Justin Barber killed his wife and then shot himself four times to make it look like they had been robbed while walking along a remote Florida beach.
Justin Barber will spend the rest of his life in prison because he killed his wife.
During his trial, it came out that the high-flying executive had cheated on his wife many times and had an insurance policy that would pay out if his wife died.
Insights of Justin Barber murder case
On August 17, 2002, Barber is said to have killed his wife, April, while she was walking along the beach at Guana River State Park in northern Florida.
A passing driver found him lying down, confused, and bleeding behind the wheel of his SUV on a coastal highway near the beach.
After that, the driver called 911, and the police found April on the beach.
Barber said that they couldn’t save her and that he and his wife had been attacked by someone they didn’t know. He went to the hospital with four gunshot wounds and stayed there for a day before he was let go.
Barber took the police back to the scene of the crime and told them about his fight with the attacker.
He said that when he woke up after passing out and trying to pull April up the beach, he realised he had been shot.
They were suspicious because the information he gave about the attacker was not clear, and there were no clues in the brush by the shore.
They looked into the lives of the couple and found that Barber had moved for work, which made his wife think he was having an affair with someone else.
The investigation of the murder
As they looked into the case, detectives put together a picture of April and Justin Barber and their three-year marriage.
Both of them got their undergraduate and graduate degrees from Oklahoma State University. Before the murder, they lived together in a house in southern Georgia.
Justin Barber moved to Jacksonville to work as a business analyst and management trainee for the company Rayonier, which makes wood products.
Justin’s wife stayed behind to keep working as a dosimetrist. A dosimetrist is a technician who helps figure out how much radiation a cancer patient needs and gives it to them.
Family members later said that April, who was smart and had been salutatorian of her high school class, felt compelled to help people with the disease. April was still in high school when her mother died of lung cancer.
April Barber drove from Georgia to Jacksonville every weekend to visit her husband, and at first glance, it seemed like the long-distance marriage was going well.
But the crime scene made it hard to believe what Justin Barber said. Detectives asked Barber a lot of questions about what happened.
At one point, they took him back to the beach and asked him to act out the crime while they filmed. April Barber had been killed by a.22-caliber gun, which is a small gun.
Barber, on the other hand, was shot four times, but none of the wounds were serious enough to require surgery, and some officers thought they were only minor.
Another problem was that April Barber had dried blood on her forehead. But her husband said that he had pulled and carried her for 100 feet.
At one point, even when he threw her over his shoulder, officials thought she hadn’t moved after being shot because only one side of her face was stained with blood.
Detectives figured that if she hadn’t been moved, she must have been shot close to where she was found, not 100 feet away on the beach by a thief.
The medical investigator said that April Barber was “incapable” because she was “almost drowned.” The investigator then went to the shooting scene.
After their suspicions were raised, the police started looking for a reason. They quickly found life insurance policies worth $2.3 million, including one that April Barber bought for $2.1 million a year before the murder.
When investigators looked into Justin Barber’s finances, they found that he had a lot of money problems.
A county judge in Oklahoma who is also his wife’s aunt said that when Barber came to the funeral, he said he couldn’t pay for the burial, the headstone, or the flowers.
According to court documents, he told the judge that he would pay her back as soon as the insurance claim was settled.
Later, Barber tried to get the money, but he couldn’t because his wife’s aunt and siblings had filed a lawsuit to stop the money from going to him because he was still a suspect in the crime.
Also, the investigators found proof that Justin Barber was a serial philanderer who had relationships with three women in Georgia, one in Florida, and another in New Zealand.
The arrest of Justin Barber
In 2006, the case was heard in court in St. John’s County, Florida. The main point made by the prosecution was that Barber killed April to get an insurance payment.
They say that after 11 months of planning, Barber tried to drown his wife and then dragged her to the boardwalk by the beach and shot her in the face.
Also, they showed proof that he had affairs with other women during the three years he was married to April.
They said that Barber was lucky to be alive after being shot four times and that the bullet holes in his shirt showed that they were fired by someone else.
At the start of the trial, the jury was split, but after four days of talking, they decided that he was guilty.
During the sentencing part of the case, the jury talked for 51 minutes and decided that the person should be put to death.
In the end, he got a sentence of life in prison without the chance of getting out.
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