TALLADEGA COUNTY — The murder trial of Fred Allen Walker of Heflin continued through its fourth day Thursday, with the defendant taking the stand for most of the day.

Walker is accused of fatally shooting his boss, Jerry Harrell, once in the head at MotorCycle Sports in Oxford, just inside the Talladega County Line.

Walker is a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, and defense attorney Mark Nelson is not disputing the fact that his client did, in fact, shoot Harrell and cause him to die.

Nelson does argue, however, that due to his condition, Walker was unable to appreciate the nature and quality of his actions, which is one of the definitions of legal insanity in Alabama.

The state says that Walker knew exactly what he was doing and asked him, on cross-examination, if he did understand the nature and quality of murder. Walker said he did not understand the question.

During Wednesday’s testimony, the defense played a series of videotapes that Walker had sent to the U.S. Marshal Service about a week before the shooting. It lays out a bizarre worldview that is obsessed with sex, rape, homosexuality, theft and extreme violence.

For several years, Walker said he believed that his employer was taking stolen parts and putting them on frames with clear titles. In the winter, the stolen vehicles were stored on cement pads on the bottom of lakes, then moved to various hunt clubs when the leaves come out.

He also recounted, on numerous occasions, seeing two to four of his coworkers running out from underneath his trailer one morning, and the subsequent investigation of his underpinning which turned up two hoses that were being run into his house. He believed these two hoses pumped a mist into his home that rendered him unconscious or helpless. He had listening devices implanted in his left eye and a tracking device in his shoulder, he added.

He said he had briefly worked with the FBI, and said that he had been given a retinal scan and a Swiss bank account, but he had refused full induction when he found out that he would be required to rape female recruits. He then turned to the U.S. Marshal Service, and viewed the FBI as villains.

Harrell was at the heart of the universal conspiracy Walker believed that was directed at him. The victim, according to Walker, had sold his soul to the devil, and was an FBI agent and serial murderer and rapist who was trying to frame Walker for his crimes.

The defendant said he believed the marshals had authorized him to kill Harrell three to four months before, but he couldn’t do it.

Some six years before the shooting, Walker said Harrell had told him to stop trying to track serial numbers or “something might happen to those three pretty girls of yours,” according to Walker’s testimony.

On the day of the shooting in 2006, it was more than five years after his wife and daughters had left him, Walker said. On that day, after going to his chiropractor in Lineville, he said the voice of God told him, “You know what you have to do.”

When he prayed for a sign, Walker said God told him that he should not shoot Harrell in front of his children. Harrell worked in the same office with his son and daughter.

When he found out that both had called in sick that day, he fired a single hollow point bullet from a 9 mm handgun into the back of Harrell’s head, killing him. He said his only motive was the remark about his daughters from several years prior, in spite of numerous statements he made in the tapes. He admitted under oath Thursday that he did not like Harrell, although he refused to characterize it as hate.

He also testified that, aside from the day of the shooting, he heard the voice of God on only one other occasion.

While being held in Cullman County pending federal gun charges (which were later dropped), Walker testified that he began thinking about a dream he had several years earlier involving sex with a headless corpse. The voice of God told him he had defiled himself and would have to mutilate his genitals.

Walker said he resisted for two weeks, but finally he pulled apart a razor blade with his teeth, removed the blade and used it to cut off his member and flush it.

The only other witnesses called Thursday were an old friend of Walker’s who said they had been estranged since 2005 and his ex-wife, who testified that Walker’s behavior had become increasingly erratic during the last few years of her marriage, until the daughters finally said they all needed to leave.

Testimony resumes today at 8:30 a.m.