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Nancy Grace
The Brett Seacat Trial
Aired June 07, 2013 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you murder her?
BRETT SEACAT, CHARGED WITH MURDER: No!
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You need to come and get your boys before something happens.
SEACAT: There`s -- there`s a fire, and my wife is -- she shot herself, but she`s in the fire!
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The sun would rise and shine on the boys.
SEACAT: There`s smoke everywhere! Just a second. (INAUDIBLE) wet rag!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you pull the trigger?
SEACAT: No!
911 OPERATOR: Is everybody out of the house?
SEACAT: (INAUDIBLE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He said that Vashti had died and there was a fire.
SEACAT: Oh, God! The smoke (INAUDIBLE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That she had killed herself. She had committed suicide.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you kill her?
SEACAT: No!
Hurry! Hurry!
911 OPERATOR: (INAUDIBLE) inside.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She was not happy in her relationship.
SEACAT: No, there`s no why, OK? I didn`t do this.
There`s smoke everywhere!
I love Vashti.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you tell her anything about what your intentions were, if, in fact, this turned into a contested divorce, both sides having their lawyers and going to court?
SEACAT: Yes, I did. Basically, I told her if this goes to court, that I was going to do everything, everything in my power to destroy her.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. Did you tell her specific things that you intended to do if she went through with a contested divorce proceeding?
SEACAT: Yes, I did.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What did you tell her on April 29th you were going to do if she proceed with a contested divorce proceeding?
SEACAT: Told her I was going to get custody of the kids, and if it was an adversarial divorce and I had to fight for custody, once I got custody, she was never going to get to see the kids again.
I was asking about the divorce. Vashti and I were talking about the divorce. And I just -- I think my main line of questioning was, Do you really know what you`re doing here? This is really big -- do you -- just along those lines because I hadn`t been served yet. I didn`t know any of the details of the divorce.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
NANCY GRACE, HOST: When I first heard the story about Brett Seacat and his wife, Vashti, the whole scenario seemed off. I don`t mean to suggest I immediately thought Brett Seacat is guilty, but the facts don`t add up. The equation doesn`t make sense. In the law, we would say it`s a non sequitur. It doesn`t follow.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I want to talk to you about the phone conversation you had with Brett.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When you first called him, what did he say?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He said, Vashti is dead and I killed her.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When you talked to Ms. Suderman (ph), did you at any time tell her, I killed Vashti?
SEACAT: No.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What did you tell her?
SEACAT: I told her, Vashti`s dead. It`s my fault.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why did you believe it was your fault that Vashti was dead?
SEACAT: Because it was.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did -- was there any -- what was your belief in that regard? Why did you make that statement to Ms. Suderman?
SEACAT: Because it was my fault. I -- for 19 years, I was the one that protected Vashti. And finally, I pushed her into what I was supposed to be protecting her from. So it`s my fault.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: From all the years that I prosecuted, whenever -- and it was argued several times that suicide was the mode of death in several murder cases that I had. I studied very hard the method and assessment of homicide and suicide, and everything about Vashti suggests this was not a suicide.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You told us that you had been Vashti`s protector for that 19 years. What do you mean by that?
SEACAT: Well, on several occasions, I had stopped Vashti from doing something that I don`t think I`m allowed to talk about.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Your honor, may we approach?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, you may.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: It`s extremely rare for a female, of her age particularly, but any female to commit suicide by gunshot, very rare, particularly in the head or face region. It`s almost unheard of.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let`s go back to the 29th. On that date, you threatened her that you would expose her affairs if she proceeded with the contested divorce.
SEACAT: That was one of the things I threatened her with, yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. Were there other things that you said that evening?
SEACAT: Yes. There were other things she had done at Cox that I knew about that would get her automatically fired.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: When a woman commits suicide, very typically, it will be with an overdose of pills, a mixture of pills and alcohol, an overdose of some other type of drug, possibly jumping out of a window to their death, maybe inhaling gasoline fumes in a closed garage or from a gas stove. Those are the typically modes of death for a female.
