Laertes (son of the murdered Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet) famously said of his father’s killer (Hamlet, by the way) that he would “cut his throat i’ the church.”¹ To Shakespeare’s audience, church was a place where God was certainly watching and where commission of a mortal sin could bring eternal consequences. Laertes didn’t care. And neither did Lori Barcroft.
There are, of course, other instances of sad, tragic homicides at places of worship. The case of Lori Barcroft is the subject of this Article because it took place in Indiana and received the attention of the Court of Appeals (COA) and Supreme Court of the State of Indiana (SCOTSI).
Following a bench trial the judge rejected on insanity plea and convicted Lori (“guilty, but mentally ill”) of murdering Jaman Iseminger, who was the pastor at the church that Lori and her adult son Jordan attended. Lori was middle-aged and divorced when she began living with her son Jordan and his wife Tamia. There was evidence that Lori was delusional and obsessive. Jordan sought counsel from his pastor. Lori’s condition worsened upon the death of her father. Jordan attempted to hospitalize her. Lori refused. Tamia became fearful for her life. Pastor Iseminger advised Jordan that Lori could no longer live with him and Tamia. Jordan insisted that Lori leave and she then moved in with her mother. This was (apparently) Lori’s grudge against Pastor Iseminger.
Early in the morning of May 19, 2012 Pastor Iseminger arrived at the church to open the kitchen so that Jeff Harris could lead a workshop there. It was Harris who noticed Lori walking around outside the church and peering into a window while wearing a “hoodie” with the hood over her head. Harris approached Lori. She asked whether the pastor was there. Harris went inside to the pastor’s office to advise him that he had a visitor, and Lori covertly slipped in behind him. The two men left the office to approach the location where the visitor was last seen. Then came gunfire at the pastor, a threat against the fleeing Harris, and two more shots. Lori fled on foot. The mortally wounded pastor climbed some exterior stairs and collapsed.
Police from Southport and from Indianapolis, with canine help, found Lori concealed under a “blanket of vegetation” in an overgrown area about a block from the church. After an initial refusal to come out from her hiding spot, Lori was cooperative and calm. She later confessed to shooting Pastor Iseminger, who had been pronounced dead at the hospital.
Lori exhibited a delusional belief system involving presidents (the Bushes and Obama) and foreign drug cartels She also claimed that Pastor Iseminger was responsible for the death of her father and the illness of her grandson. Experts diagnosed Lori’s condition as “Schizophrenia, paranoid type” or “delusional disorder, persecutory type.” The three experts testifying at trial concurred that Lori was mentally ill such that she could not appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct when she killed the pastor. Mental illness, standing alone, is insufficient to sustain the insanity defense in Indiana. Rather, there must be mental illness and a resulting inability to appreciate the wrongfulness of the subject conduct. IC 35-41-3-6. A defendant bears the burden of proving her insanity defense by a preponderance of evidence.²
A split (2/1) COA panel looked at the unanimous expert opinions that Lori was legally insane and concluded that her conviction must be reversed. The opinion at 89 N.E. 3d 448 (Ind. Ct. App. 2017) was vacated when the SCOTSI accepted transfer. The split (3/2) SCOTSI Opinion restoring Lori’s convictions was issued December 3, 2018.
The SCOTSI majority noted evidence of Lori’s demeanor exhibited before, during, and after the shooting. There was also evidence of planning both the killing and the (temporary) escape. She exhibited patience in waiting for the pastor and rationality in sparing the life of Harris. There was also evidence of a real-life grudge held by Lori against the pastor. The SCOTSI further emphasized the deference owed to a fact-finder’s conclusion that a defendant’s burden of proof on an insanity defense was not met. The SCOTSI did not disagree with the expert evidence below that Lori was mentally ill.
While there was no lay testimony of Lori’s sanity, a fact-finder may draw inferences from non-opinion evidence to controvert the opinion of an expert. A quasi-legal inference recognized by the CLB is that an insanity defense paired with a “revenge” killing is unlikely to fare well with the SCOTSI majority of three.
The CLB sides with the SCOTSI majority. Not so long ago in Indiana Lori Barcroft would likely have been institutionalized far from the societal mainstream. For good or ill, the (seriously) mentally ill now live among us, at least most of the time. Violent crime by the (seriously) mentally ill is undeterred by isolation in those institutions from a few decades ago. The impact of the murder of a loved one is not lessened by an explanation that the killer was “off his meds”. While mental illness is a proper mitigating fact for a sentencing judge to consider, impunity from criminal responsibility by way of the insanity defense should rarely be granted. Based upon the portrait painted in the two appellate Opinions, the view of the CLB is that Lori Barcroft was both mentally ill and evil, but mostly the latter.
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¹See Hamlet’s Act IV scene VII.
²Some readers may recall the acquittal of Leonard Smith for the local shooting death of MLB star Lyman Bostock in 1978 and the subsequent amendment of Indiana’s insanity defense by shifting the burden of proof to the defense.
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