Kelly Forbes

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A young immigrant mother.

You have this single mom that's in the country to make a better way for her daughter.

A successful older man.

He basically swept her off her feet, and that's the American dream.

But her dream would soon turn into a nightmare.

This marriage is just like choking her, and she felt that she's going to get out by any means.

Even if, in the end, it meant she had to choke back.

I was choking him.

He was choking me.

I thought I was gonna die.

November 21st, 2007.

It was just before 9 a.m.

in the affluent community of Merrick, New York, when the local emergency dispatch received a harrowing 911 call.

I can understand you.

What's the problem?

My husband said it's choking with his money.

The caller was 29-year-old Kelly Forbes.

She told the dispatcher she desperately needed help for her newlywed husband, 50-year-old Michael Forbes.

Is your husband conscious?

No.

Is he breathing?

I don't think no.

Moments later, police and emergency responders arrived at the Forbes residence.

Inside, they found Kelly Forbes cowering at the top of the stairs.

I'm there crying.

I'm shaking.

I'm just scared out of my mind.

And I pointed to the room where Michael was.

Brushing past Kelly, officers discovered the body of Michael, his six-foot, 250-pound frame slumped across the floor.

The officer tried CPR.

He tried mouth-to-mouth and seeing if there was any sort of a resuscitation that would assist Michael Forbes.

The EMTs weren't exactly strangers in the Forbes home.

They'd been there barely a month before when Michael had suffered a heart attack.

They got him up to the hospital and put the stent in this vein, you know.

And that's the only thing to save him.

Had Michael Forbes suffered a second heart attack?

Questioned at the scene, his wife of less than eight weeks gave police a very different account of what had just occurred.

According to Kelly, there'd been an attack, all right, but it had nothing to do with Michael's heart.

Michael woke her up early in the morning by placing an electrical cord around her neck, attempting to strangle her in her sleep.

I tried to push him off and he wouldn't come off.

And in the midst of the ensuing struggle, she'd somehow managed to wrap the cord around Michael's neck.

He was trying to kill me.

All I did was try to defend myself.

Now, as the EMTs fought to save Michael's life, detectives were left to unravel the mystery of what really happened.

A truth that lay hidden somewhere in not one, but two secret lives.

Kelly and Michael Forbes first met two years earlier in Brooklyn, New York.

Kelly, a 27-year-old single mother, had recently moved to the city with her daughter from her native Trinidad.

I moved to New York to basically start over.

I had my daughter.

She was young at the time and her father and I had just broken up.

So one of my brothers, Nicholas, he was already living here.

So I moved in with him.

You know, we have more, well, I guess, family here, you know, than other states, really.

So,

yeah, I guess New York was a place to be.

Not long after moving in with her brother, Kelly had gotten a job as a medical assistant at a Brooklyn doctor's office.

She drew blood, she took EKGs, she did all the patient care, pretty much.

She's a very caring person.

So when her patients come in, she treats them with the utmost care.

Kelly's delicate touch left an impression on one patient in particular, a local barbershop owner named Michael Forbes.

He came in to do a stress test.

I was the one that did his IV, and he was telling me that he was really scared of needles.

So I said, this is not going to hurt.

So he was like, are you good?

I was like, yeah, I'm pretty good.

And I did it, and he was like, I didn't feel a thing.

Michael may not have felt the needles prick, but he did feel something else.

He was infatuated with her.

You know, just, yo, man, I met this girl.

She got long hair, has an accent, brown skin.

Just always talked about her.

Like, you know, she was

like a goddess.

Michael wasn't interested in worshiping her from afar, however.

He left his number for her at the front desk, telling him that

he wanted to take her out or whatever.

Kelly's co-workers were impressed with her new suitor.

Cutting hair wasn't Michael's only job, and his other work paid very well.

He said he was into real estate.

He owned a couple of houses in Brooklyn.

But at 48 years old, he was also 21 years Kelly's senior.

And with her hands full with her job and daughter, Kelly intended to keep her relationship with Forbes strictly professional.

I didn't have time for a relationship at that point, and I made it known to him.

Michael, however, wasn't about to give up.

