A Casper, Wyoming, man who tried to kill his mother-in-law and killed her husband in 2023 won’t get a new trial, despite his claims that a doubled dosage of antidepressants pushed him to kill.
George Kevin Dickerson, 63, was convicted of second-degree murder and attempted second-degree murder after a December 2023 jury trial. He’d tried to kill his mother-in-law Rose Dennis, who was 84, and he succeeded in killing her husband Andy Martin, 75.
Dickerson confronted them both in their home bedroom, fought them and stabbed them repeatedly with a kitchen knife, court documents say.
He was sentenced to back-to-back prison terms of between 60 years and life.
He appealed his conviction, claiming the jury didn’t understand his accidental anti-depressant overdose, the jury was allowed to infer malice from his use of a deadly weapon, and the judge allowed too much evidence at trial.
The Wyoming Supreme Court denied Dickerson’s plea for a new trial Wednesday, saying it didn’t see any clear violations of law by Natrona County District Court Judge Joshua Eames on those matters.
The Antidepressants
Dickerson argued at his trial that before the attacks, a pharmacy had filled his venlafaxine (antidepressant) prescription with 150-milligram pills, when he was used to taking 75-milligram pills.
The instructions on the bottle said to take one pill daily instead of two, but no one gave him verbal instructions about the change and he mistakenly took two pills, Dickerson told the jury.
On Jan. 7, 2023, he took two of the 150-milligram pills, went out to pick up a job application, then stopped at a bar for two double bourbons and two single bourbons before going home for a nap, Dickerson testified at trial.
He said he remembered fighting Martin, and Dennis intervening. Everything else happened in flashes and the next thing he remembered was washing his hands in the bathroom sink.
Casper Police Department officers arrived to find Martin riddled with stab wounds to his neck, and Dennis with a beaten face and with stab wounds on her neck and body.
Not Because Of Mental Illness
Dickerson had pleaded not guilty by reason of mental illness. But a mental health examiner concluded that Dickerson didn’t have a mental illness that could see him across that plea’s threshold.
The jury agreed.
Dickerson argued on appeal that the jury wasn’t instructed properly that a man can take a pill voluntarily, but still end up involuntarily intoxicated due to an unexpected dose — which would keep him within the parameters of a mental illness plea.
But a jury instruction touching on the topic of involuntary intoxication, coupled with the defense attorney’s reasoning in the closing statements, got the message across clearly enough, the Wyoming Supreme Court’s order says.
Let’s Get Him Confined
Dickerson argued that the judge let evidence go to trial that the jury should not have heard.
Before Dickerson killed him, Martin would object to the family’s attempts to get Dennis into an assisted living facility, says the Wyoming Supreme Court’s order.
At one point Dickerson told family members that someone should provoke Martin into having a mental health episode so the authorities could take him out of his home for a temporary insanity confinement. That way, Dickerson reasoned, he and his family could move Dennis to an assisted living facility without Martin interfering.
Eames allowed testimony about that conversation into the trial evidence pool for a limited purpose.
Dickerson argued to the state’s high court that this tangential evidence could have persuaded the jury to convict him improperly.
The high court didn’t agree with that argument either, and pointed to the rigorous examination of evidence propriety that Eames had conducted.
Weapons = Malice
One of the court’s instructions to the jury said the jurors could infer that Dickerson had acted with malice because he’d used a deadly weapon.
Dickerson called that an improper instruction.
But because he didn’t object to it during trial, that makes it harder for the Wyoming Supreme Court to throw it out, and it could only do so if the evidence comprised a plain error of law.
It didn’t make for a plain error of law, because the high court has no earlier decisions defining such an instruction, the ruling says.
“Any reconsideration of this instruction,” the high court wrote, “is a ‘task for another day.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
