The picture at the left is the mugshot of Patrick Hutchinson, taken in December of 2005 following the murder of his wife Fontaine and Lexington Kentucky Fire Department employee Brenda Cowan. He was determined to be legally insane at the time of his arrest. A year later, he was determined yet to be legally insane. For a second time, as of today, he was determined, yet again, too mentally ill to stand trial.
So, what was the basis for the finding of legal insanity. Read on. I now present the original blog post about the entire incident, reprinted in it's entirety, as first published in December of 2005.
One day in February of 2004, a man by the name of Patrick Hutchinson, after years of dealing with the depths of insanity, finally went off the deep end. He shot and killed his wife of many years, leaving her dead body in the couples yard, in rural Fayette County. He then according to reports fired a number of shots, all of which precipitated a call to 911 by the police.
Unfortunately, there was an inexplicable disconnect between the Fayette County Kentucky Police and the Fayette County Fire Department, which also responded to the call. Yet, due to a breakdown in communications, the Fire Department was seemingly unaware of the danger that they hurtled headlong into on that fateful mid-winter evening. They found themselves in the line of fire, in a madmans sights.
As a result, a woman by the name of Brenda Cowan, the first African American woman to work on the Fayette County Fire Department, who had received commendations and had appearred on the local media in interviews, was shot to death. In addition, a police officer was also shot and injured. He recovered, but the death of Cowan was particularly hard, especially to the members of the Fire Department with whom Cowan was a well liked and respected member.
So why did this happen? Why did this young, vital, admired woman lose her life? What twisted madness afflicted the mind of Patrick Hutchinson?
He believed that the entire world, except for a chosen few which included himself, were in reality clones, intent on taking over the world, destroying all the true humans of the world and replacing them with soleless replicas. He evidently believed that these clones were only human copies in appearrance, in reality they were evidently some disguised species of either supernatural or extraterrestrial (or possibly both) origin, and of a serpentine nature and appearrance.
That is what he believed, with the utmost sincerity. What the genesis of this delusion was can only be guessed at, or even how long ago it began, though it seems to have been of a long duration. His wife and family were aware to a small extent of his mental and emotional instability, though I would imagine they didn't exactly comprehend the extent of it. Bu in fact, in his tortured mind, he firmly believed that there were only perhaps twenty thousand or so true humans left on the earth. All the rest had been killed, murdered, and replaced by these clones. The last straw, the breaking point, seems to have occurred when he obviousy came to believe that his own wife was, after all, a clone herself. One can only imagine by what process he arrived at this fateful conclusion.
Had it been a recent occurrence? Or had she been "one of them" all along, and fooling him for all these years, trying to control him and at the same time trying to find out just what all he "knew".
Did the total and final break come when she threatened to leave him for good, or possibly to do so if he would not seek help? For all the reasoning she may have tried to utilize at her disposal, someone with this level of delusion would never listen to any kind of logic or reason. Their logic and reason, after all, is as firmly esconced in their own mind as the average persons is to themselves. Such an appeal would be viewed as a trick, a manever to get him imprisoned, entrapped within some alien realm where he would be at the mercy of their far superior technology. He was, after all, one of the few who had somehow been immune to their invasion of his body, heart, mind, and sould. He had not only successfully resisted them, but had at the same time become aware of their presence. Not only was he therefore a danger to them, it was of the utmost necessity that he be kept under observation, studied. Only the most thorough and disciplned scientific research might yield clues as to what was so special about this one particular human. Once they learned the truth then they would be able to adequately deal with the "others". Those very few twenty thousand or so.
Perhaps this is what set him off. Perhaps she even admitted to the "truth" of this, as a means to humor him, or out of sheer disgust. She had had it with him, and decided she might as well tell him what he wanted to hear, he was going to believe it regardless. We may never know, for certain, as the secret is now perhaps permanently locked inside the tortured mind of Patrick Hutchinson.
It was recenty decided in court that Patrick Hutchinson was still yet unfit to stand trial. And so, for yet another year, he will be kept under psychiatric observation, yet safely locked away. It has been said that he may never be well enough to stand trial. He was obviosuly insane at the time of the trial, they said, and he is still every bit as insane now as he was then. True, he seems calm. Maybe he now believes he too is a clone. Maybe he has come to an inner acceptance of his fate. Maybe he now has come to loathe the person that was Patrick Hutchinson, and now longs to go out into the world at large, and take his place among the greater society of his fellow clones. Again, we may never know.
All we know for certain is that this procedure will be repeated once a year, he will be reevaluated on a yearly basis, to see if there has been an improvement in his mental condition. Should that day ever come that he is considered to be over his insanity, then he will finally, at long last, be put on trial for the murder of his wife and Brenda Cowen.
You see, Kentucky has this unusual policy that, if a person is considered insane, they can not be put on trial for any crime they may have committed while so afflicted. However, when it is perceived that they are cured, or in recovery, then they can be tried for the crime-depsite the fact that they were obviously insane at the time they comitted it.
In other words, it is not out of concern for the welfare for the mentally afflicted, out of a desire to see they are treated with compassion and fairness. They merely want to ensure that they know what they are being punished for when and if they finally are. Whether they had the vaquest idea of what they were doing at the time or not.
Patrick Hutchinson will probably never for the remainder of his life have a free day or night, he will doubtless be incarcerated for the rest of his life, whether he is ever tried in court or not. Crazy or not, I would imagine that the social life of a clone must look pretty good to him right now.