So when you get a female shooting herself in the head, that automatically raises an eyebrow because it doesn`t fit, OK? That`s like going to Las Vegas and seeing a zebra sitting in a chair, doing the slots and winning the jackpot, OK? That doesn`t make sense.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GRACE: Then you look at the crime scene itself. Seacat says that he was downstairs sleeping on the sofa when he got a cell phone call from his estranged wife upstairs, who says -- warns him to come save the children. He hears a pop, which I guess we`re supposed to imagine is the gun. He gets up there, and everything is already ablaze. She`s dead on the bed under the covers with the weapon underneath her.
Now, think this through. If she had committed suicide and she was lying on her back when she was found -- remember the angle of the trajectory path. She`s shot below the right ear, going downward right to left.
How did the gun end up behind her for her to lay down on it? How did that happen? And then have the covers pulled up over her? Now, I could see a scenario where she`s -- if I suspended all this belief, I could see a scenario where she`s under the covers and she shoots. That could physically explain the covers.
But then you`ve got the gun. How did this get under the covers, under the body? Or I could see a scenario where she is sitting up and she shoots herself, and the gun recoils and she falls back on to the gun. But then how do you get the covers pulled up over her?
The covers and the gun pulled up, and the gun under the body, together is two plus two equals five. Those two cannot both be true in a suicide scenario. And ultimately, I think that that physical evidence right there will defeat the claim of suicide and homicide will be proven.
There are only three -- four people in the home, the murder victim, the two babies and the husband, the estranged husband, Seacat.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEACAT: I just said, Am I getting served? She nodded, and I think I just said, So it`s divorce then?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: Vashti had filed for divorce less than 72 hours before she is found dead. As I always say, there`s no coincidence in criminal law. We know that he was extremely possessive, that he had allegedly installed a GPS on her vehicle, that he had a computer software program to reveal all of her text messages that she was writing on her phone.
We know that he questioned her wherever she went, was jealous, had told her if she ever divorced him, he would take the two children and leave and go to Mexico and she would never see the children again. So all of this is not just a coincidence. These are factors leading up to a homicide.
Now, as many people will argue, defense attorneys will argue, none of these factors alone proves murder, and they`re right. But when you take the forensic evidence, the crime scene evidence that shows beyond a doubt, beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was a homicide, not a suicide, then you have to determine who would have motive to kill her.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What was that discussion about?
SEACAT: All about divorce, reconciliation, staying together, splitting up, divorce. It just went around and around. At a lot of points in the conversation, I didn`t know what we were talking about because every 10 minutes, it seemed like, Vashti was pursuing a different angle on it.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What do you mean by that?
SEACAT: She did not seem to have made up her mind at all, which really seemed odd because I was being served. And she would say, This doesn`t mean we`re getting a divorce. And I would try to tell her, No, these are divorce papers. This does mean we`re getting a divorce. And she would say, We can call it off and we can work it out. And I`d say, Well, then, why was I served in the first place?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: And the husband is in the home, the estranged husband that just got divorce papers 72 hours before the homicide.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEACAT: Whenever I would -- you know, I would say, Well, OK, I`m going to get a lawyer and we`re going to have to fight this out -- as soon as I would take any sort of stand like that, Vashti would shift back to, Well, we don`t have to get a divorce. We can get rid of this affidavit and we can stay together and we can see what we can do.
And so then I`d be, like, OK, we`ll see what we can do. What do you want to do? And we would talk about what we need to do to work on the marriage. And then after 10 minutes of talking about what to do to work on the marriage, I would ask a question like, So you`re going to go back to your attorney and have this quashed or gotten rid of? And she would shift right back to, Maybe we need to split up. Maybe we do need to get the divorce.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GRACE: Now throw in to the pot another ingredient, the fact that the very next month, Seacat would commence to paying $1,300 a month in child support payments to Vashti. Maybe he thought it was cheaper to kill her. Maybe he can do that math again behind bars.
