The Scene Nobody Finished

Daniel Akers came home a little after midnight on December 22, 2019, with a McDonald's bag in one hand and his keys in the other. Within minutes he was on his back on the floor of a basement playroom with a bullet in his brain, and his wife was screaming into a phone. One gunshot. One gun. Two people in the room. And now, almost seven years later, two stories about whose hand was on that gun when it fired.

Lacy Boles says Dan was holding a small .22 revolver to his own face, that she lunged for his arm to stop him, and that it went off in the struggle. The State of Georgia says she followed him down the stairs and shot him through the nose, then built a scene around his body to make it look like he did it himself. That is the whole trial. Every witness the State calls either puts the gun in Dan's hand or puts it in hers.

After two days of testimony in a Paulding County courtroom, the jury has heard from six people who were inside that house that night or worked it in the hours after. Four deputies. One paramedic. One crime scene technician. And the detective who led the investigation, who was still on the stand when court ended Thursday. What those witnesses told the jury, more than anything else, is what nobody did. Nobody photographed the scene before people walked through it. Nobody kept Lacy's clothes. Nobody photographed her hands. Nobody tested her for gunshot residue. Nobody swabbed the blood in the sink. Nobody collected the McDonald's bag with the bloody handprint on it. Nobody, as far as this jury has heard, tested the trigger for whose DNA is on it.

So here is the question I came out of these two days with, and it is the question this whole article is built around. The State is asking twelve people to find that this scene was staged. How do you prove a staged scene when the people who worked it never finished working it?

Two openings, one basement

Prosecutor Jason Treadway opened Wednesday morning, Day 1, and he did not start with the gunshot. He started with the marriage. He borrowed the defense's own words from jury selection: a roller coaster relationship, two people who loved hard and fought hard. He reached for a famous couple to make the jury feel it, and the couple he reached for was Bonnie and Clyde.

He barely got the names out before Brian Steel was on his feet. The judge sent the jury out not five minutes into the trial. Steel's point was simple: Bonnie and Clyde were outlaws who ran crime sprees across the country, nothing in the evidence would ever bring them into this case, and it was a terrible picture to hang on a woman on trial for murder. The prosecutor said he was dropping them anyway and swapping in Sid and Nancy, the punk rock couple whose volatile love ended with Nancy stabbed to death in a hotel room in 1978. Judge Dean Bucci overruled the objection and gave Steel a continuing one.

Then came the fight that mattered. The prosecutor told the judge he planned to preview the defense's expert witnesses for the jury by name and tell them what he expected those experts to say. Steel came back with a 2003 Georgia appeals decision: an opening statement is an outline of what that side expects to prove, and a prosecutor's opening is limited to the State's own evidence. The prosecutor pushed back hard. He said the defense had served notice of six very highly paid experts, that you do not pay twenty thousand dollars for witnesses like that and not call them, and that if he previewed them and they never showed, the risk was his. Judge Bucci read the decision himself and sustained the objection. The State would open on its own evidence only.

I think the judge got that one right, and I covered why in a commentary.

COMMENTARY · DAY 1 Steel Stopped the State From Attacking Defense Experts in Its Opening

The reason it matters is the burden. The defense in a criminal case does not have to prove anything. It does not have to call a single witness. A prosecutor who stands up on the first morning and starts knocking down defense experts before the jury has heard one word of evidence is telling the jury, without saying it, that the defense owes them an answer. It does not. The State does. And for the rest of Day 1, the State had to carry its opening on what it could promise to prove itself.

What it promised was an ambush. Here is the State's story as the prosecutor told it. That Saturday was bad. There was a fight over a pet pig Dan had bought for one of the kids and money they did not have, a four-hour trip to the store with their six-year-old son, a fight that Lacy later told police turned physical. Her father came by with McDonald's for the grandkids and Dan didn't like it. Dan left, ended up at a bar, ran into an old friend, the same happy-go-lucky Dan, she would say, showing off pictures of his kids playing baseball. He stopped at McDonald's on the way home and got a combo meal. He was home by about 12:23 or 12:30.

And the first thing he met when he opened his own front door, the prosecutor said, was a trap. A Swiffer mop leaned against the inside of the door so it would fall when he came in and tell her he was home. The State put the time the mop fell at 12:25. Dan went downstairs to the basement with the McDonald's in his right hand and his keys in his left. She heard the mop and followed him down. He turned to face her, and she shot him once, through the right nostril, with a .22 revolver her father had given her. "Ambush," the prosecutor called it.

Then the State laid out the evidence it says proves it, and the prosecutor did it with a prop: a Jenga tower. Her story was the tower when it was first built, solid, because the deputies believed her and worked the scene as a self-inflicted death. Then the GBI medical examiner, Dr. Keith Lehman, found no soot and no stippling around the wound, the burnt and unburnt powder a gun leaves on skin at close range. A man who puts a gun to his own nose, the State says, should have one or the other. Dr. Lehman ruled the death a homicide. And then the blocks started coming out.

