Satan worshipper guilty of murdering two women

Satan worshipper guilty of murdering two women 

Toronto Sun

BY TRACY MCLAUGHLIN, SPECIAL TO QMI AGENCY

THURSDAY, JANUARY 15, 2015

BARRIE - A Satan worshipper who was found guilty of murder after he partially decapitated two women repeatedly begged to plead guilty before his trial but was refused by the court.

 

Mark Dobson, 24, was found guilty Thursday of two counts of first-degree murder after Superior Court Justice David Watt threw out his bid to be found not criminally responsible for killing his girlfriend, Mary Hepburn, 32, of Barrie and Helen Dorrington, 52, of Cold Lake, Alta.

Horrified staff found the women in blood-soaked beds with their heads partially severed, surrounded with small dolls and satanic art in a room at the Travelodge motel in Barrie May 2, 2012.

Dobson sat in the room, pale, naked, wet and covered in blood with his neck and arm sliced from his own failed suicide and blandly told them, “I killed them – it was a suicide cult thing.”

The three became friends by chatting on a website called The Joy of Satan and together they planned their deaths so they could travel to the planet Orion.

More than a year ago Dobson repeatedly begged the pretrial judge to allow him to plead guilty.

“I did it, I murdered them and now I want to do my time in the pen,” Dobson told the pretrial judge, Regional Senior Justice Michael Brown in October 2013, but the judge refused.

“You have the authority to refuse me? You won’t accept my plea?” Dobson asked the judge.

“Mr. Dobson it’s in your best interest,” said Brown. “You are looking at a minimum sentence of life in prison.”

Visibly upset and frustrated, Dobson tried again on subsequent pretrial days but each time was refused.

“I feel this is a corrupt justice system,” said “Dobson. “It’s not very efficient … I can’t stand this anymore.”

In the end, he was convinced to take his case to trial. Dobson’s lawyer, Mitch Eisen, fought hard during the trial last fall to prove his client was not criminally responsible because he suffered from schizophrenia and psychosis and therefore could not understand that what he did was morally wrong, but the judge disagreed.

“This case has unusual and grotesque features … by his own account,” Watt said in his verdict.

He noted even Dobson understood the grotesqueness of the killing when, hours later in a hospital bed he told a police officer, “I’ll be looked at as a monster, I know.”

In the same interview, Dobson described in horrific detail how he “kept cutting and cutting,” his girlfriend’s neck even while she pleaded with him to stop and continued to gurgle her pleas from her trachea after her throat was cut, but still he kept cutting.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he told the officer, “I expect I will get the death penalty or life in prison.”

It was Dobson’s own words, showing he recognized the horror of his act that were a deciding point for the judge.

Watt said it was not enough that Dobson was most certainly mentally ill; it was not enough that Dobson suffered from delusions and believed Satan spoke to him; and it was not enough that Dobson intensely believed he was doing right in sending the women to a better place — because Dobson also understood that the killings were morally wrong in the eyes of society.

“He knew it was contrary to the law and it would land him in jail,” said Watt. “He knew what he was doing when he cut their throats and he knew it was wrong.”

Outside of court, Hepburn’s mother, Sonya Hepburn, expressed her grief.

“She was my sweetie, my baby,” said Hepburn, as she held a tiny silver urn containing some of her daughter’s ashes. She said she had no idea her daughter was involved in Satan worship until after her death when she found a Satanic bible in her room.

Crown attorneys Lynn Saunders and Shannon Curry will be back in court Feb. 10 to seek two consecutive life sentences.

http://www.torontosun.com/2015/01/15/barrie-man-guilty-in-satanic-cult-killings