Well aware of James White's weaknesses as a witness, prosecutor Jimmy Fry's strategy was to put White on the stand early.

We never asked the jury to believe James White.

We asked them to listen to James White and listen to other witnesses and then decide for themselves what parts of his testimony were the truth.

Nor did Fry hold anything back when it came to White's plea bargain.

I told the jury in the beginning that I didn't like him, I didn't trust him, and I didn't expect the jury to like him or trust him.

But I did ask them to put that aside until they heard the evidence from other witnesses who could corroborate what he said.

With White's story unshaken, Fry presented his corroborating evidence, starting with phone records.

We had a chart that showed practically no phone activity between the sisters before the murder, extensive telephone activity the week or two before the murder, and then beginning immediately before the murder, phone activity between Peggy Lowe and James White, which even Peggy Lowe admitted she talked to this man for hours at a time, which seemed to me to be fairly inexplicable in the context of the thing.