The eyes would set him off. The eyes of his parents, his friends, doctors, cops. He'd fixate on the eyes, then watch in terror as they grew small and round and "shiny." Those eyes held a telepathic power that could reach into Michael Ouellette's mind and ignite a frenzy of paranoia.

Everyone was watching him, following him, photographing him, hunting him down for the kill. His parents were impostors, the embodiment of evil spirits, fronts for Satan. People were conspiring to condemn him to hell. Only the Virgin Mary could save him. Only Mary, with her kind and trusting gaze, could offer him refuge from the flames.

"I didn't know I had the illness," Ouellette says. "I thought everything was real."

Michael Ouellette's eyes are dulled now by medication. His beige, prison-issue pants and shirt blend with his pallid skin. He is 35, but he looks older. His face carries the weight of premature age. His brown hair, once perfectly groomed, is shorn haphazardly into jagged clumps.

He says the paranoid delusions are gone, but clarity of mind brings a different kind of torment. His demons have been replaced by the awful shame of "what happened with the priest."

Ouellette is lucid enough now to grasp the brutal reality of what he did that night in June 1999, when his paranoid hallucinations and his obsession with Catholicism converged in the sanctuary of St. Matthew Church in Bristol. He remembers it from inside his own sickened mind, when, fearing for his life, he grabbed a heavy candlestick and beat the Rev. Robert J. Lysz to death. And he remembers it from the rational world he has re-entered, where the obscenity of his crime is stark and clear and his religious fixation has become a prayer for forgiveness.

"I'm very sorry about it. I wish I could change things, but I can't," Ouellette says from the visiting room at Garner Correctional Institution in Newtown, where he is serving a 60-year sentence.

"I'm glad to know, to realize, that the people after me and hunting me are not true." His voice slows, then throttles forward.

"At the same time, I'm depressed. I had to face reality -- what happened with the priest and that I took somebody's life, which is very hard to deal with."

Over the course of two 90-minute interviews, Ouellette provided an extraordinary window into the swirling fear, confusion and chaos of a deranged mind. In gruesome detail, he recounted the months, days and hours leading up to his act of barbarism. He recalled the moment of murder, and the hours that followed, when he spent the night in the church with Lysz's corpse.

At times he seemed detached, clinical. Other times, he was overcome with guilt and pain. He doesn't want to be viewed as a "savage beast." He insists that Lysz was a character in his delusion.

"This is hard," he says; then, finally: "I thought he was conspiring, trying to have me killed. I thought it was a life-or-death situation and I was trying to defend myself. I thought if I didn't kill him, I'd be killed."

Interviews with Ouellette's parents, siblings and friends, as well as court testimony -- and the detailed notes that fill thick files from his defense, medical and police records -- trace his odyssey from a mildly troubled child to an impulsive and brooding adolescent to a young man in the grip of mental illness. They tell of his parents' desperate efforts to find a diagnosis and treatment for a son increasingly out of control. And they chart the escalation of a paranoia that, in Ouellette's words, "came gradual, then exploded."

Ouellette was hospitalized repeatedly over the years, but those periods would last no more than a few months, usually just a few weeks. He'd sign himself in at the pleading of his family, or he'd be forced into treatment after run-ins with police. But the outcome was almost always the same. He'd stabilize on medication, then he'd be released. But he would quit taking the medication and his mental state would deteriorate. He'd wind up back in the hospital.

As his illness worsened, he wandered the country, landing disoriented on the streets of an upscale New Jersey suburb, getting thrown off an airplane in California, hiding behind the pillars outside Grand Central station. He frequented a community of Catholic friars in Michigan and North Dakota. Once, he made it to the Vatican, where he spoke with Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Basilica before being spirited away by security officers.

But, as Richard Ouellette points out, his son always seemed to be running away from something, not toward anyone.

Sandra Ouellette, a petite woman whose stature belies her emotional strength, says she knows there were two sides to her son -- the sweet, soft Michael, and the Michael with the vacant stare or menacing eyes. She also knows the two sides of herself -- the woman who barricaded herself in her bedroom because she feared her son might hurt her, and the mother who loved him unconditionally.

"Fear and love are uneasy side by side," Sandra Ouellette says. "You fear him and love him. What do you do? I felt that fear and love. I lived in fear. ... I lived it because I didn't want him to be out on the street."

All along, what Michael Ouellette feared most was hell. Now he lives in a purgatory where evil and conscience dwell side by side. Can God forgive him? He asked his parents that when they visited him in March. He asks it again and again. He prays.

'Like A Light Switch'

Richard and Sandra Ouellette's tidy colonial in Gibbsboro, N.J., sits in a quiet subdivision near Route 73, a thoroughfare of sprawling strip malls that boast the likes of Pottery Barn, Victoria's Secret and Williams-Sonoma.

Tall trees shade a rich carpet of lime-green grass, and a purple rhododendron brushes the entrance of the front porch. The doorbell brings an outburst of barking from Sammy, the couple's bichon frise.

The Ouellettes, who moved to New Jersey from Bristol in the 1990s for Richard's job in the printing business, have told no one in the neighborhood what they have endured with their son.

Inside their home, the ceiling in the second-floor hallway still bears the faint mark of repair where Michael crashed through from the attic. He had been hiding there one day, trying to escape his fear.

Downstairs, a photo of Michael sporting a crew cut sits next to the large couch that anchors the family room. Sandra Ouellette flips through dozens of snapshots of her eldest child. He is in a robin's egg blue spring coat and cap, mugging for the camera as a toddler. A few years later he sports a winter coat and knit hat as he perches on Santa's knee, his sister, Denise, beside him, a sideward glance on his face. He is the big brother, standing at Daren's First Communion outside St. Matthew Church in Bristol, a statue of the Virgin Mary in the background between the two.