Block one: she told a detective Dan was right-handed, and the gun was lying by his left hand. Half an hour later in the same interview, she said he could use both hands. Block two: the deputies smelled fresh French fries and saw a cup knocked over with the ice not yet melted, which the State says means Dan was shot within seconds of walking in. Block three: a holster she said she found on the floor and locked in the gun safe, though Dan wore sweatpants with no belt. Block four: watery blood in her bathroom sink, though she said she never washed her hands at the house. And the safe and the holster, sprayed with Bluestar months later, showed no blood at all.

CASE STORY PT 1 · DAY 1 State Opens Staged Death Trial Saying Lacy Boles Set a Mop Trap for Daniel Akers

He finished on the gun. Dan's voice would speak to them, he said, through a pistol "conveniently or not so conveniently put by the man's left hand." Dan, he told the jury, is saying he did not do this.

Brian Steel answered with an opening that was, to me, as strong a defense opening as I have heard in some time. His first words turned the State's last ones around. Every day since that Sunday, he said, Lacy Boles has been tormented by the picture of her husband taking his life right in front of her.

Steel's version of the same night: Dan was not himself. He had been pulling away for days. He left without a word around 9:30 and Lacy texted him things she never thought anyone would read. Don't come home. I'm getting a lawyer. You won't see your kids. In Steel's telling the mop was a doorbell for a wife who had told her husband not to come home, knew he had a key, and wanted to hear him if he did, because she wanted to talk. Lacy came down the stairs behind him with nothing in her hands, looked left into the playroom, and saw Dan holding a small revolver in his left hand pointed at his open mouth, saying something like you can't help me, no one can help me. She screamed and lunged for his arm. He stepped back. The gun turned, and it went off.

Then Steel did something I think the jury will remember. He turned the State's best block into a question. If Lacy staged that scene, why would she put the gun by his left hand and then tell the police her husband was right-handed? A woman building a story does not hand the detectives the one fact that breaks it.

And he went after what was never done. No body cameras in Paulding County in 2019, so nobody knows what the first responders touched. Nobody photographed Dan before the paramedics reached him. Nobody photographed Lacy's hands. Nobody tested her for gunshot residue, though by her own account she was right there when the gun fired. Nobody kept her clothes, which Steel said would have shown she fell on top of her bleeding husband exactly as she says. And the gun was preserved, he said, but nobody tested the trigger and the hammer for Dan's DNA. If Dan never touched that gun, his DNA should not be on it. That test, Steel told the jury, would have told them who held the gun.

CASE STORY PT 2 · DAY 1 Brian Steel Tells Staged Death Trial Jury Lacy Boles Tried to Stop Daniel Akers

He took on the medical examiner too. Steel said the doctor was given bad information by the investigators: that Dan had just been promoted, that he had bought his kid a pig and the pig's food, that he was a happy man. Steel told the jury none of it held up. Dan was about to be laid off, he returned the pig food, he was turned down twice that evening trying to take forty dollars out of the bank, and he was on felony probation with years left on it and believed he was facing prison. Steel also told the jury there is an abrasion at the edge of Dan's right nostril that the defense says matches the round end of the revolver's cylinder rod, pressed against his nose when it fired. The jury has not heard Dr. Lehman yet. When it does, that abrasion is going to be the fight.

The call, and the minutes before it

The first evidence the jury heard after lunch on Day 1 was the 911 call. The prosecutor had told them to listen hard and ask whether the emotion was genuine or part of the plan. Steel told them that if they thought it was acting, that was their decision.

HOT CLIP · DAY 1 Staged Death Trial Jury Hears Wife Lacy Boles' Frantic 911 Call Over Husband Daniel Akers

It is hard to listen to. She is screaming and sobbing, and the dispatcher keeps telling her she can't understand her. She gives her name, where she is, the children and their ages, the two little ones just woken up beside her. Asked whether she wants to do CPR, she says no. Asked whether she can go unlock the door and turn on the porch light for the deputies, she says she can. You can decide for yourself what you hear in it. I'll tell you what I didn't hear in two days of testimony: anybody explaining the clock.

Steel told the jury the call came in at 12:44. The scene log, which the jury saw later that afternoon, was opened at 12:45, and the first deputy signed in at 12:52. That all fits. But go back to the State's opening. The prosecutor told the jury Dan was home around 12:23 and the mop fell at 12:25, and that he was shot within seconds of walking downstairs. If both of those times are right, there are nineteen minutes between the shot and the call. A woman who ambushed her husband and then waited nineteen minutes to pick up the phone is a different case from the one the prosecutor described. Maybe the State's phone analyst closes that gap. Maybe 12:25 is a number from an opening the evidence won't hold. Either way, the State owes this jury an answer, and I said so in my reflection on Day 1.

