Husband in Wilmette murder-suicide left 43-page note

A Wilmette man who police say murdered his wife and teenage stepson with a Civil War replica rifle before killing himself wrote "I could not fight off the suicide dreams."

Wilmette police on Thursday released a 43-page, handwritten journal by Richard Wiley, who also stabbed his first wife to death more than two decades ago.

Wiley wrote that he refused to go back to prison for the Feb. 28 deaths of 50-year-old Kathy Motes and 17-year-old Christopher Motes.

He stabbed his 25-year-old wife, Ruth, to death in 1985, and was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. At his murder trial, Wiley said he suffered from a rare mental disease called "intermittent explosive disorder," but the judge rejected his claim that he was insane.

Wiley was paroled in 2000.

"I'm not going back to prison," he wrote. "So I know the final chapter is now written. What started as my problem turned into a larger situation. People will say many things and nothing I say will matter."

Wiley said he was upset that he'd had few visitors since breaking his ankle more than a year earlier.

"While I was incarcerated for 15 years I thought I knew loneliness," Wiley wrote. "But during the last 20 months it became profound."

Wiley also wrote that he'd killed the family's three cats, four birds, a parrot and a turtle.

"Our little loved ones could not be trusted to anyone else," he wrote.

The bodies of Wiley and Kathy Motes were found in a second-floor bedroom, while Christopher Motes was found in an upstairs bathroom; all three had single gunshot wounds to the head, police said.

The murder weapon, found by Wiley's body, was a black-powder, muzzleloading Civil War replica rifle that may have belonged to Christopher Motes, a Civil War buff, police said.