Every murder mystery is fundamentally a “whodunit.” It’s the same with most murder trials, too; the difference between fiction and fact is that a fictional plot ends with “who” while a trial begins with “who.”

In both fiction and fact, most other questions are answered in the course of the drama: what, when, and how. Most, but not all: the question of “why” is always answered in fiction but almost never in court.

Look up “motive in criminal law,” and you will discover “why”: motive is traditionally not considered one of the elements of a crime. (The elements are things such as intent, state of mind, prohibited acts.) The law doesn’t care why you do something, only “if” you did it and what you were thinking at the time.

The problem, in my opinion (and I am not a lawyer), is that jurors are human, but the law is not; jurors want to know “why?”

The Trials of Raynella Dossett-Leath

I plan to revise and enhance some of my posts on the trial of Raynella Dossett-Leath, the Tennessee nurse convicted of killing her second husband and who now faces another trial later this year for murdering her first husband. Before I repost, I want to be sure I know all the facts the jury who convicted her knew.

As I reexamine my opinions on this case, I find the question of “why” is what puzzles me the most (incidentally, “why” puzzled me during my own jury experience, too.)

I wonder why a woman would kill both her husbands when all she needed to do was divorce them.

Why?

As I understand it, from news reports and from my memory of the televised first trial of Ms. Dossett-Leath, the state posed at least two motives. I believe I recall the prosecution claimed the marriage was rocky and the deceased had threatened to change his will so his cancer-stricken mother would be cared for if he died before she did (a bizarre concern in itself).

At the time I heard this (in early 2009) I wondered how the jury had received these motives. Surely a rocky marriage isn’t sufficient motive for murder, or else almost every marriage on earth would end in murder shortly after the first argument. Disputes over inheritance, of course, have led to violence since the beginning of time.

The Will

In the Dossett-Leath case, the issue of valid wills is centermost. It’s very complicated, and I need to do some serious research; but jurors in both trials must have arrived in court with some knowledge of Tennessee inheritance law. (If not, I recommend they look into it, because those laws can come back to bite them in their own butts.)

In the U.S., marriage affects inheritance, as well as divorce; property is owned by spouses under one of two legal structures, either community property or joint property. Less than a dozen of the fifty states are community property states. Tennessee is not one of them.

In joint property states, all property belongs equally to both spouses; upon dissolution of a marriage or death, all property is either divided equally or is inherited by the surviving spouse. This is the law of Tennessee, where the state claimed that Ms. Dossett-Leath murdered her husband so that nothing would go to his mother or to his daughter by a prior marriage.

Think about this. Does it make sense to you as a motive? (And, remember, the state did not need to prove a motive to convict this woman.)

First, her husband was not terminally ill; she had no reason to fear he would die before his mother.

Second, if Ms. Dossett-Leath had divorced her husband, the divorce settlement would have allocated their property equally between them, and then he could have willed all of his share to his mother or his daughter, and she would not have had to worry that he would give away what was rightfully hers.

Third, when they married, Ms. Dossett-Leath’s property was more valuable than his. She did not marry him for his money; if anything, it would have been the other way around. They married under a prenuptial agreement which established a sort of community-property inheritance. After several years of marriage, they legally dissolved that prenuptial agreement and adopted the joint-property form of inheritance.

Fourth, in a joint-property state, if one spouse attempts to control his estate through a clause in a will, which disinherits the other spouse, even partly, the surviving spouse can dispute the validity of that clause after her husband dies; if the probate court isn’t biased, it must side with the surviving spouse and invalidate that clause. (FYI: As I understand it, the probate court in this case did not side with the surviving spouse, in part because she was under indictment—although presumed innocent at the time.) It seems that the courts declared that the deceased’s will was presumed destroyed and reverted to the terms of a will he wrote before he married the now-convicted wife.

I’m not a lawyer, but I’ve made a point of understanding probate law in my state. Based on my limited understanding of probate law in general, it seems to me that Ms. Dossett-Leath was among the least likely people to want her husband dead because of the family’s inheritance disputes.