By HELEN POW and DAILY MAIL REPORTER
A teenage girl with Asperger's Syndrome and her boyfriend who has mental health problems have been charged with the murder of her father. Morgan Arnold, 14, has been charged with first-degree murder and two counts of solicitation of murder for allegedly coaxing boyfriend Jason Bulmer to stab her father to death. Bulmer, 19, has also been charged with first-degree murder over the death of Dennis Lane at his home in Ellicott City, Maryland. Both are charged with conspiracy to commit murder. A defense lawyer has expressed concern over the teenagers' mental ability to understand the legal proceedings.
A grand jury indicted and charged both Arnold and Bulmer this week, according to the Baltimore Sun.
Arnold's mother says that her daughter has been diagnosed with Asperger's and an anxiety disorder while Bulmer's father described him as being 'slow'. Joseph Murtha, attorney for Arnold, said he asked the court to sent Arnold's case back to juvenile court and was trying to establish if she was competent for trial. Scheduled preliminary hearings for today did not take place, according to the state attorney's office and arraignment dates are still to be scheduled. Arnold is accused of coaxing her 19-year-old boyfriend to stab her father in a bloody attack they plotted for months over Facebook and Skype.
The pair also allegedly planned to kill Dennis Lane's fiance, Denise Geiger, but didn't get the chance as she called 911 when she heard her partner's screams. The teens were arrested on May 10. Officers discovered Lane, 58, dead in an upstairs bedroom at around 4.30am and the two suspects were discovered in a nearby room with Bulmer drenched in blood. According to charging documents, Bulmer had been instructed by 14-year-old Arnold to stab Lane in the throat 10 times with a kitchen carving knife and Geiger in the throat 15 times with the same weapon. When detectives asked why Geiger was to be stabbed five times more than Lane, Bulmer, who is only in the 10th grade, told detectives that Arnold said: 'I have my reasons, and I'll tell you later.' The pair were then planning to flee to California, police said.
According to police, the teenage couple plotted the murder for months over 'electronic communication.' 'I don't know what I'll do if you don't do it tonight,' Arnold told Bulmer in one of their last exchanges, according to CBS. Bulmer was instructed to bring his own knife to the house, which Arnold shared with her dad and Geiger, and he sent his younger girlfriend a photo of a kitchen knife in a text message, checking for her approval. She replied in such a way that 'indicated to Bulmer that this knife was satisfactory,' according to the charging documents. She sent a further message to say she would leave the door unlocked and Bulmer let her know when he had left his home in Ellicott City and was en route to her father's house. When he arrived, at around 4 am Bulmer allegedly crept into the home then into Lane's bedroom where he stabbed him multiple times, leaving him in a pool of his own blood.
'We do believe this homicide was very much encouraged by this fourteen-year-old daughter,' a police spokesman said. 'Both Bulmer, who had blood on his hands and clothes, and Arnold were sitting in an upstairs bedroom when the police arrived. Officers found Lane deceased with multiple stab wounds in a different upstairs bedroom.' Both teens are active on Facebook and on their pages, which are plastered with dedications of their love for one other, they discuss communicating over Skype. Investigators haven't pinned down a motive for the horrific act but they believe Arnold urged Bulmer to stab her father, a prominent blogger in Howard County and a real estate exec, so the two could run away together. In early December, Arnold wrote a post on her Facebook page warning her friends of the apocalypse.
'The world shalt end this year!!!' the 14-year-old lamented on her page, which is otherwise covered with obsessive posts about her boyfriend. Her mother quickly responded with 'or not' before her father weighed into the conversation minutes later. 'We'll find out next week if you're right...' he wrote after the post, which now seems particularly chilling. She wrote, simply: 'Yay!'
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