PRINCETON, Ind. — There is little dispute that Patrick Waite fired the shots that killed three members of his family and wounded a fourth inside his Haubstadt, Indiana, home last spring. What a Gibson County jury must now decide is why.
To prosecutors, it was a triple murder driven by a collapsing marriage and a fight over the “dream home” Waite had lived in for decades. To his defense, it was the desperate act of a frightened 77-year-old man who believed his newfound wife and her family had come to kill him after a months-long “con.”
The dueling accounts opened Waite’s trial Thursday afternoon in Gibson Superior Court, capping a day in which attorneys pressed dozens of prospective jurors on the question at the heart of the case: How did they understand self-defense?
Waite has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder in the May 2025 shooting at his lakeside home. He admittedly shot and killed his wife, Alma Waite, 61; her mother, Gloria Garcia Tapia, 81; and son-in-law Fernando Tapia Ramirez Sr., 39. A fourth man, also one of Alma’s son’s, survived a gunshot wound and is the basis for the attempted-murder charge. Waite has been held without bond since his arrest.
Because Waite is claiming self-defense, jurors must contend with the usual burden of proof and Indiana’s expansive self-defense statute. Reading jurors Indiana’s self-defense law before opening statements, Gibson Superior Court Judge Robert Krieg told them it is the state that must disprove Waite’s claim.
“The state has the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt the defendant did not act in self-defense,” Krieg said.
Gibson County Prosecutor Michael Cochren took just seven minutes to lay out the state’s primary argument.
“This is a case about three people who are dead because of the actions of the defendant, Patrick Waite,” he told jurors. Waite, Cochren said, killed his wife, shot and killed one son-in-law and attempted to kill another, and killed his “bedridden” mother-in-law — all, the prosecutor said, in the presence of a child.
The motive, Cochren said, was “the pending demise of his marriage and disputes over property.” He told jurors the evidence would show what Waite did in the days before the killings, including buying a box of ammunition, and promised a forensic “3-D tour of the crime scene” would show “exactly what [Waite] saw.”
“What did not happen,” Cochren said, “was self-defense.”
Scott Danks, a veteran Evansville defense attorney, spoke for more than 20 minutes and told a far longer, and perhaps darker, story.
“It will be crystal clear to you … that Patrick Waite is not guilty, is not a murderer and, in fact, has never acted violently in his 77 years of life,” Danks told jurors, calling his client a “model citizen by anybody’s standards.”
Danks traced Waite’s life: a self-made man who started cutting grass as a teenager, rose to a management job at Chrysler and later Toyota, and was married to his first wife for 52 years until she died of ovarian cancer in 2019. Alone and isolated during the pandemic, Danks said, Waite turned to online dating and met Alma. “She’s a chameleon,” Danks said. “She’s a con.”
In the defense’s telling, Alma and her family set out to defraud Waite of the lakeside home he had bought decades earlier with his first wife, deeding it into Alma’s name, stealing from the property and turning it into what Danks called “a flop house.” That dispute has become the subject of an ongoing civil lawsuit in which Waite, represented by Danks’ firm, has accused Alma’s family of elder abuse.
Danks described Alma’s relatives as “cartel”-connected with lengthy criminal histories and told jurors of Alma’s prior federal drug-trafficking conviction – a case that centered on her shipping pound-quantities of methamphetamine through the mail. A devout Christian and “the forgiving type,” Waite kept hoping to reform Alma’s family, Danks said, even as he grew so afraid that he began sleeping with a handgun under his pillow.
On the day of the shooting, Danks said, Waite had been out treating his lake and trying to shoot a snake, and still had the .45-caliber handgun on him when he came inside and dozed off. He awoke to Alma screaming at him to get out of the house and shouting for “the boys,” Danks said, referring to her sons. She turned toward her husband, holding a “shiny object” that Waite believed was a knife or a gun, his lawyer said. And her sons, in Danks’ words, charged at Waite “like crazed bears.”
“At that point, it wasn’t about serious bodily injury,” Danks said. “He knew he was going to die.” Both younger men were unarmed, according to police; Danks argued that to a 77-year-old man, they did not need weapons to pose a deadly threat.
The death of Gloria, the bedridden 81-year-old, Danks attributed to a stray or “pass-through” round — an accident, he said, not the “knowing and intentional” killing at issue in Indiana’s murder statute.
“They’ll never prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he didn’t act in self-defense,” Danks told jurors, “because you can’t disprove the truth.”
The openings unfolded as severe storms briefly knocked out power to the courthouse, prompting Krieg to press ahead. “We’re going to push through and try to get some things done today,” the judge said.
With supporters of both Waite and Alma’s family in the gallery, Krieg later thanked them for their composure on an “emotional” day and asked that it continue. “We just don’t want any problems,” he said.
Testimony was set to resume Friday morning.
The trial is expected to run through at least July 2.
Houston Harwood may be contacted at houston.harwood@courierpress.com
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Self-defense or triple murder? Waite jury hears two stories
Reporting by Houston Harwood, Evansville Courier & Press / Evansville Courier & Press
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By Houston Harwood, Evansville Courier & Press | USA TODAY Network
