Medical examiner Dr. Todd Grey first ruled Pamela Mead's death accidental, believing she had stumbled and fallen into a fish pond behind her Salt Lake home. Stunned when her head hit a brick, she drowned, Grey first decided.
But a week after the Aug. 15, 1994, drowning, Grey changed his ruling. Pamela Mead was murdered, he testified Wednesday.Her husband, David Mead, 30, is charged with killing his wife. His preliminary hearing opened Wednesday in 3rd District Court.
Salt Lake police detective Jill Candland investigated the death and said she, too, believed at first that the death was an accident.
But Mead's cousin, James Hendrix, later told her that David Mead offered him money and drugs to kill his wife. His girlfriend had given him an ultimatum and he wanted the woman killed so he could collect on a life insurance policy he took out on her six months before, Candland testified Hendrix told her.
Hendrix was in jail at the time, Candland said, charged with robbing David Mead of drugs and guns a month after the incident. Candland said she didn't make Hendrix, who is currently in prison, any deals in return for his testimony but did write a positive letter to the Board of Pardons.
Using Candland as a stand-in for the victim, prosecutor Howard Lemcke on Wednesday demonstrated how he believes the murder was committed.
He showed, with Candland bent over at the waist and peering into a make-believe fish pond, how a brick similar to ones that lined the pond was swung, striking the victim behind one ear, knocking her temporarily unconscious and causing her to topple into the 3-foot-deep pond.
Lemcke said Mead's brothers came to the house the day after the incident, dismantling the pond and burying the bricks and rocks that lined it. Police responding to the house found Pamela Mead's body lying next to the pond, where David Mead had dragged it, and David Mead standing in the pond, already taking it apart, Lemcke said Wednesday.
Most of the testimony at this week's hearing has aired before. Pamela Mead's parents, Sinnie and Garfield Stokes, sued David Mead last year in federal court, charging he was responsible for their daughter's death.
No criminal charges had been filed yet and county prosecutors watched the civil trial closely.
The 12-member jury was unable to reach a verdict, with a single juror insisting that evidence presented by a defense expert medical witness that the death was accidental could not be ignored.
Candland said the insurance company paid over $600,000 to settle the death claim, turning the money over to the court to decide its disposition. In an out-of-court settlement, David Mead accepted 15 percent of the settlement with the remainder going to the Stokes family.
Prosecutors filed first-degree felony charges of murder and solicitation of murder last Aug. 15, three years to the day after Pamela Mead's death.