Michael Ouellette was born Dec. 30, 1966. As an adult he would come to believe his birth date had an ominous meaning: He would add the numbers of the month and day -- 12-30 -- and place the sum next to the year, '66. His reconfigured number, 666, is considered the mark of the devil.

In the beginning, he acted like a normal kid, according to his mother. He walked at only 10 months and spoke sentences by the time he was 2.

"He just brought joy into the family," Sandra Ouellette says. "There was always something about Michael's smile, his grin, that just always captured my heart, in all honesty."

As a youngster, Michael Ouellette and his family lived in Bristol in a ranch on Fifth Street. Next door was Michael's paternal grandfather, Leo Ouellette. In the common backyard between the two homes, Leo often hoisted his grandson atop a tractor, his hands clutching the small boy on his lap as they rode around.

"He thought he was a big boy," Leo Ouellette recalls.

Family gatherings were frequent. No holiday passed without an appropriate celebration and a large, home-cooked meal of lasagna or baked stuffed shrimp, and Sandra Ouellette's specialty: cream puffs. There were family trips to places such as Frontier Town in upstate New York, a park that revisited the Old West and gave kids a chance to be a star for the day. "Mike Ouellette Captures Outlaw," reads the headline on The Frontier Town Gazette, which Sandra has kept all these years.

But Michael's parents say their son was somewhat different from other children. Richard Ouellette remembers taking his young son to a carnival and sitting him on a ride that spun around and around. Most of the kids were gleeful. Not Michael. He stared at the ground.

"He seems to be very timid," Richard thought to himself. "He'll probably outgrow it."

Like so many children, Michael feared the dark. But the anxiety lingered. And there was the paranoia that seemed to creep into his life as he entered adolescence.

"Truthfully, and I really do believe this, Michael always probably had an imbalance in his mind," Sandra Ouellette says. "There were little signs here or there, but we didn't know them at the time."

Whether the incidents were signs of Michael Ouellette's ultimate diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia isn't clear, particularly since the early symptoms associated with schizophrenia are not specific. One study of children who were followed for 40 years revealed nothing unique about youngsters who later developed schizophrenia. They tended to be clumsy, to have problems reading and making friends, and they developed their hand preference later than most children, according to Dr. Godfrey Pearlson, director of the Neuropsychiatry Research Center at The Institute of Living in Hartford.

But "all the risk factors and abnormalities are common and much more common than schizophrenia," says Pearlson, who also is a professor of psychiatry at Yale University.

"How often do you hear teens isolate themselves or think they are depressed?" asks Dr. Patrick Fox, a psychiatrist with the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. That teen "may turn out to develop schizophrenia later down the road or it may be a phase of adolescence. There's no way to see it with specificity."

Ouellette had behavioral issues throughout his school years, however. He often didn't pay attention in class as a youngster. When he was a first-grader at Hubbell Elementary School in Bristol, his teacher, Grace Ann Grindal, noticed the sweet boy gazing at her somewhat suspiciously, often out of a corner of his eye. He had difficulty getting along with other children and often was gripped by unhappiness, she says.

"When I read about his diagnosis and what happened, I said, 'OK, that explains what I saw and sensed,"' says Grindal, who is now retired from the school district.

Over the years, two school psychologists assessed Ouellette. When he was 9, one wrote: "It appears that Michael is an insecure, unhappy child who may have difficulty with impulse control."

But one place held joy for the boy with the tousle of brown hair: the ball field. What he lacked in natural talent, Ouellette made up for in persistence and practice. The hard work paid off in 1979, when he pitched a 1-0 shutout and batted in the only run to win the city championship for the Forestville Little League Dodgers.

"There was no 12-year-old who took as many ground balls or swings as he did," says Alex Monico, a friend of the family who personally coached Ouellette at the request of the boy's mother.

But even at that age, Ouellette was mercurial.

"He was like a light switch," Monico says. "At times, he was really funny and he'd make you laugh. All of a sudden he'd become angry, very aggressive. If he was on the baseball field and someone hit a grounder -- it takes a hop and hits him in the chest -- he'd get upset. ... He'd stare at you, walk off the field and go home."

As a teenager, Ouellette continued to play ball, earning a spot on his high school team. But his fits of anger, behavioral problems in school and cavalier attitude toward rules continued. For the first time, Ouellette told his family of the devils that only he could see, insisting that a Bristol church had caught fire, that the devil had appeared and that he was going to die.

"I always thought Michael was belligerent and difficult to deal with," Richard Ouellette says. "But I always thought it was something he would grow out of. Some kids are tough to deal with at a younger age, but they outgrow it."

When Michael turned 16, Richard Ouellette purchased his son's first car, a metallic-blue, 1970s Pontiac LeMans, surprising Michael during a special Saturday breakfast at a restaurant. Several months later, Michael Ouellette was stopped by police on his way home from work, apparently for speeding. But rather than wait for the officer to approach, he fled and smashed his car. Police charged Ouellette, and his father paid the $1,000 fine.

Michael Ouellette's behavior also caused friction with his younger siblings.

"It was either really good or really bad," says his sister, Denise Ouellette, now 31 and an accountant. "There were times when he could be the most lovable, sweet person and fun to be with, caring. But then there were other times when he would find great joy in harassing you just to get under your skin. It was purposeful and willing. It was difficult to grow up with him."

Fishing and hunting brought younger brother Daren closer to Michael. But the relationship was strained. Initially, Daren chalked up his brother's petulant behavior to drug use.

"I think when it's your own kid, or someone you love, then you tend to put the blinders on," says Daren, 30, a developer in Philadelphia. "There are a lot of people who cause fights, who have a bad six months. Does that mean they are all schizophrenic or bipolar?"