The fact that Seacat showed no grief or emotion the night police and fire people came to his home -- his home was an inferno -- to me speaks volumes.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What, if anything, did you observe?
SEACAT: Fire.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Where was the fire that you observed?
SEACAT: The only fire that I remember seeing was at the base of the door. The door was still shut. I remember seeing a flame right there in front of the door. And I remember seeing a flame on the right-hand side of the doorframe.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you see any other flame at that time?
SEACAT: I did not. But I have to say, the second I got to the top of the stairs and saw the master bedroom door, I was completely focused on that, so...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What did you do once you saw that?
SEACAT: I was still running. And I ran to the bedroom door.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What did you do when you got to bedroom door?
SEACAT: I was still running. I threw it open and took a couple steps into the bedroom.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What, if anything, did you observe after you`d taken that couple steps into the bedroom?
SEACAT: That`s when I saw Vashti.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Where was she?
SEACAT: She was laying -- laying on her side of the bed, but not over toward the edge. She was more toward the middle, but still on her side of the bed.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How was she laying there?
SEACAT: She was laying on her back, flat on her back.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you go over to where she was?
SEACAT: I did.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Was there anything that you noticed between -- after you had taken the first couple steps in between you and the bed?
SEACAT: Flames.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. How big of flames are we talking about?
SEACAT: That`s hard for me to say. I just said that when I saw the bedroom door, I focused in on that. Well, it`s what we in law enforcement call tunnel vision. When your blood gets pumping and your adrenaline goes, you actually have a physiological reaction with your vision in which your vision narrows.
When I came through this door and was looking at Vashti, I was basically looking down her body at her face. And the big thing I remember was her face, but I can say there were flames between Vashti and I because in my vision of her face, flames were in that vision. You can liken it to looking down a paper towel roll. It limits your vision. And I was looking at Vashti, but in that limited vision, there was flame in the vision, in my vision.
So if you ask me how tall the flames were, I can`t say because if they were on the floor, they were tall enough that I could see the flames between Vashti and I.
And I think with my right hand, which at the time would have still had the cell phone in it, I started to reach under her right side, around the abdomen area. And I was leaned pretty far over because she was -- she was -- like I said, she wasn`t at the edge of the bed.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. Was she still on her back at this point?
SEACAT: Yes, when I ran over and reached for her.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. After you reached for her, what, if anything, did you do?
SEACAT: I started to pull her up.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When you pulled her up, did you make any observations?
SEACAT: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What did you see?
SEACAT: Well, I started to pull her up. And immediately -- I think the first thing I noticed is there`s no resistance here at all. When I pulled her up, she just seemed to double over at the waist and her head was flopped back. And I yanked her up, and her face would have been about a foot from my face when I stopped because that was the first time I saw the blood.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: She even confided that Seacat had told her he was going to kill her if she did not go along with his demands regarding their marriage and set it up to look like a suicide. And lo and behold, she`s dead, and it`s set up to look like a suicide. What was she, clairvoyant? No! He had to have told her something along those lines to make her verbalize that fear to friends and colleagues.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Jurors also took a look at this cryptic note written by Seacat.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: ... that you threatened to kill her...
SEACAT: What?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She had just served him with divorce papers.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You`d threatened to burn the house down.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: ... "calm (ph), died, accident" on the first line...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She said, Do you think Brett would burn the house down with me in it?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: ... threatened to make it look like she did it.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I said, Not with the kids at home.
SEACAT: There`s -- there`s a fire, and my wife just...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She was happy.
SEACAT: She shot herself, but she`s in the fire!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: ... with "no suicide" in parentheses.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE) right?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That`s correct.
SEACAT: That is -- that is bull (EXPLETIVE DELETED).
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The motive?
SEACAT: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The divorce.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How far up the stairs did you get the second time? Did you get all the way to the top?
