Court Told How Son Was Driven to Kill Spiteful Mother

Thomas Hayhurst, who was sentenced Thursday for bludgeoning his 74-year-old mother to death with a crowbar, hardly cut the profile of a killer.

The brutality of the crime aside, he is passive and nonaggressive, driven by a sense of duty and altruism, and one who appreciates life’s aesthetics, according to a psychologist’s evaluation.

A decent and dutiful son, he was so family-oriented that he returned to his mother’s home in Escondido last December after she was seriously injured in a car accident, to help care for her and his developmentally disabled 30-year-old sister, the evaluation said.

And he stayed at home with his mother even though he described her as a “spiteful, hateful woman” who sold his personal belongings behind his back, according to that same report.

But last Oct. 15, waking up to a glass of vodka that had become his primary antidote to his mother’s constant haranguing, the slightly built, 41-year-old Hayhurst found his mother barking at him once again, this time accusing him of hiding her walking stick.

“I told her she was crazy,” Hayhurst told a psychological examiner, according to court records. “She said something like, ‘I don’t want you around here anymore.’ I told her, ‘Just leave me alone.’ She wouldn’t stop. She got in my face. She had a glass jar and threatened to hit me with it.

“I just blew it. I grabbed the crowbar. I hit her. Everything was like in a fog, like in a dream. It was like I wasn’t there.”

Observed psychologist Wistar H. MacLaren: “He may have been ventilating the rage felt by his siblings and his deceased father who, by his account, all experienced (the mother’s) abuse, manipulations and cruelty.”

On Thursday, Hayhurst was sentenced by Vista Superior Court Judge J. Morgan Lester to 15 years to life in prison for the second-degree, unpremeditated murder of his mother, Violet Hayhurst.

Lester, after having read a Probation Department report describing how his mother had driven her entire family to distraction--and her husband to suicide--looked to the handcuffed Hayhurst and wished him “good luck.”

“I suspect, when I look him over from head to toe, that he’ll end up on some forestry gang, and that’s all right,” Lester said as Hayhurst’s two brothers sat in the first row.

Prosecutor Greg Walden has previously said that Hayhurst will be eligible for parole in 7 1/2 years.

The Probation Department’s and psychiatrist’s reports provided, for the first time, Thomas Hayhurst’s side of the story that led him to kill his mother.

He told of how his mother “would throw dishes at (his father), throw the phone at him, throw him out of the house,” according to the probation report. Hayhurst said that after he himself moved out of the house, his father, Lou Hayhurst, would visit him, “displaying black eyes and bruises where his mother had hit his father or had thrown something at him. She was also abusive to the other brothers, but they moved out.”

Hayhurst was asked by the psychological examiner why his father had not moved out of the house. “You have heard of battered women? He was a battered husband,” he was quoted as answering. “My mother would hit him. He was not a violent man and wouldn’t stop her. My brothers and I couldn’t understand why he didn’t separate. We suggested it to him. But, he was very dependent upon her.”

Finally, in 1986, Lou Hayhurst, standing in front of his wife and daughter, fatally shot himself in the head.

Violet Hayhurst’s reaction to that, Thomas Hayhurst said, was “one of irritation . . . for leaving so many loose ends.”

Thomas Hayhurst moved to Arizona, but returned to the family home in Escondido after his mother was injured in a car accident because “he felt it was his duty to come when she called.”

Hayhurst was not paid a salary to care for the family home and avocado groves but instead was given room and board. Still, he chose to live in his van in the driveway, to put distance between himself and his mother.

Life back home quickly turned sour.

“She began verbal and physical abuse of him, brandishing a knife and throwing objects at him,” wrote Barbara Gerlach, a deputy probation officer, in her report to the court.

“Instead of leaving, the defendant began to drink, all day, every day.” Hayhurst admitted to consuming a fifth or more of gin or vodka daily.

Why didn’t he leave home?

“I didn’t have enough money to move out and get my own apartment,” Hayhurst told MacLaren, the psychologist. “I also didn’t feel it was right, because of my sister. My mother was constantly fighting with my sister. I’ve had to pull them apart.”

On the morning of the killing, according to the reports, Thomas Hayhurst awoke in his van, polished off a glass of vodka, went into the home to make some coffee, and was confronted by his mother--one last time.