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I have enough information to write the brief now.This episode covers the 1988 murder of Russell "Russ" Stager, a popular baseball coach and driver's education teacher at Durham High School in Durham, North Carolina. Barbara Stager was convicted in 1989 of murdering her husband, Russell Stager, the previous year; Russell was shot while in bed, and Barbara reported the shooting as accidental. Investigators eventually determined the shooting was staged, aided by forensic evidence (trigger-pull tests, bullet trajectory, missing gunshot residue) and a cassette tape Russ had recorded days before his death expressing fear of his wife. Her first husband, Larry Ford, had also been killed under similar circumstances a decade earlier, though that death was never prosecuted.
At the conclusion of her trial for first-degree murder on 30 August 1989, the jury deliberated for 44 minutes to reach a guilty verdict, and Stager was sentenced to death the next day. Stager's death sentence was overturned on a procedural issue, and the life sentence she subsequently received by a different jury made her eligible for parole in 2009. During resentencing, her son Jason testified about the morning of the shooting, undercutting her original account. Barbara Stager has been serving her life sentence at Raleigh's North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women and was denied parole in 2009 and again in 2018. Prison records have noted she has been denied parole but is allowed to leave prison for short periods of time under approved supervision, a detail that drew criticism from victims' family members.
The case has generated substantial true-crime coverage over decades. Jerry Bledsoe wrote a 1994 book about the case, "Before He Wakes: A True Story of Money, Marriage, Sex and Murder," which was adapted into a 1998 TV movie starring Jaclyn Smith. A&E's City Confidential profiled it in 2003 ("Durham: Dangerous Housewife"), Investigation Discovery's Deadly Women covered it in 2010, Scorned: Love Kills revisited it in 2012, Forensic Files aired "Broken Promises," Fatal Vows examined it again in 2015 as "No Accident," and Discovery's The New Detectives featured it in 1999. More recently, Oxygen's "Black Widow Murders" series profiled the case, and independent true-crime podcasts have continued covering it as well.
Barbara Stager was originally sentenced to death, but that sentence was overturned and replaced with life imprisonment. She is still alive and remains incarcerated, serving a life sentence with parole eligibility that has been repeatedly denied. She was never executed.