MOUNT VERNON – The murder trial of Kevin Remillard, the Gambier man who allegedly shot and killed his cousin in June 2017, began Tuesday in Knox County Common Pleas Court.
Remillard, 49, is charged with murder with a firearm specification, and tampering with evidence, a third-degree felony. If found guilty of murder, Remillard faces 15 years to life in prison.
Remillard allegedly shot and killed his cousin, Nick Remillard, 20, at their Gaskin Road residence on June 10, 2017. Law enforcement officials found Nick’s body in a swimming pool at the residence on June 12 with one fatal gunshot wound.
On June 14, Kevin turned himself in to the Mount Vernon Police Department.
After months of investigation and pre-trial motions, opening statements were offered and witnesses testified on Tuesday. Kevin Remillard sat in the courtroom wearing civilian clothing, represented by Knox County Public Defender John Pyle and Assistant Public Defender John Dankovich.
Knox County Prosecuting Attorney Chip McConville sat alongside Assistant Prosecuting Attorney David Merrell, representing the state.
The jury for the trial was selected after nearly three hours of voir dire questioning on Tuesday morning. The trial then began with opening statements.
Prosecution’s opening statement
McConville began by explaining the charges to the jury, in order to clarify what the state has to prove in the case. He then walked through a proposed timeline of events that occurred beginning the day after the alleged murder.
McConville said on that day, Kevin and Nick’s next-door neighbor, Roy Daubenspeck, woke up to a pile of instruments, tools, and a note laid up against a vehicle in his driveway. The note read, “Nothing in this world makes sense. Lack of sleep. Constant pain. Who knows, but I’ve snapped. These things are yours,” and it was signed, “Kevin.”
Daubenspeck had known Kevin because they’d worked together on construction jobs, McConville said, and they were also neighbors. Concerned about the note, Daubenspeck went next door.
“He didn’t know what it meant, but he thought it probably wasn’t good,” McConville told the jury.
Daubenspeck failed to get a response from his neighbors. He then realized that a .357 caliber pistol was missing from his own home office and noted that he frequently left his home unlocked. In its place was a sword that he had seen in the possession of Kevin, McConville said.
Daubenspeck then called law enforcement out to the house, saying he wanted to check on his neighbor but couldn’t because the door was locked and three to four dogs were barking at the door. He was met at his house by Knox County Sheriff’s deputy Scott Baker, who discovered Kevin’s initials – K.R.R. – on a guitar piled up near Daubenspeck’s car.
Detective Terry Wolfe then responded to the scene, McConville said. When the two deputies were unable to summon anybody from the 405 Gaskin Ave. residence, they called Melanie Remillard, mother of Nick. Melanie is the daughter of Sally Parsons, who owns the property where Nick and Kevin were staying (Parsons was staying in a nursing home at the time).
Melanie was called to see if she could help get the dogs in the house out of the way before the deputies searched the house. The dogs “appeared to be big dogs,” McConville said.
After Melanie was able to remove the dogs from the house, McConville said that Baker shoved Wolfe through a window to enter the living room of the house. Baker and Wolfe made a sweep of the house in search of Kevin, but could not find him.
They did, however, find blood in various places on the first floor. They also found an eight-page note left on a tray in an upstairs bedroom that was believed to be Kevin’s. McConville read the note to the jury.
“As for yesterday, I woke in so much pain and hate that all my head was thinking was to kill everybody that has harmed me my whole life,” the note begins.
The note appears to be written in similar handwriting as the one left on the vehicle in Daubenspeck’s driveway.
“I really, really tried to let go of all the hate, but it kept growing and growing. I have no idea when I stopped being in control but eventually, I couldn’t live with myself like that anymore,” the note continued. “So I was going to ride my bike somewhere and shoot myself, but I have no idea how Nick got in the way.”
The letter’s author claims to have fired a round into the wall as a warning shot to Nick, but when he didn’t react, the author shot him.
“At that point, my mind just wanted to kill my family en masse,” the note read. “I have no idea if I did any more damage or not. I can’t remember anything else I did until this morning. I do not know if I have harmed anyone else other than me shooting Nick. My mind is black, blank and tormented.”
The author repeated that they did not know why Nick became involved, and that he had just planned on killing himself. The author detailed the darkness within the mind, claiming that voices inside his head had taken control of his actions.
