Jury: Butler murdered his mother

June 24, 2005

KATE GOLDEN/Frontiersman reporter

PALMER - A Palmer Superior Court jury took two hours Wednesday to find a 29-year-old man from the Wasilla area guilty of stabbing his mother to death with a steak knife two years ago.

Jurors apparently did not believe Aaron Butler's testimony that he saw a drug dealer kill his mother for objecting that he was bringing drugs into the house.

Superior Court Judge Beverly Cutler will sentence Butler Sept. 26 for his convictions on charges of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder. The maximum sentence is 99 years.

The day of the murder, March 26, 2003, 25-year-old Hillarie Sweeden arrived at the Wasilla-area house and found her aunt, Grace B. Butler, in front of the loveseat, dying of 88 stab wounds.

"Aaron did it," she said, according to Sweeden's testimony. "He's in the bathroom."

Sweeden described the blank look Aaron Butler gave her as he emerged, covered in blood, a moment later. She had already called 911; he had not.

Alaska State Troopers arrested Aaron without incident, and he confessed hours later to the murder. He said he had stabbed his mother in the eyes, face, belly and arms, and that the blade of the knife he used broke off in her hair. He did not mention Jody Plummer, the alleged drug dealer the defense, last week, accused of slaying Grace Butler.

"And you know the consequences of your actions Š that she could be injured or killed?" trooper investigator Craig Allen asked in the hours after the murder.

"Yes," Aaron said that night.

The bloody T-shirt

Last week, Aaron Butler testified he was sitting on the couch when Plummer pulled a steak knife out of his pocket after arguing with Grace Butler, and stabbed her as she sat on a loveseat.

After four or five stabs, Butler ran to hide in the bathroom. Later, Butler returned from the bathroom to pick up his mother from the floor and move her back onto the loveseat.

But that didn't explain all the stains on his T-shirt.

After the defense objected last week that the investigating trooper couldn't provide an expert interpretation of the stains, the state called in a rebuttal witness.

William D. Gifford spent the last three decades reconstructing crime scenes, he said, mostly for the Anchorage police force and recently as a consultant. He's a member of the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysis who still does experiments in his own kitchen, sometimes with his own blood.

Friday, he received a package at his home in Soldotna containing the shirt and pants Butler wore, an audio tape of his testimony on the stand and his interview with the troopers, and the autopsy report for Grace Butler.

Gifford pointed out hundreds of tiny dried droplets on the shirt in addition to the smears. It is not possible, he testified, that these resulted from the wearer simply moving a body. These droplets traveled through the air at close range as the result of an impact - much closer, he noted, than Butler's testimony described.

Also, enough time must have passed for the victim to begin bleeding copiously; belly bleeding takes a while to reach the surface.

That Aaron Butler didn't admit to noticing the spatter is inconsequential to the case, he said.

"Most of the time people don't understand the physics of bloodstain Š and don't realize that it's there," Gifford testified.

In cross-examination, Assistant Public Defender George Davenport introduced the possibility that Grace Butler had coughed on her son as he moved her.

"There's just no evidence of coughing," Gifford replied.

A 'dream case'

"It's a prosecutor's dream case," District Attorney Roman Kalytiak said during closing arguments Wednesday. He had, and laid out for the jury, the dying woman's accusation, the defendant's admission to a family member, the defendant's confession to a trooper, including a statement of his murderous intent, and a bloody shirt that virtually named him as the killer.

Only the killer would have known, and Aaron Butler told the troopers that night, that he had stabbed Grace in the eyes, Kalytiak said. Only the killer would have known, he claimed, that the blade had broken.

As for the defense's case, Kalytiak called it "convenient": only Aaron Butler and Grace Butler saw the killer, and Grace is no longer around.

"What I really want to do is call it a bunch of bull. But I want to call it in a legal way," he said. A drug dealer pulled a steak knife out of his jeans pocket? The defendant, hiding in the bathroom from the killer, turned the water on? Kalytiak was incredulous.

"What's that going to say? 'Here I am?'" Kalytiak said.

The convenience of the story, Kalytiak argued, dissolved with Gifford's analysis of the bloody shirt.

Kalytiak thanked the defendant for his testimony. It helped him a lot, he said.

He urged the jurors to ascertain the truth, and not to pity Butler.

Davenport's last shot

In closing arguments, Davenport focused on plugging some holes in the defense's case and poking others in the state's. Butler never acted guilty at the time of his arrest, Davenport said. Nor did he have the injuries one might expect from someone involved in a stabbing.

Davenport argued that it was indeed plausible that a drug dealer, who engages in high-risk activities, might carry a steak knife in his jeans pocket.

It was plausible that Plummer might have killed Grace Butler simply for interfering in his business.

It was plausible, despite the expert's testimony, that in a chaotic scene, Grace Butler may have coughed on Aaron Butler, Davenport said.

"He basically does not know what happened in this case," Davenport said of Gifford.

It was plausible, Davenport said, that Grace Butler independently decided, upon hearing Plummer's mandate to Aaron ("You know what to do"), to make her son take the fall for the crime to save his life.

And Davenport suggested that stress and shock, not guilt, were the reasons the defendant washed his hands at a time when he might have been helping his mother.

Finally, he said, there was no evidence of a motive.

"He wouldn't kill his own mother over nothing," he said. "That would be crazy."

Kalytiak countered that the state doesn't have to prove any motive - only that there was intent, which the defendant already admitted. And while insanity is a possible defense, Kalytiak said, Davenport wasn't using it in this trial. He likened Davenport's argument to an ill-conceived sales pitch, sprinkled with "probablys" and "maybes."

Kalytiak added a picture of Butler: a 27-year-old man, unemployed, living with his mother, whose only entertainment or activity was smoking meth and working on the exhaust system of his car.

"It doesn't sound like a life that's going very well or according to plan," Kalytiak said.

Aftermath

As soon as they heard there was a verdict, family and friends of Grace Butler - who had packed one side of the courtroom during the entire trial - appeared relieved. They began to joke among themselves as they waited. Though silence came over them, and the tone turned down again when Aaron Butler and Davenport returned.

At the foreman's announcement of the verdict, two people in the audience quashed cries, some reached over to squeeze others' arms, and tissues came out. As the jury exited, there was a short applause. Outside, afterward, the family, who had disowned Aaron Butler, sang and laughed.

"About damn time," said Arlene Warrior, who considered Grace Butler a sister.

Contact Kate Golden at 352-2284 or kate.golden@frontiersman.com.