Murder suspect claims fit of rage led to wife’s slaying

Molly Ball

Friday, July 1, 2005 | 11:20 a.m.

The day he killed his wife and turned himself in to the police, accused murderer Robert Allen tried to explain himself.

"It wasn't like I done planned this (expletive), you know what I'm saying?" he told a Henderson Police detective in a videotaped interview.

That is the same argument his lawyers are making now. They concede that 59-year-old Allen did kill 38-year-old Laurel Allen two years ago, but they say he did it in a fit of rage.

"His ability to think things through was gone," Deputy Public Defender Bob Amundson said in closing arguments this morning. "It was like an alien took over Bobby (Allen)."

The defense is asking the jury to find that Allen committed second-degree murder or involuntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder. The jury was deliberating this morning and was expected to reach a verdict later today.

In describing the killing as a crime of passion, Amundson pointed out that Allen didn't try to cover up the crime or deny responsibility.

But prosecutors said Allen's action was premeditated. They note that between the phone call that supposedly enraged him and the bludgeoning and stabbing, Allen had hours to mull things over, and he made a conscious decision to kill his wife.

Allen, a gaunt-faced man with a thin mustache and buzz-cut hair, testified in his own defense Thursday. He said his 2001 marriage to Laurel Allen was based on mutual understanding.

"I've known a lot of women in my life, but I could talk to her -- I could tell her anything and she wouldn't laugh at me," he said.

"Everyone always tell me I march to a different drummer. I wasn't like the other people. I was kind of like a loner," Allen added. "She was the one ... She was all I ever wanted."

But a few months before the killing, things changed. Allen said his wife had had an abortion and became moody, and she began to get mysterious, brief phone calls that would cause her to leave the house. One day, a piece of paper fell from her pocket bearing the name and phone number of a man he knew from the bar at which she worked, Allen said.

In June of 2003, police were called to the couple's Henderson apartment. Allen was arrested for domestic violence based on the incident, but he claimed it was his wife who threw him across the room.

At the police station, while talking to an officer, Allen considered suicide, he said. "I said, 'If I got up and ran, would you shoot me?' He said no. I just wanted it to stop. I just wanted the world to stop and let me off. I was tired of hurting."

Allen then moved out for about a week, but he said she begged him to come back and he agreed, thinking things would be better.

However, in August another of the mysterious phone calls came. Laurel Allen claimed it was a wrong number, but Robert Allen thought the number on the caller identification device was familiar.

"I told her, 'This stuff needs to stop,' " he said.

Later that night, the couple got ready for bed and Allen began the nightly ritual of rubbing therapeutic oil into his wife's body for a skin condition she had. That, he said, is when the rage flooded him.

"I began to sweat. I got this real bad odor in my mouth, it tastes like -- the only way I can describe it is like when the water in the fish bowl gets stagnant, that's the way my breath tasted in my mouth. And it was like my mind snapped."

Weeping, Allen said he seemed to float above his body. He said he couldn't remember the details of the killing, just driving to a friend's house afterward and telling him what he'd done.

Prosecutors said Allen was just making excuses for a crime he fully intended to commit. In his closing argument, Deputy District Attorney David Schubert said Allen waited until his wife couldn't possibly defend herself, then attacked her until he could be sure she was dead.

"She was naked, she was lying down and the defendant was putting lotion on her body," Schubert said. "Laurel Allen was completely defenseless and vulnerable when the defendant brutally bludgeoned her. And was that enough? No."

After striking his wife six times on the head with an antique iron, Schubert said, Allen went to the kitchen for a knife and stabbed her throat and chest.

The killing came from Allen's building frustration with the marriage over many months, not a moment's provocation, Schubert said.

"He says he snapped. That's what he claimed," Schubert said. "But what he did was got fed up."