Chapter 10 - The Trial
The proceedings ran nearly five months, and Demi’s defense team — she had hired the most expensive one money could still reach — fought every inch of it.
Their central strategy was the recording. If they could get it thrown out, or convince a jury it couldn’t be trusted, the rest of the case grew harder to prove.
So they attacked it from two directions at once. They argued that Roderick had been delirious and medicated in his final days, a confused dying man who had turned on a devoted wife out of paranoia and been manipulated by a scheming orderly who saw a fortune within reach.
And they argued that the recording itself was a fabrication — that in an age when a laptop could put words in anyone’s mouth, no jury should convict on the strength of a voice on a file.
Both arguments failed, and they failed on the evidence.
Independent audio forensics examined the recording and testified that it was authentic, continuous, and unedited — no splices, no synthesis, no manipulation of any kind, consistent in every technical respect with a genuine recording made on the device it came from.
The psychiatrist who had evaluated Roderick the morning of the will signing took the stand and described, in careful clinical language, a man entirely oriented and lucid, who had answered every capacity question correctly and explained his reasoning without prompting.
The notary’s video was played for the jury: Roderick, gray and frail but plainly clear-headed, listing his own assets from memory, stating his own reasons, executing the documents while three witnesses looked on.
And Teresa Pearson, the company’s chief financial officer, produced the financial records — including a transfer of four hundred thousand dollars that Demi had moved from a shared marital account into a shell company registered in Gareth’s name, weeks before Roderick died.
Money, Teresa noted dryly from the stand, that a grieving, innocent wife would have had no reason to hide.
The gallery was full every day. Hospital staff came on their days off. Reporters filled a row. And, most days, so did families Brandon had never met — parents of children with heart conditions who had read about the case in the papers and driven in to sit through it, because somewhere in the middle of a murder trial there was a story about a sick kid getting a chance, and they knew what that was worth.
The prosecutor played the recording for the jury near the end of her case. She did it without preamble, simply asking the courtroom’s permission and pressing play, and Demi’s own voice went out into the silent room — You’re finally going to die, Roderick — cool and amused and unmistakable.
May you like
Several jurors looked at the defendant. Demi looked straight ahead at nothing. Then came the photographs of the forged prescription pads and the pages of the journal in her handwriting, and the message threads arranging the attack in the alley, and finally a toxicologist who explained, plainly, that Roderick Benedict had not suffered a natural cardiac arrest at all.
He had been poisoned, slowly, over months, in a manner designed to look like the ordinary failing of an ordinary bad heart.