Michael began to woo her by sending flowers to the doctor's office.

And I don't mean once.

Tons of flowers were delivered.

Michael's persistence eventually paid off.

In late September of 2006, Kelly agreed to a date.

And the steady stream of gifts turned into a flood.

He sent Roses to the job constantly.

He would take her out to like elaborate places.

He was that kind of guy.

He made me feel like, you know, like a princess, basically.

Michael had every intention of making Kelly his queen, too.

Less than a month after their first date, he proposed.

I said, this is way too soon.

And he told me that he loved me and I just kept saying, you don't know me that well.

I don't know you that well.

But Michael didn't seem all that interested in exploring their respective pasts.

Instead, he urged his would-be bride to focus on their future.

He was emailing her pictures of million-dollar homes on Long Island that he was telling her he was going to buy for her.

And when he proposed for a second time with an even bigger diamond ring, it was hard for the 28-year-old singled mother to say no.

I wanted my daughter to be happy.

I wanted to be happy.

So I was like, you know what?

Give it a chance.

What's the worst that could happen?

It wasn't exactly an enthusiastic yes.

But at their wedding ceremony a year later, Kelly and Michael certainly seemed happy.

Michael also seemed determined to earn his new bride's devotion, no matter what it cost.

He had blayed out a tremendous amount of money for a Caribbean-style wedding that Kelly wanted.

It was a very big wedding.

He pretty much went all out for it.

But would it be enough?

At the reception, watching her son and new daughter-in-law dance within the drum circle, Michael's mother wasn't so sure.

I saw Michael, you know, in the middle of the circle, and they just beating the drums.

But it reminded me of um

maybe a sacrifice.

Two weeks later, following their honeymoon, Michael made good on one of his many courtship promises, surprising his bride with a waterfront home.

The house is a split-level ranch in Merrick, New York, right on the water, very affluent community here in Nassau County.

There was, however, one major problem from Kelly's perspective.

Merrick was over an hour commute from Brooklyn, where her life had been based since immigrating to the United States.

It was too far because I worked in Brooklyn.

My daughter went to school in Brooklyn.

Michael moved her away from her family, away from her friends.

Distance wasn't the only issue either.

She didn't have a car.

Michael had the only car.

I was in the house by myself and I told him, I was like, this is not what I got married for.

Was Michael keeping her cooped up in the house on purpose?

Was he trying to keep her under control?

Whatever the answer, less than two weeks into the marriage, Kelly was ready to pull the plug.

We arguing and I said, I'm going back to Brooklyn.

Kelly moved back in with her family.

She moved back in with her brother in Brooklyn.

Kelly would stay the occasional night with her husband.

When she did come home, she had to leave the next morning early to get her train to go to work.

The hour train ride wasn't all that ate into their time together either.

We would have arguments about time.

He would, you know, he would get upset because we wasn't spending enough time together.

It wasn't long before the petty squabbling took its toll.

Less than a month after the wedding, Michael was awakened by severe chest pains one night when Kelly wasn't home.

This person, supposed to be his wife, wasn't home that time of night.

So he called us.

Instead of me going there, I called the ambulance to go there.

They realized he's having a heart attack, and then they got him up to the hospital.

As Michael lay in the hospital, many of his family and friends gathered by his bedside.

Kelly finally showed up, but she didn't stay long.

I did ask him, where was Kelly?

And he would just excuse it, like, oh, she had something to do in Brooklyn.

Maybe he's a little embarrassed that his wife isn't there.

But Michael's cardiac scare also led to a change of heart.

Just days after coming home from the hospital, he made Kelly a peace offering.

I went to take the garbage out in the garage and I saw a Mercedes-Benz sitting in the garage that he bought for me.

And he said, I have a car now.

I could go to work, whatever.

He apologized.

Kelly was happy to take the keys her husband offered.

But rather than allow her to commute from Merrick, the Mercedes simply made it easier for Kelly to trek to Brooklyn and stay.

She's worked all week long.

And every weekend, she's go to Brooklyn to spend the weekend with her people.

