the family s crossbow back in october. that time police say it accidentally struck anna creamer. lightning striking twice, a person could understand, actually. but this? resuscitative efforts were attempted, but she was pronounced deceased at the house. detectives put creamer in a police car, he said good-bye to his son and said he d be back. the detective drove him down to the station. i appreciate you coming down. am i in any trouble? no, you re not. we re just talking. he said under the direction of his wife anna was cleaning up the garage, picking out things to save and items to throw away or give away and rearranging and then he picked up this one bag, didn t know what was in it, he said. he kind of throw it off to the side. i heard you right, so you threw the bag, you heard the sound of the crossbow going off immediately. yeah. okay. i heard sound, and i didn t really know what was happening. an accident, said ken
ken creamer killed his wife anna. of that, there was no doubt. shot her with a crossbow, right here in his garage. and the shock of it was, he d done it before. just didn t kill her that time. so the charge that put him in this place, first-degree murder, is no surprise. but, still, justice crawled. the boy adjusted to a new life with anna s family, a family that came to believe firmly in creamer s guilt. and for 2 1/2 years, he sat in jail waiting to answer the question. how do you plead, guilty or not guilty? not guilty. this was june 2008. the commonwealth evidence will show this was no accident. and this, the prosecutor, tabitha anderson. here s your time line, september 2005 the defendant
creamer, horrible, unbelievable but true. creamer told the cop he didn t even know the crossbow was still in the house, didn t know it was in the bag he tossed across the garage, didn t know it was loaded, with a hunting arrow, no less. maybe she loaded it, he says. why would she load it? i don t know. i don t know. sometimes she does she my wife does whatever she wants to do. you can tell her not to do something, and she ll do it? really? even after she d already been injured in that earlier crossbow incident, asked the interrogator? i didn t touch it. i didn t say you did. kenny, i didn t say you did. and only then it seemed to dawn on ken creamer that the man in the room did not believe him. we ve been married 13 years. never had one. never had a fight? never had a fight. never had one. my wife did whatever she wants. i m asking you for the investigation, ken. i didn t
found no reason why it would fire without a pull of the trigger. in other words, the arrow that went through anna creamer must have been fired on purpose. i saw anna laying there facedown with an arrow square in her back. but the true star of the case against ken creamer was the next-door neighbor. that retired naval commander, randall howes. ken is kind of just babbling, making noise or whatever and saying, we need help, we need help now. remember, howes told us he saw something in the garage that jumped out at him much later. a detail about to assume a huge importance. as howes stood there near anna s body, he testified, he was scanning the room looking for that crossbow. on the far side of the refrigerator there was a cardboard box, and sitting on top of the cardboard box was the crossbow. i could see the front of it. mr. howes, i d like you to take a very careful look at that picture. you see a blue paper bag in front of the refrigerator in that picture, sir? yes, i
any doubt. he told the truth. still, creamer said the crossbow went off inside a bag. maybe that made it an accident after all. we had the bag and we had the weapon, and we were trying to figure out desperately how could this weapon be in the bag and have done what it did. and none of the positions this bag was in made any sense whatsoever with the weapon inside of it. it just didn t make sense. we couldn t find we couldn t figure it out. we couldn t find a good exit hole. there was no rip in it. there was no hole for the arrow. it didn t make sense. so if it couldn t have been an accident the second time, what about the first? this sounds like that to me already he s already planning something. so now jury members realize they had formed some strong opinions about mr. creamer. i just don t put any stock in anything he says. you know, i just don t don t trust the guy. and once they decided that about ken creamer, members of the jury began to look at the marr