AP News, January 23rd, 2007
A man charged with fatally stabbing his wife in a frenzy last February testified Monday that his 12-year-old daughter did it and does not remember the murder.
"If she remembered what I saw, she'd kill herself," Brad Reay, 47, told jurors after taking the stand in his own defense Monday.
Haylee, now 13, testified last week that she never would have hurt her mother. The girl said she was afraid of her father and had never been very close to him.
The nude body of Tami Reay, 41, was found near Lake Oahe outside Pierre on Feb. 9. She had been stabbed dozens of times, and some of the wounds in her chest showed a knife had been forced in to the hilt. The weapon has not been found.
Reay said that on Feb. 7, the night Tami was killed, he awoke to find his daughter standing over her mother in the woman's bedroom, "catatonic or in shock." His daughter had a knife in her hand, he said.
Reay said that he administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on his wife and that she had no pulse.
Reay said his daughter did not awaken from her catatonic state until after he had cleaned the blood off her and placed her in bed and asked her again what she'd done.
"She just kind of looked at me like she didn't know what I was talking about," he said.
Reay said that he and his wife had told their daughter a few days earlier about their plans to divorce and that she was upset with her mother.
Reay said he tried to make his wife's death look like she had been raped to divert attention from his daughter. He had hoped to throw off investigators long enough to escape to Mexico with his daughter, he testified.
"I plan to go to jail for her," he said. "I didn't want her to get in trouble."
On cross-examination, Reay acknowledged knowing that his wife had been dating a couple of men. But Reay said he did not know she was having an affair with a co-worker until after he was arrested.
Jurors could find Reay guilty of first-degree murder, punishable by a mandatory term of life in prison without chance of parole, or manslaughter, which carries a sentence of up to life in prison. Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty.