“Maybe they are demons or something, I just don’t know and never have. But they take me and I can’t stop them,” the note read. “Ever since I was a very young child, they have made me do things I normal wouldn’t. I have tried to stay away from people, but there is no normal way to do this.”
The author repeatedly admits to shooting Nick, acknowledging there is nothing he can do to fix the situation now. The author also repeatedly blamed the voices in the head for the shooting and expressed remorse for the actions.
“I have done nothing but cause misery and hurt to others my whole life,” the note read. “My parents had a right to hate me like they always did, good riddance to me. I’ve caused enough pain and misery, and me being able to live in prison would be too good for me. I was born with no love inside, I couldn’t even love my children. I’m just an empty, hateful thing, not even human by any standards, and now I am a murderer of a child.”
“Now, I am no longer a victim, but a monster – a horrible, disgusting monster, and I deserve the hell that is coming to me.”
McConville said after Baker read the note, “he knew he was dealing with a much different situation than when he entered the home.” He contacted detective David Light, which set in motion an exhaustive criminal investigation.
McConville told the jury that they would hear testimony during the trial from Melanie, who he said made last contact with her son, Nick, at 7 p.m. on June 10, 2017. She tried to reach him again later on that night via telephone, McConville said, but couldn’t. At the time, she believed it was because Nick was playing video games.
McConville detailed the investigation that unfolded on the afternoon of June 11, which included multiple law enforcement agencies. Agents found large amounts of blood on the living room carpet, which had been covered over with clothing, McConville said.
Investigators discovered that there was a bullet hole in the living room about four feet up the wall. There were bloody footprints on vinyl flooring close to the door.
McConville said the search of a spare room on the first floor showed the other side of the bullet hole that was in the living room wall. Agents were able to find the spent bullet in a box of papers and books behind that wall. The firearm, however, was not found.
Blood was found in Kevin’s room upstairs, as well as on the back door that led outside, McConville said. The search then continued outside, which was when authorities found Nick’s body in “brown, brackish water,” submerged in a pool that hadn’t been used for years.
The Knox County Coroner’s Office ruled that Nick’s death was a homicide and that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head. Autopsy experts found that Nick had been shot in the head at a range of about two to two-and-a-half feet.
An autopsy also found that Nick had no alcohol or illegal drugs in his system at the time of death.
In closing, the prosecutor said he planned to prove to the jury that the bullets found on the scene match the type of gun that went missing from Daubenspeck’s office, that the DNA in the blood samples found in the house match that of Nick Remillard, and that the handwriting in the initial note found by Daubenspeck matches that of the eight-page letter found upstairs by the sheriff’s deputies – and that the handwriting was Kevin Remillard’s.
Defense’s opening statement
Pyle began his opening statement by saying the evidence will show that Kevin did not purposefully cause Nick’s death.
He told the jury that evidence will show that the reason Kevin had the weapon on June 10, 2017 was not to kill his cousin – it was to kill himself.
Pyle detailed Kevin Remillard’s upbringing in Massachusetts, where he had a “tumultuous” childhood. He said that Kevin had been abused and that from a very early age, Kevin had felt as if he were worthless. His parents divorced when he was 5 years old and Kevin was sent to a special school. Eventually, he went to a public high school, but he wouldn’t graduate.
Pyle showed the jury a diagram of the Remillard family tree. Neal Remillard, brother of Kevin’s father, Dennis, had left Massachusetts for Colorado when he was young and met Melanie, whom he would eventually marry.
At age 20, Kevin decided to hitchhike from Massachusetts to California with one of his friends in order to relieve his personal problems. When they got to Medina, Ohio, they threw a hotel party that landed Kevin in jail. That’s when Neal, Kevin’s uncle, came up from Knox County to bail him out. Kevin then moved down to Knox County and has stayed in the Central Ohio region ever since.
Pyle explained how Kevin bounced around from job to job in his 20s and 30s, saying that he had “always been a good worker, always was handy.” Kevin could play the guitar and was featured in bands, Pyle said.
“From the outside looking in, he was a guy with a lot of game,” Pyle said. “Certainly had skills I’d like to have.”
“But within him, there’s always the message: you’d be better off dead.”
Kevin had become quite a drinker, Pyle said, and struggled to keep a job by the end of 2015. Wrestling with inner demons, he became estranged as he fell out of communication with his family and children.
In the summer of 2015, Nick was playing in a baseball game in Columbus, where Kevin was living at the time. Nick told Kevin that he should come back to Knox County to live and work on a farm with him, as his grandmother had moved out of her old house.
