DAY 1: July 21, 2025

It took from 9 am until 2:30 pm to select the jury. There were 80 potential jurors, and it took 5 1/2 hours to whittle this down to 12 jurors and 2 alternates. The trial then began and the Prosecution called 2 witnesses:

  1. The victim’s daughter, Hope Retter, who was 13 when her father died. She basically said “I don’t remember anything.” Of course she doesn’t, she was only 13, and 21 years have passed. Her testimony was meaningless.

  2. Our ex next-door neighbor, Jeffrie Morgan, who heard gunshots on the night of the murder, but who has changed his story half a dozen times, and it was painfully obvious within 60 seconds that this gentleman has some degree of intellectual disability. His testimony was meaningless.

Meanwhile, the prosecution told the defense that the prosecution IS NOT CALLING ANY OF THEIR KEY WITNESSES, including the detective who submitted the Probable Cause statement, the technician from the state crime lab who performed gunshot residue tests on my clothes, or my cousin Eric, whose unverified and unsubstantiated statements to law enforcement were the key to my arrest, according to Attorney General Eric Schmitt. This decision was probably the result of the lies, inconsistencies and contradictions in their stories which were revealed in the depositions we took from all three of these men, which reveal that the detective and my cousin Eric are not credible witnesses.

DAY 2: July 22, 2025

The first item today was listening to the 911 call I made in April 2004. I frankly think this might have been a mistake on the prosecution’s part, because I couldn’t stop crying on this recording. It would be a hard-hearted juror indeed who could listen to that and not believe I was in great distress at the time. I don’t know why they bothered to do this since I didn’t say anything incriminating. I was crying so hard I could barely speak at all.

Dr. Michael Graham, the forensic pathologist then testified. He’s a professor of forensic pathology at St. Louis University School of Medicine and has performed more than 10,000 autopsies, and he is a leader in his field. He was extremely professional. He said something very important…that based on the wounds he observed, Jim could have survived for up to 2 minutes after being shot, which means that where his body was found might NOT be where he was shot as he could possibly have walked for up to 2 minutes. His body was found right outside the garage, and yet the cops never once investigated inside the garage for evidence. They apparently never set foot in the garage and did not check inside it for ballistic or fingerprint or blood or DNA evidence.

Then they called Nick Todd, an ex-cop who was a deputy in 2004 and who interviewed me in my house on the evening of the murder … with no recording equipment, so he just wrote up a report afterwards and his report was inaccurate. Before that my lawyers submitted a Motion to Exclude Mr. Todd’s testimony on the grounds that in 2007 he was involved in a fight in a bar in which he and several other police officers beat someone up quite badly, and the Attorney General’s office took over the investigation and decided not to file charges against any of the them. The particular Asst. Attorney General who handled this was Mr. Kevin Zoellner, who is prosecuting me right now, therefore it could be assumed that Mr. Todd would be biased in favor of the Attorney General’s office and might say what he was told to say.

At this point the judge sent the jury out so she could listen to arguments by the defense and the prosecution, which lasted an hour and a half, and then the judge denied the motion. So the jury came back in and Mr. Todd was called to testify. It was very obvious that Mr. Todd, who is no longer a police officer because he was fired after that fistfight in the bar, does not remember ANYTHING from the time of Jim’s murder, and he had to constantly refer to his 21-yr-old report to answer questions, and he kept contradicting himself. It was also quite obvious that Mr. Todd was never trained as a detective and should never have been allowed to interrogate anyone. When it came time for cross examination, my lawyers ripped his testimony to shreds.

So far on Day 2 the jury has not heard one single word from anyone about any actual evidence against me. It’s all just bad policing and false assumptions made by the deputies. We have written documentation that as of January 2005 they had simply stopped investigating the murder altogether, and never did investigate it again until 2021 when they decided to arrest me, saying they had uncovered “new evidence”. However, they hadn’t uncovered any new evidence at all, so that was the Big Lie at the heart of this case.

