Voices and Violence

Hermann “Hans” Woerrlein was fifty-one, German-born, and living in a group home in Idaho Falls, Idaho, a place for men working on their mental health and their sobriety. People who knew him described him as bright and kind. Early in 2020 he was paired with a new roommate, thirty-two-year-old Douglass Taylor, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in his twenties and hospitalized roughly thirty times since.

Taylor had been committed to State Hospital South in Blackfoot in December 2019 and released about five weeks later. On the night of March 10, 2020, he decided Hans was secretly founding a Nazi cult. He stabbed him seventeen times and cut his throat. Another resident found Taylor standing over him and called 911 shortly after 10:30 p.m. Officers picked Taylor up behind a grocery store minutes later, still bloodied, and he admitted the killing once detectives sat down with him.

Taylor pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in December 2021. On February 9, 2022, District Judge Bruce Pickett sentenced him to life in prison with a minimum of twenty-seven years, longer than prosecutors had asked for, and added a fine and restitution. His attorney argued that Idaho’s mental health system had turned loose a man it knew was not stable.