A Florida ballerina is on trial for murder, with prosecutors alleging that she brutally killed her wealthy Republican donor husband because she wanted to be a single mother raising their young daughter.
But Ashley Benefield, 32, admitted to killing 59-year-old Douglas Benefield during a custody battle in September 2020, but claims she feared for her life after years of abuse.
“She felt her life was in danger when she was forced to shoot him,” Benefield’s lawyer, Neil Taylor, told jurors in opening statements Tuesday.
But prosecutors argue Doug was shot with his back turned to his wife, suggesting Ashley killed him in cold blood.
“This case is about a woman who decided early in her pregnancy that she wanted to be a single mother,” Assistant State’s Attorney Suzanne O’Donnell argued, “and she will stop at nothing to achieve that goal.”
Both parties agree that Doug and Ashley’s marriage was irreparably broken when police responded to a 911 call on Sept. 27, 2020, to Ashley’s mother’s home in Lakewood Ranch, about 50 miles south of Florida.
Paramedics found Doug lying on the bedroom floor with three shots, and Ashley told police her husband had tried to attack her.
But the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office didn’t believe it: “Detectives found no evidence that she acted in self-defense when she fired multiple shots at her husband,” they said in an affidavit obtained by The Washington Post.
“Judging by Douglas’ entrance wound, it does not appear that Douglas was facing Ashley when Ashley began firing,” the affidavit states. “It also does not appear that Douglas was in a defensive or combative position. There was no weapon on or near Douglas’s body.”
It was a violent ending to what started out as a fairy-tale romance.
Ashley Benefield met Doug, a Navy veteran and wealthy tech consultant who has founded several businesses, at a Republican fundraiser at Ben Carson’s Palm Beach mansion in 2016. Two weeks later, the couple were married.
Ashley, then 24 and a trained dancer, wanted to start her own ballet company, and Doug funded the venture from his savings.
Ashley later gave birth to a daughter with the couple, who is now six years old.
But things quickly went wrong: Doug began to run out of funds. The entire ballet company fell apart. The couple were soon embroiled in a bitter divorce, rife with allegations of infidelity and abuse.
Throughout their four-year marriage, Ashley made multiple allegations of abuse against her husband, claiming that he beat their dog so hard that it knocked her unconscious, that Doug shot a gun into the ceiling to “shut her up,” and even that he tried to poison her.
But prosecutors told jurors Tuesday that the allegations were part of a calculated strategy to win sole custody of the couple’s children.
The judge previously found no evidence of abuse by Doug.
The trial is expected to last more than two weeks.