DAY 3: July 23, 2025

Today the first witness called by the prosecution was Ms. Michelle Mick, who was once a detective but quit in 2007 to become a nurse. In response to cross examination she stated that:

  1. she did not know who was the lead detective on the case 21 years ago (apparently there wasn’t one?!?).

  2. She did not follow up one single lead she was given in 2004 as to other suspects, nor did she know if any other detective did so in 2004.

  3. She did not process the garage for evidence – not DNA, not fingerprints, not blood, not anything – and she had no idea if anyone else had done that (according to the Discovery, nobody ever did!).

The state then made everyone sit through FOUR HOURS of video recordings of the 2 interrogations Ms. Mick subjected me to in 2004, in which she lied to me repeatedly, alleging that the police had evidence incriminating me which they DID NOT HAVE, and never acquired at any time. She refused to believe my protestations of innocence, and dozens of times she kept insisting that I was guilty and should confess, even though she had absolutely no evidence whatsoever that incriminated me (this is standard police practice, witness the treatment of the Central Park 5).

The videos were of such poor audio quality that nobody could hear the vast majority of what I said, and so we were all given copies of a transcript. However, even the transcriptionist couldn’t catch most of what I said and so the transcript was full of lines saying “inaudible” and “incomprehensible”, at least several on every page. In addition, there were multiple places in the transcript where we could not hear what I said, but the transcript included false statements allegedly made by me that they simply made up “to fill in the gaps.”

Then my attorney cross-examined Ms. Mick and shredded her to bits. He really crushed her, and made it very clear to the jury that the entire investigation 21 years ago was grossly incompetent.

The next witness called by the prosecution was Mr. Evan T. Garrison, who was the state crime lab’s ballistic expert in 2004. He is now retired and owns his own ballistics consulting firm. He was extremely knowledgeable and professional. His conclusion was that he CANNOT CONFIRM that the bullets retrieved from Jim’s body WERE SHOT FROM MY FATHER’S GUN!! We were never informed of this during the Discovery phase.

And then the state rested their case. They had still not presented one shred of evidence to the jury indicating that I was the murderer. Not. One. Shred. They also did not present any kind of motive, because they couldn’t ever find one, because there wasn’t one. Tomorrow is closing statements. Defense is not calling any witnesses, because the ones we had lined up were all going to refute the lies told by police and my cousin Eric, but the state didn’t call those particular witnesses, so we can’t cross-examine them, and it is now too late to subpoena them.

DAY 4: July 22, 2024

Closing arguments. The prosecutor’s closing argument presented absolutely no evidence, only speculation. 10 jurors voted Not Guilty, 2 voted Guilty and refused to budge after 5 hours of deliberation, so the judge declared a mistrial. There will be a hearing in August to decide on the next trial date.

One of the jurors who voted “Guilty” told the attorneys that she was enraged by the way my attorney cross-examined the two police officers, because her daughter is a police officer, and this offended her. Now, the judge gives the jury instructions three times during a trial on the rules of evidence and how they must vote based on the evidence only, which must be “beyond a reasonable doubt”, and not vote based on their personal feelings. This woman ignored the instructions, and managed to convince one other undecided juror to vote Guilty with her. This other juror had made it pretty obvious during the jury selection and the trial that he didn’t want to be there and wanted the trial to end ASAP so he could get out of there.

A mistrial was declared, and a hearing date was set for August 28 to decide on the next steps. The Attorney General’s office could, and should, drop the charges at this point because it is painfully obvious that they have no evidence against me, and that they are never going to convince 12 people that I am guilty of murder, but the Attorney General’s office never drops charges.

It might have been a good idea for the judge to tell the jury to go back into deliberations and not come out until they had a unanimous verdict, even if it took another full day, but she did not do that. My attorney submitted a Motion To Acquit based on lack of evidence. The judge denied it.