93 After
After
It was late November when my father told me the news: The police had arrested Forrest, charging him with Regina’s murder. Bail denied.
In the charges she filed, the district attorney for Franklin County, Maine, asserted that Forrest was a serial cheater and sex addict with a long history of deceit and betrayals.
The DA alleged that Forrest’s motive lay in his desire to end his marriage and his intention to create a new life with a woman named Brenda Barnett.
She pointed to the fact that just weeks before her death—with her husband’s encouragement, no doubt—Regina had named her husband as beneficiary of a three-million-dollar life insurance policy in the event that she died before him.
Now more accusations spilled out over the pages of the Portland Press Herald and beyond: the theory that Forrest had stockpiled sleeping pills with the intention of giving his wife—whose pill usage he oversaw—a lethal dose.
In an attempt to replicate the manner in which Regina would have crafted a suicide note—and to avoid handwriting analysis—he’d typed the letter meant to look like a suicide note.
But Forrest had made a grievous mistake, the DA contended. Given the spelling errors in the note he allegedly laid beside his wife’s body—errors of a kind Regina herself would never have committed—he identified himself, a man known to have struggled with literacy, as the true author of the note.
Then he’d administered the drugs that killed her.
Now Forrest Emerson was charged with first-degree murder, locked up in a jail, awaiting trial.