i started a bunco group about eight years ago. what s bunco? bunco is like a dice game. it s where a bunch of women get together and you talk stuff about the husbands and stuff, you know? that s how kim heard the story. from anna herself. the first incident was purely an accident, which happened when her son, not her husband, handed her the crossbow. she didn t grab it quick enough, and the bow hit and went off. so she blamed herself and it wasn t her son s fault? no, no. absolutely not. i can t even imagine a child thinking they almost hurt their mama, and then they did. most of anna s stories were happy back then, like the one about their wedding. kenny had a way of doing things with flare. when he and anna got married he put on a giant fairy tale event and actually rented jackie onassis yacht for the reception. she never had anything to say negative about kenny. i always thought they had a perfect marriage. but you know and i know that
station. you can take it to the police station and you can just drop it off there. and he said he started to laugh. could such a precise memory 2 1/2 years later be trusted completely? that would become an issue. still, two shootings less than three months apart. perhaps insurance was the motive, said the prosecution. the creamers kept policies for heart attacks, for cancer, even for their dog, about $1 million in all. enough for murder? but motive wasn t at the heart of the prosecution s case. rather it was two witnesses who claimed they had evidence to show it couldn t have been an accident. here was the first. a man named j.j. mason, a firearms expert who said he tried to make that weapon fire by accident. hit it with a mallet a couple dozen times, and during the course of my examination of this crossbow i found no reason why it would fire without pulling the trigger. in other words, the arrow that went through anna creamer must have been fired on purpose.
me. come on, it was an accident. end of conversation, and he was released. they bought the crossbow together for recreation anna told them, and both she and ken had tried it out, but after that close call, they were getting rid of it. he was giving it to his wife to give to one of the other teachers she worked with and, you know, get rid of it. but, of course, they couldn t have any idea back then what would soon happen to that crossbow, and their good friends, the creamers, especially, said their friends, when they thought about what lovely people the creamers were. what a loving couple. he was a good father and husband. he took his son to scuba diving lessons, to dance lessons. he treated his wife with the utmost respect. never raised his voice, never used profanity. just a nice guy. he was a well-rounded nice man,
paper, the far side of the refrigerator. that s what howes remembered. the rest of us might have missed it. here s what else he saw. he was beside himself. he was very, very, very upset, agitated, and i ll say this. my impression was if you were standing on the edge of hell, when i walked in and i saw her laying down with the arrow in her back, it was my first impression was, it was a dead kill shot, because it looked like it went right through the heart. if it wasn t, it was very, very close, but it was dead on. i mean, 90 degrees, straight in. that s what you told the police? that s what i told the police. so if it had gone off by accident, it would have had to have hit that fridge, somehow hit at such an angle that the arrow that s right. in a strange coincidence, came out perfectly, but it would have been
ahshin farashahi replied how many times after an accident that you ve said to yourself or someone had said, oh, my god. i can t believe i did that. that s the essence of an accident. and just because it s an accident, that it s unlikely, that it s a freak accident does not mean that it s murder. to the jury the choice seemed relatively straightforward. i don t think anybody on the jury really wanted to say this man did it. of course, for the jury, and these members of the jury that gathered to talk about it, there were a number of questions to consider. as they talked in that jury room, they struggled to figure out how an accident might have played out. his statement that he threw this christmas bag, unbeknownst with the weapon in it, and it discharged. where did it hit the refrigerator, for example?