Spokane Valley man accused of cutting out wife’s ‘tongue from Satan’ ruled competent to stand trial

Doctors say a Ukrainian refugee who blamed demons and voices in his head for telling him to kill his wife is competent to stand trial.

Vladimir Pavlik, 62, was arrested and charged in late 2016 for attempted murder after leaving his Spokane Valley home covered in blood. For the past two years, he’s had multiple stays at Eastern State Hospital, where a doctor recently ruled he showed little or no signs of psychosis, including schizophrenia.

When Pavlik was first arrested, he told deputies he attacked his wife with needle-nose pliers and a knife because she had used her “tongue from Satan” to curse him.

The woman was discovered by police on Oct. 5, 2016, in a pool of blood on the couple’s dining room floor. Nearby were the weapons used to beat her, and pieces of her tongue next to a steak knife.

Dr. William H. Grant, a psychiatrist at Eastern State Hospital and professor of psychiatry at University of Washington, diagnosed Pavlik with “passive-aggressive personality features,” according to court documents, but said the 62-year-old was not suffering from mental psychosis.

Throughout his 21 days at Eastern, Pavlik told staff that he had hallucinations of his wife trying to calm him and a “hole in a wall opening up with a loud noise and coming into his body,” which is when the hallucinations first began. Several people interviewed by Grant told him the defendant would often act confused, but that could have been because of the language barrier, since Pavlik spoke mainly Russian.

However, on multiple occasions Grant and others noted Pavlik would often speak near-perfect English “when it suits him.”

In his reasoning for declaring Pavlik competent to stand trial, Grant wrote that Pavlik’s description of visual hallucinations are atypical to what people with psychosis or schizophrenia normally experience.

“The defendant reported visions of his daughter and his spouse appearing very anxious,” Grant wrote. “Hallucinations of other people experiencing emotional problems are quite rare in my experience.”

Grant said that if Pavlik is hallucinating, “there is no nexus between any hallucinations he is experiencing and trial competency.

“Hallucinations alone are not a barrier to competency, although they can render a defendant incompetent if they are intrusive or distracting or give bad legal advice,” he wrote. “There is simply no connection.”

At Eastern and in the Spokane County Jail, where Pavlik is housed in lieu of a $1 million bond, the defendant refused multiple interview requests, and at one point, wanted to wait “two to three months” while he consulted with his family.

Grant forwarded his finding to Judge Timothy Fennessy on Sept. 19. And on Oct. 6, Fennessy ruled Pavlik competent.

Trial is scheduled for May.