Michael Ouellette was always remorseful after conflicts with his family. Once, after an argument, he presented his father with a special-edition lighter.

"I can remember being upset with him, yelling at him," Richard Ouellette says. "At that time I used to smoke. I've given it up. And he said, 'Here I bought this for you.' ... With that, I just shut up."

By his senior year at Bristol Eastern High School, Ouellette's remorseful side grew more obscure, at least to school administrators who documented his hostility toward authority. He called one teacher a "bitch," stabbed a guidance counselor's chair four times with a pencil and showed up at a school in Burlington where he hit a teacher. He graduated only with his mother's tutoring.

"Michael was not a student," his mother says. "He just barely made it. ... The end of his junior year and senior year he was the worst, very rebellious."

After graduating, Ouellette worked at jobs in construction and at print shops. He spent time with his mother's father, who was wheelchair-bound, often taking him to a pizza shop on Scott Swamp Road in Farmington.

After his grand-uncle, Roland Fecteau, suggested that he look into the military as a possible career, Ouellette enlisted in the Marines. He survived tough training and was active from 1986 to 1989, earning the standard recognitions: the Good Conduct Medal, Expert Rifle Badge and Sharpshooter Rifle Badge. A letter of appreciation, an accommodation above and beyond the usual acknowledgements, is also noted on his record.

But even while he was at Quantico, Va., Ouellette felt alienated from his fellow recruits. He called Fecteau a couple times to complain that other Marines beat him up. When Fecteau asked why, Ouellette never had an explanation.

"I thought it was odd that he was getting beat up in the Marines and he did not know why," Fecteau says.

Then, in November 1987, a road rage incident in Southington -- while Ouellette was home on leave -- marked a serious and violent turning point.

Ouellette and a friend fought with a 20-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl whose car they had been tailgating. According to police reports, Ouellette's friend blasted a 16-gauge shotgun into the air. Then a fight began. Ouellette unsheathed a bayonet-style knife and stuck the 7 1/2-inch blade into the girl's hip. She survived. Ouellette was arrested, convicted of second-degree assault and given a suspended sentence and probation. He was ordered to participate in alcohol treatment and evaluation.

Ouellette's 1989 medical records from the Marines say he had a problem with alcohol.

"He admits to loss of self-respect, behavior change, working with a hangover, occasional loss of control, personality change, feeling a need to drink to calm his nerves and relax, drinking to forget problems, gulping his drinks and a blackout," according to his military medical record.

Outpatient treatment was recommended.

After the Marines, his father helped him get jobs in the printing industry, and eventually Ouellette moved to Bedminster, N.J., where his parents resided before Gibbsboro. He lived with his parents and, later, in an apartment, the location of which he wouldn't disclose to his family.

In bucolic, upscale Bedminster, where mansions and horse farms dot the landscape, Ouellette gradually came undone. Every day began on a slow boil. Sandra Ouellette noticed that Michael neglected to shave. He paced the floors. He came to the threshold of her bedroom as she pretended to sleep, checking her room.

Sometimes, Sandra admits, she was afraid of the illness that lurked under Michael's skin. At times, she pacified her son, saying the rosary with him as she ironed in the kitchen. But would he hurt someone else? Never. He was afraid of others and always running from his fears.

His father prepared for the phone call he worried would one day deliver the news that his son was dead.

"Never did I think I'd get a call that he murdered someone," Richard Ouellette says. "He was always running from someone."

downward spiral

Michael was working the line at a print shop in East Rutherford, N.J., when he looked up one day and saw a picture of Jesus on the press. He prayed. He heard God instructing him to become a priest and, ultimately, the pope.

It was 1995. Michael Ouellette was 28. It was his first major break with reality.

Because of the vision God had confided in him, Michael believed people were trying to kill him. He accused his mother of talking behind his back to members of their health club. When he went to the beach, he thought strangers were taking pictures of him.

When his parents took a vacation in Virginia, Michael panicked and fled New Jersey for his maternal grandmother's home in Bristol. He carried a baseball bat to fend off his imaginary pursuers. He couldn't sleep for fear that his grandmother would kill him.

He drove back to New Jersey, where, along I-78, he became convinced the other cars were following him. He pulled off the highway and ended up in Summit, an affluent suburb about 25 miles east of Bedminster. When he improperly turned right on red, a police officer tried to stop him, but Ouellette continued through the center of town. He fled to a tree-lined residential neighborhood, where his right front tire fell off after hitting a curb. Police lost sight of him.

"I end up parking the car and run into the woods," Ouellette says. "I ended up staying in the woods all night until the next morning. I hid in a shed and prayed, 'Please don't find me.' I didn't want to die."

The next day, Ouellette emerged among the handsome homes, hulking trees and lawns bordered by pachysandra and wooden fences. Carrying a baseball bat and wearing torn blue sweat pants and a T-shirt, he was stopped by police, held at gunpoint and arrested. In Ouellette's car, left several blocks away, police found a letter he had written to the pope. It spurred a call to the U.S. Secret Service.

Ouellette no longer remembers the contents of the letter, only that it said something about "carrying the cross for Jesus."

A condition of Ouellette's bail was that he be evaluated by the psychiatric staff at a nearby hospital. As he sat in the emergency room, waiting to be taken to his first psychiatric facility, Carrier Clinic in Belle Mead, N.J., his father walked in. As their eyes met, Ouellette asked why his father was looking at him that way.

"I said, 'I'm not looking at you in any particular way, I'm just looking at you,"' Richard Ouellette says. "Then he made the remark, 'I think you're Lucifer,' or something like that."

It took Sandra Ouellette an hour to coax her son into an ambulance.

