divorce him.
"What you did was cold, it was callous, and it was cruel," the judge said. "And there is one more word for it – it was cowardly."
Mains interrupted Kenny about a half-dozen times as the judge pronounced the sentence. Mains repeated that he was delusional, and he criticized Kenny for not allowing him to put on evidence at trial that his wife had tried to poison him.
Twice during the trial, Mains disrupted the proceedings by shouting out loud the poisoning allegation. Kenny on both occasions told the jury to ignore the outbursts.
A construction worker and country musician, Mains played music under the stage name Outlaw Josie Wales, named for the character in the Clint Eastwood western.
Mains had admitted himself to a hospital several times in the months before he killed his wife. He claimed he was either suicidal or had taken too much blood pressure medication in an effort to kill himself.
He called 911 after he shot Pamela Wales and told the dispatcher he had taken pills again, in another botched suicide try.
Deputy District Attorney Donell Slivka offered an opinion in court Friday on Mains' failure to follow through in doing himself in.
"He didn't do that because he's a coward," Slivka said.
During trial, forensic psychologist Paul Mattiuzzi testified that Mains' mental problem was more borderline personality disorder than psychosis.
To Mattiuzzi, Mains came off as "histrionic," an "emotionally dramatic" sort who affected "exaggerated feeling to generate sympathy."
Before he killed her, his wife was trying to divorce Mains, according to testimony at his trial.
Pamela Wales' daughter Stephani Simon told jurors her mother even offered to pay Mains $3,000 to get out of her life. Mains told detectives who interviewed him after the killing, "She was going to leave me on the street to die."
A tearful Stephani Simon told the court the killing deprived her of the unconditional love of the woman who brought her into the world, the almost-housemate with whom she was able to eat lunch almost every day.
"She was the sweetest, kindest person I've ever known," Simon said.
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