SEACAT: I got all the way to the top of the stairs and I turned the corner around the banister, and that`s as far as I got because this time, the smoke was almost to the floor. I encountered the smoke before I was even done ascending the stairs, going up the stairs.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. What happened? What did you do next?
SEACAT: I got around the banister corner, and I found out that the wet towel thing was something that only works in the movies because I don`t even know if I took another two steps, but there was simply no air. You couldn`t breathe.
And that was when I just sort of said, This isn`t going to happen. I`m not going to -- I don`t know if I processed the thoughts or not, but I decided I`m not going to get killed trying to recover a body.
I dropped down to my hands and knees because I wanted to get under the smoke layer, but the smoke layer was already there. I was completely blinded. I couldn`t see anything. And when I dropped down to my hands and knees, I realized I can`t even crawl under this. My calf -- I remember bumping the banister rail with my calf, so I knew right where the banister was, and I just backed up to the stairs and started sliding down the stairs.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: Once again, the forensic evidence does not add up to suicide.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Where`s the fire at? Brett?
SEACAT: Right here!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Where are you at?
SEACAT: (INAUDIBLE)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is there anybody inside? Is there anybody inside?
SEACAT: Just my wife.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is she inside?
SEACAT: She`s dead. She shot herself. Her (EXPLETIVE DELETED) head`s gone.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. The kids are in the car?
SEACAT: They`re in the car.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK.
(CROSSTALK)
SEACAT: Can I move it?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: Seacat`s story is falling apart. Now there is an ear witness. A neighbor hears a gunshot nearly an hour before police and fire people arrived on the scene. They got there in moments, minutes from Seacat`s call, his 911 call. They were there.
Nearly an hour before, a neighbor hears a gunshot from Vashti`s home. It took him that long to shoot her dead as she was laying asleep. That`s the scenario I believe is correct because of the angle of the bullet path in her body. She was lying down when he shot her, hence the bullet going from neck downward.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I wear ear plugs, so -- but my dog was barking. He barks at anything he hears. And he started barking, and as soon as I took my ear plugs out, I found out the reason why he was barking was because there was ammunition being discharged from somewhere.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. And did you investigate?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: My wife said that the neighbor`s house was on fire. And I went outside expecting it to be the house across the street because those people had just moved in and that was their first night living in that house, and I thought maybe they had lit a candle and knocked it over or something because they weren`t used to their surroundings. And then whenever I looked to the east, I seen that it was the Seacat house that was on fire.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. And while you were outside, did you hear anything?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Just pretty much the ammunition going off is all that I could hear, that and the crackling of the fire burning.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: He took that time, I believe, to kill her and then staged the scene for arson. That`s what I think happened. And the gunshot sound that the neighbor heard verifies that.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEACAT: I`m smart enough that if I wanted to kill my wife, it would have been a lot -- I could have come up with something better than this. This is (EXPLETIVE DELETED) insane! This is what a crazy person does.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Not necessarily, crazy in love, crazy for his kids, you know?
SEACAT: Don`t try to twist it around.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No, I`m not. I`m just telling you what I`ve experienced in all the people I`ve talked to over the years. I`ve seen...
SEACAT: Yes, you`ve seen more than I have.
(CROSSTALK)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I`ve talked to a lot of people that made, you know, emotional mistakes, is what it was, emotion.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you tell Vashti what it was you were aware of that you could use to get her fired from Cox?
SEACAT: Yes, I told her.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What did you tell her that evening?
SEACAT: Several things. I don`t know what I`m allowed to talk about, but I know -- I knew that Vashti had had an affair with the vice president of Cox, and I was suspecting that she was having an affair with her boss, or had an affair with her former boss, which I knew -- which I knew Cox doesn`t allow.
I know that Cox doesn`t allow supervisors to sleep with their employees. And I know if -- how Vashti had always explained it to me was, if a supervisor sleeps with an employee, the supervisor is automatically fired, and she said that eventually, they find some reason to fire the employee.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. Had Vashti ever confirmed for you the affair with the vice president?