She held him. "I can remember those eyes, he was looking at everybody," she says. After he got in the ambulance, "My husband was following us and [Michael sat] up and said, 'Why is someone following us?"'

The doctors at Carrier diagnosed Ouellette with "delusional disorder" and said schizophrenia was a possibility. Ouellette was prescribed Haldol and appeared to do well on it, according to hospital records. But Ouellette says the medication did little to dispel the root of his paranoia.

"I still thought everything happening was real," he says of his first hospital stay. "I was still frightened. But at the same time, the medication was stopping me from thinking that people were after me. I was stiff, very restless. I couldn't sit still for very long. It was horrible. It was hell being on medication."

For Daren Ouellette, his brother's first psychotic break offered hope.

"I was relieved at that point because I thought perhaps it was the beginning of some help, where he'd get better and everything would be OK," Daren says. "There was a diagnosis that came along. I thought it was good. I said, 'OK, finally. Now he'll just take the medication and everything will be OK.' But that obviously didn't turn out to be the situation."

Michael Ouellette was released after two weeks. Soon after his discharge he stopped taking his medication. His family felt stymied, confused about how to proceed and unable to get detailed information about their son's condition because of patient confidentiality rules. It would become a vicious cycle -- Ouellette refusing to have details of his condition shared with family members, who were at a loss to help him without all the facts. One doctor told them Ouellette's breakdown probably was a one-time episode.

While doctors diagnosed Ouellette with a range of mental illnesses over the years, schizophrenia and its associated symptoms were a constant thread. The disease remains somewhat mysterious to the medical community. Researchers don't know, for instance, what causes the brain disorder, and there is no medical test to determine if people will develop it.

Medical experts estimate that schizophrenia affects about 1 percent of the population. Research on twins has shown that the more genetic information a person shares with someone who has schizophrenia, the greater the risk that person has of developing the disease. Yet only a small percentage of schizophrenics has a family member diagnosed with the mental illness.

"The bottom line is that while we've made a lot of advancement, there still is a lot more for us to do," says Dr. Deepak Cyril D'Souza, an associate professor at Yale University and a psychiatrist who runs the schizophrenia research clinic at the university.

Physicians rely on an evolving definition for the disease, which is described as a cluster of symptoms of which a patient must exhibit two or more for a continuous period of time. The symptoms include delusions, hallucinations and disorganized speech and behavior.

Ouellette insisted he was not mentally ill, which hindered the treatment he received at about half a dozen mental-health facilities over the years. His parents say the facilities never kept Ouellette long enough for him to adequately recover.

Records document a dizzying revolving door of admission, discharge, readmission -- and little, if any, progress.

Less than a month after he was discharged from Carrier, Ouellette was back. He crashed his car in New Jersey, ran away from state police into the woods and walked to Newark International Airport, where security officers apprehended him. His parents brought him to Carrier, where he stayed for another eight days.

"I start thinking my parents are evil spirits and my parents are not really my parents, that they may have been killed when they were on vacation and they're imposters," Ouellette says.

Carrier's admission evaluation, dated November 1995, states: "Over the past couple of weeks the mother reports the patient has become very aloof, paranoid, scared, has barricaded himself in his room, sleeps only in the attic, feels that people are possessed, that they are after him, and that his mother was not his mother anymore. ... He wears rosary beads all over his body, is not sleeping recently, and feels that people are going to kill him. In the past few days, he has not been sleeping; he is pacing."

By the fall of 1996, Ouellette's fears led him as far as northern California, where he lived outside an office building and ate at fast-food restaurants. He stopped a police officer and said people were following him. The officer took Ouellette to the John George Psychiatric facility near Oakland, where Ouellette said he had been scared of the devil since he was a child and had no idea why he was on medication. He was released from the hospital after nine days.

His discharge summary: "He denies suicidal or homicidal ideation. He denies auditory or visual hallucinations. He is alert and cooperative, average intelligence, bouts of agitation, somewhat slightly improved insight, improved judgment, less paranoid, less delusional. Psychosis has decreased. Hopefully the patient will continue on his medications."

But when hospital officials attempted to put him on a plane to New Jersey, Ouellette acted strangely and he was removed. He later got into a taxi and went to a homeless shelter. A few days later, he got back on a plane and completed the trip back to New Jersey.

Then the downward spiral accelerated.

Only days after coming home to live with his parents in Bedminster, he threatened to kill his mother.

"I can see him clenching his fist and see that look -- all tense, such anxiety in him, almost where he wasn't at peace," Sandra Ouellette says. "I could see it in his face. Just very stern and almost in his eyes see the fear and the hatred, almost. He came upstairs and I just ran. ... I shut the doors and he pushed them open. He came next to me and said, 'I'm going to kill you."'

Using some pop psychology she had read in a magazine, Sandra assured her son he was too nice to do that. The Virgin Mary wouldn't want him to do such a terrible thing, she told him.

"He said, 'You know, you're right. I won't hurt you.' He went downstairs. I was shaking all over."

It would be another couple of hours before Sandra could escape her home.

Within days of the incident with his mother, Ouellette stopped at a police barracks, complaining that he was afraid and that people were trying to harm him. He was admitted to Charter Behavioral Health System of New Jersey in Summit, where he stayed for almost a month. At one point, Ouellette said he intended to leave the hospital and officials there sought an involuntary commitment, according to hospital records.

While other facilities had discharged him because he agreed to take his medication, Charter discharged him because he refused to.

"Despite all our efforts getting the patient to accept Depo Haldol Decanoate, this was declined and, as such, it was felt that he had reached maximum hospital benefit," according to Charter's notes. "He appeared to have gained some insight in that he promised to continue his Haldol, but the fact that he refused other mood stabilizers and Haldol Decanoate makes this questionable."