Kevin said that he had only planned on living there for a couple of months and that he planned to go back to Massachusetts at some point to kill himself. But after moving back home, he began to turn things around. He found work with Daubenspeck and became friends with him, which helped Kevin through the dark days.
“He was the upside of his life,” Pyle said. “He was a guy he could talk to.”
Despite his new friendship, however, Pyle noted that Kevin’s mental scars still persisted.
Kevin and Nick got along, Pyle said, but they never connected because of their age difference.
On June 10, 2017, Pyle said that Kevin woke up and “hadn’t slept for weeks.” He was hoping to spend time with Daubenspeck that day, but Daubenspeck had other plans. This put Kevin in a funk and he quickly sunk into depression.
Pyle then presented the jury with a proposed timeline for June 10, 2017, the day of the alleged murder. He pinpointed the time when Kevin took Daubenspeck’s pistol, after he left for the day, so that he could kill himself. He noted the phone call between Nick and Melanie at approximately 7 p.m.
And he said that after that, “we don’t know in great detail” what happened.
Pyle said that at this point, evidence applied during that time frame is merely circumstantial.
But he said that what is clear is that at some point between the phone call and the next morning, the gun went off twice, sending bullets in opposite directions.
Pyle said the defense will show that Kevin was fiddling with the gun when it went off and that when the second shot, which Pyle believes killed Nick, was fired, Kevin was trying to take the bullets out of the gun.
During the three-day span between when the alleged murder occurred and when Kevin turned himself in to the police, Pyle said that Kevin was walking aimlessly around Gambier, “trying to find a place to kill himself.”
“There’s no handbook for what you do after a tragic accident, but that’s what he did,” Pyle told the jury.
Pyle concluded by telling the jury that they would see that what happened on June 10, 2017 was not a purposeful act, that it occurred because Kevin was trying to inflict harm on himself, and that things went “terribly, terribly wrong.”
Witness testimony
The first three witnesses of the trial were brought before the jury by the prosecution after opening statements were made on Tuesday afternoon.
The first was Paty Steward, the Knox County 911 dispatcher who answered the initial call Daubenspeck made on June 11, 2017.
The prosecution played a recording of the 911 call, where Daubenspeck tells Steward that Kevin is not stable enough to take on full-time work with him and that “he’s a case, he really is.”
Daubenspeck goes on to describe Kevin as “a little bit unstable, pretty much an alcoholic.”
Daubenspeck then urged law enforcement to come to his neighbor’s house to check on his well-being.
The second witness was Baker, who was dispatched first to go to Daubenspeck’s Gaskin Avenue residence. McConville presented Baker with four photos, one of the Remillard residence and three of the items left on Daubenspeck’s vehicle, including the note.
Baker said that detective Terry Wolfe then came to assist him and detailed the way in which they climbed into the Remillard’s house. He said that once he found the note upstairs, which implied that this may be a pending murder-suicide investigation, he and Wolfe got Melanie off the scene.
Upon entering the house for the first time, Baker said that the house “seemed to be somewhat in disarray.” He and Wolfe started in the living room, sweeping through rooms and hallways, operating under a tactical approach in case there happened to be a gunman inside the house.
McConville handed Baker the note that he had found on the desk in Kevin’s room, asking him what he remembered about that moment.
“At that time, I realized we were possibly looking for two persons,” Baker recalled.
He then answered questions from McConville about the house, which Baker said was ridden with blood stains.
The third witness was Wolfe, who was working on the day shift as a detective on June 11, 2017. Upon questioning from McConville, Wolfe backed up Baker’s testimony about the way in which the investigation began.
While Wolfe was on the stand, McConville showed pictures on the TV monitor of the living room where Wolfe and Baker first entered the house. The picture was taken during the initial stages of the investigation that day and showed clothes and blankets strewn across the floor, large objects knocked sideways and couch cushions astray.
Wolfe confirmed that he had found blood underneath the items on the floor of the living room.
Pyle then sought to question Wolfe, pointing to the photos of Remillard’s living room and asking about the possibility that the dogs, which Wolfe said numbered three or four, could have caused such a mess.
“I guess, but that’s a lot for a dog,” Wolfe responded.
After Wolfe’s witness testimony, the trial was dismissed for the day.
The trial is expected to run through Friday, Common Pleas Judge Richard Wetzel told the jury, although it may last until the following Monday or Tuesday.
