Cemetery Plot

Kelly told the jury that she kept trying to dissuade the boys from talk of murder. When she pointed out that they did not have a gun, Byron said his dad's old hunting rifle was in the trunk. Kelly said that she never believed the boys would really go through with their plan. She admitted making a call to Anastasia from a Phillips 66 pay phone to arrange a place to meet.

After the three arrived at Dairy Queen and picked up Anastasia, they headed toward Mount Washington as Justin and Anastasia argued bitterly. At one point, Anastasia took a ring off and threw it at Justin. When they saw the caretaker's car at Mount Washington, they left.

Then, Kelly told the jury, one of the boys spotted the secluded dirt road that led up to Lincoln Cemetery. "That looks cool," Kelly remembered one of them saying. "Let's see where it leads."

At dusk, headlights on, they drove up the road and past an old stone building. Justin stopped the car. He and Anastasia got out and were standing by the driver's side arguing. Again, Kelly tried to dissuade Byron from shooting Anastasia, she told the jury.

"Byron said, 'We've been talking about it all day. Justin asked me to do it, and I want to do it, so I'm going to do it,'" Kelly testified. Then he said, "I'll be right back," and got out of the car. Sitting in the back seat of Justin's car, Kelly said she heard the trunk pop open and saw Byron raise a "big, long gun." She said she saw Justin wave his arms and shout, "No! No!" and heard him yell something in German.

Then, she told the jury, she heard a loud "boom" and saw Anastasia fall.

Within seconds, she said, Byron was yelling at Justin to drive and saying that they had to get rid of the gun. She remembered that Byron dumped the gun in an industrial-looking area that had railroad tracks, she told the jury. After that, Justin was ashen and too upset to drive, so Byron took the wheel.

Kelly told the jury that she and Justin were both crying and that Justin was telling Byron, "Didn't you hear me tell you to stop?" Byron replied, "I couldn't stop. I already had the gun in her face!"

That night, Kelly said, the boys invented a story they felt sounded believable, based on Anastasia's reputation for "throwing fits." She had gotten out of the car at Truman Road and I-435 and had walked angrily away to the east.

"Byron kept telling us, 'Act normal,'" Kelly said on the stand. "It seemed like a sick movie."

When they dropped off Kelly at home, she was late for her curfew. Kelly's mother testified that all three teens entered the house and that she heard a lot of whispering, which worried her. When she called Kelly upstairs to ask why she was late, Kelly told her that the couple had fought and Anastasia had jumped out of the car in a "bad part of town." Her mother thought the concern strange considering the annoyance with which they usually treated Anastasia's antics.

Downstairs, Justin was calling Anastasia's house to tell her family she had gotten out of the car and to ask that she call him when she arrived home. When he told Anastasia's younger sister that the girl had gotten out of the car more than an hour earlier, she replied, "If anything happens to her, it's your fault."

Kelly said that statement gave Justin chills and that he whispered, "It's like she already knows something happened to her." Then Justin said, "Maybe I should just kill myself right now," Kelly recalled on the stand.

That night, Kelly could not sleep. The next day she went with her mother to visit her grandmother. It was a long car trip, and Kelly slept all the way across Missouri each way. When they walked in the door at home, the phone was ringing. It was Byron. He told her to turn on the news. Anastasia's body had been found.

Kelly testified that Byron insisted they attend both funerals because it would look "weird" if they didn't go. On the stand talking about Anastasia's funeral, Kelly described the horror she felt.

"It just seemed so disrespectful. I saw her get shot, and I'm supposed to go in there in front of her family and friends and act like I didn't know what happened?" Kelly said, her voice racked with distress, tears in her eyes.

With his trial nearly over, Byron suddenly decided to take the stand in his own defense to try to refute Kelly's testimony.

Byron described Kelly as a "traditional psychotic ex-girlfriend" and hinted that she was trying to ruin his life by lying on the witness stand, recalling how she'd lied to him that her father was an alcoholic who beat her.

Byron described the same set of events that he and Kelly had consistently told police before Kelly had changed her story. He explained the tapes, saying that he had been so sick when Kelly called him, that he was "bedridden" and "feverish" and had "just misunderstood what she was talking about." He said he did not kill Anastasia WitbolsFeugen.