REFLECTION · DAY 1 Staged Death Trial Day 1: Four Deputies, a Gun Nobody Can Place and 19 Missing Minutes

The first deputies, and a scene nobody recorded

The State's first live witness was Captain Brent Miller, who was a night shift patrol sergeant in 2019 and the first officer through the door. He remembered two things best from that night: the man on the floor, plainly dead, and the smell of McDonald's. He remembered a cup with ice still in it.

Through Miller the State put about 160 photographs of the house into evidence, and walked the jury down the stairs to Dan's body. A McDonald's bag beside him. A cup lid by his left foot. A ball cap and keys near his left shoulder. And by his left hand, the gun. The last photograph the State showed him was a close-up of that hand, with the gun lying right beside it.

Then Steel stood up, wished the captain well with the surgery he has coming next week for a nerve condition in his face, thanked him for his service, and took the scene apart one quiet question at a time.

Miller had a cell phone that could record video. He did not use it. He had a patrol car with a dash camera that records sound. He did not recall whether it was on, and he has never heard any recording from it. Lacy was at the door, between the two porch lights she had been told to turn on, within arm's reach when he walked in. He did not ask her to preserve her clothes, though he agreed clothing can have value in a death investigation. He did not remember whether she came down to the basement with him. He did not remember whether he checked Dan's pulse. If he had, he agreed, it could have been at the wrist. And the paramedics came right after him, and touching the body is what paramedics do. So the close-up of the left hand and the gun, the photograph the State ended on, was taken after the paramedics had been at Dan.

Steel put it to him directly: without a camera, we don't really know where his hand or the gun was when you first walked in.

"Gun was never moved," Miller said.

Steel didn't fight him on it. He asked whether somebody could have kicked it or touched it by accident in a room that busy. And the captain gave ground. He did not know that the gun was ever touched, he said, but the hand or the arm, maybe. He did not know. That's my point, Steel said. We don't remember. Correct, the captain said.

CASE STORY PT 3 · DAY 1 First Deputy Can't Say If He Checked Daniel Akers' Pulse in Lacy Boles' Staged Death Trial

The cup got the same treatment. Was it already tipped over when he got there, or upright? He did not remember. Did he see any dent or crush on it, the kind of mark a full drink knocked out of a man's hand might take? No. Had anyone ever filled a cup like that, put the lid on, and dropped it on that carpet to see what it does? Not that he knew.

That cup is one of the State's blocks. The State says ice still in a spilled cup means the shot came seconds after Dan walked in. The defense says a cup set down and knocked over later by any of the people walking through that room would look the same. Two days in, nobody has tested either one.

The State got some of it back with its second witness. Brett Whitsitt was the deputy in the second car, with a trainee riding along on what Whitsitt believed was the trainee's very first night. Whitsitt said the cup did not look set down. It looked like it fell, and the impact threw ice out of it. The food smelled fresh, warm, not stale, though on cross he agreed he could not tell by smell whether it had just been bought or reheated. And when the prosecutor asked about Dan's hands, Whitsitt said he saw a pistol near the body that appeared to have blood on it, and he did not notice any blood on Dan's hands.

CASE STORY PT 4 · DAY 1 Deputy Saw Blood on the Gun but Not on Daniel Akers' Hands in Lacy Boles' Staged Death Trial

That is the State's strongest point after two days, and I want to be fair to it. Blood on the gun, and no blood on the hand that is supposed to have been holding it. If Dan fired that gun into his own face, the State will argue, his left hand should be bloody. It isn't, in the photographs. The gun is. That is a real point, and the jury is going to come back to it.

The third deputy, Major David Pace, was the night shift captain in 2019. His memory of the basement was thin. He did not recall the McDonald's bag. He did not recall the gun by the left hand. He was down there only a few minutes. What he did give the jury was the scene log, the sheet a deputy at the door keeps of everyone who goes in and out, and it is the first hard clock in this trial. Opened at 12:45. Closed at 4:33. Sergeant Miller in at 12:52. Pace's own line signed but with no time, which he took the blame for.

On cross, the defense co-counsel put Pace's own report in front of him. Pace had told the jury he wrote it before he got off shift that morning. The report is dated March 5, 2020. That happens to be the date of Lacy's last recorded interview with detectives, more than two months after the death. Pace said he honestly did not know why. Maybe a typo.

Then the defense read the log line by line to suggest the ambulance crew had come and gone before Whitsitt even arrived. On redirect the prosecutor pointed out that the line marked Metro is the ambulance company and the line marked Fire is the paramedics who did the work, there from 1:05 to 1:38. On the log, the prosecutor had a point. But here is how he made it, in front of the jury, about the defense lawyer who had just sat down: everything that lawyer said was wrong, "or what he was fed by Mr. Steel is wrong."

Nobody objected. I would have. A prosecutor telling twelve jurors that a defense lawyer is being fed bad information by the lead defense lawyer proves nothing about the case, and it takes a shot at the man those same jurors are going to have to listen to in closing. The point about the log could have been made without it. I expected the judge to say something. He didn't.

