EAST CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Court TV) — Mass killer Michael "Mucko" McDermott took the stand in his insanity defense murder trial Thursday and matter-of-factly told jurors he died 62 years ago on a suicide mission to prevent the Holocaust.

"Where are you now?" asked his lawyer, Kevin Reddington.

"In purgatory," said McDermott.

Michael "Mucko" McDermott takes the stand in his own defense.

In an clear, calm voice at odds with his irrational statements and wildman appearance, the 43-year-old software technician said he traveled back in time at the request of St. Michael and killed Hitler and six Nazis Dec. 26, 2000. In reality, McDermott fatally shot seven co-workers at Edgewater Technologies in Wakefield, suburb of Boston, that day.

"The whole idea was to prevent Nazi supremacy," said McDermott, his shoulder length hair and salt-and-pepper beard forming a mane around his face. "I would save tens of millions of people."

Of courtroom observers, the judge and jurors, who will decide whether he is guilty of seven counts of murder and should spend life in prison, he said, "None of them are real...Are they automatons? Are they demons? I don't know."

The extraordinary testimony was too much for some victims' relatives. They sat through graphic autopsy testimony and bloody crime scene photos earlier in the trial, but as McDermott recalled the massacre as a military operation targeting men "with swastika armbands" rather than innocent office workers, several relatives filed out of the court in disgust.

McDermott's parents, Rosemary and Richard Martinez, remained seated in the gallery's front row to hear their son say, "That's actually not my mother and father. It's a construct of my mother and father."

When Reddington, whom McDermott identified as "an archangel," asked why he then talked to the elderly Martinez's and returned their affections, he said, "I don't want to be rude."

Prosecutor Thomas O'Reilly briefly cross-examined McDermott Thursday afternoon, suggesting his account was as fantastical as the Dungeons and Dragons games the self-described geek played weekly. The bulk of his grilling will occur Friday. The prosecution contends McDermott plotted the rampage after the company garnished his wages to pay a $5,500 IRS debt.

But Reddington told jurors Wednesday that the shootings were the result of a religious delusion under which McDermott continues to live. McDermott, dressed in a gray jail jumpsuit, brought the paperback Bible he had read throughout the trial with him to the witness stand.

McDermott's Bible

Jurors have heard terrifying accounts of how McDermott stormed through the Internet company's offices shooting some workers and leaving others untouched. McDermott's own account of the shooting, however, took place in a different era and different nation. The body count was the same.

McDermott's living room

The defendant said that after receiving a vision from St. Michael, he was blown through a time "portal" in his office lobby.

"On this side of the doorway was the year 2000. On the other was Berlin in 1940," he said.

"I was in a room in a bunker. There were two men and a woman in front of me. Both the men had swastika armbands. I immediately shot both of them."

Cheryl Troy, 50, the human resource director, and Janice Hagerty, 46, the office manager, were killed in the lobby.

McDermott described killing three more men in Nazi armbands on a raised stage. Louis Javelle, 58, the director of consulting, Craig Wood, a 29-year-old who worked in the human resources department, and Jennifer Bragg-Capobianco, 29, were killed in the mezzanine area of the office.

He said he then turned his attention to a bunker from which, he said, he could hear Hitler's thoughts "emanating."

"The last Nazi was there. I shot and killed him. And Hitler was there. I shot and killed him," said.

Development technician Paul Marceau, 36, and payroll accountant Rose Manfredi, 48, were slain in the accounting office.

McDermott in 1976

The man whose IQ has been tested at 165 said he had no idea what day or year it was, but under close questioning from Reddington, gave a detailed account of his life up to the shootings.

He recalled his upbringing as the second of four children born to school teachers. He said he was raped by a teenage neighbor at age 8, and began having hallucinations before he left home for the Navy at age 17. He said he hears many voices, including "a chorus whose job seems to be to tell me what a bad person I am."

He also said he had two suicide attempts and three hospitalizations for depression, but generally avoided telling psychiatrists about the extent of his delusions.

"They are prone to lock you up. You lose your jobs over things like this," he said.

On Dec. 14, 2000, an official at Edgewater, where McDermott was salaried at $55,000, informed him that they would begin garnishing his wages to pay a $5,500 tax debt. McDermott said his car was about to be repossessed and he felt a "complete financial failure" at the "nadir" of his life.

He said he knelt in his cubicle and prayed despite the fact he did not believe in God and felt like he lacked the soul or moral compass others had. A saint appeared to him, he said.

"Michael the Archangel came and lifted me up," said McDermott who described the appearance as a "theophany" — a word he easily defined for Reddington. "He told me God had a plan for me."

The plan, McDermott said, was for him to receive a soul in exchange for an act of heroism: saving the victims of the Holocaust. St. Michael told him he would receive two more signs before traveling through a portal to Germany in 1940, McDermott said.

A Christmas day eclipse was one of those signs, he said.

"They had created a sign just for me," he said.

On Christmas night, he took target practice and secreted a shotgun, a rifle and an "elephant gun" in his work area so he wouldn't scare his co-workers.

"I didn't want to be responsible for any glaring mistake that would blow the plan," he said. He also devised what he called a "clever" scheme to avoid being captured by the Nazis after the assassinations. He would overdose on drugs and alcohol and carry out the killings before he succumbed. That way, he said, his suicide would be redeemed by his good works, allowing him to get into purgatory and eventually heaven.

On the morning of Dec. 26, he said, his mother called him in the office to discuss what a nice Christmas they had together.

"She asked me if I knew it was St. Stephen's Day," he said. He took that as the third sign, he said.

He said he downed a bottle of vodka and vial of painkillers purloined from his father's medicine cabinet, picked up his guns and walked to the lobby.

When he got there, he said, he uttered the phrase that St. Michael told him would open the time travel portal: "I'm looking for human resources."

Then, he said, he began shooting.

When he finished killing, he waited for the authorities. McDermott told jurors he died in a German police station.

"My mission was complete. I knew at this point I had a soul," he said.

His testimony continues Friday morning.