CLAYTON - A decade before police charged John Patrick Violette with beheading his 4-year-old daughter, he began battling an illness that planted strange voices in his head, his family said.

Violette's loved ones are now replaying every scene they can remember from a stretch of months in the mid-1990s when doctors at a mental hospital in California first told Violette and his family that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, his sister Denise Violette said.

"I look back and I think, 'We should have never let him out of that place,'" said Denise Violette, John's older sister who helped care for him during this time.

Schizophrenia -- a brain disorder that often causes victims to lose sense of reality and to hear and see things that aren't there -- struck Violette in his mid-20s, long before he married Amber Marks and fathered Katlin. It's unclear whether his wife of eight years even knew of his mental illness; Amber's father Thomas Marks has said that John's outbreak caught them all off guard.

As far as Violette's family can tell, John Violette, 37, somehow managed to quiet the turmoil in his head for the better part of a decade. Schizophrenia is sometimes marked by long stretches of seeming dormancy, only to erupt in dramatic, occasionally violent, breaks with reality, mental health experts say.

Erratic behavior

Police won't discuss whether Violette's mental illness motivated Katlin's slaying. Violette's lawyer, Robert Denning, says his client is mentally ill and asked a judge to send him to Dorothea Dix Hospital last week so psychiatrists can determine whether he is competent to stand trial for his daughter's murder.

"He doesn't seem to grasp what's going on," Denning said.

Neighbors saw John Violette act erratically on Jan. 12, the afternoon Katlin's mother came home and found her decapitated in the hallway of their Clayton home. He sped down the narrow lane of their subdivision, whipping the car into their driveway. Neighbor Diana Narron said she saw him rant angrily as he rushed to the front door, "like somebody was talking to him in his head and he was talking back." When U.S. marshals found him holed up in a Washington hotel room early the next morning, he was shouting scripture from the Bible's Book of Revelation.

His family said no other explanation for John Violette's behavior makes sense.

As a kid, John was always the gentle, tenderhearted one of the siblings, his sister said. He and his sisters were military brats, moving from state to state and abroad as the Army shuffled their father between bases.

The family eventually settled in California, where John Violette's parents later split.

John Violette loved working with his hands and apprenticed as a carpenter after high school, his sister said. He crafted fine wooden furniture and gave it to relatives.

John Violette also messed with drugs, though his sister never knew for sure which kinds. Denise Violette later blamed her brother's mental breakdown on his drug habit.

"I thought it all had to do with the bad choices he made," Denise Violette said. His family suspected a drug high when John Violette first started to unravel 11 years ago.

When Denise Violette visited her brother at his new home in Hawaii then, John Violette confided in her that men were following him. Denise Violette said she believed he might be in danger and urged him to come home to California.

When John Violette came home, he was panicked. He ducked in and out of bathrooms, hiding from people he imagined might be after him, Denise Violette said.

His strange behavior didn't relent. Later, he tried jumping from his brother-in-law's moving car, Denise Violette said.

The family ended up putting him in a drug rehabilitation program, Denise Violette recalled. He fled there, only to end up belligerent in the emergency room of a hospital one night. Doctors found no drugs in his system, Denise Violette said.

Off medication

His family then committed him to a psychiatric hospital. A month later, doctors sent him home with pills and a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, his sister recalled. He moved and talked more slowly, his sister said.

"He didn't seem like he was totally 100 percent," said Denise Violette.

At the time, Denise Violette doubted her brother had schizophrenia and didn't think he needed medicine. She urged him to stop taking the pills. He eventually did. As far as Denise Violette knows, that's the last time he took medicine to try to control his schizophrenia. It haunts her now that she encouraged him to quit.

Within a few months of his release from the mental hospital, John Violette headed east to North Carolina and settled with relatives in the Triangle. He eventually regained some semblance of a normal life, Denise Violette said. He picked up jobs, holding on to some longer than others, his sister said. The day before Katlin died, John Violette quit his job at Lowe's Home Improvement, a move he made to get back into carpentry, Denise Violette said.

In North Carolina, John Violette immersed himself in activities for singles at Colonial Baptist Church in Cary. That's where he met Amber Marks. The two married nearly eight years ago.

Katlin made the family three in 2002. By then, they'd set up home in a new subdivision in Clayton. They relished family time, making it a point to meet for lunch at the house each day. The three had slumber parties, setting up tents and sleeping bags in their living room.

John Violette's heart was so tender toward Katlin that he couldn't even spank her, Denise Violette said. He logged her journey with Christ in a journal; his other sister read from it at Katlin's funeral.

Denise Violette is still hoping she is having a nightmare, that some stranger broke into the house and killed Katlin instead of her brother.

"Even now, I think I will wake up and this will be someone else's family," Denise Violette said. "It is so beyond understanding."

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