Psychologist: Anger didn't rule out intent
A psychologist hired by the defense told a Westmoreland County jury on Thursday that Richard McAnulty could have formed a specific intent to kill his wife's former lover a year ago.
Dr. Lawson Bernstein testified that a series of sexually explicit e-mails, exchanged between Diane McAnulty and Harry Mears III of Southwest Greensburg, plunged McAnulty's husband into an "hours-long period of rage."
But under cross-examination from District Attorney John Peck, Bernstein conceded that McAnulty's rage did not preclude him from planning to fatally shoot Mears, 39, on July 11, 2010.
"It would not have negated that capacity," Bernstein testified.
The prosecution contends that McAnulty, 54, drove more than 40 minutes from his Center Township, Indiana County home to Mears' house on Oakland Avenue to exact revenge against the man who had a sexual relationship with Diane McAnulty a year before the slaying.
Police said McAnulty barged through a locked front door, went upstairs and shot Mears once in the back of the leg as he dove out of a window onto a porch roof and fell to the ground. McAnulty then went out the front door, walked around the house and shot the prone Mears twice more with a .44-caliber Magnum revolver, witnesses testified in the trial before Judge Debra Pezze.
The prosecution contends Mears' death was premeditated and that McAnulty should be found guilty of first-degree murder. The defense contends McAnulty is guilty of the less serious charge of voluntary manslaughter, brought on by a sudden, intense passion.
Defense attorney Tim Andrews said McAnulty was drunk, depressed, suicidal and enraged after reading e-mails between his wife and Mears.
Bernstein testified the e-mails, sent from "Master Harry" to "Slave Slut Diane," humiliated McAnulty.
"He didn't say he felt emasculated, but that's what I understood him to mean," Bernstein said.
Andrews attempted to have three graphic e-mails entered into evidence, but Pezze has not yet decided whether the jury should see the correspondence. She ruled that the defense will first have to prove that the e-mails were retrieved from McAnulty's home computer.
Bernstein said McAnulty was suffering from depression but had stopped taking his medication, despite the recent death of his father and the burden of caring for his ill mother.
Bernstein described McAnulty as a high-level functioning alcoholic who displayed no outward signs of intoxication on the day he shot Mears.
"That day he said he had 12 to 14 shots of rum in the morning, then went to the American Legion and had four more rum and cokes," Bernstein said.
Blair Coleman, a friend of McAnulty's from White Township, testified that he regularly drank with McAnulty, but he never showed signs of intoxication.
Andrews declined to say whether McAnulty will testify when the trial resumes on Monday.
Pezze called a recess until then to accommodate the schedule of the last prosecution witness, a man who spoke with McAnulty before and after the shooting, according to Peck.