SEACAT: Yes, she`s the one who told me that she had slept with the vice president.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: When did -- well, did you have a specific date that that had occurred?
SEACAT: That she told me or that she slept with him?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That she told you.
SEACAT: She told me on the 18th, after she had told me that she had filed for divorce.
There`s a fire! And my wife is -- she shot herself, but she`s in the fire!
911 OPERATOR: Is everybody out of the house?
SEACAT: (INAUDIBLE) Oh, God!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What all injuries did you have to your feet?
SEACAT: I had burns, redness. I had blistering in spots. I had some pretty good burns on the toe, just straight black burns. And I had some -- I didn`t know it at the time, but it was melted plastic on my foot.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: Seacat`s behavior the day before his wife is found dead is stunning. We see him at work. His friends at CSI -- he`s a veteran police officer, one of the elite CSI. He even is an instructor of CSI, crime scene investigative technique. He is spotted at work with an overhead projector practicing tracing words, words written by his wife, Vashti, the day before she`s found dead. How damning is that?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You were looking for something like state`s exhibit 121 that I`m standing next to here?
SEACAT: Something like that was what I had in mind when I was asking.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. And did you make any secret of that?
SEACAT: No.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: And then there`s the ridiculous journal entry that`s found that allegedly is some sort of a suicide note written by her, although the handwriting analyst says she didn`t write it. That it`s very indicative of tracing.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: After examining, re-examining and taking in all these different scenarios, it all came back to the same thing. This was either a tracing or a simulation.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: Then there`s the issue of the little boys, ages 2 and 4, that he had dangled in front of Vashti, bullying her, threatening her that he would take them to Mexico, she would never see her children again if she did not go along with his demands regarding their marriage. Then it turns out about two weeks after she`s dead and buried, he`s trying to pawn the boys off and have them raised by her sister. He`s trying to get Vashti`s sister to take the boys and raise them.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mr. Seacat, you understand you`re charged with the first degree murder of your wife, don`t you?
SEACAT: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you love Vashti?
SEACAT: I love Vashti.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you kill Vashti?
SEACAT: No, I did not.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you pull the trigger on the Ruger Red Hawk that resulted in a bullet going through her neck and severing her spine?
SEACAT: No, I did not.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you set the house on fire -- the house at 255 B on fire?
SEACAT: No, I did not.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did you endanger either of your sons?
SEACAT: Absolutely not.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And what you were actually doing there that day was torching two hard drives.
SEACAT: I did torch two hard drives.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You also destroyed two cell phones, right?
SEACAT: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And you threw all of those away at KLETC, correct?
SEACAT: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Now, you torched the hard drives. You didn`t torch the cell phones, right?
SEACAT: No.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You testified that the reason you got rid of the cell phones was the same reason you were getting rid of laptops, because of personal information on there, correct?
SEACAT: Yes, ma`am.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Didn`t feel the need to torch the cell phones, though.
SEACAT: The cell phones don`t operate the same way a hard drive does.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Well, you testified on direct that the laptops were the same as cell phones, and that`s why you got rid of all of them, because of personal information on there.
SEACAT: And so the reason behind it was the same, as to obscure the personal information. But with a hard drive, if one of those is discovered, you can just install it in another computer, and it will go. With a cell phone, if you break a cell phone in half, that`s not something an identity thief can just repair. They can`t just take the parts and plug it into another phone, like you can a hard drive.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So your testimony is that you can obtain information off of cell phones after you break them apart?
SEACAT: You can obtain it, but you`re going to need some pretty -- pretty advanced equipment that I can`t imagine any identity thief investing in.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You would agree with me that the KBI was able to pull some information off those phones, right?
SEACAT: Oh, yes.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Now, another thing were you busy with that day was an overhead projector. And you`ve seen that throughout this trial in this courtroom, right?
SEACAT: I`ve seen (INAUDIBLE) overhead projector.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And you testified that the only reason that you needed it was for the magnifying glass on it, correct?
