CUNNINGHAM TRIAL: Defense's closing arguments set for Monday

Matthew Cunningham’s defense team doesn’t dispute that their client killed Robert Barker and Katharine Spain at the Andante Apartment complex near 48th Street and Chandler Boulevard in 2004.

They said as much during opening statements in November when the trial began, claiming that Cunningham suffered from untreated schizophrenia, heard voices and didn’t know the difference between right and wrong.

Deputy County Attorney Kristen Larish said that 40-year-old Cunningham knowingly went on a knife-wielding spree in front of dozens of witnesses.

“There is no 'whodunit’ in this case,” she told the jury Thursday. “This is a case about the defendant’s choices, defendant’s decisions, defendant’s actions.”

Larish told the jury that witnesses testified about how Cunningham was going downhill in the days before the attack, doing cocaine and methamphetamine daily until he finally snapped when he was fired as a server at Va Bene Italian restaurant and was told by his roommate that he would have to get a job or move out.

Mental health professionals for the prosecution and defense all agree that Cunningham today suffers from a psychosis that isn’t specific. But the issue the jury must decide is if he suffered from that psychosis in 2004 when he killed Barker and Spain or if it is the result of being hit repeatedly in the head when he tried to kill Gerardo Barrientos Olivares and Maria Veronica Manriquez the same night.

Further complicating the deliberations: if the psychosis was due to drugs and alcohol it is not a defense and the jury could still find him guilty even if he was hearing voices at the time of the attack.

Cunningham is charged with the first-degree murder of Barker and Spain, plus two counts of aggravated assault and one count of burglary, all stemming from the Oct. 12, 2004, incident.

If found guilty, Cunningham faces the death penalty, which would require several more weeks of testimony and deliberations by the jury.

If the jury finds Cunningham guilty of murder, but insane, he would be turned over to the Arizona Mental Health Hospital for life.

Larish reminded jurors Thursday that Cunningham set documents on fire in the apartment he shared with Barker, after being told that he would need to move out. He then got a kitchen knife and attacked his roommate, stabbing him and then chasing Barker out into the apartment complex. Barker, 38, was screaming for help when Cunningham stabbed him and then slit his throat in the pool area of the complex.

Cunningham then chased other witnesses and, as he descended a stairway, saw Spain and turned on her. He stabbed the 28-year-old, who had left her 2-year-old son Marlon in the apartment when she walked out to see what the commotion was about.

Police say Cunningham then ran through the complex and tried to stab a third neighbor, Olivares, before his 19-year-old wife Manriques picked up a baseball bat to defend him.

As Larish went through the deaths, including showing the jury graphic crime scene photographs that included the bloody hallway where Spain fought for her life, Cunningham sat quietly, showing no emotion.

Prosecutors said Cunningham was high on cocaine and legally drunk at the time of the rampage.

Five of the Phoenix police officers who responded to the stabbings, and eventually subdued Cunningham, later received the department’s second-highest award, the Medal of Merit, for their quick actions that night.

Closing arguments by the defense will take place starting at 10:30 a.m. Monday, Jan. 28.

Doug Murphy can be reached at (480) 898-7914 or dmurphy@aztrib.com.