By ROXANA HEGEMAN ~ Associated Press
KINGMAN (AP) – A former Kansas lawman has told jurors in his first-degree murder trial about the early morning phone call he got from his wife telling him he needed to get their boys or they might get hurt.
Brett Seacat testified Friday about the April 2011 death of Vashti Seacat and the fire that engulfed their Kingman home. He and the couple’s two young sons escaped the fire.
The 37-year-old testified he was sleeping on the couch in their home when his wife called him on the phone from an upstairs bedroom. He said he heard a loud crackling and then popping sound as he ran upstairs.
He testified he picked up her body off the bed and dropped it as he realized she was dead and the house was on fire.
His voice cracking at times, a former Kansas lawman told jurors Friday that it was his fault his wife is dead – but that he didn’t kill her.
Seacat is charged with first degree murder in the April 2011 shooting death of Vashti Seacat. Prosecutors say Seacat wrote a fake suicide note for his wife, then shot her and set their home on fire. Defense lawyers say Seacat’s 34-year-old wife set the house alight then shot herself.
Seacat, of Kingman, is also charged with aggravated arson and two counts of child endangerment. The Seacats’ two children were at home and asleep when the fire started. They were not hurt in the fire.
On Friday, his second day of testimony, Seacat haltingly told jurors how he had threatened his wife that evening when he realized she intended to go through with a contested divorce. He testified that he told her he would expose her affairs with two managers at the cable company where she worked so she would be fired. He said he threatened to publish private photos of her.
“For 19 years, I was the one who protected Vashti,” Seacat said. “Finally I pushed her into what I was protecting her from.”
He told the jury how he met Vashti when he was competing at a wrestling tournament. They were both in high school – he was 16, she 15 – and they began to date the next day.
“On several occasions I stopped her from doing something I don’t think I am allowed to talk about,” Seacat testified.
The comment – an apparent reference to previous suicide attempts and fires Vashti allegedly set – prompted prosecutors to object. Judge Larry Solomon ordered jurors to ignore the statement and immediately called a recess.
Brett Seacat testified for nearly two hours Thursday about his work as a police instructor and a Sedgwick County sheriff’s deputy. He also talked about his wife’s moods swings over their impending divorce, saying she could not decide if she wanted them to separate or reconcile.
A key piece of evidence is the suicide note prosecutors say Seacat traced. Prosecutors have introduced as evidence an overhead projector he used at work that day, along with burned computer hard drives and discarded cellphones.
But Seacat matter-of-factly explained to jurors that he needed the projector to examine an exercise he had presented three weeks earlier in a class.
He said he burned the hard drives at the maintenance shop because he planned to sell some old laptops to raise money and showed a receipt for a new hard drive he had purchased months earlier. He said he discarded the old phones to prevent identity theft after briefly considering whether to sell them as well.
Earlier Thursday, defense attorneys called forensic consultant Gene Gietzen to testify about traces of gasoline that the prosecution contends were found on the pants Brett Seacat wore that day. Gietzen disputed the findings that the compounds found on the clothing proved it was gasoline and criticized the way the evidence was handled.