The deputies' full testimony is up for anyone who wants to hear it whole.

FULL TESTIMONY · DAY 1 Brent Miller: Full Testimony, the First Deputy at the Staged Death Trial Scene FULL TESTIMONY · DAY 1 Brett Whitsitt: Full Testimony, Staged Death Trial Deputy Says the Food Was Still Warm FULL TESTIMONY · DAY 1 David Pace: Full Testimony, the Captain Who Started the Staged Death Trial Scene Log

"A lot of blood on it, laying in his hand"

The last witness on Day 1 was the trainee, Deputy John Curtis Beall, on his very first night in a patrol car. He told the jury he saw blood on the inside of the front doorknob, blood on the stair railing, a McDonald's bag with a bloody handprint on it, and a gun covered in blood. He remembers the doorknob as if it were yesterday, because he spent the rest of the night at the front door telling people to stay clear of it.

On cross, the defense asked whether Beall knew that the dispatcher had told Lacy to go unlock that front door, and that she had said she had blood on her hands. He had not known that. So if she had blood on her hands and opened the door, the defense asked, that is probably how it got there? Yes, sir.

Then the defense read Beall's own report back to him. It is dated December 22, 2019, the same night, and it is signed by a supervisor. It says the cup was knocked over by Dan's left leg. It says the bag looked like it had a bloody handprint on it. And the last sentence of the third paragraph says there was a gun that had "a lot of blood on it, laying in his hand."

In his hand. That is the description written closest in time to that night, by a deputy who said he was being careful not to make a mistake on his first scene.

The prosecutor tried to take it back on redirect. He put up the crime scene photograph of the gun, circled a smear on the bottom of the grip, and asked whether "a lot" meant that little smudge. Beall said he wanted to get it right, and that he used "a lot" against the lack of blood on the hand right beside it. There was blood on the gun, he said, and he saw none on the hand around it.

CASE STORY PT 5 · DAY 1 Rookie Deputy's Blood-Covered Gun Report Meets the Photo in Lacy Boles' Staged Death Trial

So the State got its clean hand. But look at what it cost. The State has now put three descriptions of where that gun was in front of this jury. The trainee's same-night report: in his hand. The crime scene photographs, taken hours later: beside the hand. And on Day 2, as you'll see, the lead detective's: on the inside of the left arm. The State's whole theory says the gun was placed. Its own witnesses can't agree on where it was.

FULL TESTIMONY · DAY 1 John Curtis Beall: Full Testimony, the Rookie Deputy's First Night at the Staged Death Trial Scene

The soot question that drives the medical examiner's ruling got its own moment in the State's opening, and it is worth hearing in the prosecutor's words before Dr. Lehman takes the stand.

CLIP · DAY 1 Prosecutor Tells Staged Death Trial Jury Daniel Akers' Wound Had No Soot or Stippling

The paramedic who heard one word

Day 2 opened Thursday with Michael Logan, who was a paramedic with Metro Atlanta Ambulance in 2019. On the way to the house, dispatch told his crew it was a possible self-inflicted gunshot and to wait outside the neighborhood. While they waited, the radio said two things at once: it was safe to come in, and the patient was dead on arrival.

So Logan walked into a house where, as far as he knew, the people already there had decided Dan could not be saved. He saw Dan on his back, a great deal of blood around his head, some of it already thickened. His protocol said no CPR for a wound like that, and he did none. He did not touch the gun, did not move the bag, did not kick the cup. And he noticed a smell down there besides blood: alcohol.

Upstairs, he found Lacy in the living room and saw blood on her clothes, her hands and her arms. Smeared, dried blood, better seen later under the ambulance lights. She was crying and inconsolable. He called it a panic attack.

On cross, the jury learned that Logan wrote a patient care report that night, finished in the ambulance bay, and that nobody had ever asked him for it. Not the prosecution, not anyone. Nobody asked her about her clothes in front of him. And the only thing she said to him on the ride to the hospital, apart from answering his medical questions, was one word. Why. She kept looking him in the eyes and saying why.

CASE STORY PT 6 · DAY 2 Paramedic Says Lacy Boles Kept Asking Why as Staged Death Trial Shows a Bloody Handprint

The prosecutor asked whether she ever said why did he do it. Logan didn't remember that. Did she ever say why have I done this? No. Just why. The defense asked one question back: if she had said why did I do this, that would be in your report, wouldn't it? Correct.

I keep coming back to that word. The State will tell the jury it is a woman who knows what she did. The defense will tell them it is a wife who just watched her husband die and does not understand it. The word itself doesn't choose. What I notice is that the man who heard it wrote a report that night, and the investigation never asked to read it.

FULL TESTIMONY · DAY 2 · PUBLIC FRI 2:00 PM ET Michael Logan: Full Testimony, the Staged Death Trial Paramedic Who Rode With Lacy Boles

The technician who waited outside

Then came the witness the whole gun question turns on. Amanda Carter was the Paulding County crime scene technician that night. Every photograph this jury has looked at since Day 1 is hers.

