State v. Seacat
| Decision Date | 15 January 2016 |
| Docket Number | No. 110,360.,110,360. |
| Citation | 366 P.3d 208 |
| Parties | STATE of Kansas, Appellee, v. Brett T. SEACAT, Appellant. |
| Court | Kansas Supreme Court |
Debra J. Wilson, of Capital and Conflicts Appellate Defender Office, argued the cause, and Reid T. Nelson, of the same office, was with her on the briefs for appellant.
Kristafer R. Ailslieger, deputy solicitor general, argued the cause and was on the brief for appellee.
Brett T. Seacat takes this direct appeal from his conviction by a jury of one count of first-degree premeditated murder, one count of aggravated arson, and two counts of aggravated endangerment of a child. Finding no error on the part of the trial court, we affirm.
In April 2011, Seacat lived with his wife, Vashti, and their two sons in their house in Kingman, Kansas. Seacat was employed at the time as a police instructor at the Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center. He had previously worked for the Sedgwick County Sheriff's Department. In the early morning of April 30, police and fire personnel responded to a call to the Seacat residence, where they found the house on fire and found Vashti lying dead on her bed, the victim of a gunshot wound to her head. The circumstances of the fire and her death would become the focus of Seacat's criminal trial.
For several years, his marriage with Vashti had shown signs of troubles. In November 2010, Seacat and Vashti began seeing Connie Suderman, a clinical social worker, for marital counseling. Suderman met with Seacat and Vashti together, and with Vashti individually, through the end of April 2011. She also met several times individually with Seacat. As the counseling continued, Vashti and Seacat considered the possibility of divorce.
According to Suderman, Vashti's mood was sad and symptomatic of depression when the counseling began. Those symptoms improved "dramatically," and by April 2011, Vashti was saying that she felt better than she had in years. Vashti's outlook became hopeful, and she was making healthy life changes, such as exercising and eating better, as well as planning to move closer to her sister and to her place of employment. Vashti spoke often about her sons, about how she loved them and how she loved being a mother.
In response to a direct question from Suderman, Vashti said she would never commit suicide because of her religious faith and because of her love for her sons. She also relayed to Suderman that Seacat was not handling the prospect of divorce well and had threatened to kill her if she left him. In individual counseling, Seacat told Suderman that, if Vashti divorced him, he would make sure that she never saw her children again, even if it meant taking them out of the country.
On April 19, Vashti had her last individual session with Suderman. Vashti reported that Seacat had awakened her one night and told her that he had a dream in which he killed her. She was worried about how he would react to her filing for divorce, and she wanted to have someone with her and the children when he was served with process. Suderman and Vashti arranged for a safety plan for Vashti's protection when she served Seacat with divorce papers.
Seacat knew that Vashti wrote a personal journal, which she kept on a table beside the bed. About a month before her death, Seacat took the journal to the Center and scanned and subsequently printed numerous pages. He testified that he did this at Vashti's request, because she wanted an electronic copy of the journal as a keepsake.
On the morning of April 29, Seacat drove to his office and opened an envelope containing the divorce papers that Vashti had given him. That afternoon, while still at work at the Law Enforcement Training Center, he located an overhead projector in storage and used it for about an hour. Seacat then inquired of maintenance staff the best way to dispose of computer hard drives, and on their recommendation he used a torch to destroy the drives and threw the melted hard drives in a trash can. He next decided to throw three old cell phones in the trash because they had not been used for a long time, believing they had little or no resale value. Later that afternoon, he drove to a convenience store and purchased gasoline, which he testified he put into his pickup truck.
Early in the morning of April 30, 2011, police responded to a report of a fire and possible shooting at the Seacat residence. The second story of the house was in flames, and Seacat was standing in the backyard by the driveway. The police officer asked Seacat whether anyone was inside the house, and Seacat responded that his wife was there. The officer inquired further, and Seacat said,
After the fire department arrived and extinguished the fire, Vashti's body was found lying on a bed in an upstairs bedroom. An investigator found a Ruger Redhawk 44–caliber revolver lying on the bed under Vashti's body, with the barrel pointed down toward her legs. A single gunshot wound through her head and into her neck proved to be the cause of her death. A 5–gallon gasoline container was lying on the middle of the bed.
A neighbor who had been unable to sleep was awake and watching a television program that morning. She heard a sound which she described as sounding like a gunshot, based on other gunshots she had heard in the past. Frightened, she covered her head until she saw the lights of emergency vehicles arriving. Based on the timing of what was taking place on the show she was watching when she heard the gunshot, investigators concluded that she heard the shot at 3:15 a.m.
An investigating special agent later determined from the burn patterns and different kinds of damage that the fire started in the hallway and moved south to north into the bedroom. Searching through the house, investigators found on the dining room table a water-soaked printed PowerPoint presentation that included information about suicide wounds and death investigations, specifically, death investigations involving fires. One of the pages discussed investigations distinguishing between homicides and suicides, and one page discussed reasons for suicides, including severe marital strife, recent emotionally damaging experiences, financial difficulties, humiliation, and revenge.
The coroner's report and testimony indicated that Vashti nearly instantaneously died from a bullet wound to her head. She had also sustained gunshot wounds to her torso, hip, and thigh. These wounds were consistent with shots "cooking off" the gun from the heat of the fire. Blood tests and lung tests were negative for smoke inhalation. Blood and urine tests were also negative for alcohol and a wide variety of drugs. The coroner reached no conclusion as to whether the death was murder or suicide.
On May 13, 2011, the State filed a complaint/information charging Seacat with one count of premeditated first-degree murder, one count of aggravated arson, and two counts of aggravated endangering a child based on the presence of the couple's two sons in the house at the time of the fire.
The State's theory at trial was that Vashti was in good spirits and was looking forward to a new life after her marriage. Seacat was unwilling to accept divorce as the way his marriage would end. He threatened Vashti that he would murder her, burn the house down, and convince investigators that it was a suicide based on his expertise in law enforcement. He used an overhead projector to project her handwriting from her journal and trace the letters to compose a suicide note. When it appeared to him that she was going to go through with the divorce, he shot her in her sleep, doused the hallway and bedroom with gasoline, placed a call from her phone to his phone, and then lit the fire.
Seacat's theory was that, while Vashti was outwardly in good spirits, she was privately uncertain and depressed about her faltering marriage. She took Seacat's threats seriously that he would take the children and she would never see them again. She made up stories about him threatening to kill her so that she would have an improved posture with friends and courts in the event of a contested divorce. Seacat borrowed her journal to do her the favor of scanning it, and he borrowed the overhead projector to learn more about forgeries for his work at the police academy. Having filed for divorce, Vashti became overwhelmed with regret, sought to burn the house down with her children it, and shot herself.
Vashti's journal was pivotal to the case. If Vashti had written about planning to commit imminent suicide, it would strongly bolster Seacat's theory. If, on the other hand, the expression of suicidal ideation was forged, it would seriously undermine his theory and bolster the State's case.
Two days after the death and fire, investigators found Vashti's journal in her car. On the last page was a hand-written message reading:
Dennis McPhail, a certified forensic document examiner for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, testified for the State. He testified that there were certain incongruities in the last journal page that led him to conclude that the writing had been traced from other samples of Vashti's handwriting. These discrepancies included tremorous writing and smearing, which contrasted sharply with the fluid writing that was highly consistent in Vashti's known writing samples. He pointed to features indicating that the writing had been done slowly, with added corrections to certain letters. He noted that Vashti's lower case "d" was very consistent throughout many samples of her...
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