And when Kelly was back in Merrick, she usually wasn't there to help nurse her convalescent husband.

Her daughter was adapting to be in

a new situation away from everyone that she knew.

So at night, she would go in and tuck her in and fall asleep.

And he really didn't like that.

He would come wake me up and start arguing.

He would see, I am married to him.

I'm supposed to be in his bed.

She was just to the point that, you know, it's too early for them to be having this much conflict.

So she's like, you know, I need to get out.

November 21st, 2007.

It was just before 9 a.m.

when Nassau County Emergency Dispatch received a frantic 911 call from the home of Michael and Kelly Forbes.

On the line was Kelly, and she told the dispatcher she desperately needed help.

Is your husband conscious?

No.

Is he breathing?

I don't think no.

Minutes later, a Nassau County patrolman arrived on the scene.

In an upstairs room, the officer found Michael's unresponsive body crumpled on the floor.

He tried CPR, he tried mouth-to-mouth, and both were unsuccessful.

Requesting paramedics, the officer asked Kelly what had happened.

She indicated the orange electrical cord lying on the floor, not far from her husband.

At this point, she says he came at me with a cord.

I had to defend myself.

What could she do?

She's 5'6 ⁇ , 130 pounds, maybe.

He's, again, 260-pound guy.

Michael, according to Kelly, had come at her with the cord, but it had apparently ended up around his neck.

Coming up, police tried to determine who the real victim was in the Forbes house that morning.

He wouldn't get off, so I took a piece of the cord, put it around his neck.

On the morning of November 21st, 2007, the yard outside Kelly and Michael Forbes' Merrick, New York home was bathed in the blue lights from half a dozen squad cars.

They'd come in response to a 911 call Kelly had placed moments earlier.

Is your husband conscious?

No.

Is he breathing?

I don't think no.

According to what Kelly told the first officers on the scene, her husband had just tried to kill her in her sleep.

She shouted to the officer who arrived in the house.

He tried to strangle me.

He tried to strangle me.

All I did was try to get him off me.

All I did was try to defend myself, to protect myself.

She had apparently succeeded.

Despite the efforts of emergency personnel, Michael's prospects didn't look good as he was loaded into the ambulance.

There were no signs of life.

He was officially pronounced dead later at the hospital.

And just how had Michael died?

An official ruling would depend on the autopsy results, but the police at the scene suspected it had something to do with the series of bruises beneath Michael's chin.

There was not a doubt in my mind those were ligature marks.

Why would Kelly's husband attack her?

And how did she not only survive, but end up killing him instead?

Determined to get to the bottom of what had happened, detectives asked Kelly to come back to the precinct and make a statement.

But first, she said she had to take care of her daughter.

The seven-year-old had slept through Kelly's struggle with Michael, only to be awakened by the police sirens.

I'm there crying.

I'm shaking.

I'm just scared out of my mind.

And she comes and she hugs me and she said, Mommy, I love you.

I was like, I I love you too and I told her something happened so mommy gotta talk to the police for a while

minutes later in a police interrogation room detectives asked Kelly to explain what exactly had happened with her husband that morning starting from the beginning

and the story Kelly told was of a brief eight-week marriage punctuated by abuse There were two specific claims that she made.

She made one claim that Michael smacked her in the head.

And there was another claim where she stated that Michael was at the top of the stairs and he shook her from behind.

Kelly explained that she'd never filed charges against her husband.

Instead, she said after each incident, Michael had broken down and begged her to stay.

He asked me to forgive him.

Sometimes I blame myself, but I knew the situation I was in, and I stayed.

And earlier that morning, according to Kelly, Michael's behavior hadn't just been abusive.

it had been attempted murder.

That's the last thing I remember.

Everything just went blank after that.

I thought,

I thought that was like

I was gonna die.

Kelly told the officers it had all started the night before.

She and Michael had gotten into an argument over the amount of attention Kelly had been paying to her daughter.

So I said, I'm gonna get her ready for bed and then we'll talk.

So he said, all right, he walks off.

Kelly said once Michael had left the room she'd gotten in bed with her daughter.

She's laying on the bed, I'm laying on the bed.

