Howard Richmond researched PTSD hours after killing wife

Canadian soldier Howard Richmond researched post-traumatic stress disorder in seven separate online queries hours after he killed his wife, including one search about flashback recovery, his first-degree murder trial heard Tuesday.

• IN DEPTH |Howard Richmond trial coverage

Richmond, now 53, has admitted to stabbing his 28-year-old wife Melissa Richmond to death in July 2013 but his defence team is arguing he is not criminally responsible because he was struggling with PTSD after six tours of duty at the time of the killing.

Defence lawyer Jason Gilbert said during the trial's opening statements in September that Richmond was experiencing dissociativeflashbacks when he killed his wife, causing him to break from reality and relive a previous trauma.

Gilbert argued that Richmond had no immediate memory of the killing because it happened when he was in an unconscious automatic state and that he could have misidentified his wife as a threat he had to defend against.

On Tuesday, Ontario Provincial Policecomputer forensic analystJeremy Dupuistestified that Richmond made a dozen searches during a six-hour period beginning at 2 a.m. on July 25, 2013. Aside from PTSD, he also searched the terms "lamb chops on the BBQ," and "ugly sheep."

Court previously heard thelast known images of Melissa Richmond werecaptured on a gas station's surveillance system at about 11:30 p.m. on July 24. Her body was found four days later in a deep ditch near South Keys Shopping Centre in Ottawa.

Deleted texts

Court previously heard that Melissa Richmond was having an affair and planned to leave her husband days before she was killed.

Dupuistestified that 49 text messages betweenMelissa Richmond and her loverJeffreyThornton were deleted from her cellphone.

One of thelast messages on her phone wasfrom Thornton at 11:27 p.m. the night she was killed, Dupuis testified. After that, theonly activity on her phone were messages from her husband and lover the morning after she disappeared.

Howard Richmond reported to police that his wife went on a late-night drive to clear her head and never returned to their Winchester, Ont., home, locatedabout 60 kilometres south of downtown Ottawa. He said she left her cellphone on the kitchen counter.