Psychiatrist Says Laura Troiani Was Mentally Incapable of Murder Plot

The prosecution’s contention that Laura Troiani plotted and helped execute her husband’s killing three years ago was dramatically countered by the defense Wednesday when a psychiatrist testified that she was mentally and emotionally incapable of planning and pulling off the scheme.

Dr. Mark Mills, called as an expert witness on Troiani’s behalf, suggested in Vista Superior Court that Troiani lost control of her fantasy of being rid of her husband or ending their unhappy marriage. Her desires evolved into a reality in which she was unable to exert any control and she found herself literally “along for the ride” with the killers, Mills said.

Troiani professed an intrinsic morality “that killing was inappropriate and utterly wrong,” said Mills, who interviewed Troiani for more than 15 hours. He ultimately diagnosed her as suffering from “a major depressive episode” in the weeks leading up to the shooting in August, 1984, noting that she contemplated suicide because of an unsatisfactory family life as a child and later as a wife and mother.

‘Somewhat Spacey’

He said she did not suffer from any personality disturbances, but characterized her as naive, child-like, impulsive and melancholic. She was “somewhat spacey, out of it, preoccupied, easily distractable, immature and primitive,” he said, and was unable to deliberate or formulate plans of action.

“She certainly engaged in wishful thinking . . . that her marriage would end, but to implement or even develop a detailed plan (of killing her husband) is where her impairment was most evident,” Mills testified.

When others offered to “help her,” she didn’t realize until it was too late that the others in fact planned to kill her husband of five years, Carlo Troiani, said Mills.

“She never believed that it would come to pass,” he said. “Laura perceived herself as a victim, caught up, incapable of even deflecting the events. She was more unable than most of us to differentiate between fantasy and reality.” To her, the unfolding episode was not unlike watching television, he said.

After the killing, Troiani was “desperately sad” and expressed “significant remorse,” Mills said.

Mills, whose testimony is the heart of Troiani’s defense, said that due to an “impairment of her cognitive capacity,” Troiani was unable “to resist ideas that were otherwise foreign to her.” She would have been unable to resist, for instance, the sales pitch of a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman even though she would have no need for the books, Mills testified.

Not Diminished Capacity

Defense attorney Geraldine Russell said Mills’ testimony was not intended to suggest that Troiani suffered from diminished capacity, which cannot be claimed in defense, but to gut the prosecution’s contention that Troiani was the leader of the pack, responsible for planning, and instrumental in carrying off, her husband’s death.

Instead, Russell has maintained, the five Marine co-defendants were thrill-seekers bent on violence who took up Laura Troiani’s gauntlet and killed her husband, even against her wishes as she came to realize what their plan was.

The San Diego County district attorney’s office maintains that Troiani wanted her husband killed so that she could collect his insurance proceeds, pay off the five co-defendants and marry a secret lover.

Prosecution witnesses have testified that they overheard Laura Troiani solicit her husband’s killing, while defense witnesses have testified that she was abused by her husband, who had struck her in fits of anger.

Troiani, a Marine staff sergeant, was found shot to death Aug. 10, 1984, on a rural Oceanside road near a back entrance to Camp Pendleton. In a taped confession to Oceanside police within hours of the shooting, Laura Troiani conceded that her husband was lured to the site on the pretext that she ran out of gas and needed help.

The co-defendants will be tried separately; the district attorney’s office is seeking the death penalty for all six on the charge that they conspired to kill Carlo Troiani, laid in wait and killed him for profit.

Inadmissible Testimony

Superior Court Judge Gilbert Nares has ruled much of the testimony of defense witnesses, given out of the presence of the jury, as inadmissible because it referred to incidents too many years ago to be relevant. One of the witnesses was a former wife of Carlo Troiani who testified that, when she was a teen-ager, he once hit her in the stomach while she was 5 1/2 months pregnant.

Nares also has ruled as irrelevant the testimony by several defense witnesses who said the five co-defendants were violent and recalcitrant--testimony which Russell hoped would show that Carlo Troiani’s killing was beyond Laura Troiani’s control.

Some witnesses testified that one of the co-defendants once bit off the head of a live mouse, and that another snorted the chain of his I.D. tag through his nose and pulled it out his mouth, in loop fashion.

On Wednesday, Russell brought out her best witness so far, in Mills, with the intent of showing that Laura Troiani didn’t have the state of mind of intending to really have her husband murdered.

When Mills was asked by Russell whether her client could have manipulated the co-defendants into killing her husband and could be characterized as a black widow spider, which seduces and then kills its mate, he answered:

“To characterize her as that is relatively absurd. She had trouble (because of her depression) getting up, getting dressed, of feeding the children she cared for. . . . It is not a very compelling scenario to think she manipulated the five men.

“It is virtually inconceivable for me to see her as a leader . . . To hatch an elaborate plan to ‘off’ her husband doesn’t make much sense. It’s something I’m sure in retrospect she wishes she could have controlled. She didn’t perceive it as real, and that she had a role in it, or could change the course of events.

“She was along for the ride. She didn’t have the cognitive and emotional capacity to object in any kind of meaningful way.”

‘Acted Impulsively’

At another point, Mills said Troiani was “not a grand master chess player planning 20 moves ahead. She acted impulsively and simply.”

Virtually all of Troiani’s life was sorrowful, Mills said, testifying that her mother was abused by her first husband, Laura Troiani’s father, who is now “serving time for attempted murder in a Washington state prison.”

He noted that Laura Troiani had a child out of wedlock by a different man, then married Carlo Troiani, who was nearly twice her age at the time. Within months, Mills said he was told by her, she began considering divorcing her husband because at times he needed to be mothered and at other times he treated her “like one of his Marine recruits.”

But she could not muster the strength to decide to leave him, Mills testified. “She couldn’t live with him, and she couldn’t live without him,” he said.

Because of Mills’ testimony, by which Laura Troiani waived her right to patient-doctor privilege, the prosecution on Wednesday won the right to have its own psychiatrist examine her, either on Friday or Monday, and to also review reports by a marriage counselor who met with Carlo and Laura Troiani in 1984.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Paul Pfingst declined to comment Wednesday on the effect of Mills’ testimony. He is expected to cross-examine Mills today.