The two Oklahoma City-area men authorities have blamed in the bloody beating death of a Fargo dentist last fall are turning on each other.
Michael Allen Nakvinda, a carpenter police accuse of killing Philip Gattuso in his south Fargo home with multiple hammer blows to the head, plans to testify in his own trial that Gene Carl Kirkpatrick has set him up to take the fall.
“In the end, he got framed. He got framed for a murder he didn’t commit,” said Nakvinda’s defense attorney, Steve Mottinger.
Kirkpatrick, who faces a murder conspiracy charge for allegedly paying Nakvinda to off his former son-in-law, will also take the stand in Nakvinda’s trial, and he’ll insist he didn’t pay his handyman to kill Gattuso and orphan his 4-year-old granddaughter.
The voluntary testimony from the grandfather will be for the state, though the same state’s attorneys have not given him any deal, will not drop the charges he faces and still plan to prosecute him this spring.
“Those offenses are not going away,” said Mark Boening, an assistant Cass County state’s attorney.
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Mottinger sketched an alternative explanation for the evidence appearing to implicate Nakvinda: It was there because Kirkpatrick had a “carefully planned scheme to exact revenge.”
In addition to wanting to have custody of Kennedy, Kirkpatrick and his family were enraged that Gattuso wouldn’t sign off on an out-of-country stem-cell treatment for Valerie, he said.
Mottinger also said he’ll introduce as evidence of the family’s intentions an e-mail sent by Regan Williams, Gene Kirkpatrick’s other daughter, to her own attorney – a message she later showed her father. In that e-mail, Williams asks what would happen if they had Gattuso killed, he said.
Williams added in the e-mail, “Ha, ha, just kidding,” Mottinger said.
Before Valerie Gattuso’s death, the Kirkpatrick clan also hired a North Dakota investigator to try to dig up dirt on the dentist to use in an eventual custody case, Mottinger said.
After Philip Gattuso was killed, there was a custody battle over Kennedy waged by Williams and Philip’s brother, Roy Gattuso. Prior to the case going to trial, Williams withdrew, and the girl is with the Gattusos.
Mottinger said precisely how Nakvinda was framed will be impossible to show.
“Only Gene Kirkpatrick knows what happened,” he said.
However, Nakvinda will tell the jury what he knows happened, his lawyer said. He will claim Kirkpatrick had asked him to pick up a car up north and told him to go to a rest stop along Interstate 29 by Wahpeton, N.D., to await instructions on a citizens band radio.
He then got a CB radio message to come to a home in Wahpeton to spend the night, and the next day he woke up to find the trailer had a vehicle on it. So he drove back to Oklahoma as planned. He tried to drop the car at the Kirkpatricks’ house, but there was a sign out front that said they’d gone to North Dakota for a family emergency.
Nakvinda had never been in Fargo and was “flabbergasted” when he was arrested, Mottinger said.
Mottinger also noted that neither the DNA nor the fingerprints of Nakvinda were found at the crime scene, though there was an extensive investigation.
Minutes before, in the state’s opening statement, Boening had addressed the newly seated jury about the lack of physical evidence. He said there was enough other proof to make forensics unnecessary.
“That would be useful, but we can’t fabricate evidence,” he said.
In addition to detailing the string of circumstantial evidence that gave police cause to arrest Nakvinda, including witness accounts and video surveillance, the prosecution in its opening statement revealed several previously unpublicized pieces of the state’s case.
A hammer discovered in the stolen Porsche found in an Oklahoma City storage unit rented by Nakvinda had Gattuso’s blood and hair on it, Boening said.
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“It’s not the hammer that’s on trial. They need to prove it was Mike behind the hammer,” he said.
The state also identified the secret witness whose discovery delayed the trial from its initial start date in August: Debbie Baker.
Baker was a friend of both Kirkpatrick and Nakvinda and had also hired the handyman to do work for her, Boening said. In early October 2009, weeks before Gattuso was killed, Baker claims Nakvinda told her he’d use a hammer to handle Kirkpatrick’s problem with Gattuso.
Boening said the scene of the beating was so bloody it was hard to tell what had happened, and some investigators at first thought Gattuso had been shot. The dentist most likely took hours to die, he said.
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and one having too little ambition. He didn't want the same fate for his granddaughter. He was a selfish old coot in a family of crazies.
