What Michael Holmes did -- barging into his neighbor's house, shooting one person dead and wounding another -- might have been crazy, but he was not.

That was the verdict Friday from a Roanoke jury that rejected Holmes' plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. After deliberating into the evening, jurors convicted Holmes of the first-degree murder of Connie Mills and the aggravated malicious wounding of David Ray.

Holmes, 24, was sentenced to life in prison plus 58 years.

Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Holmes blamed the crime on the voices inside his head. In the weeks before the shootings, Holmes said in pretrial statements, he could hear his neighbors, Mills among them, make insulting comments about him. Other voices then commanded him to kill in his Northwest Roanoke neighborhood the morning of July 29, 2005.

"You've got to do this," the voices told him, according to Dr. Conrad Daum, a psychiatrist who evaluated Holmes. Daum told the jury that he believed Holmes was legally insane by virtue of an irresistible impulse he experienced the night of the crime.

Prosecutors offered no expert medical testimony to contradict Daum. Instead, they simply asked the jury to disregard his opinion.

"The mere fact that someone suffers from paranoid schizophrenia is not a license to kill," Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Patrick Jensen said.

Holmes' two-day trial in Roanoke Circuit Court was unusual in several ways.

"The insanity defense is raised a lot less frequently that what people think," said Richard Bonnie, a law professor at the University of Virginia and head of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy.

About 1 percent of felony cases involve insanity pleas, and only a small fraction of those result in acquittals. Even more rare, Bonnie said, is the use of an irresistible impulse defense.

For an insanity defense to succeed in Virginia, there must be proof the defendant suffered from a mental disorder that produced at least one of three results: inability to understand the nature and consequences of an act, inability to distinguish between right and wrong, or an irresistible impulse.

An irresistible impulse happens when someone knows that something is illegal, but cannot control their actions because of mental impairment. The defense is perhaps best known for the case of Lorena Bobbitt, who was found not guilty in 1994 of severing her husband's penis.

Holmes, who did not testify, accepted the jury's guilty verdict with the same flat demeanor he showed during most of his trial.

There was no dispute about what he did: About 3 a.m. on July 29, 2005, he barged into Mills' home in the 600 block of Madison Avenue with a 9 mm pistol and shot the first person he saw. That happened to be Ray, another neighbor who was fixing Mills' door at the time.

Holmes then went to another room and shot Mills, 37, twice in the back, leaving her to die from a bullet through the heart. He then returned to Ray, whom he had already shot three times in the leg, and shot him three more times in the same spot. Ray's left leg is paralyzed from the shooting.

When Holmes made a statement to police shortly after the crimes, he made no mention of hearing voices, Commonwealth's Attorney Donald Caldwell reminded the jury. It was only after meeting with a psychiatrist that the topic of delusions came up, the prosecutor said.

But there was more to the insanity theory than Daum's expert opinion. Friends and family members testified that Holmes, who had been committed three times to psychiatric hospitals in the year before the shootings, was so paranoid that he suspected the Orkin man of tapping his telephone and his girlfriend of being the Antichrist. Holmes also insisted that he could hear his neighbors calling him a pervert even though there was no one within earshot.

"He's a sick man, and it manifested itself on this night in a tragic way," Holmes' attorney, Assistant Public Defender Anna Bagwell, told the jury.

But the jury sided with the state's version of events, which portrayed Holmes as a man consumed by drugs, alcohol and anger. He might have been mentally ill, prosecutors said, but he knew what he was doing.

Caldwell said in his closing arguments: "There's a world of difference between an irresistible impulse and an impulse not resisted."