Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
And fortunately, much bigger celebrities were embroiled in a bitter, ugly divorce that was hogging the national limelight and lighting TikTok up with a salvo of new content.
Even so, what happened that night at the stables wasn’t going to fade easy in a starry, mountain night.
Not even close.
It, and what happened after it, was going to cause loads more drama, and trauma, and get way more interesting.
It begins here…
Unsurprisingly, Jefferson Whitaker immediately started pointing a finger right at Sharon Swindell.
At first, she didn’t speak a word.
But Jeff had a lot to say.
The first twist was, he claimed he did not shoot his uncle and mother.
No.
He shared in the statement he made to the police that they weren’t shot at all.
Instead, Sharon had drugged them (something which would be easy for her to do, since she stocked Roosevelt’s larder, doing this also when Sarah was around), then she dragged them to the stables, and it was she who lit the fire in order for them to expire in it.
She’d then covered Jefferson in blood and gave him the shotgun, knowing the fire would bring Lincoln running.
Jeff admitted to being there and doing what she ordered, saying this was both because she’d convinced him of terrible things about his family and he was terrified of her.
What she ordered was for him to let the horses out and make sure they ran away.
Other than that, he had nothing to do with it.
Sadly, the investigation of the situation was woefully mishandled. They had no traces of the blood she allegedly drenched him with to test. The scene had not been properly examined. And although the bodies had been examined, they were burned so badly, the coroner couldn’t report if they’d sustained gunshot wounds or had been drugged or had died prior to being burned to ash.
More metal detectors had been dispatched, and the area was swept, but they found no evidence of spent shells or shot.
That said, fifteen years had transpired, so this could have been washed away by rain or melting snow or scattered by animals.
Or Jeff had had plenty of time, not to mention he’d revisited the area frequently—and he’d put no small amount of effort into successfully keeping it vacant of anyone who could see him doing it—in order to pick up after himself.
A jury would have to decide.
The next twist was, even if they didn’t have this evidence, they did have the shotgun.
And when Harry pulled it from the evidence locker, he found almost immediately that Lincoln had turned over a weapon with the double barrel fully loaded.
This definitely gave credence to Jefferson’s claims that the gun had never been fired, and Sharon had made a mistake in first, not firing it, or second, at least not unloading it before she handed it to Jeff. Because who would reload a weapon after they used it, supposedly successfully, and before they turned it over to the police as the apparent murder weapon?
And it showed even more how shoddy the policework had been around the case, because all you had to do was cock the barrel open to see this, and then a lot of questions would, and should have been asked and answered.
Maybe saving a man’s life.
Sharon remained silent, and in the end, Harry was forced to charge Jeff solely with criminal trespass and criminal malice.
Jeff pled guilty to these, admitting that yes, he and Sharon had spent years doing a number of things to keep people away from that lake and looking for the “lost manuscript” (the fake existence of it something Jeff’s father had shared with Tru, but not with Jeff, though perhaps it was understandable he hadn’t because he thought Jeff was fragile about Sharon).
Though, Jefferson agreed to this in a deal he’d made where he would also testify against Sharon.
Sharon took it to trial, and Maribeth (obviously) had to take time off work to come to MP so she could go with me every day to watch it unfold.
And this was something my bestie did.
At first, Sharon, who was rather attractive in a tough-nut sort of way, seemed calm and docile.
I could see that.
The case was old. They had a confession from a man who was now dead, so he couldn’t speak. Without a murmur of dissent, someone had served seven years of his life for the crime. And the investigation had been bungled, so they didn’t even have circumstantial evidence against her, barring the shotgun (though, that was pretty damning).
On top of that, she could ride the wave of a jury who might find the way of life of the Whitakers distasteful.
However, she wasn’t counting on the Whitaker family having very good friends, quite a number of them, all of them very keen to speak on behalf of the dearly departed—in fact, they’d been waiting years to have the opportunity—and at least two children who loved their parents unconditionally.