We both fall asleep.

A few hours later according to Kelly she'd woken back up and after making sure her daughter was still asleep crept back to the master bedroom.

Inside she said she'd found Michael waiting up and furious.

He said

What the F are you coming into bed for?

He was like, get the F out.

Kelly told police she'd left the room, grabbed a comforter, and tried to make a bed on a sofa in an adjacent room.

But she said Michael had soon followed her into the room.

And according to Kelly, he'd had a lot on his mind.

He began arguing about everything.

I was like, you know what?

If I make your life that stressful, that miserable, I'll leave.

According to Kelly, Michael's reaction to the suggestion had hardly been the one she expected.

He started laughing.

He said, that's not going to happen.

Kelly said she'd finally fallen asleep on the sofa.

But maybe an hour later, Michael woke her up with an electrical cord.

Michael placed the cord around her like that, which doesn't really give you a lot of leverage as the attacker.

Kelly said she'd managed to roll off the couch before Michael had been able to fully tighten the electrical cord around her neck.

I didn't know it was him until I rolled off the sofa and I got up and I saw him standing in front of me.

And I just went numb.

I was so scared.

And that's when, according to Kelly, Michael had grabbed her by the throat and begun to squeeze with his hands.

I couldn't hear anything.

I couldn't feel anything.

The only thing I know that he was trying to choke me.

And he's not letting go.

Kelly told the police that she needed him in the groin.

Kelly said Michael had fallen to the ground, pulling her down with him.

And the struggle, according to Kelly had continued on the floor.

He had me by my neck and he was trying to put the cord back and he was squeezing my neck and he wouldn't get off.

So I took a piece of the cord, it was a long cord,

and I put it around his neck and started pulling, hoping that he would let go.

But

he didn't and

I don't even know how long that lasted for.

The daughter was in the next room.

She was fighting for her life.

She was just trying to survive.

The next thing I remember was seeing him laying there

and he wasn't moving.

And

I tried shaking him.

I was like, Michael,

he wasn't getting up.

Afraid that Michael was dead, Kelly said she'd quickly called her brother and father in Brooklyn.

She also told police she had called a friend named Jeremy Bryant.

He lived in Hempstead.

He was the closest one there.

And I tried to tell him what happened.

I was crying so much that, you know, I don't think he understood what I was saying.

So he told me to call 911.

Kelly's version of events certainly sounded like a clear case of self-defense.

But was it true?

It all hinged on one question.

Was Michael an abusive husband so out of control that he'd try to strangle his wife in her sleep?

The detectives weren't necessarily sure.

For starters, if Kelly and Michael had been engaged in such a violent struggle, why had her daughter slept through the whole thing?

She was asked whether or not she made any noise.

And she said, I didn't want to scream because I didn't want to wake my daughter up.

I remember thinking about was my daughter sleeping.

And I couldn't do anything.

It was an explanation that police found hard to to believe.

She's about to breathe her last breath.

She's about to meet her maker.

And better for her daughter to be an orphan than to wake up because she didn't want to make any noise.

It made no sense at all.

And without her daughter as a witness, police had only the physical evidence to confirm Kelly's story.

The bruises around Michael's neck certainly suggested that he'd been strangled.

But what about Kelly?

What they saw was a small bruise about the size of a thumb on her wrist, and they also saw a bruise on her arm.

Why weren't there any bruises on Kelly's neck?

After all, didn't she claim Michael had strangled her first?

There were no tears to her pants or tank top.

There was no clothes out of place.

There were no rips.

No bloody lips, no black eye.

To police, Kelly didn't look like she'd just been through the fight of her life with a man twice her size.

Neither, for that matter, did the crime scene.

This room was messy.

Certain things were out of place, but certainly not a scene that would be indicative of some sort of violent struggle that Kelly described to the police.

Did that imply the struggle didn't occur?

At this point, the investigators weren't sure.

Still, despite the inconsistencies in Kelly's statement, some facts about the case were certain.

There was no doubt that he was dead.

There was no doubt that Kelly pulled on the cord and because Kelly pulled on the cord, he died.

There was no doubt.

