A more reasonable question, some might argue, is how anyone could have doubts at all. Not even Falater, a devout Mormon and an engineer for Motorola, disputed the horror of what happened on the chilly evening of Jan. 16, 1997. That is when he grabbed a hunting knife from his garage, stabbed his wife, Yarmila, 44 times, stashed the bloody weapon and his clothes in his Volvo, rolled Yarmila's still-breathing body into their pool and held her head underwater—all while their two children slept upstairs. An open-and-shut case, save for Falater's novel defense: He claimed that he was sleepwalking through the entire episode and could not remember one minute of his murderous rampage.
After a month of testimony, it took 12 Maricopa County jurors only eight hours to find Falater guilty of premeditated murder. Falater's actions during the nearly 50-minute incident "were too complex and did not fit the mold of a sleepwalker," says prosecutor Juan Martinez. Although a sleepwalker's behavior often lacks logic, Falater's conduct seemed as rational as it was deadly, Martinez argued. Among the more damaging evidence at trial: Falater left his contact lenses in that night, though he usually took them out; he put a Band-Aid on his bleeding hand and stashed his clothes after stabbing Yarmila, his wife of 20 years; and he stood over her body for 30 seconds before slipping on gloves and dragging her into the pool, an act witnessed by his next-door neighbor, who dialed 911. "Falater did a lot of things with logic in them," says Dr. Meir Kryger, the director of a sleep-disorder center in Winnipeg, Man., and an expert on the ailment that afflicts roughly 9 percent of Americans but remains little understood. "Getting gloves, putting clothes in a container—what he did was not random. If he had really been doing it randomly, he would have killed his wife and then gone and planted some roses."
Yet Kryger, who did not testify at the trial, allows that "it is conceivable that Falater was sleepwalking," and at least three other defendants—notably Canadian Ken Parks, who said he was asleep when he drove 13 miles to kill his mother-in-law in 1987—have used the sleepwalking defense and been acquitted. What's more, the shy and well-liked Falater had a history of sleepwalking and no clear motive for slaughtering his wife. "They were very affectionate toward each other, and I never saw them argue," insists the Falaters' daughter Megan, now 18. (She and her brother Michael, 15, have stayed with several Mormon families in Phoenix since the killing.) "We were a very happy family."
Certainly, there was little in Falater's background that would indicate that he might turn violent. An honor student in Riverside, a Chicago suburb, he was raised by his father, Fred, a personnel manager, and Lois, a nurse. "I suppose he was a nerd," says his mother, agreeing with the characterization made in court by Falater's sister Laura Healy, 39, a medical-journal editor (he also has three younger brothers). When he was a teenager, Falater startled family members by sleepwalking on four separate occasions. "He'd get dressed for school and come down the stairs," says Lois. "We'd help him get into his pajamas and put him back to bed." His sister Laura testified at the trial that during one episode Falater picked her up and threw her to the floor.
Falater excelled at math and science at Riverside Brook-field High School, where he met the bright and boisterous Yarmila Klesken, the only woman he would ever date. Bonded by a shared turmoil—their parents divorced around the same time—they stayed in touch while Scott studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology (where he converted from Catholic to Mormon) and Yarmila got a degree in medical technology from the state's North Central College. The two college seniors got married in 1976, and a year later Yarmila followed Scott into the Mormon faith.
They embarked on a seemingly idyllic life, settling in Phoenix and raising two children. Scott impressed coworkers at Motorola as an engineer and product manager, and Yarmila worked at the Rancho Solano preschool. There were, however, at least two known sources of tension in the marriage. While Scott taught a daily 6:15 a.m. Bible-study class and aspired to a leadership position in his church, Yarmila did not share his devotion to Mormonism. "I think she joined mostly to support him," says LuAnn Keadle, a former family friend now living in France, who believes Falater is guilty. Nor did Yarmila want to have a large family, something that is typical among Mormon leaders. "Scott wanted to have more children, and Yarm wasn't comfortable with that," her friend Melanie Gee, a fellow preschool teacher, told lawyers in the case. "If there was something that she didn't want to do...she would let you know."
Nevertheless, Falater threw his wife a surprise 40th-birthday party in 1995, and the family enjoyed a vacation in Sedona, Ariz., three weeks before Yarmila's death. "Scott was a quiet, likable person, not aggressive," says Sarah Biggs, one of Yarmila's best friends. "What happened came totally out of the blue."
Indeed, Yarmila's final night began as normally as any other. According to trial testimony, the Falaters had dinner in their Mediterranean-style, two-story home around 7 p.m., after which Yarmila asked Scott to fix a malfunctioning pump in their pool. He checked on it and said he told his wife, "It's too dark. I promise I'll be home tomorrow before it's dark and fix it then."
Falater says he went to bed around 9:30, but within 45 minutes he was on his feet again. Chicago psychologist Rosalind Cartwright, a sleep-disorder expert who assisted the defense of Ken Parks, testified as an unpaid defense witness that Falater's stress over his demanding job and his unfinished task "triggered his sleepwalking episode." Falater went to his garage, changed into jeans and a T-shirt that were in his car and got out a knife to pry a seal off the defective pool pump. "We speculate that his wife must have come to get him back to bed," said Cartwright, leading to the fatal assault.
Alerted by screams and moans, neighbor Greg Koons testified that he peered over his fence and saw his neighbor standing over Yarmila. When Falater dumped her in the pool and held her head underwater, Koons ran in and called police, who arrived just after 11 to find an apparently calm Falater, blood on his neck, coming down the stairs of his house.
The admittedly diffident suspect testified at his trial, but some jurors, like housewife Theresa Beaubien, were unswayed by his brief sobbing fits. "He accepted the fact that his wife was dead too easily," she says. "Wouldn't you be astounded and crying and so upset that you did it?" Falater was also hurt by his claim that he was still asleep when police arrived, nearly an hour after he said he had left his bed. "Most sleepwalking episodes are 5 to 10 minutes in length," says Kryger, one of the sleep-disorder experts. "An hour is really stretching it."
For now, Falater is in the Maricopa County Jail, awaiting an Aug. 20 presentencing hearing that could pave the way to his getting the death penalty. Meanwhile his lawyers are planning an appeal, hoping not only to land a new trial but also a more sympathetic jury. "This could become the Twinkie defense of the 21st century," says Kryger, citing the infamous 1979 case of a San Francisco killer who successfully blamed his crime on a sugar rush. "We don't know everything there is to know about sleepwalking. In 10 years, maybe we'll find out he was telling the truth. You need to be King Solomon to figure it out."
Alex Tresniowski
Lorenzo Benet in Phoenix, John Slania in Chicago and Alec Marr in Toulouse, France
- Contributors:
- Lorenzo Benet,
- John Slania,
- Alec Marr.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
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