Ashley Benefield is on trial in a Florida court on accusations she murdered her estranged husband Doug.
The 32-year-old former ballerina is accused of killing her estranged husband, 58-year-old Doug Benefield, in her mother’s Lakewood Ranch home in September 2020.
The trial, which is being broadcast by Court TV, has been dubbed the"Black Swan Murder Trial," based on the 2010 filmAshley was a 24-year-old ballet dancer and Doug was a 54-year-old Navy veteran and technology consultant when the two met at a Republican party fundraiser at the Palm Beach mansion of former presidential candidateAshley had a dream to start a ballet company, and with financing from Doug, the couple founded The American National Ballet, with a goal of hiring dancers of...
Soon after, police responded to a 911 call and found Doug fatally shot on a bedroom floor, bleeding in three places. Ashley told police her husband had tried to attack her and she had shot him in self-defense.The Manatee County Sheriff's Office at the time said that Ashley claimed Doug was attacking her during the incident, but "detectives found no evidence that she was acting in self-defense when she fired multiple shots at her husband.
Ashley ’s defense attorney Neil Taylor disputed the claims, describing Doug as a “disturbed man” who during the couple's four-year relationship, Taylor claimed, fired a handgun into the ceiling to get Ashley to stop talking, knocked a dog unconscious by punching it in the face, carried a concealed weapon and kept tabs on her by placing a tracker on her vehicle.
"I was scared to death. I thought he was going to kill me. There was nowhere to go. I was trapped," she said, according to FOX13.She told the jury that Doug was standing in the doorway. "His face was red," she said, per FOX13. "The veins were bulging in his neck. The way he was looking at me, it didn't even look like Doug. His eyes we're black."
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