SEACAT: That was my motive for going and getting it, yes.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK. So how big is the magnifying glass on the overhead projector that you need?
SEACAT: Oh, it`s about that big.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK. So the overhead projector -- I`ll just pick it up, state`s 121. You needed this whole thing just for the magnifying glass that was about 5 inches big, as you just showed us? Is that your testimony?
SEACAT: No, (INAUDIBLE) the magnifying glass, but I wasn`t about to disassemble it.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You told us that you never turned this on.
SEACAT: I never did.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So what part of it did you use?
SEACAT: I used this part.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This would be the head of the projector that you`re referring to?
SEACAT: You could call it that.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And where`s the magnifying glass?
SEACAT: When you hold items underneath, it should magnify.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: OK. Is there a magnifying glass in there that you can see?
SEACAT: Not anymore, no.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: I watched Seacat`s interrogation tapes very, very closely, and I think that he had prepared for this moment, this moment that he was interrogated by police, that he was in an interrogation room being questioned, hard questions, and how he was going to act.
And one moment that really sums it up. He`s talking and talking and talking as if -- it`s almost as if he`s an actor in a Shakespearean play, where he pauses for effect and says very slowly and carefully, enunciating his words, I love Vashti.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SEACAT: I didn`t do this. I love Vashti.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: He should be on the stage, on Broadway. The delivery was perfect.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: ... you had to reach over the bed that was on fire.
SEACAT: Well, certainly, that part of the bed wasn`t on fire, ma`am.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So your testimony is that the part of the bed that you reached over was not on fire.
SEACAT: (INAUDIBLE) part of the bed that I reached, where Vashti`s body was, no. (INAUDIBLE) I never said that the part of the bed where Vashti`s upper body where I reached was on fire.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You tried to pick her up.
SEACAT: Yes, ma`am.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And show us how you did that.
SEACAT: I leaned over the side of the bed, and I leaned over her and I reached up and grabbed her arm (ph). For lack of a better term, it would have been her right trap (ph) area.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And for the record, you`re using your left arm, right?
SEACAT: I`m using my left arm to my right shoulder, which would have -- I`m simulating Vashti`s right shoulder. And that`s the area that I grabbed.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And what happened when you grabbed that area?
SEACAT: I pulled.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What did you do next?
SEACAT: Well, after I pulled her up, that`s when I saw her face, the blood on her face.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You saw blood on her face.
SEACAT: Yes, ma`am.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You were able to see her face.
SEACAT: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And you told Agent Paletti (ph) that.
SEACAT: Yes.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You said that when you tried to pick her up, you just rocked her up.
SEACAT: Yes, she rocked up. I mean, it wasn`t like a -- if you`ve ever tried to lift somebody up who`s not -- who`s just limp, it`s very hard to do. And as I pulled her toward me, rocking her up would be a pretty good example.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: So you`re just rocking up the upper part of her body towards you.
SEACAT: At that point, yes.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You see her face. You see the blood on her face.
SEACAT: Yes, ma`am.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She`s limp, so you drop her. That`s what you told Agent Paletti, right?
SEACAT: I just let her go.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And you told several people that when you were in there trying to pick Vashti up, that there was blood everywhere.
SEACAT: Yes, ma`am.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Physically (ph), you told Sergeant Sowers (ph) that just minutes within the incident, right?
SEACAT: Yes, ma`am.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You told Mandy Cupper (ph) that on Monday, May 2nd.
SEACAT: I don`t remember. I remember telling Sergeant Sowers because I heard it on the video.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You remember telling Agent Paletti on the recorded interview that there was blood everywhere.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GRACE: If demeanor is to be considered -- and a jury can consider Seacat`s demeanor -- I find it very damning that the day care people that take care of his two boys say he got choked up when talking about his two boys escaping the fire, but when he talked about his wife, Vashti, nothing, just like stone. It was as if she was somebody he didn`t even know when he talked about her death. That`s damning.
END
