Before the divorce, Steven Ray Stout's parents fought constantly, sometimes arming themselves with knives.
When the parents parted ways, things only got worse, as Stout's elder brother turned into a monster who physically tormented the younger children, according to testimony from Stout's younger sister.Rosemary Ghobadpoor was one of seven witnesses called Thursday afternoon in Stout's defense.
Defense attorneys - trying to persuade 3rd District Judge James Sawaya to spare Stout's life - are arguing that Stout's childhood was literally a battleground and that Stout suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome, also known as "shell shock."
Stout, 33, pleaded guilty in September to brutally murdering his wife's stepmother, Bonnie Craft, 41, and Craft's daughter, Maureen Turner, 18, at the Craft mobile home in West Valley City on Jan. 22, 1988.
Ghobadpoor testified that the eldest child in Stout's family when he was growing up, Toby, was insane and "got off" on torturing his younger siblings.
"We lived with an injustice you could not imagine unless you experience it."
She recalled one incident in which Toby almost killed Stout by breaking quart-size pop bottles over Stout's head.
Ironically, a pop bottle is one of the weapons suspected in the Craft-Turner murders.
Toby at times called the younger children into a bedroom they nicknamed the "torture chamber," where he drew the shades and beat them, so severely that their eyes would swell shut for several days, Ghobadpoor said.
Stout's stepson, Jason Craft, testified that Stout was the better parent and that his wife, Sharon Craft Stout, was "always mad and depressed and never wanted to go out and do anything."
Pressed for more details, Jason Craft, 17, began weeping and said, "He's a good man . . . He tried hard."
The young man, who lives in Florida with an aunt, said he feels sorrow for the victims but that "I can only see it that people pushed him too hard and that he shouldn't have been treated like that."
Craft, who said he would move to Utah if Stout were given a life sentence, was referring to circumstances surrounding his parents' divorce in late 1987. The family lived in North Salt Lake at the time.
Stout, in an interview with authorities shortly after his arrest last December, said that "everything went haywire" in his relationship with his wife, who he said was often depressed.
Their relationship, which he said he had tried hard to make work, was strained further when he learned that his wife had been having an affair with her father, according to a taped interview entered into evidence.
A divorce was filed in the fall of 1987 and Stout subsequently violated a restraining order in an attempt to see his sons, whom she was keeping from him, Stout said during the interview.
"I had all I could take," Stout said of the pressure being put on him by police, the Davis County attorney's office and probation officers.
Though Stout refused in the interview to talk about what happened the day of the murders, defense attorneys argued earlier that he was under a great deal of stress because "he was losing everything he'd worked for in his life."
Defense attorneys said Stout went to the Craft mobile home to get a gun, either to kill himself, his wife or both, but never intended to kill the two people who apparently got in his way.
Other defense witnesses testified that Stout was a skilled carpenter, a dependable worker and was not a violent person.
One man who employed Stout testified that in the weeks preceding the murders, "It seemed everyone, except the few friends he had left, were coming against him."