EVERETT — A murder suspect who escaped from Western State Hospital last year is back in the Snohomish County Jail as prosecutors move forward with the first-degree murder case against him.
Anthony Garver made a brief video appearance Tuesday in Superior Court from the jail. He pleaded not guilty to the 2013 stabbing death of Phillipa Evans-Lopez. The 20-year-old mother was found tied to a bed in her Lake Stevens home. Her throat had been slashed and she’d been stabbed more than two dozen times.
Snohomish County sheriff’s detective believe that Evans-Lopez met Garver at an Everett McDonald’s a day or so before the killing. Investigators say that Garver’s DNA was found on the electrical cords used to bind the victim. The woman’s blood also was discovered on a knife seized from Garver at the time of his arrest, court papers said.
Garver, 29, was moved Monday to the jail in Everett from the Spokane County Jail, where he’d been serving time since his April escape on a federal probation violation.
Garver and another patient snuck out of their bottom-floor room at the state psychiatric hospital. The men spent months hatching the plan and removed a window frame. Garver, a self-proclaimed survivalist with a history of threats toward the government, was caught two days later in some woods near his mother’s Spokane house.
The security breach led Gov. Jay Inslee to fire the head of Western and called for safety reforms at the problem-plagued hospital.
Garver was sentenced in December to two years in prison for violating the terms of his federal probation for illegally possessing ammunition.
Snohomish County deputy prosecutor Matt Hunter raced against the clock last week to refile the murder charge after he learned that the Federal Bureau of Prisons was planning to release Garver.
Hunter was told that Garver was being given credit on the federal case for the time he served in jail and at Western in connection with the Lake Stevens homicide.
Hunter had been forced in 2015 to dismiss the murder charge against Garver after state doctors concluded that the defendant was too mentally ill to assist his own lawyer and efforts to restore his competency had failed. Garver was civilly committed to the state hospital.
His well-planned escape could make it difficult to convince a judge that Garver can’t assist his lawyer, said Snohomish County public defender Jon Scott. There was no mention of Garver’s mental health during Tuesday’s hearing.
Scott told the judge that he hadn’t had a chance to meet with his client, nor did he have any information about how Garver has spent the past 18 months.
In charging papers, Hunter said he was refiling the murder charge based on the December competency proceedings in the probation case.
A U.S. District Court judge relied on the findings of mental health evaluation and reports from a treatment team at Western, according to charging papers.
Garver told the team two months before his escape that his mental conditions would not prevent him from functioning adequately outside the hospital walls, “yet he still complained that his ‘severe psychosis’ would likely impair his ability to assist with his defense should criminal charges ever be refiled,” Hunter wrote.
Also before his escape, staff informed Garver that they intended to report that he appeared to understand that charges could be refiled.
A doctor concluded that Garver exaggerates his psychotic symptoms and feigns memory impairment. The federal judge, in his findings in the probation case, wrote that Garver “is malingering, at least in part to avoid prosecution,” court papers said.
Superior Court Judge Joseph Wilson ordered Garver held without bail. Trial was scheduled for March 17.
Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463; hefley@heraldnet.com.
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