And the first thing she gave the jury was a clock. When she got to the house, she asked whether they had consent to search or a warrant. They did not. So she waited at her van out front while the detective went to the hospital to get Lacy's consent. Only after that did she go in, and only then did she take her first photograph. The pictures of the basement, the gun among them, were taken hours after Deputy Beall stood at that door and wrote that the gun was in Dan's hand.

Carter was right to wait. Waiting for consent or a warrant is everyone's right. Nobody gets to search your home without one or the other. But it means the scene the jury is looking at in those photographs is the scene as it stood after deputies, paramedics, a captain, a sergeant, a family member, and a trainee had all been through that house. When the State asks the jury to read the position of a gun and a cup in a photograph as proof of staging, it is asking them to read a scene that was hours and a lot of footsteps old when it was recorded.

Carter told the jury the cup she photographed had no ice in it. None. Just liquid around it. The trainee remembered ice still in the cup at about one in the morning. By the time Carter got down those stairs, it had melted. Ice the State says proves timing was never photographed by anyone.

On direct, the prosecutor asked her the question the defense would have asked, and got the answer himself. Did she collect the McDonald's bag, the one with the bloody handprint on the bottom and finger marks on the carpet beside it? No. She photographed it and left it, because it fit what the detective had already told her: that Lacy had been over Dan and had blood on her. And then she said it plainly. In hindsight, she wishes she had collected the bag. And the cup too.

CLIP · DAY 2 · PUBLIC FRI 12:00 PM ET Crime Scene Tech Says Someone With Blood on Them Touched the McDonald's Bag in Staged Death Trial

She took the State upstairs to Lacy's bedroom, to a smear of what looked like blood by the window where Lacy's phone had been, and then into the master bathroom off that bedroom, to the sink. She saw what looked like leftover blood in it and photographed it. She ran no test that night to say whether it was blood at all, let alone whose. That is the sink the State promised the jury in its opening.

She opened the gun box in front of the jury. A High Standard Sentinel revolver. Nine chambers. Eight live rounds and one spent casing when she opened the cylinder that night. One shot fired from a full gun.

And then the last thing on direct. She had photographed a trash can in the upstairs living room, because she was told Lacy had used it to vomit before Carter arrived. Carter never saw it. The prosecutor asked whether she had seen that at other scenes. She said it was the first time.

What was never collected

Brian Steel's cross of Amanda Carter lasted most of the day, and it is the reason I named this article what I named it. He did not attack her. He did the opposite. He spent the first part of it building the standard she would be measured against, with her agreeing at every step: the job is to gather the truth for everyone, you observe and then preserve, you photograph, you collect the thing itself, you swab it and send it to someone who can say what it is. DNA, fingerprints, residue. We don't work on hunches, he said. Where there is more than one way to read something, you say so.

Then he walked her through everything that was not done, and she agreed to all of it.

The gun was preserved, and it could have been tested for whose DNA is on the trigger. Whose call was that? Not hers. The lead detective's. The smooth parts of the gun could have been checked for fingerprints. Not her call either. The bag could have been tested for whose blood made that handprint. It wasn't. And here is the answer that explains the whole morning: she said there was never any question, on the details the investigation gave her, about whose blood was anywhere in that house or how it got there. The only person bleeding was Dan, so on that account all of it was his, carried by somebody. And none of it, so far as this witness knows, was tested to be sure.

CASE STORY PT 7 · DAY 2 Crime Scene Tech Agrees Lacy Boles' Clothes Should Have Been Collected in Staged Death Trial

Nobody asked Carter to photograph Lacy. Not her face, not her hair, not her hands, not her arms, not her legs or feet. Nobody asked her to collect Lacy's clothes. She took great care with Dan, Steel pointed out. She made the coroner wait and let nobody move him until she had photographed him exactly as he lay, because the blood on his clothes and his face and his hair tells a story. If Lacy pressed on his chest the way she says, there might be her handprint on his shirt, just like the one on the bag. Yes, Carter said. That is why you photograph so carefully.

CLIP · DAY 2 · PUBLIC FRI 4:00 PM ET Crime Scene Tech Was Never Asked to Photograph Lacy Boles' Face or Hands in Staged Death Trial

So whose job was it to get photographs of Lacy Boles as she looked in that house? Usually the lead detective's, Carter said. Officers had phones that could photograph and film. Whose job was it to keep her clothes? The lead detective, perhaps, or a deputy if a supervisor thought it right. Steel asked whether somebody should have done it. "Yes, sir, no doubt about it," she said. And when he said that otherwise we're guessing, and we don't guess in courtrooms, she agreed.

