EPILOGUE 361

  virtually confessing his own role. And with photos of a bloody head recovered from his laptop and the van key from his house, Samia faced a seemingly insurmountable collection of circumstan- tial evidence. Not to mention that the government planned to pre- sent Le Roux as the mastermind who had arranged it all and now could condemn all three men to their fates.

  Before we got to that, the prosecutors laid out the gruesome details of Lee’s death, the same ones that I had found in the police file three years earlier. She had died immediately, the doctor who conducted the autopsy testified, from two gunshot wounds, one below each eye, that left .22-caliber slugs lodged in her brain.

  On day two a juror wrote a note to the judge declaring that she feared for her safety; Judge Abrams replaced her and the trial car- ried on. I was surprised that she was the only one. The prosecution called a DEA technician in Thailand to establish the validity of the surveillance video of Hunter in Phuket, and then began playing snippets of him describing the murder plan—and how Samia and Stillwell had botched it. An expert in electronic evidence explained how they had recovered files, emails, and photos off of Samia’s and Stillwell’s digital devices. Then the prosecution began methodi- cally introducing years’ worth of emails between Samia and Hunter, Samia and Dave Smith, Hunter and Smith, Hunter and Le Roux.

  The main event began midway on the second day, when another prosecutor, Emil Bove, stood and called Le Roux to the stand. He entered from a door behind and to the right of the judge, in a dark blue, short-sleeved prison uniform. He’d maintained his bulk since the hearing two years before, in Minnesota, but his face seemed thinner. His gait was labored as he walked across the courtroom to the witness stand, unshackled but escorted by a U.S. marshal. He pulled out a pair of glasses from a small case in his breast pocket, put them on, and gazed out over the courtroom. If it was infamy he’d been seeking, as his cousin once suggested to me, the smatter- ing of spectators—a few reporters, Thomas Cindric, and several fellow agents from the 960 group—suggested that he hadn’t quite