Background
Colby Trickle called 911 on October 31, 2019, and reported that his wife, Kristen Trickle, had shot herself while he slept beside her. Responders found Kristen on the bed with Trickle’s revolver on her abdomen. Although Trickle said he checked her bleeding neck for a pulse, officers observed no blood on him, and investigators later determined that several of his statements were false.
The investigation showed that Trickle’s phone had been used shortly before Kristen’s death to search for the amount of spousal military life-insurance coverage. Video evidence contradicted his suggestion that Kristen conducted the search. Trickle later received proceeds from military and employer-provided life-insurance policies. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder and interference with law enforcement, and he appealed directly to the Kansas Supreme Court.
The Court’s Holding
The court held that the district court did not abuse its discretion by admitting a psychologist’s testimony that Kristen was at low risk for suicide and that suicide was relatively less likely based on the available data. The testimony was grounded in the expert’s suicidology analysis and did not improperly decide Trickle’s guilt or assess a witness’s credibility. Trickle’s challenges to the testimony as unnecessary or unreliable, and his claim that questioning about reasonableness diluted the burden of proof, were not preserved by specific objections at trial.
The court also upheld the exclusion of lay testimony about an unrelated person’s suicide and rejected Trickle’s best-evidence and judicial-bias claims. It found that the prosecutor exceeded permissible bounds by describing Trickle’s conduct as a “performance” and his account as a “yarn,” and it assumed additional errors involving sex-doll evidence and comments about a gunshot-residue report. Nevertheless, the court held beyond a reasonable doubt that the cumulative errors did not affect the verdict, given their limited and largely unrelated nature and the strength of the evidence against Trickle. It therefore affirmed both convictions.
Key Takeaways
- Expert testimony framed in terms of suicide risk factors may be admitted when it assists the jury without deciding the defendant’s guilt or passing on witness credibility.
- An evidentiary objection must clearly identify the specific ground later asserted on appeal; a different or vague trial objection does not preserve the issue.
- Prosecutors may highlight inconsistencies in a defendant’s statements but may not use flippant language that effectively accuses the defendant of lying.
Why It Matters
The decision clarifies the permissible scope of expert testimony based on a psychological autopsy when suicide is offered as an alternative explanation for a death. An expert may discuss relative suicide risk even when that opinion bears closely on the central factual dispute, so long as the expert does not determine guilt or improperly judge credibility.
The opinion also reinforces Kansas’s strict preservation rule and illustrates how prosecutorial and evidentiary errors are evaluated cumulatively. Even multiple errors will not require reversal when the State proves beyond a reasonable doubt that their combined effect did not influence the verdict.