Libby man who killed two on mushroom hunting trip to be paroled

A Libby man has been approved to be paroled from a prison sentence handed down after he killed two people during a drunken mushroom hunting trip in the Yaak area in 1992.

James Allen Egelhoff, 54, was granted parole at a hearing in late December.

Egelhoff had previously been approved in November 2015 for transition into a prerelease program in which he was allowed to get a job, save for an apartment and begin making other transitional steps toward being released back into the general public.

According to Montana Parole Board analyst Christine Slaughter, Egelhoff is currently housed at the Billings Prerelease Center, and will have to have good conduct for at least 90 days, after he was found to have committed a major violation while in the program.

That puts his projected parole date at sometime in March.

Egelhoff was convicted of two counts of deliberate homicide and a subsequent count of committing a felony with a dangerous weapon after he killed Roberta Pavlova and John Christenson, who had been picking mushrooms with him. He was sentenced to 84 years in prison, with half of that time suspended. The case was appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which was narrowly divided over a key question Egelhoff presented: Could he legally be convicted of murder if his drunkenness made him so inebriated that he did not know he was committing a crime?

Egelhoff was found early in the morning on July 13, 1992, by authorities after someone reported that a station wagon had been driving erratically. The station wagon was found crashed in a ditch, with the bodies of Christenson and Pavlova in the front seats. Each had died of a single gunshot wound to the head.

Egelhoff was in the backseat at the time, screaming obscenities. He had gunpowder residue on his hands, with the weapon in the vehicle.

His blood-alcohol concentration an hour after he was taken into custody was .36, which is more than four times the legal limit to drive. Egelhoff’s legal team had a medical expert testify that the man had blacked out the night of the murder. The defense argued that there was no way Egelhoff could have had the wherewithal to kill the victims, and if he had, he wasn’t aware of it.

But prosecutors pointed out that Egelhoff had used a stick to push the accelerator from the back seat to drive the car. He also was particularly dexterous when officers tried to arrest him. He was combative and was able to kick the camera out of the hands of a deputy who was taking a photograph of him. Egelhoff had plenty capability of committing murder, the prosecutors argued.

The jury was instructed to not take Egelhoff’s blood-alcohol level into consideration during deliberations, because Montana was one of 10 states at the time that had not carved out legislation permitting an intoxication defense. The jury found him guilty.

Yet the Montana Supreme Court found Egelhoff’s defense to be valid and overturned the conviction.

The case went all the way to U.S. Supreme Court and the justices found by a narrow 5-4 margin that the U.S. legal system had long ago established that intoxication was not an adequate defense for committing a crime. They quoted an 1820 court decision in their rationale.

“This is the first time, that I ever remember it to have been contended, that the commission of one crime was an excuse for another,” Justice Joseph Story wrote in United States v. Cornell. “Drunkenness is a gross vice, and in the contemplation of some of our laws is a crime; and I learned in my earlier studies, that so far from its being in law an excuse for murder, it is rather an aggravation of its malignity.”

Reporter Megan Strickland can be reached at 758-4459 or mstrickland@dailyinterlake.com.