Then the residue. Carter ran a gunshot residue kit on Dan's hands that night, by the kit's own directions. She was never asked to do the same for Lacy. On redirect, the prosecutor had her explain she could not have, because Lacy was already gone to the hospital by the time Carter went in. Fair enough. But Steel stood back up and asked the obvious question: nothing stops an officer from running a residue kit on someone before she leaves, does it? Nothing, Carter said, unless they don't know how. Nor from photographing her, at the house, in the ambulance if a deputy rode along, or at the hospital where officers were with her. It could be done, she said, by someone with the training.

CASE STORY PT 8 · DAY 2 Crime Scene Tech Says Nothing Stopped a Gunshot Residue Test on Boles in Staged Death Trial

The prosecutor's last question to her was whether washing hands with hospital soap would make a positive residue test less likely. It could reduce a positive result, she said, but that is a question for a scientist.

CLIP · DAY 2 · PUBLIC FRI 11:00 AM ET Crime Scene Tech Says Hospital Handwashing Could Cut Gunshot Residue in Boles' Staged Death Trial

Think about what that exchange does. The State's opening told the jury that Lacy scrubbed her hands at the hospital and threw her clothes away, and that whatever her hands and clothes could have shown, nobody will ever know. The State wants that to sound like a woman destroying evidence. But the evidence was hers to destroy only because the investigation never took it. A sergeant saw blood on her hands at the scene. A paramedic saw blood on her hands and her arms in the ambulance. Officers were at the house with her, and an officer came to the hospital to get her signature on a consent form. At no point did anyone photograph those hands or test them. Nobody ever asked for the clothes.

Then there is the sink. Steel walked Carter through it the way she photographed it, wide, then closer, then closer still, down to the spots in the basin. She did not swab it. Anyone with that blood on them who washed it off would leave it in the sink, Steel said, including someone who had never touched Dan, if Lacy's bloody hands had touched them. Her mother was in that house. Her children were in that house. Carter didn't know whether any of them used that sink. Nobody tested it to find out whose blood, or whether it was blood.

CLIP · DAY 2 · PUBLIC SAT 10:00 AM ET Crime Scene Tech Saw No EMT Gear Left Around Daniel Akers in Lacy Boles' Staged Death Trial

And the gun. Steel borrowed gloves, picked up the revolver, swung the cylinder open, and showed the jury the rod under the barrel. When the cylinder is closed, the round end of that rod sits almost level with the muzzle. He had Carter carry it along the jury rail so each juror could see it. Then he pointed it at himself, safe and open, with his left hand, and asked: if a man held a gun like this toward his own face, and someone grabbed for it, and he went over backwards with the gun turned, that rod would strike about here, at his nose? She couldn't say for certain. Possibly. Had anyone ever shown her the autopsy photographs of the abrasion on Dan's right nostril? No. Had anyone asked her about it? No.

Let me be careful here, because this is where the trial is going to be fought. The defense's rod theory is not evidence yet. Carter is not a firearms expert and she said so. The medical examiner hasn't testified. But the rod, the nostril, the trigger and the hammer are all physical things that existed in 2019 and still exist, and the questions they could answer were not asked. That is the pattern of these two days. Every time the State points to a piece of the scene as proof of staging, the defense points to a test that would have settled it and was never run.

The trash can and the objection

There was one exchange in Carter's cross that tells you a lot about how this trial is being tried.

The State had closed its direct by having Carter say that, in her years, she had never seen a victim vomit at a scene like this. Notice what that does. Carter never saw Lacy vomit. She photographed a trash can and was told what it was for. The prosecutor did not say what it meant. He sat down and let the jury finish the sentence. People in real shock don't do that, so maybe she was sick over something else.

Steel asked what the State would not. Carter agreed that trauma affects people mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically, and that vomiting can be all of those at once. Then he asked: when the prosecutor had you say you'd never seen somebody vomit after a traumatic situation, are you saying that's some inference of guilt?

"I'm only saying that it's something that I haven't seen," she said.

The witness had already answered. The State objected anyway, and the jury and the witness were sent out. With the room cleared, the prosecutor argued that a witness cannot comment on inferences of guilt or innocence, which belong to the jury. Steel answered that he was not asking her to decide anything. He was asking why the point was raised at all, and she was free to say it meant guilt, or innocence, or nothing.

No ruling was heard aloud. When the jury came back, Steel asked the question again and got the same answer. Then he put the whole defense to her in one question: had she ever come to a scene where a wife sees her husband about to take his own life, grabs for him, the gun goes off, he falls, and she falls on top of him trying to save him? She could not say she had. So the vomiting she had never seen came from a scene she had never seen either.

And then, on redirect that afternoon, the same State that said this witness could not comment on inferences of guilt asked her whether a wife who had decided to shoot her husband in the head would be upset, and whether someone who planned it and carried it out and saw what it did could want to vomit. Yes, sir, she said.

Count what the State did with one trash can. On direct, a vomiting wife is unusual. On objection, the witness can't say what that implies. On redirect, the witness agrees a guilty wife would vomit too. By the end of the day the State's own witness had told the jury that throwing up fits an innocent wife and a guilty one equally. A fact that fits both stories proves neither. In my view the vomiting is off the table, and the State took it off.