Ouellette's obsession with Roman Catholicism continued. In the spring of 1997, he flew to Rome with a tour group and visited the Vatican for Easter weekend. On Good Friday, he stood in St. Peter's Basilica among a crowd hoping to meet Pope John Paul II. Ouellette spoke briefly with the pontiff, who couldn't understand him and called another priest over for help. Ouellette told the priest he was being followed by Italian people and his life was being threatened. He also said he had studied at a seminary in order to become pope.

On Easter Sunday, Vatican security staff found Ouellette hiding behind the monument of Pius XII in the Chapel of San Sebastiano.

"He was recognized as a disturbed person, not in full possession of his mental faculties, but not dangerous," according to Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo, apostolic nuncio.

Ouellette returned home to New Jersey. But by the end of the year, he left the state again, believing people were chasing him. This time, he ended up on the streets of New York City, panhandling when he ran out of money. When his car was impounded, he became frantic and called his younger brother.

"He said the government was after him, the FBI, everyone was after him, they were in the mob and trying to kill him and that he was so scared," Daren Ouellette says. "I tried to explain to him, 'You're not thinking clearly.' I said, 'I'll pick you up on one condition, that you let me take you to the hospital."'

Daren had to circle Grand Central station several times before his brother finally popped out from his hiding spot behind a pillar. When Daren said he was going to the hospital, Michael began to argue. While driving on the interstate in New Jersey, Daren saw a state trooper and asked for help. Michael was admitted to Overlook Hospital in Summit that night, then transferred to Marlboro State Psychiatric Hospital.

The state hospital is in central New Jersey, near the eastern coast. A Tudor-style building rises from amid a grove of thick trees, one of many buildings on the 400-plus acre campus in Marlboro. During Ouellette's stay, he denied having a mental illness or needing medication, and told hospital personnel that he had never assaulted anyone. His brother and father went to a hearing at the hospital to keep Ouellette from being released. But Ouellette didn't want them in the room when his case was discussed. Even without the testimony of his family, Ouellette was kept at Marlboro for five months, the longest stay at any mental facility where he was treated.

He was discharged in May 1998, a month before the hospital was shut down: "Patient was given a 30-day supply of Lithium 300 mg, two tablets twice a day; Cogentin 2 mg one tablet twice a day; Stelazine 10 mg one tablet in the morning, two at bedtime. He was advised to follow up with aftercare."

By the fall of 1998, Ouellette traveled to North Dakota to St. Joseph, a friary in Aneta that emphasizes prayer and work. The friars' goal is to seek perfection through vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Ouellette prayed. He worked.

But during Christmas with his family in New Jersey that year, Ouellette broke with reality once again.

"He said that God said to him, 'Three strikes and you're out, so I know I'm going to die and go to hell,"' Sandra Ouellette says. "I was telling him, 'You didn't see God, you're just hallucinating.' He said, 'I'm not hallucinating."'

Ouellette had stopped taking his medication again. Frustrated and exhausted, Ouellette's father told his son to leave the house since he wasn't going to take his medication. Ouellette's sister saw Michael driving, stopped him and promised to get him help. But Ouellette was resolute. He didn't need help.

Several days later, Ouellette called his parents from Ohio. He was lost, the road signs kept changing, people were speaking German. Police called Ouellette's parents to say Michael was at a rest stop off the Ohio Turnpike. But by the time Richard and Sandra made the 12-hour drive, their son was gone. They returned to New Jersey to find a message on their answering machine. Michael was in a psychiatric hospital in Cleveland.

Richard Ouellette remembers hospital officials urging him to pick up his son. But he stalled, hoping to prolong Michael's stay. Richard waited 11 days before he flew to Ohio, dug Michael's car out of a snow bank and picked him up at North Coast Behavioral Health. For much of the ride back to New Jersey, Michael was quiet.

"I was driving him back on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and we went by this place, the Lonestar Steakhouse, and they have a big star in the air," Richard Ouellette says. "He looked over at it and said, 'That's me, the lone star."'

five days to murder

Five days before the murder of the Rev. Robert Lysz on June 24, 1999, Michael Ouellette drove frequently between New Jersey and Bristol. His frenzy was growing. Now, even the Virgin Mary had turned on him, thanks to his father's 1988, sapphire-blue Cadillac with the white roof.

"I've had bad luck ever since you bought that car because it's the blessed Virgin's color," Michael told his father.

Saturday, June 19: Ouellette arrives in Bristol to visit his grand-uncle Roland Fecteau. Ouellette looks unkempt and complains of not having a place to stay. Fecteau invites him to sleep at his home. Ouellette accepts. When Fecteau questions Ouellette about whether he is taking his medication, Ouellette insists he is.

Sunday, Father's Day, June 20: About 6 a.m., Fecteau finds Ouellette seated on the living room couch. "He had this funny look on his face, his eyes looked ferocious. He was staring, not saying much."

Fecteau tells Ouellette he must go home to New Jersey. Ouellette once again insists he's taking his medication.

"I asked him if he wanted breakfast. He said, 'No.' As far as I knew, he went home."

Ouellette sets off for his parents' house in Gibbsboro, but stops at a Catholic organization called the Blue Army Shrine in Washington, N.J., where he attends the holy hour in the afternoon and tells those waiting in line for confession that he must go first. A nun says he appears strange and scares others.

By the time he arrives at his parents' home that night, he is agitated and pacing. Richard Ouellette tells Michael he needs to go to the hospital.

"He said, 'You don't think they're going to keep me?' I said, 'Probably not. They'll just talk to you and give you medication and let you come back home."'

Richard and Sandra make a plan to take Michael to the hospital the next day. That night, they push their bureau in front of their bedroom door.

