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)
The defense, going in with all the cards, in the end, was forced to try to guide the jury into believing the word of a single woman, the defendant, who had acted bizarrely in the extreme during the trial, when she simply said she wasn’t there. But she had no alibi for the time it happened, though she did have multiple people who testified she had means, access and motive.
Sharon might be able to lean on her behavior in court in future appeals, but it backfired in the present.
The jury was out for two and a half hours, and Maribeth and I thought that length of time mostly had to do with Jefferson being an obviously spoiled brat.
They came back with a guilty verdict.
She was given two life sentences, to be served concurrently, with the possibility of parole.
This meant she could be out in twenty years.
And Maribeth and I figured the apparent leniency of that sentence was because of Jeff too.
As an aside, Maribeth told me it was the best vacation she’d ever had in her life.
Things went far worse for Sharon Swindell in Seattle, however.
I didn’t attend that hearing, except for one day, when Riggs was forced to go with me. But Harry did, and he gave Riggs and me the full skinny of what we missed.
This detective, uneasy for years about this case (and on top of that being a big thriller reader, and Roosevelt Lincoln was one of his many faves), went after it like a mad dog.
Therefore, he uncovered a bartender at Lincoln’s hotel who had witnessed Lincoln and Sharon arguing at the bar the evening Lincoln supposedly committed suicide. The bartender remembered it because he recognized Lincoln after the big brouhaha of his arrest and confession, and because they were having said argument, which he described as extremely heated on Sharon’s part, but Lincoln appeared quite calm.
Though, he had to admit he didn’t see Sharon slip anything in Lincoln’s drink. However, he hadn’t been watching them the whole time because he was at work and had a job to do.
Further damning was the investigator tracked down a hotel employee who saw Sharon come out of the elevator later that night. She remembered this because Sharon seemed mildly disheveled, which was odd, because it was a very nice hotel, so it caught her attention.
It kept her attention when, halfway across the lobby, Sharon started laughing rather maniacally—at nothing—and that stuck in the employee’s brain, because she thought it was super weird.
The hotel had no record of Sharon being a guest, ever. And Sharon could not produce evidence that she was there to visit someone she knew. So she had no reason to use the elevators at all, as the bar was on the lobby level.
She just said she wasn’t there, but was in Misted Pines, home alone with her dogs, which wasn’t a stellar alibi, especially when two people who didn’t know her, and had no motive to lie, pointed her out in the courtroom with no hesitation.
But the smoking gun was that a friend of Sharon’s had come forward to admit she’d procured a bottle of arsenic at Sharon’s request. Sharon had told her she’d been having issues with mice and rats getting in her house, and she needed it to poison them.
This, even though rat poison, which was not arsenic, was easy to find.
This friend further admitted that she wondered for years, not only because Sharon could have gotten her hands on what she needed herself, but especially after Lincoln died in that manner, and she knew Sharon had “a serious thing against Lincoln.”
She just couldn’t believe her friend would do something like that. And Sharon, at the time, had been significantly distressed and was behaving in an agitated manner, because Lincoln had been released. Therefore, her friend felt Sharon might not have the wherewithal to follow through with an easy errand. Not to mention, she’d been complaining about having trouble with rodents for weeks.
Though, what she could do was identify from pictures the bottle discovered at the scene as being the one she procured.
Truman, Kennedy and Jefferson all testified at that trial as well, reiterating their alibis and the nature of their visits with Lincoln prior to his death. Jefferson adding that his dad had taken him aside and shared that he was going to work with him to help him deal psychologically with what had happened at the lake.
They explained Lincoln seemed sad, and tired, but not morose, and he definitely had plans for his and their family’s future.
And they were all firm in relating that he did not seem to be a man who was about to take his own life, and that they had all retained open communication with him and visited him as often as they could in prison. Though all of this, he’d never given indication this was at hand.