And that alone was enough for an arrest.

She was placed under arrest by the police based on her statement.

Considering she'd claimed self-defense, Kelly was stunned by the turn of events.

I'm thinking they're gonna take me back home.

Then he came back in

with a little card

with my rights on it.

Kelly was booked on second-degree murder charges and immediately taken to jail.

12.30 in the morning, the following morning, one of the detectives called me and told me, He said, Well, I just want to inform you your sister was being arrested for murder.

Then he hung up.

I was scared.

I haven't seen my family.

I didn't speak to anyone.

I didn't know where my daughter was.

I was just in shock.

Coming up, police dig deeper into Kelly's marriage and what she was doing outside of it.

Jeremy Bryant produced a series of text messages sent by Kelly.

They had met on a social networking website.

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On Thanksgiving morning, November 22nd, 2007, 29-year-old Kelly Forbes sat in a Nassau County jail cell.

She'd confessed to strangling her husband Michael with an electrical cord the morning before.

But Kelly had insisted she'd only choked Michael in self-defense after he had attacked her first.

He was trying to kill me.

I told him I never meant for this to happen.

I've never been in a fight in my life.

And the shock had scarcely worn off hours later when she was ushered into a Long Island courtroom and arraigned on murder charges.

I couldn't even stand up.

I was crying so much.

And indeed, when he said second-degree murder is like,

I don't know, I can't explain that feeling.

As Kelly fell apart, her attorney entered her plea: not guilty by reason of self-defense, which put a little pressure on the prosecutors.

Typically in Nassau County, the prosecutor has to indict someone who's accused of a felony within six days.

If the prosecutor fails to get an indictment at that time, the defendant must be released.

Not only would Kelly be released, without an indictment, the DA would be forced to drop the murder charges.

It was a small glimmer of hope for Kelly Forbes as she was taken back to the cell where she was being held without bond.

They didn't have enough evidence so

things wasn't hard enough.

So

everything was looking very very optimistic.

If a grand jury failed to reach a unanimous decision she would be released and back home with her daughter in just six days.

All she wanted to do was to see her daughter.

I was scared.

The lawyer explained, you know, a lot of legal terms I didn't understand.

But my dad, he said he's, you know, he's a very good lawyer, so I trusted that they were going to fight for me.

Nassau County police and prosecutors, however, had no intention of letting Kelly off easily.

But with the clock ticking, they had only days to gather additional evidence to bolster their case.

Step one, try and substantiate Kelly's accusations of abuse.

In order for her to sustain a defense of justification, she had to believe that Michael was going to kill her.

And that claim would have been sustained by

any past abuse to determine whether or not that was a reasonable belief for her to have.

There was only one little problem as far as Kelly's accusations of abuse were concerned.

There were no reports to police, no complaints to friends, nothing.

Questioning Kelly and Michael's family and friends didn't produce any evidence that Kelly had ever complained about abuse either.

But she had apparently complained plenty about Michael.

They all described that.

Kelly complained constantly about Michael.

Disgusted with Michael.

I can't stand Michael.

Every negative word in the book.

But never once did she ever describe any physical abuse.

But by far the most important of Kelly Forbes' friends the police spoke to was Jeremy Bryant.

In her statement to the police, Kelly had admitted calling Bryant before she dialed 911.

He was a friend of mine.

I met him, I think, like about nine months before I moved to Merrick.

The first call she makes is not to the police or or a doctor or to a neighbor kelly had said she called jeremy because he was closest but did that make any sense after all when police questioned jeremy he admitted he'd done little other than offer advice he asked her did you check for a pulse call an ambulance call 911 get him help those were his original responses Jeremy told police Kelly had texted him too.

Messages that he had just happened to have saved on his phone.

Jeremy Bryant produced a series of text messages that he claimed were sent by Kelly after she killed her husband.

Kelly texted him back and forth and said, you know, she did it.

Were the messages all part of a desperate woman's call for assistance?

Or were they an admission of guilt?

Only one thing was certain.

Jeremy Bryant's phone indicated that the first message was sent at 8.17 a.m.,

long before Kelly had called 911 at 8.48 a.m.

