KAMLOOPS, B.C. — Jurors at the trial of a man charged with killing his girlfriend have watched video of the accused behaving calmly in the hours before and after the Crown says he committed the crime.
Five minutes of video from the Greyhound depot in Kamloops, B.C., showed Taylor sitting at the door, doing little but looking in his backpack.
Crown lawyer Iain Currie said that activity shows Taylor acting in “absolutely normal fashion," except that it contradicts the man's account of hallucinating and running from what he believed were his pursuers.
Taylor has said he awoke on the grass to find 16-year-old CJ Fowler dead on Dec. 5, 2012. Court has heard she was pregnant.
Taylor, 24, is charged with second-degree murder in Fowler's death. He has told B.C. Supreme Court that the week before was a blur of using drugs including crystal meth, cocaine and marijuana.
Currie noted Taylor showed no obvious twitches and did not appear hyperactive in the Greyhound video.
“I’m going to suggest this is markedly inconsistent with someone experiencing psychosis from crystal meth," he said.
But, a forensic psychologist who examined Taylor over eight hours testified that despite his demeanour, Taylor may have been psychotic from days of crystal-meth use and lack of sleep.
“He appears calm in that five minutes (of video),” Dr. Sunette Lessing agreed.
“Even people who are psychotic can appear calm," she said.
Lessing added neither the Greyhound video, nor video from Royal Inland Hospital three hours earlier— when the pair was last seen together — show Taylor behaving in a psychotic manner.
“This video would not prove or disprove that,” she said.
Lessing also said Taylor told her he was hearing voices, what she described as an attempt to fake symptoms of mental illness. But his accounts of hearing voices during crystal meth use is believable, she added.
Hours before dog walkers found Fowler's body near a creek, she and Taylor went to Royal Inland Hospital, where she complained of chest pain, possibly from drug use. Crystal meth was found in her body.
While Taylor frequently asked for questions to be repeated during cross-examination and gave conflicting accounts of some of his actions, Lessing said he scores well on most measures of intelligence.