Monday, June 21: By the time Richard Ouellette awakens at 5 a.m., his son has left home.

Tuesday, June 22: Just down the street from the Ouellettes' Gibbsboro home, at St. Andrew the Apostle Roman Catholic Church, Monsignor Ciaran O Mearain receives a visitor. (O Mearain later tells police he believes the visit occurred Tuesday, although it could have been earlier in the week.) The visitor has come at least twice before to the church and is driving a car with a Connecticut license plate. O Mearain feels uneasy as he speaks with the man, so he leads him from the rectory into the public parking lot.

"I perceived him as being very disturbed. When I would talk to him and help him he would calm down. But then, within minutes of having him sort of calm down, he would boil up again very quickly. ... When he would start to talk, I felt menaced. I felt fearful."

The visitor says he is being pursued and feels rebuffed by the church. O Mearain senses the man's muscles tightening and wants the meeting to end.

"I remember the emotion of it, the way he would look at me. There appeared to be a great anger at the bottom of it. I felt uncomfortable. ... I felt it could go out of control at any minute."

(Not until June 28, when he reads a New York Times article, does O Mearain learn his visitor was Michael Ouellette.)

Later that night, about 9:15 p.m., Ouellette arrives in Bristol, his boyhood home, and visits family friend Alex Monico, who had coached him in baseball. Ouellette wants Monico to drive him to Michigan to pick up some clothes he left there. Monico tells Ouellette he will buy him new clothes. Ouellette says he won't be around for the new millennium and is going to hell. He asks to stay the night at Monico's home, but Monico declines.

Monico goes inside his home and locks his door. Ouellette follows him, saying his car keys are locked in his car. The Bristol police are called and told Ouellette is a paranoid schizophrenic. Monico walks outside and tells Ouellette the police are coming. A wrecker comes to retrieve Ouellette's keys and police tell Ouellette not to return to Monico's home. When police ask Monico whether Ouellette might hurt someone, Monico tells them no.

"I didn't believe he would, knowing that Mike was heavily into church and wanted to be a priest at one time," Monico says.

Ouellette leaves. His world is collapsing. Time is running out. No one will help him. He believes his only salvation lies in getting a prayer to the Blessed Virgin published in The Bristol Press, a prayer he had placed in the local newspaper the year before.

"I didn't know where to go to anymore because everyone was a part of the conspiracy," Ouellette says. "I wasn't eating. My stomach was in a pit from what was going on and what I was going through. ... There's a wide conspiracy. People are hunting me down, people want to get me before the prayer is printed. I thought my family was involved, that they were all part of the conspiracy and that my father was really Satan."

Wednesday, June 23: About 8:15 a.m., Ouellette appears at The Bristol Press office. He smells bad, his lips are white and cracked and his eyes are glassy. He wants the newspaper to publish the prayer. He paces and becomes upset when an employee is unable to immediately find a copy of the prayer. Ouellette leaves only after a male employee tells him to. His parting words: "I need that prayer in by Friday!"

After Ouellette leaves, an employee calls police.

Ouellette returns to the office later to pick up some old newspapers, then leaves again. He drives to Washington, N.J., to visit the Handmaids of Mary Immaculate located at the Blue Army Shrine, a place he has frequented over the past couple years. A nun asks him whether he is on his medication. Ouellette says he is. He says he doesn't know why the sisters are afraid of him because he is normal and would never hurt anyone. He tells the nun he has failed the Virgin Mary three times and is going to hell. The sister suggests that he go to confession, but Ouellette wants a special prayer to the Virgin Mary that is "never failing." The sister doesn't know how to get the prayer.

He leaves about 5 p.m. after one nun gives him some money and another tells him he needs professional help.

Thursday, June 24: Ouellette arrives in Southington, where a gas station attendant on West Street sees his car early in the morning.

After several phone calls to The Bristol Press office inquiring about the prayer, Ouellette goes there in person just before noon. He pays $80.76 for the publication of the prayer and leaves.

About 3:30 p.m., Ouellette arrives at St. Matthew Church on Church Avenue, where his family had been parishioners for a little over a decade and where he received his First Communion and was confirmed.

"I was just driving by the roads there and so I went in. I stopped there because I thought I had to confess my sins so I could clear myself of any wrongdoings in case they kill me."

The modern brick-front church sits atop a hill overlooking Forestville, and is one of the largest parishes in the Hartford Archdiocese. The Rev. Robert Lysz, known affectionately as "Father Bob," has spent the past 11 years there as pastor. He is 50 years old.

When Ouellette arrives that afternoon, Lysz agrees to see him. He hears Ouellette's confession, but is wary of the man's odd behavior. Ouellette is skittish and nonsensical. When he leaves, Lysz locks the rectory door and tells the bookkeeper there is something wrong with Ouellette. Lysz copies down the license plate number of Ouellette's 1988 white Mercury Cougar. Moments later, Ouellette returns to the rectory and speaks with Lysz briefly, asking to stay at the church. Lysz suggests a nearby shelter, and when Ouellette leaves, Lysz calls police.

"I thought he wasn't a priest and that he was a Satan agent, part of the conspiracy. I asked if I could stay right over there. I had no place to stay. He told me I couldn't, that there was a shelter. I said, 'OK.' But when I got outside in the car, I was frantic. I think people are after me. I go to the back of the church. Where the glass doors are I pick up a cigarette receptacle and bang open the doors. One door is banged in enough that I could stick my arm between the doors and get into the church. I got in. But there were all the windows and people could see me. I was scared and I crawl on my belly to the sanctuary. ... I hide there for a few hours."