She waited about a half an hour before reaching out to anybody.

According to what Kelly had earlier told police, the attack had occurred at 7.30 in the morning, meaning she'd waited an additional 47 minutes before she had texted Jeremy.

She didn't call the police for about 78 minutes after she strangled Michael.

She waits and she calls up Jeremy Bryant.

And there was still the question of just why she had called Jeremy.

Was it simply as Kelly had claimed that he was the closest?

Or was there another reason?

Speaking to the police, Jeremy revealed just how close he and Kelly were.

She calls up an individual that she was carrying on an extramarital affair with.

Jeremy told the investigators he'd first met Kelly on an internet dating site where she went by the screen name of Sexy Trinny.

She was from Trinidad, and that was one of the names she used, Sexy Trinny.

According to Jeremy, they'd started hanging out before she'd met Michael, but they had continued to see each other after Kelly had gotten married.

And Michael, according to his mother, had started getting suspicious.

He knew something wasn't right, because he would say to me, well, I know why she goes to Brooklyn so much.

Why she stays in Brooklyn.

I think that was one of the frustrations that Michael had with Kelly, is that she was still carrying on with men on the phone and on the internet.

On November 23rd, Michael's autopsy report returned from the medical examiner's office.

According to the report, the force and pressure that Kelly had applied to Michael's neck was bone-crushing.

Strangling somebody to death is no easy task.

Our medical examiner described the type of force and pressure needed to be placed on that neck in order to kill Michael.

So much pressure that the cartilage in his neck was crushed.

And she would have had to hold that pressure for a long time.

He described a time period of a minimum of 10 seconds to a minute of applied pressure on that neck in order to cause death.

He's sitting there just pulling and pulling and pulling.

This is a lot of strength and this is a lot of hate that did this.

Which begged the question, if the strangling was merely the side effect of a life and death struggle, how did Kelly manage to overpower a man twice her size?

For prosecutors, the answer was obvious.

Kelly's story about the fight simply wasn't true.

This was not a simple accident.

This took work.

But would the grand jury agree?

When they finally submitted their case that afternoon, prosecutors were confident they'd uncovered enough evidence to secure an indictment.

Unfortunately, the grand jury wanted additional information.

At that time, Miss Forbes was not indicted and she was released.

We ultimately won her freedom.

Kelly naturally was thrilled.

I was relieved.

I walked out to the car park and there were like cameras everywhere and I just ran into the car.

She was optimistic.

Everybody was optimistic because, you know, the lawyers were, you know, were encouraging.

Watching the entire scene unfold, Michael's family feared they'd never see justice.

She had a high-power lawyer, and he was on the TV just about two or three times a day saying that looked around you and then convicted her.

So, you know, it was kind of put fear in us.

Were their fears justified?

Not entirely, as Kelly learned only hours after her release.

We went straight to the lawyer's office and he explained to me they couldn't get second-degree murder, so they're going to try for a lesser charge, which would be first-degree manslaughter.

Two days later, prosecutors submitted the new charges before a second grand jury.

Manslaughter in the first degree is that with the intent to cause serious physical injury, you cause the death of another individual.

As a result of her actions, she caused his death.

This time, prosecutors quickly secured an indictment.

Kelly was immediately taken back into custody.

Coming up,

when the case goes to trial, stunning new evidence reveals that Kelly wasn't the only one who knew what it was like to sit in a jail cell.

I was there, shocked as everyone else.

On June 2nd, 2008, Kelly Forbes walked into the Nassau County Criminal Court to stand trial.

She'd been arrested in November of 2007 for strangling her husband, Michael.

But after a grand jury had failed to indict her for murder, prosecutors had been forced to settle for a manslaughter indictment.

And now it was up to 12 men and women to weigh those charges against Kelly's claim of self-defense.

If convicted, the 29-year-old former medical assistant faced up to 25 years in prison.

In their opening statement, the prosecution painted Kelly as a fickle young woman married to a man 20 years her senior.

She was somebody that could not handle a relationship in a mature and responsible way.

Kelly was so immature, according to prosecutors, that in a mere eight weeks, her marriage was already coming apart.

