Osborn, Mo. ? Those who love Raymond Boothe knew he was in trouble in the days and hours leading up to 11-year-old Levi Boothe’s brutal death on the Kansas Turnpike.

The day of the killing, Aug. 27, the boy’s mother even asked police in Cameron, where the family lived, to arrest her husband after he took their son from a Creston, Iowa, group home, then returned to Missouri to collect the couple’s other three children from his sister’s house.

The family was alarmed, Lisa Boothe said, because Raymond Boothe was clearly going insane.

“We tried to get him committed,” the 31-year-old mother said, “but everything happened before we could get in to see the judge. There was nothing any of us could do; I felt completely helpless. All we could do was wait.”

Now, Levi is dead and Raymond Boothe is accused of murder.

Before it happened, police said they couldn’t stop Raymond Boothe because there was nothing illegal about a father being with his children.

Later, a sympathetic officer called a judge to ask if he would have her husband committed to a mental institution, Lisa Boothe said. But it was 7 p.m. and the judge wasn’t home.

She and other family members interviewed this week said they still loved Raymond Boothe. They are heartbroken, however, because of the mental illness they say has claimed the lives of both the man and his gentle, developmentally disabled son.

“I don’t blame (Raymond),” said Lindsay Boothe, Raymond’s sister. “And we don’t blame him as a family. It wasn’t him,” it was the illness that gripped his mind.

Strange behavior

Family members say the evidence of Raymond Boothe’s derangement began appearing about two weeks before Levi’s death.

“He started saying stuff that didn’t make sense, and when you’d ask him what he was talking about, he’d sort of snap out of it and say ‘Oh, what? Never mind,’ and that’d be it. He’d move on to something else,” said Lisa Boothe, seated in a blue plastic lawn chair outside her mother-in-law’s mobile home in tiny Osborn.

“It’s like you knew something was going on, but you didn’t know what it was,” she said.

A few days later, Lisa Boothe recalled, Raymond’s condition worsened. One minute, he’d be happy, life was good. Then, for no apparent reason, he was mad at everybody.

“One time, he told me we were going to have a great life together and that he was going to sell one of his cars and make a bunch of money and not to worry,” she said. “And then, a minute later, he was going 90 to nothing, telling me I was drinking too much and that I had a problem and that I was hurting the kids.”

Under pressure from her husband, Lisa Boothe admitted herself to an alcohol rehabilitation program in Excelsior Springs. That was a week before Raymond Boothe went berserk on the Kansas Turnpike. She said she later realized she didn’t have a drinking problem, but that her husband’s illness was pushing her toward a mental breakdown.

“Raymond and I had been married 14 years, and he’d never been like this, never. So I was thinking, ‘Maybe there is something wrong with me, maybe I do have a problem.'”

Raymond’s mother, Carol Boothe, said she thought her son had forced his wife into rehab because he knew he needed help himself. If Lisa Boothe got help, maybe he would, too.

“In his own way, I think he was trying to get help,” Carol Boothe said.

Both women said the likelihood of Raymond directly seeking help for himself was unimaginable. It wasn’t something he could bring himself to do.

And he couldn’t forget the bad experiences he had after he was hospitalized for mental problems in 1992.

Seemed OK

After his discharge from an Iowa state mental hospital, “for the next eight years, he was fine,” Lisa Boothe said.

While at the hospital, Raymond was on medication. But by the time he was discharged, he was no longer taking anything, Lisa Boothe said.

She said she was never told what mental illness her husband suffered.

“There wasn’t a diagnosis  not that I knew of,” she said.

Lisa Boothe said through the years her husband occasionally drank too much or used drugs, but that he wasn’t a frequent abuser of alcohol or drugs. All seemed fine.

“We were just plugging along,” she said. “I’d come into a partial inheritance, so we’d put a down payment on a house we were fixing up, and I put some money down on a decent car. We were doing OK.”

But in mid-August, her husband came down with bronchitis.

“It was awful,” Lisa said. “He couldn’t go to work because of it, and then he couldn’t go to sleep  he’d lay down for an hour and then he’d be up again. That’s really when this whole thing started.”

In the days before Lisa went away for the alcohol-abuse treatment, Raymond Boothe started acting strangely. One minute he was planning to start a new business; the next, material goods didn’t mean anything to him anymore because they weren’t part of God’s plan.

He thought God wanted the Boothe family “to write, produce and sing songs for the Lord,” she said.

He even yelled at his mother during breakfast at her place.

“That was something he never, ever did,” Carol Boothe said.

“Raymond was the type that whenever we’d see each other in public, he’d give me a hug and a kiss and tell me he loved me. It didn’t matter if we were the only two people there or if we were in front of a thousand people. He wasn’t embarrassed to show his love.”

Raymond Boothe’s family  his wife, his parents, his sisters  all said they knew something was wrong. But no one knew what to do.

“Looking back, I don’t think any of us knew what to do,” Lisa Boothe said.