A Florida man was declared guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison Friday for stabbing his wife to death 19 times in 1998.
The defense team of 60-year-old Bobby McGee had claimed that their client was performing an exorcism to cast out the demons that were inside his wife Helene Ball, according to Click Orlando.
McGee had written in his diary that he thought Ball was possessed by the devil and that he believed conducting an exorcism would help save their marriage. Therefore, he never tried to kill his wife, his lawyers argued.
Meanwhile, McGee's public defenders, Jane Matheny and John Swisher, maintained that he was insane at the time of the murder and received psychiatric treatment while under custody for the last two decades, Local 10 reported.
The Clearwater jury only spent two hours to find McGee guilty of killing his wife. "I've waited 17 long years for them to say the word 'guilty,'" Amy Stout, Ball's daughter from another relationship, told The Orlando Sentinel after the verdict.
Ball's niece, Anne Larder, who was only 10 years old at the time of her aunt's murder, only had this to say about McGee: "You were the cockroach she just couldn't get rid of. I hope you hate yourself as much as the world hates you," according to the Daily Mail.