She felt trapped.

She just had to get out and just each day maybe this marriage is just like choking her.

Yet somehow it was Kelly's husband who ended up being choked.

According to prosecutor Michael Canty, the implication was obvious.

She had an opportunity and she was angry and frustrated and disgusted with Michael.

And she managed to get that cord around his neck and she strangled him.

He said he's going to prove that.

And he pointed and he raised his voice that this woman killed her husband.

And he pointed at me and I was like,

I started crying.

Kelly was crying now.

But according to the prosecutors, she hadn't been so hysterical after she'd strangled Michael.

As evidence, they called Jeremy Bryant to the stand.

During the investigation, police had found out that Kelly and Jeremy were more than just friends, as Kelly had initially claimed.

We decided to go have lunch, get some drinks.

And I guess I did have a little too much to drink.

And one thing led to another.

And, you know, we slept together.

In his testimony, Jeremy told jurors about the text messages he'd received from Kelly immediately after Michael's death.

Messages that indicated Kelly had waited more than an hour before calling police.

She didn't call 911.

She didn't reach out for a doctor.

And at this point, Michael was absolutely no threat to her at all.

None of that happened.

She's just calling someone saying, I did it.

He's dead.

Just shows that, you know, this plan that she had, you know, came to fruition.

Next, in an effort to discredit Kelly's claims of self-defense, prosecutors asked Brian whether he'd ever seen any evidence of physical abuse.

I asked Jeremy, I said, you've had the opportunity to see Kelly in the most intimate of settings with no clothes on.

Did she ever show any signs of abuse?

Any bruising?

Any black eyes?

And his answer was clear, no, never.

And according to Jeremy, she'd never so much as mentioned abuse either.

Never.

All she did was complain about Michael.

That was really disappointing.

I

told him about what I was going through at home.

You know, I thought that, okay, he's gonna testify, at least somebody gonna say something on my part.

And it was the total opposite.

After Jeremy's testimony, Michael's friends and family started breathing a little easier.

When her boyfriend came in and testified against her, I think that was pretty strong.

Prosecutors didn't ask jurors to take Jeremy's word for it either.

Calling the medical examiner to the stand, they reminded the jury that Michael had suffered a heart attack barely a month before his death.

When he got out of the hospital, he was in no condition to care for himself.

Weeks later, would he have been in any condition to initiate the violent struggle Kelly had described to police?

According to prosecutors, the answer was no.

To reinforce the point, they asked the medical examiner to testify about the medications Michael was taking.

According to his testimony, not only had Michael been in no shape to start a fight, he'd barely been able to defend himself.

He would have been basically physically impotent.

Lack of muscle coordination, weak, lethargic, certainly somebody that was not a threat to Kelly Forbes.

The proof, they said, was how Kelly had somehow managed to escape what she claimed had been a life or death struggle relatively unscathed.

In fact, the only injuries Kelly had suffered were bruises on her wrists and arms.

But prosecutors claim these were the result of Michael's desperate dying attempt to pry his wife off of him.

These were bruises that Michael most likely inflicted as he was breathing his last breath.

When it came time to present their case, Kelly's attorney turned the toxicology evidence on its head, arguing that several of the medications in Michael's system could, in certain situations, result in adverse side effects where a person might become more violent.

The side effects of the drugs that were in Michael's system could cause one to be violent, to have mood swings, to become irrational, to hallucinate.

And if the drugs hadn't caused Michael to become violent, it wouldn't have been the first time.

Michael, as the defense revealed, had an extensive history of drugs and violence.

He had rapes and robberies and all of which came out and the jury had full knowledge of that.

One of the drug dealers working under him did not pay his drug debt.

So Michael and some other guys went to this drug dealer's house, duct taped the guy's girlfriend, and raped her and held her hostage so that the drug dealer would come back and pay his drug debt.

As the defense attorneys walked jurors through Michael's rap sheet, the courtroom sat in stunned silence.

No one more so than Kelly.

There he was, his picture, and all his charges, most of his charges, attempted murder, rape, robbery, and I was there, shocked as everyone else, because I didn't know.