Shortly after 4:15 p.m., Bristol police arrive at the church at Lysz's request. Officers find Ouellette's car parked on church property, but there is no sign of him. They check all the doors and windows at the rectory, then leave, telling Lysz to call them if Ouellette returns.

About 5:30 p.m., Lysz leaves the church grounds to visit his mother at the nearby Subacute Center, a nursing home on Fair Street. Lysz feeds her dinner and stays with her until about 7:30 p.m. Before Lysz leaves, he speaks with two nurses about St. Matthew School.

Inside the church, Ouellette is desperate and praying for his life.

"I'm praying to God that nobody will come in and find me, that I'll be safe until the next morning when the prayer is printed and everything will be all right. Father Lysz comes in and finds me standing behind the sanctuary. ... He tells me, 'Let's go, you have to go, they're going to tow your car.' ... I start walking toward the door to leave the church. I hesitate and stop and he starts shoving me. I was scared to leave because of what I was facing out there. I grab his arm and both of us fall back on the floor. I'm scared. I think he's a Satan agent. I think he's purposefully sending me out of the church to be killed. We both fall backwards on the floor. We start fighting. ... The candlestick is right next to me on the floor. I thought I had to knock him out so I could stay there and if I didn't he was going to have me killed."

Ouellette sees a screwdriver fall out of Lysz's pocket and Lysz crawl to get it. "That's when I grabbed the candlestick and hit him over the head with it a few times."

Finally, Ouellette feels safe. He still believes people outside are looking for him, but God is protecting him.

"At first I thought [Lysz] was just knocked out, but afterwards he was stiff and I knew he was dead. I stay in the church because I think it's the only safe place. I have to hide there. I can't leave there until 8 a.m., when they're going to have the prayer printed. I thought all the people who were looking for me didn't know where I was."

Ouellette hides overnight in the back of the church, while Lysz's body is lying face down behind a block of pews. Blood is everywhere.

"I straightened things out in the church. I thought the people hunting me down might see me there. If the Satan agents after me looked through the windows they won't see anything abnormal."

Friday, June 25: Ouellette puts on the priest's clothing, hoping to disguise himself. At 6:35 a.m., parishioner Lionel Martel arrives at the church, unlocks the doors and gets the sacraments ready for Mass. He sees a man in a white-hooded robe leave the church.

Ouellette makes his way to the rectory next door.

"I straggle into the rectory. The door isn't locked; it was left half-open. I went upstairs. I didn't know what to do so I was just wandering. I put on some more of [Lysz's] clothes. I thought I had to disguise myself. I go walking downstairs. People at the rectory ask me what I'm doing and I say I'm looking for a priest."

Parishioners gathering in the church for early-morning Mass are now concerned that Lysz, who is always punctual, has not shown up. The rectory is checked but Lysz can't be located.

Shortly after 7:30 a.m., Lysz's body is discovered under a pile of religious robes in the northeast corner of the church. He is clad only in his undershorts. In his right hand he is clutching a flat-head screwdriver. Lysz's palm has blood on it but the screwdriver appears to have none. A pink, long-sleeved shirt, saturated with blood, is found turned inside out near his left hand. Underneath is flesh that has been ripped from his ear. Strands of hair are stuck to blood spatters on the pedestal of the candlestick; bloody fabric imprints trail along the altar; two smeared bloodstains cover a light switch in the rear hallway leading to the chapel of the sanctuary.

In the rectory, Lysz's wallet has been hidden under a vanity sink in the first-floor bathroom, where Ouellette asked to go after he met the people in the rectory. Hidden under the foot of Lysz's bed upstairs is a pair of bloodstained sneakers. Inside a hamper are a heavily bloodstained golf shift and Bermuda-style shorts.

When Ouellette is taken into custody, he is wearing Lysz's clothing and a pair of socks so caked with dried blood that they stick to the soles of his feet. In his car, police find a set of religious books, including a prayer against Satan and the rebellious angels, as well as 119 capsules of Lithium and a holy water bottle.

That morning, Ouellette first identifies himself as "Jimmy." Later, he confesses to police, with an account that is different than the one he now tells.

To the police, he says he waited near the trees of the church parking lot until he saw Lysz unlock the church. He says he followed Lysz inside to ask if he could stay, but that Lysz swung a screwdriver at him.

According to his confession: "I had to defend myself, we fell to the floor. He was hitting me and I was hitting him. The priest bit my thumb, and would not let go. I bit the priest [sic] ear off. He was still fighting me, and had the screwdriver. ... I hit the priest over the head with the candleholder, about three or four times, he was still coming at me with the screwdriver. It was either him or me."

Police charge Ouellette with murder.

Sandra and Richard Ouellette return home from dinner at a restaurant to find a message on their answering machine asking them to call Bristol police. Sandra dials and talks with Det. Andrew Barton, whom she remembers from her son's Little League team. Richard Ouellette hears his wife answering a series of questions and thinks, like so many times before, that his son has been picked up for driving erratically.

But as he looks over, he sees Sandra nearly collapse in hysterics as she learns her son is being held on a murder charge.

Thoughts race through Richard Ouellette's mind: There is no longer any hope that his son will get better and lead a normal life. He will certainly spend the rest of his life in prison. Richard can't believe he has brought someone into the world who has killed a priest.

"I felt like I had lost a child," he says.

Legally Sane

"During the portion of the interview involving his understanding of the crimes he is charged with committing, Mr. Ouellette was able to maintain his composure and carry through on the question and answer process without any evident signs of disturbance or notable mental blocking," states the April 2000 report declaring Ouellette competent to stand trial.

In the fall of 2001, a three-judge panel spent about three weeks hearing evidence in the case. Ouellette entered a plea of not guilty to the murder charge, and his lawyer, public defender Kenneth Simon, relied on an insanity defense. The state contested it.

