"Rage drove knife attack on woman, DA says" May 18, 2012|By Brian R. Ballou
WOBURN - Robert Gulla wanted Allison Myrick all to himself, and in a fit of jealous rage two years ago he attacked her with a kitchen knife in his basement, inflicting a slow and excruciating death on his former girl-friend, prosecutors said yesterday.
“This was a death perpetuated with extreme atrocity and cruelty,’’ said Lisa McGovern, assistant Middlesex prosecutor, during her opening statements Thursday in the first-degree murder trial.
“She was alive when she was stabbed in the head, in the abdomen, in the neck,’’ McGovern told Middlesex Superior Court jurors. “She was alive when she was slashed in the throat.’’
McGovern said the knife missed major arteries and Myrick, 19, a student at Fitchburg State College, slowly bled to death on Jan. 23, 2010. She said the defendant, then 19, also shot Myrick “right between the eyes’’ with a pellet gun and smoked a cigarette and put the lighted end against her skin.
While the prosecutor characterized Gulla as obsessively jealous and violent, the defendant’s lawyer, John Galvin, said that his client suffers from Asperger’s syndrome and that alcohol played a role in his behavior.
Is he also a computer hacker for the government?
Galvin said Gulla found himself in a love triangle when Myrick began dating someone else.
“A constant, constant factor was alcohol,’’ Galvin told jurors. Gulla has pleaded not guilty to the murder charge and to another count charging him with violating a restraining order.
That's no longer an excuse with me, sorry. I was drunk just ain't cutting it.
When Gulla and Myrick were dating, he delivered bread for a local bakery and lived in his mother’s basement in Shirley. Myrick, who lived in Groton, was studying graphic design and journalism.
Gulla’s mother left her house on the afternoon of Jan. 23, 2010. She told authorities that her son and Myrick had been arguing when she went out.
Gulla’s mother returned at about 7 p.m. and found her son lying, moaning, next to Myrick’s lifeless body. He had self-inflicted wounds, according to authorities, a pellet shot to his temple and a slit wrist. He was hospitalized for three days.
In court Thursday, Gulla showed no emotion. His mother sat in the first row of the courtroom, across the aisle from Myrick’s relatives.
Evidence of a stormy and often volatile relationship included a no-trespass order that school police issued against Gulla in September 2009, after he allegedly showed up drunk at Myrick’s on-campus dorm.
Three months later, Myrick took out an emergency one-day restraining order against Gulla, saying he had hit her. In January 2010, she went to Fitchburg District Court and obtained a one-year restraining order against him.
Galvin painted a life of isolation and hardships for his client.
Oh, cry me a river of blood, will you?
Gulla was diagnosed at an early age with Asperger’s and had difficulty understanding social cues, the lawyer said.
Was he on some kind of pharmaceutical?
His parents divorced and his family lost their house, Galvin said in his opening statements, adding that Gulla had few friends.
Well, that happens to a lot of people and they don't kill someone because of it, 'kay?!!!!!!!!!!!!
Myrick’s mother, Susan Sleeper, issued a statement shortly after her daughter’s death that cautioned women about the dangers of abusive relationships.
“Please take this as an example that this can happen to anyone,’’ she said. “If you are in a situation that is in any way abusive, no matter how small it may seem at first, please ask for help. You cannot fix this yourself, and no matter how many times your abuser says that he has changed, you cannot trust that.’’
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Getting harder and harder to trust that, too.
