Murder trial continues for ex-ISP trooper

COEUR d’ALENE — Kendy Howard was a loving mother and grandmother.

That’s what her daughter, Brooke Wilkins, told jurors Thursday when she took the stand in the first-degree murder trial of 58-year-old Daniel Howard.

The former Idaho State Police trooper is accused of killing his wife, Athol resident Kendy Howard, then placing her in the bathtub, shooting her and staging the scene to look like she died by suicide.

Prosecutors say he murdered her three years ago because he’d learned she was having an affair and didn’t want to split $2 million in shared assets with her in a divorce.

“My mom was my best friend,” Wilkins said, smiling through tears. “She was my daughter’s best friend. I can’t ask for a better role model or just a better person to be around. I didn’t even have to find her and choose her. She was just there. I was lucky enough to just have her there.”

Wilkins said her stepfather, Daniel Howard, behaved lovingly toward her mother in public, but in private, he frequently insulted her.

“He would call her fat, a [expletive], stupid, dumb Indian, a slut, a [expletive],” Wilkins said.

She described Daniel Howard as miserly and controlling, checking bank account balances daily and berating his wife for any unapproved purchases.

Wilkins said her stepfather also harshly criticized Kendy Howard’s body.

“He would often come up behind her and grab her sides and tell her to stop eating so much,” she said.

Kendy Howard felt insecure about her body, her daughter said. Prior to her death, she had scheduled consultations for cosmetic surgeries.

In efforts to lose weight, Kendy Howard took pills, exercised and dieted. She also became a client of Kristin Miller, a psychiatric nurse practitioner who runs a small business working with people who struggle with compulsive overeating.

Miller testified that she prescribed phentermine, a medication used to lessen appetite, to Kendy Howard along with “the smallest possible dose” of Prozac. Though Prozac is commonly used to treat mood disorders such as depression, Miller said she prescribed it only to help the appetite-suppressing drug work longer throughout the day.

Miller said she screens her clients for psychiatric illnesses, including depression, and does not accept clients who live with such conditions.

“It would be inappropriate for (Kendy Howard) to be in the program if she had those issues,” she said.

A forensic pathologist previously testified that Kendy Howard had no drugs, alcohol or prescription medication in her system when she died.

Wilkins said she’d never known her mother to shoot or handle guns. Kendy Howard received a handgun as a Christmas present from her husband five years before her death, but she was unhappy with the gift and it was soon locked away inside the gun safe Daniel Howard kept in his workshop on the family’s 10-acre property.

Kendy Howard didn’t have a key to the gun safe, her daughter said.

Wilkins said her mom took bubble baths nightly to relax. Kendy Howard usually left her purse in her car, but when she brought it into the bathroom, she left it within reach of the tub, along with her phone and glasses. On the night Kendy Howard died, police found her purse and phone by the bathroom sink, out of reach.

When Daniel Howard called Wilkins around 6:30 a.m. on Feb. 3, 2021, he told her there had been “an accident.” Wilkins said she hung up and called 911.

Hours later, they reconnected on the phone and Daniel Howard said her mother had shot herself. Wilkins said she was crying as she asked her stepfather what he’d done.

“I told him I know she wouldn’t do that,” Wilkins said. “She would not have shot herself. He kind of mumbled. I got to the point of asking him if he was in custody and if the cops were there.”

Matt Kulac, who worked alongside Kendy Howard at Kootenai Health for 13 years, saw her at work the day she died. She didn’t have the large second-degree burn on her forearm that police photographed hours later, after her death.

Kulac said Kendy Howard had been in good sprits.

“She was going to move to Kamiah, go back home and take a little time off and then she had a job lined up,” he said. “She was going to start over.”

In court, Idaho State Police Detective Eric Tolleson described the “carotid restraint” technique that prosecutors say Daniel Howard used to kill his wife.

Unlike a chokehold, which renders a subject unconscious by cutting off air, Tolleson said a carotid restraint cuts off blood flow to the brain. The technique involves hooking an arm around the subject’s head and using the forearm and bicep to apply pressure to both sides of the neck, rather than the windpipe.

A person subjected to carotid restraint can lose consciousness in five or 10 seconds, Tolleson said. The technique can be fatal.

“I was taught not to apply it more than 15 seconds,” Tolleson said. “It can cause permanent brain damage or death.”

Tolleson said Idaho State Police trainees learned to perform a carotid restraint as part of their basic training at the time when both he and Daniel Howard went through Idaho POST training.

ISP District 1 Capt. Paul Berger said troopers are familiar with the sound of gunshots, both indoors and outdoors. He said this is particularly true for those who are part of SWAT, as Daniel Howard was during his time with ISP.

“Probably more so than a regular trooper would be,” Berger said. “They do training within houses.”

Daniel Howard told investigators he heard a thud upstairs when his wife allegedly shot herself and thought nothing of it until he found her body.