I'll give the State this: Judge Bucci heard that argument with the jury out, which was the right way to keep the argument itself from telling the jury what the State was implying. If he ruled, he ruled off the microphone. I would have liked to hear it. A ruling on the record is how an appeals court knows what happened, and it is how we know.

The detective on his first homicide

The last witness of Day 2 was the one every question Carter couldn't answer was pointing toward. Detective Thomas Ogden was the detective Carter waited on outside, the one who went to the hospital for consent, the one who told the crime scene technician that Dan had taken his own life.

The prosecutor took him through his career slowly, and where it led is the point. Ogden has been with Paulding County since 2015, almost all of it on patrol. He was a detective for about one year, starting in the spring of 2019. It was his first time doing detective work, and he had no added training for it. On the night of December 22, 2019, he had been a detective for seven or eight months. The prosecutor asked how many homicide cases he had worked when he got to that house. None, he said.

CASE STORY PT 9 · DAY 2 Detective on His First Homicide Says Lacy Boles Cried Without Tears in Staged Death Trial

He was doing a hard job, and I take no pleasure in pointing it out. The State chose to make it the frame. The State put its least experienced investigator's inexperience on the record itself, I think, because it knows the defense is going to lay every missed test at his feet. It is a fair thing to get out in front of. But it does not change the list. Every decision Carter said was not hers, the trigger, the prints, the bag, the clothes, the photographs of Lacy, the residue kit, was the lead detective's. And the lead detective that night had never worked a homicide.

Ogden said he pulled up as Lacy was being walked out of the house by the medics and put into the ambulance. The sign-in log has him inside at 1:33 a.m. and out at 2:16, when he left for the hospital, and back at 2:53. Downstairs, he saw so much blood on Dan's face he could not find a wound, and a silver revolver with a pearl grip lying on the inside of Dan's left arm. That is the third description of where that gun was.

At the hospital, Lacy gave him a brief account and kept breaking down. And for the first time in this trial, the jury heard her account of the shot from the man who took it that night. She heard Dan come in, followed him down to the basement, and he said something like "you can't save me," and then he shot himself.

HOT CLIP · DAY 2 Detective Says Lacy Boles Told Him Her Husband Said 'You Can't Save Me' in Staged Death Trial

Then Ogden said something the State plainly wanted the jury to hear. Before he left the house, Sergeant Miller told him Lacy had blood on her hands. At the hospital, her hands were clean. Washed. But the paramedic told the jury that morning he saw blood on her hands and arms in the ambulance. So whatever washing happened, happened at the hospital, which is exactly what Lacy herself told detectives, as the jury was about to hear. And it happened after an officer had been told at the scene that she had blood on her hands, with nobody photographing them in the hours between.

Ogden did not take a full statement at the hospital. He had no recording device, he said, and she was a grieving wife who had just lost her husband. So the next time anyone sat down with her was eight days later, December 30, in an interview room at the sheriff's office. The State played the whole recording for the jury.

On the tape, Lacy told the story of the day. The errand that ran three hours with their son, who came back quiet and not himself. The fight. Her phone taken. Driving to her father's car lot. Dan back in the kitchen with a new key, startling her. Her father arriving with chicken for the kids, and Dan saying we don't need your charity. Dan leaving at about a quarter past nine. She said she set the Swiffer against the door because he had a new key and had startled her once already, and she wanted to hear if he came in. She heard it fall. She looked over the railing and saw the back of his head going downstairs. She went down to ask where he had been. When she reached the bottom and looked left, he was standing in the playroom with the gun in his left hand, and then he was done.

Ogden asked which hand. Left. Was he left-handed? No. He was right-handed.

HOT CLIP · DAY 2 Lacy Boles Told Police Her Right-Handed Husband Had the Gun in His Left Hand in Staged Death Trial

She told him she grabbed Dan and tried CPR, went upstairs for her phone, called 911, and went back down when the dispatcher asked whether she could get the gun, and picked it up. She did not remember what she did with it. She felt like she threw it. Were her hands bloody? All over. Did she wash them at the house? Not once that she could remember. Her sister washed the blood off her hands at the hospital.

Had Dan ever threatened to take his own life? Not clear statements, she said, but yes, in the way people say things in an argument, and it went both ways. She never took it seriously. The last song he sent her, she said, she only listened to all the way through afterward, and almost felt he had been telling her something.

The gun? Hers. Her father gave it to her. It was kept in the safe in their bedroom closet, the same bedroom where her phone was.

Then, after a stretch of about fourteen minutes of video with Lacy alone in the room, Ogden came back with one more question. She had said they went to a shooting range. Which hand did Dan shoot with? Both, she said. Predominantly right, but he could use both hands for catching and throwing. Their son is the same way.

