The murder trial of Sarah Boone, accused of leaving her boyfriend to suffocate in a suitcase in February 2020, finally begins Monday after 4½ years in which the outrageous details of the case and Boone’s own behavior have gained international attention.
It began with what Boone, 46, initially told detectives was a wine-fueled game of hide-and-seek with Jorge Torres Jr. that went horribly wrong. Then came a convoluted court process which saw her burn through eight attorneys, many of whom she subjected to slashing criticism, leading the judge to strip her of the right to court-appointed representation.
Boone managed to find a ninth attorney — from the Panhandle — who has a new strategy to defend her: Self-defense from a woman suffering battered spouse syndrome. That same strategy recently led to a high-profile acquittal in the case of a woman who killed her husband in South Florida.
But defense attorneys interviewed by the Orlando Sentinel — including the lead defense attorney in that recent case — cast doubt on whether the same argument will work for Boone. The strategy is further complicated by statements she made to police undermining the claim. Days before the trial, the judge rejected her attorney’s attempt to have those statements thrown out.
Boone, a clerical worker, and Torres, 42, had been dating since around March 2016, according to one police report. It was a tempestuous relationship: They were arrested on battery charges in July 2018 when Boone said Torres kicked her in the face and he said she tried to strangle him. Police were unable to determine the primary aggressor. Torres was arrested three times in 2019 for battery involving Boone and once for violating terms of pretrial release by meeting her, according to court records.
The night Torres diedOn the evening of Feb. 23, 2020, after sharing a bottle of Chardonnay, Boone and Torres decided to play hide-and-seek, she later told police. The game ended with Boone zipping him in a dark teal, soft-sided suitcase in the living room of their Winter Park apartment before going to sleep upstairs.
When she woke up the next morning and went to check on him, she said she found him unresponsive in the suitcase and called her ex-husband, who arrived on the scene and told her to call police. A medical examiner’s report said Torres had been in the suitcase for “up to 11 hours or more” and ruled he died of asphyxiation, according to reporting by WKMG.
Boone told Orange County Sheriff’s Office homicide detective Chelsey Koepsell she thought Torres could get out of the suitcase on his own.
But police found a two-minute-long video on her phone showing Torres in the suitcase repeatedly shouting Boone’s name and telling her he couldn’t breathe — with her taunting him in response, telling him “Yeah, that’s what you do when you choke me,” and “For everything you’ve done to me. F*** you. Stupid.”
Boone had a follow-up interview with Koepsell at the Sheriff’s Office the next day, where she denied intentionally leaving Torres in the suitcase and began saying the wine had affected her, contradicting her earlier insistence that she was not drunk. She was arrested immediately after the interview and charged with second-degree murder.
Many delays and attorneysSince then, the case has been delayed 16 times, largely because of what Circuit Judge Michael Kraynick described as Boone’s antagonism and hostility along with professional and personal attacks on her attorneys.
Dissatisfied with her eighth attorney, Patricia Cashman, Boone sent the judge a handwritten 58-page letter blasting her performance.
“I want to make it known I walked out on my attorney in our last meeting due to her unwarranted, uninformative, unprofessional, snotty attitude and her untruthful answers to my questions and beyond,” she wrote. “She seems, like everyone else, not to remember I am innocent until adjudged otherwise.”
That was enough for Kraynick, who then ruled that Boone must represent herself.
“Allowing defendant to her eighth court-appointed attorney (ninth overall) will only serve to delay the case further and encourage Defendant to persist in efforts to prevent the resolution of the case on its merits,” Kraynick said in the ruling.
But in a surprise, Boone in late August retained a new, private attorney — James Owens, based in Milton, a town near Pensacola — after he saw an online flyer she made looking for a new lawyer.
Court records show Owens intends to defend Boone by claiming she suffered from battered spouse syndrome, which resulted in the July acquittal of Marcia Thompson, of West Palm Beach, on first-degree murder. Thompson faced life in prison for shooting her husband nine times — six in the back — while he lay on the couch in his underwear.
This argument, which reasons that a litany of abuse compelled the perpetrator to act in perceived self-defense, goes against what Boone has maintained previously — that Torres’ death was an accident.
Prosecutors, who declined to speak to the Sentinel, sought to prevent Owens from such a defense — but Kraynick allowed it.
A good defense?While Owens also declined to speak to the Sentinel, Jessica Mishali, lead attorney for Thompson at trial, said she wouldn’t use the argument to defend Boone.
She explained that it’s not enough to be the victim of abuse if you want to claim battered spouse syndrome.
“When you look at a battered spouse, which is a person who has been battered, kind of consistently, repeatedly over time, and it kind of changes their brain,” Mishali said. “It changes when they are in fight or flight. It changes what they’re thinking all the time, and so someone like that would have a different perception of when they might be in imminent harm.”
She doesn’t think Boone fits the criteria because she went to sleep after leaving Torres in the suitcase and a person can’t defend themselves while asleep.
“Battered spouses also don’t talk the way she talks,” Mishali said. “Battered spouses are meek and meager, and quiet and passive, and kind of accept and put up with anything and everything, which is why they end up in that situation.”
Longtime prominent Central Florida defense attorney Mark NeJame, who’s served as an analyst for some of the region’s most historic criminal cases — including murder trials of Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman — agreed that mounting a battered spouse defense will be difficult.
“Most jurors do not accept it, because they say, ‘Hey, you could have left,'” NeJame said, “and in this case, I think it’s going to be especially hard, because you hear her mocking him, you hear her taunting him, but she could have clearly gotten out of there and not gone to bed while he suffocated.”
Both Mishali and NeJame said Boone might fare better by claiming she hadn’t intended to kill Torres, which would open the door for the jury to convict her of a lesser crime, like manslaughter.
Jury selection begins Monday; the trial is scheduled to last three weeks.
Two experts Owens plans to call on Boone’s behalf are Dr. Michael Brannon, a forensic psychologist who testified at Thompson’s trial, and Dr. Julie Harper, a forensic psychologist from the Panhandle.
But prosecutors can use Boone’s own words to attack that claim.
Owens filed a motion Sept. 25 to have Boone’s initial claims that Torres’ death was an accident ruled inadmissible, arguing Koepsell hadn’t properly read Boone her Miranda rights.
Kraynick decided Thursday evening to allow the evidence.
He also denied Owens’ motion to allow Boone access to hairstyling and makeup for trial. The Sheriff’s Office said it had security concerns because makeup is considered contraband at the jail. However, Kraynick did grant motions letting Boone wear civilian clothing during the trial, and go without handcuffs.
