2000, when we first spoke to him about beverly s case. i do have sympathy for beverly monroe. there are a lot of people that really thought she deserved a medal for having killed him. the state of virginia appealed the federal court s ruling and lost. sending the case back to the local prosecutor to decide if beverly monroe would face another murder trial. you know, clearing my name is a huge part of this. a year after the appeal, the prosecutor in powhatan county announced he would not retry beverly monroe for the murder of roger burde. this is a case without a crime. i think the only crime is what s been done to my family. and to roger. the prosecutor said he did not pursue a retrial largely because, after 11 years of litigation, the victim s family wanted to move on. he also noted that beverly
what investigator riley did was cause her to think the truth as she knew it was not the truth. this was a woman who was not in her right mind. but beverly s attorneys told the jury her only crime had been to love a complicated man. did you kill roger burde? of course not. this isn t a case in which you were terribly jealous about another woman who was going to have his child and push you out? that motive wasn t true. there wasn t anything to lose emotionally that i hadn t already lost with roger, and that was trust. and you weren t so angry at him for violating that trust that you killed him. sara, you know, at trial we proved, we proved that i couldn t have been there. beverly produced a receipt stamped 10:40 p.m. but the state medical examiner testified that roger could have been killed as late as 3:00 a.m. at the end of the seven-day
he didn t want a baby. he didn t want a child. he wanted that love and that respect. that s why i think that, when roger learned that she really was pregnant, that that reality hit him. besides beverly s attorneys argued, even if roger had been murdered, there were a host of others more likely to kill him than his understanding girlfriend. they described the real roger burde as a ruthless, immoral provocateur. who thrived on turmoil and lies, and delighted in bizarre practices, including his worship of an obscure nigerian deity, eshu, the god of chaos. they portrayed this would be country squire as a low class lothario and an all too tempting target. there s a whole list of enemies, and any one of them could have pulled the trigger. could roger s art dealings made him vulnerable to some unknown killer? it turns out the value of some of his supposedly priceless
this was a woman who was not in her right mind. but beverly s attorneys told the jury her only crime had been to love a complicated man. did you kill roger burde? of course not. this isn t a case in which you were terribly jealous about another woman who was going to have his child and push you out? that motive wasn t true. there wasn t anything to lose emotionally that i hadn t already lost with roger, and that was trust. and you weren t so angry at him for violating that trust that you killed him. sara, you know, at trial we proved, we proved that i couldn t have been there. beverly produced a receipt stamped 10:40 p.m. but the state medical examiner testified that roger could have been killed as late as 3:00 a.m. at the end of the seven-day trial, prosecutors told the jury this was a case of hell hath no fury. a woman scorned killing her lover in a jealous rage. but defense attorneys said the
trial, prosecutors told the jury this was a case of hell hath no fury. a woman scorned killing her lover in a jealous rage. but defense attorneys said the state had nothing more than beverly s vague statements which proved nothing at all. at most, what they elicited from beverly was a statement that she might have been present and asleep when roger killed himself and suppressed any memory of it. as the jury filed out, reporter arthur hodges says the whispers began again. and some in the courtroom thought the defense had done too good a job of vilifying roger burde. a lot of the dirt they dug up for roger ended up tainting beverly herself. so it made him seem like the kind of person that somebody would murder? right. because she stuck with him. it wasn t like a year or six months. 13 years. the packed courtroom was left to wonder who would the jury believe? it took just two hours for the jury to reach its decision. jurors found beverly monroe guilty of first degree murder. b