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Is man fit for trial in grisly slaying?

Prosecutors and defenders debate his competence and sanity as he bounces from mental hospital to jail.

By CHRIS TISCH
Published July 17, 2006

ST. PETERSBURG - The murder shocked and revolted the community.

Police said Dennis Roache, a man with a history of mental health problems, broke into his ex-girlfriend's Childs Park home in February 2002 and attacked her boyfriend with a machete. Roache cut off the man's head, then carried it outside and placed it on the windshield of an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.

He placed a mirror in front of the head "so that if the head were still alive, it could see itself," police said.

More than four years later, judges twice have declared Roache incompetent to stand trial and have shipped him to a state mental hospital. Both times, the facility has sent Roache back to the Pinellas County Jail after hospital officials determined he was competent.

Roache, 38, was returned again in April and is scheduled for trial Oct. 3. But Roache's attorneys will try to persuade a judge once again to declare him incompetent, which would result in a third trip to a mental hospital.

"I think the facts and circumstances of this case clearly show the mental illness," said Pinellas-Pasco Public Defender Bob Dillinger, whose office is defending Roache.

Even if a judge declares Roache competent for trial, his defense team likely will use an insanity defense. Competency addresses whether the person is mentally able to go to trial; sanity applies to whether the person knew right from wrong when the crime occurred.

Prosecutors think Roache was sane at the time of the killing and is now competent to go to trial.

Assistant State Attorney Richard Ripplinger, who is prosecuting the case, said Roache was driven by motive when he killed his girlfriend's new boyfriend.

"I think he was competent for trial and we've taken the position that he was sane at the time, based on the concrete motive we think was behind it," Ripplinger said.

Dillinger said no one is suggesting Roache should be returned to society. But he does need to be treated in a secure mental health facility, where he will receive care that he wouldn't get in prison.

But Bruce Bartlett, the chief assistant in State Attorney Bernie McCabe's office, said someone who is found incompetent can seek release from their institution after five years.

"From a prosecutor's point of view, our ability to continue to ... keep him from society is weakened when he is sent off to a state hospital or they are found legally insane," Bartlett said. "But we would do everything in our power to make sure that didn't happen."

Roache was charged with first-degree murder for the Feb. 4, 2002 slaying of 18-year-old Gregory Shannon, who was dating Monique Pennywell, the mother of Roache's child.

Police said Roache broke into Pennywell's home through a window, warned Shannon that he had told him to stay away from Pennywell and began swinging a machete. Pennywell hid in a bathroom and called 911.

She emerged to find Shannon, by whom she was two months pregnant, headless.

Roache had a history of mental illness and had been declared incompetent for trial for other crimes in the past.

Family members said he was a schizophrenic who needed daily medication, but was afraid the pills were poisoned and refused to take them.

Bartlett said cases like this can result in return trips to the state hospital. Mentally ill inmates receive close mental health attention and a steady diet of medications at the facility, while they may not receive that level of care at a county jail.

Therefore, they may seem fine to staff after several months at the hospital, but become less stable and less cooperative with their attorneys when they are returned to jail.

"Then they go back and forth and it's kind of a yo-yo effect," Bartlett said. "In this type of case, you do see a backslide in competency when they are returned to the Pinellas County Jail. A state hospital, their function is to deal with these types of people every day and that's what they do."

[Last modified July 17, 2006, 01:10:51]