Some of the charges had been dismissed, but others had led to convictions that landed Michael in jail.

However, all of them were more than two decades old.

Michael had done his time, putting his years in prison to use by learning a trade.

And once he'd gotten out, he'd opened his barbershop and turned his back on his old ways.

Or had he?

According to the records that we subpoenaed and were introduced into evidence, Michael Forbes was claiming about $45,500 a month of income from that barbershop.

So one legitimate question that we asked, and

that really was never answered to our satisfaction, was where is Michael Forbes getting this money from?

The Forbes family, who felt so confident after Jeremy Bryant's testimony days before, suddenly started to worry.

That was hard.

Her lawyer tried to say that

his place was a drug place.

The prosecutors scrambled to shift the jury's focus from Michael's past to the crime Kelly stood accused of.

I wanted to clearly demonstrate to the jury that Kelly was certainly not the victim here.

At the end of his closing argument, prosecutor Michael Canty picked up the orange electrical cord from the evidence table, the same cord Kelly admitted to wrapping around her husband's throat, and crossed to the jury box.

Kelly pulled that cord for a minimum of 10 seconds.

And I sat there with the cord and I held it out.

And I looked up at the clock in the courtroom.

And in silence, I pulled that cord taut.

And I waited.

And I waited.

And I waited.

Coming up, the jury delivers its verdict.

But which will matter more in jurors' minds?

Kelly's actions or Michael's criminal past.

It was very plausible that a jury would be able to rib onto it and find a reasonable doubt.

On June 16, 2008, Kelly Forbes was seated at the defendants' table in a Nassau County, New York criminal court.

Accused of strangling her husband to death, the 29-year-old widow was awaiting the verdict in her manslaughter trial, a verdict that appeared to hinge on her claims of self-defense and her late husband's extensive criminal record.

It was very plausible that a jury would be able to

bear bond to it and find a reasonable doubt.

Moments later, the jury announced it had reached a decision.

In the crowded courtroom, the clerk read the jury's verdict aloud.

Guilty.

I don't think anybody was expecting a guilty verdict.

So when they said guilty, Kelly

was silent at first and then she started to cry.

She could have gone under the table like that.

Just flat and scream.

My knees got weak.

I couldn't feel my legs.

I just dropped on the chair.

Kelly's defense attorneys were almost as dismayed.

There was, however, still one more fight left.

Eight weeks later, Kelly was back in court for sentencing.

She faced a maximum of 25 years.

This was my first time ever getting into trouble.

So everyone was expecting, you know,

something minimum.

She'd only be disappointed again.

When the judge said, 21 years, I.

I didn't even have a reaction.

I just sat there.

He spoke.

I was just shocked.

Kelly's sentence was only four years short of the maximum.

But Michael's family was disappointed as well.

In fact, for Michael's mother, even the full 25 years wouldn't have been enough.

This wouldn't satisfy me, but it would make me feel a lot better if they would have given her the same thing she gave Michael.

She could have been honest with Michael and said, this is not going to work.

But she killed him because he was generous and she just wanted it all without Michael.

But Kelly doesn't see it quite the same way.

Now in prison, she sticks by her story of an early morning struggle, maintaining that she only killed Michael in order to save herself.

I didn't mean for this to happen.

Yes,

you know, Michael died.

I didn't mean for this to happen.

They tried to make it seem that it was planned, that I had a motive for doing it when I didn't.

It's all a light-hearted nightmare on our podcast, Morbid.

We're your hosts, I'm Alina Urquhart, and I'm Ash Kelly.

And our show is part true crime, part spooky, and part comedy.

The stories we cover are well researched.

Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group.

With a touch of humor.

Shout out to her.

Shout out to all my therapists out the years.

There's been like eight of them.

A dash of sarcasm and just garnished a bit with a little bit of cursing.

That motherfer is not real.

And if you're a weirdo like us and love to cozy up to a creepy tale of the paranormal, or you love to hop in the Way Back Machine and dissect the details of some of history's most notorious crimes, you should tune in to our podcast.

Morbid.

Follow Morbid on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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