So here is the left-hand point, start to finish, out of her own mouth. She told the detective the gun was in Dan's left hand. She told him Dan was right-handed. Later in the same interview, she said he could use both. The State says that is a woman adjusting her story when she realized the problem. The defense says it is a woman who handed the detectives the one fact that hurts her before anybody asked for it, and then answered a question about a shooting range honestly. You can hear it both ways. What I'd point out is the order. She volunteered the left hand. Nobody walked her into it.

And then the moment the State had been building toward. The prosecutor asked Ogden whether anything struck him as unusual in the room with her. When she cried on December 30, Ogden said, there were no tears. At the hospital there had been so many she sometimes couldn't get a sentence out. A drastic difference, eight days after her husband died.

CLIP · DAY 2 · PUBLIC FRI 1:00 PM ET Detective Says Lacy Boles Cried With No Tears in Her Interview in Staged Death Trial

Nobody objected, and I think that testimony deserves more scrutiny than it got. A detective on his first homicide, who did not record his hospital conversation, telling a jury how much a grieving woman's eyes watered eight days after her husband's death, is opinion about grief dressed as observation. The jury has the tape. They can watch her face for themselves. That is the better evidence, and it is the evidence the State already played.

What the three counts need, and where they stand

Lacy Boles is charged with malice murder, felony murder and aggravated assault. She is presumed innocent of all three. Malice murder means the State has to prove she unlawfully caused Dan's death with malice, the intent to kill without legal excuse. Felony murder means she caused his death while committing a felony, here the aggravated assault. Aggravated assault means an assault with a deadly weapon, the gun. Read those three together and you see the same thing I do. Every one of them stands or falls on one fact: that Lacy fired that gun at Dan. None of them can be proven without it.

So where does that fact stand after two days? Here is my read, as one person watching the same evidence the jury is.

The State has a good point in the clean left hand beside a bloody gun. It has a real point in the left hand on a right-handed man, though the person who first told police about the left hand was Lacy. It has a death ruled a homicide by a medical examiner the jury hasn't heard from yet. It has a cup the deputies say looked like it fell, ice the technician never saw, a holster in a safe, and a sink with something in it nobody tested.

What it does not have yet, from any witness on the stand, is anything that puts the gun in Lacy's hand when it fired. No residue result from her. No DNA from the trigger. No prints from the grip. No photograph of her hands. No clothes. The State's case is a case about how the scene looks, and the scene was walked through for hours before anyone recorded how it looked. The deputy who wrote closest to the moment wrote that the gun was in Dan's hand.

I think, two days in, the State has not proven the one thing all three counts need, and the gaps that stand between it and that proof were left by its own investigation. That is my opinion and I could be wrong about where it ends up. The State has not rested. Dr. Lehman has not testified, and his autopsy is the foundation of the homicide ruling. The firearms evidence and the phone analyst are still to come. The friend from the bar and Dan's family haven't taken the stand. Any of that could change the picture. But the State told this jury in its opening that whatever Lacy's hands and clothes could have shown, nobody will ever know. After two days, the jury knows why nobody knows. Nobody asked.

Friday

Court sits today, Friday, Day 3, with Detective Ogden still on direct. With the jury out Thursday evening, the judge settled that the State's next exhibit, a 52-minute video of Lacy alone in the interview room on January 7, 2020, writing out her statement, will play in full. The State wanted to skip past the writing. Steel wanted the jury to see all of it, because, he said, she never stops writing. Then the detective reads her statement aloud. Then cross.

That cross is where the answer to this article's question has to come from. Carter said, over and over, that what to collect and what to test was the lead detective's call. Ogden is the lead detective. On Friday, the defense gets to ask him why.

If you missed either day and want every minute of the testimony with the breaks taken out, the No Breaks editions are here. Day 2 goes public this evening.

NO BREAKS · DAY 1 Staged Death Trial Day 1, No Breaks Edition: Openings and Four Deputies NO BREAKS · DAY 2 · PUBLIC FRI 7:00 PM ET Staged Death Trial Day 2, No Breaks Edition: Carter's Cross, Boles' Interview

Amanda Carter's full testimony, nearly four hours of it, goes public this afternoon. If you only watch one witness from these two days, make it hers.

FULL TESTIMONY · DAY 2 · PUBLIC FRI 5:00 PM ET Amanda Carter: Full Testimony, the Staged Death Trial Crime Scene Tech and What She Never Collected

Both days aired live and in full on our channel, and every Case Story part for this trial lives in one place: the Case Story Trial Podcast playlist.

LIVE BROADCAST · DAY 1 Staged Death Trial Day 1, Full Live Broadcast LIVE BROADCAST · DAY 2 Staged Death Trial Day 2, Full Live Broadcast CASE STORY TRIAL PODCAST Georgia v. Lacy Boles: Case Story Trial Podcast, Parts 1 to 9

We're live in court today. Tell me in the comments what you make of the clean hand and the bloody gun, and whether you think the State can close the gap its own investigation left.