[Sim Kid]

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/Central/0....ap/index.html

Jurors found 25-year-old Marc Sappington guilty on the murder charges as well as one count each of kidnapping and aggravated burglary stemming from a separate carjacking.

Sappington had claimed that voices ordered him to act when he killed Terry Green, 25, Michael Weaver Jr., 22, and Alton "Fred" Brown Jr., 16, over a four-day span in April 2001.

Prosecutors were seeking three consecutive terms of 50 years without possibility of parole and said sentencing was likely within three or four weeks.

In a confession that was videotaped in April 2001 and played for the jury Wednesday, Sappington talked about killing Green and leaving his body in a car, stabbing Weaver to death, and shooting Brown in the back and dismembering his body. He said he cooked and ate a small part of Brown's leg.

Sappington said on the video that voices in his head told him he had to eat flesh and blood or he would die -- voices he only heard when he was high on the hallucinogenic drug PCP.

Sappington's attorney said his family has a history of mental illness. His mother had schizophrenia for most of her son's life, attorney Patricia Aylward Kalb told the jury earlier Friday. She said Sappington began suffering from schizophrenia when he was about 16, and it got worse as he grew older.

"He was in a constant struggle from a very early age between good and evil," Kalb said during closing arguments. "He thought this was something he was commanded to do."

But prosecutor Jerry Gorman said it was Sappington's use of PCP -- not mental illness -- that caused him to hear voices. Sappington has admitted he used PCP almost daily in the months before killing the three men.

Schizophrenia is probably one of the worst mental disorders ever.