SMITHFIELD - Amber Violette says her husband John begged her to skip work last Jan. 12. He believed that the apocalypse was going to destroy the Eastern seaboard that day.

John Violette's revelation spooked Amber, but she went to work anyway.

She couldn't hear the voice of God doctors say drove John Violette to stab their 4-year-old daughter, Katlin, with a kitchen knife and then behead her.

On Thursday, Superior Court Judge Jack Thompson determined that John Violette was insane that day. As a result, he ruled that Violette is not guilty, ensuring that Violette will never stand trial for her killing.

Amber Violette, tormented by her decision to go to work, begged the judge for that outcome.

"I want him to be able to be treated. I still have hope," Amber Violette, thin and tired from weeping, whispered from the witness stand.

John Violette will be held indefinitely at Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh unless he can convince a judge he's no longer mentally ill or a danger to others. He will join 27 other North Carolinians held at Dix because a judge or jury found them to be insane at the time of their crimes.

Three doctors testified in Johnston County Superior Court on Thursday about the voices and delusional spiritual mission that guided John Violette. District Attorney Susan Doyle consented to the hearing before a jury trial because the state doctor whom prosecutors must turn to at trial believed Violette should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Charles Vance, a forensic psychiatrist who works for Dix, gave this account:

A month before Katlin's death, Violette heard the voice of God tap him to join the "CIA: Christ Intelligence Agency." The voice told him that by acts as simple as clicking his pen and taking out the trash he was helping cast out the world's evil.

On Jan. 12, though, the voice insisted that Katlin was possessed with an evil spirit. Violette went to the kitchen, grabbed a knife and stabbed Katlin several times before decapitating her. To contain the evil spirit, he stuffed her body in a trash can and ordered the family dog to guard it.

He then rushed to Raleigh-Durham International Airport to try to catch a flight to Montana, where fellow "CIA" agents would gather for the millennial reign described in the Bible's Book of Revelation. Not finding a direct flight to Montana, Violette flew to Washington, D.C., instead. The voice told him Katlin would be buried there as a reward for her sacrifice hours before.

"He was being moved like a chess piece, like he had no control over his actions," Vance told the judge.

Vance and other doctors have diagnosed Violette with paranoid schizophrenia and say the illness caused him to break so hard from reality last January that he couldn't tell the difference between right and wrong.

"He thought he was attacking an evil spirit," Vance said. "He wasn't aware of the nature of his actions."

It's not clear what sense John Violette makes of his daughter's death, his illness and his future. His attorney Bob Denning said he wasn't sure Violette knew the meaning of the judge's ruling.

In court, John Violette sat behind a table and bounced his left leg, shackled to the other at his ankles. He wiped a single tear from his eye when Vance described his daughter's slaying. Mostly, Violette hunched forward, staring straight ahead as he clenched his jaw.

As he shuffled out of courtroom trailing a sheriff's deputy, he managed a weak smile at his wife of eight years. His family, ministers and friends from Colonial Baptist Church sobbed as he left, many bowing their heads in thanks for the mercy of the judge's ruling.

When asked how she could stand by the man who killed her little girl, Amber Violette rattled down a list with such sureness it seemed like she'd repeated it a hundred times. Amber Violette said she trusts God to make good of this horror and she knows Katlin is with Jesus in Heaven.

"John is the most loving, compassionate, gentle man," she said. "And I know he would never do anything like this unless something were wrong."