Murder trial begins for son

June 10, 2005

KATE GOLDEN/Frontiersman reporter

PALMER - Trial began Tuesday in Palmer Superior Court for a Wasilla man whose mother, in her last moments, named him as the killer who stabbed her to death.

The niece's story

Twenty-five-year-old Hillarie Sweeden testified Thursday that on March 26, 2003, around 9 p.m., she arrived at 5840 Dewberry St., the house her 54-year-old aunt Grace Butler shared with Aaron Butler. She took her shoes off, looked into the kitchen, saw no one, headed to the living room, and found Grace.

"She was sitting upright and she was covered in blood from head to toe," she said.

Grace told her, "Aaron did it. He's in the bathroom," Sweeden told the jury.

Shaking, Sweeden called 911 immediately on a phone that already had blood on it, she said. Dispatchers told her to leave, but Grace wanted her to stay. Meanwhile, she heard water running in the bathroom. Sweeden called 911 back and said she wasn't leaving. She propped Grace's legs up, but Grace fell off the couch. She couldn't see the wounds, Sweeden said; there was too much blood. She watched the bathroom door. After perhaps 10 minutes, she said, Aaron Butler emerged. He looked at her briefly.

"It was just blank," she said of his face. She told dispatchers he'd emerged, and ran out of the house. Alaska State Troopers arrived just after she got in her car, she said.

Sweeden began to cry as she recalled the events.

Troopers testified that they arrested Aaron, in bloody clothes, without incident as soon as they arrived.

Then they found his mother lying in a pool of blood, and focused on trying to stop the bleeding. She faded in and out of consciousness, they said. She occasionally asked for help. Medics arrived and transported her to Valley Hospital.

Butler was pronounced dead in the emergency room at 10:10 p.m.

A medical examiner will testify next week that Butler was stabbed 88 times: in her arms, legs, torso and head, including her eyes, Palmer District Attorney Roman Kalytiak said Thursday.

Aaron Butler was indicted days later on charges of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder.

The defense's bomb

Defense and prosecution attorneys gave starkly different accounts of the murder in their opening statements Thursday.

Kalytiak walked the jury through a chronology of the evening as given by troopers, a witness and Aaron Butler himself.

Aaron told troopers after his arrest that he had retrieved a steak knife from the kitchen, climbed on top of his mother while she protested, and stabbed her in the eyes and belly.

Kalytiak maintained Aaron was acting on thoughts he'd had for the last year of harming his mother.

"Between each of those 88 stabs," Kalytiak said, "the defendant had a chance to think about what he was doing," he said.

Palmer Assistant Public Defender George Davenport said he would not contest the events as presented by troopers and Sweeden, including Sweeden's account that Grace Butler, in her last moments, told her Aaron had stabbed her. Davenport accused someone else: Aaron's drug source, he said, a man with "a violent disposition, a violent history."

"He was the person," Davenport said. "He stabbed her because she confronted him about him bringing drugs to her son."

Davenport said that person, whom he did not name, threatened to kill Aaron if Aaron didn't take responsibility for the stabbing.

"Even Grace Butler decided it was better for [Aaron] to take the fall than to risk this person coming back and killing them both," he said.

A disbelieving crowd

Many in the audience, a cluster of family members and friends, gasped at Davenport's story.

Outside the courtroom, they were indignant.

"She would not have given false testimony against her son," said Dorothy LaVine, a longtime family friend.

"Gracie wasn't afraid of nobody," said Steven LaVine, her husband. "And she knew she had God on her side to fight."

Dorothy and others said Aaron had a history of drug use and violence against people, including his mother.

Carol Eubanks, who said she and Grace were mutual confidants, said they'd had long discussions about Aaron's violence toward his mother.

Dorothy said that the week before the murder, she'd warned Grace that her son might harm her. Grace, she said, had defended her son.

Drugs, but not insanity

A few months after the murder, the defense filed an intent to rely on Aaron's mental condition. However, Davenport said Tuesday that the defense had abandoned this option.

Kalytiak argued outside the jurors' presence, and Judge Beverly Cutler granted, that the name of Aaron's prescription drugs should not be freely mentioned in court, because jurors might deduce a mental condition from it.

Aaron told troopers after his arrest that he had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic four or five years ago. He had been seeing professionals for treatment, he said, and had been given medication.

The day of the slaying, he told them, he had not taken his medication. He said he had taken methampetamine the day before, and smoked marijuana with Grace the evening of the murder, according to the affidavit. He said he had not been warned about possible effects of using drugs while on the medication.

Kalytiak said Thursday that experts would testify that methamphetamine and THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, were identified in Aaron's urine sample from that night, but that Grace's vitreous fluids tested negative for controlled substances.

Butler has no felony history. He was convicted in 1996 for public excretion, a misdemeanor. The state will continue its presentation of witnesses and evidence on Wednesday next week.

Contact Kate Golden at 352-2284.