In his closing argument, New Britain State's Attorney Scott Murphy said the state agreed that Ouellette was mentally ill and had been for a number of years. But the issue, Murphy said, was whether Ouellette was "legally insane" at the time of the killing -- essentially that he didn't know right from wrong.

The judges heard about Ouellette's tortured past, his stays at mental hospitals, the frustrations of his family and their efforts to get him help and from mental health experts who had evaluated Ouellette. Parishioners described how they found Lysz's body the morning after the murder. Investigators recounted the bloody crime scene; they said Ouellette appeared calm after the murder.

In November 2001, the judges convicted Ouellette of murder, a decision that meant he would face prison rather than the likely commitment and treatment at Whiting Forensic Institute in Middletown, a state psychiatric hospital. At Whiting, his status would be reviewed at least every two years and he would receive more intensive psychiatric therapy.

The judges rejected the notion that Ouellette did not understand the wrongfulness of his act and said his ideas about a conspiracy against him were not credible.

"The court finds that [Ouellette] moved and covered the body in an attempt to secret the crime and delay discovery," the judges wrote in their decision. "The defendant placed a screwdriver in the victim's hand after he was dead and moved. The defendant, it is found, washed his hands in a back room, secreted his bloody pants and put on the victim's pants. He took the victim's wallet, credit card and driver's license. ... The placing of the screwdriver in the victim's hand is found to have been the beginning of the contrived defense of self-defense. ... The court finds that the defendant's theory of conspiracy against him and hallucinations did not develop until a considerable time later. The court finds this to be a contrived theory and that the defendant is not credible in that regard."

The court also found that the state proved Ouellette did not believe he was in imminent danger of death at the time he killed Lysz and didn't have reasonable grounds to believe he was in imminent danger.

In January, the judges imposed the maximum prison sentence, a 60-year term that will end on June 27, 2059, when Ouellette is 92. He is not eligible for parole. His appeal is pending.

Simon says he knew he had an uphill battle when he learned the makeup of the three-judge panel: Superior Court Judges Robert C. Leuba Sr., Peter Emmett Wiese and William L. Wollenberg. Both Leuba and Wollenberg are conservative and, Simon believes, less likely to rule in favor of a defendant.

Simon believes Ouellette's was one of the clearest cases for an insanity defense he has ever seen. The decision, he says, sends a message to the mentally ill and their families that it really isn't an illness, it's a choice.

"I believe that it truly is an illness just like cancer," Simon says. "And as in this case, it has the potential for destroying lives -- the life of the priest, the life of Michael Ouellette and anyone affected, such as Michael's family, the priest's family and the members of [the priest's] parish."

Tom Lysz wished his brother's killer had gotten the death penalty. Yet Lysz, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark, is conflicted. At times he wants revenge, but he also laments the irony of his brother's murder -- that it took a crime of violence to get help for Ouellette.

"I think it's a sad commentary on society when you have to have somebody murdered in order to find out [Ouellette] needs medication and attention," Tom Lysz says. "It's sort of like, let's see if 10 people have to die and then put up a railroad crossing. It's the same kind of stupidity."

Tucked underneath his bed, Tom Lysz keeps his brother's papers and vestments.

For the Ouellette family, the sentence has resolved nothing. It has provided a final injustice in a lifetime of unfairness. They wish Michael could spend his sentence at a psychiatric hospital rather than in prison. They feel betrayed by a mental health system they believe released Michael before he ever had time to get well.

"If the system had completely worked, Michael would have been in an apartment-type housing where his medication is regulated," his sister, Denise, says. "They would have made him have a quality of life. They would have protected the innocent people who are no longer here with us as a result of what happened. It's a very sad thing. This priest was a very good man. He was an active member who made a difference. He made a difference every day in people's lives. How can you justify that he's not here anymore? You can't. It's impossible and beyond comprehension. That man should have still been here. My brother still should have been here."

Denise, who was married late last year by the Rev. Ciaran O Mearain, the priest Michael visited the week of the murder, questions whether she should give birth, fearing any child might develop schizophrenia, too.

"As sad as it is to say, it's hard to say it would be a blessing from God to have a child like that. I've been here. I've lived it. It wasn't a blessing for my parents, my brother and I, and it certainly wasn't a blessing for Michael. It's been a struggle for everyone. Do I want to bring someone into the world that has it? I don't think so. ... Right now, my future still is uncertain."

At Garner, Michael Ouellette inhabits a cramped cell he shares with another inmate, a bunk bed, a desk bolted to the floor and a toilet and sink.

He says he spends 21 hours a day in his cell. He usually rises after breakfast has been served, but eats lunch and dinner. He reads. He sleeps. He paces his cell thinking about the "what if": If only he had taken his medication, he wouldn't be in prison. And the priest wouldn't be dead.

He goes to Mass every Sunday and considers himself a devout Catholic. He reads the Bible.

He recently told his mother he spoke with a priest who forgave him for his sins.

Still, Michael wonders whether God will ever forgive him.

THE PRAYER MICHAEL OUELLETTE BELIEVED WOULD SAVE HIM FROM HELL:

"Prayer to the Blessed Virgin: Never known to fail. Oh most beautiful Flower of Mount Carmel, Fruitful Vine, Splendor of Heaven, Blessed Immaculate Virgin, assist me in my necessity. Oh Star of the Sea, help me and show me that you are my mother. Oh Holy Mary Mother of God, Queen of Heaven and Earth. I humbly seek you from the bottom of my heart to secure me in my necessity. (Make your request.) There are none that can withstand your power. Oh Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee (3 times). Holy Mary, I place this prayer in your hands (3 times). (Say this prayer for three consecutive days and then you must publish it and it will be granted to you.)"