By Jim Hannah
The Cincinnati Enquirer

LEXINGTON - Three and a half years after Stephen Craven was found bludgeoned to death in his home on a quiet Northern Kentucky cul-de-sac, his wife will be tried a second time for his killing.

Adele Craven's first trial ended Dec. 6, 2002, in Lexington with a hung jury. Eight jurors wanted to set the stay-at-home mom free, three wanted to send her to death row and one was undecided.

CRAVEN TIMELINE

Click here to view a timeline detailing the three and a half years it's taken to bring Adele Craven to trial. (GIF file, 60k.)

Her second trial, again in Lexington, is to start today. The first trial lasted six weeks, and despite pledges from the judge to speed up the proceedings, the second is expected to take a month.

Citing pretrial publicity, Kenton Circuit Judge Patricia Summe decided in July 2002 to move the case to Lexington.

Prosecution's plan

Much of this trial is expected to be a replay from the first with a few, but significant, changes.

Prosecutor Luke Morgan hopes to tilt the retrial in the state's favor by calling a new star witness - the hit man.

Ronald Scott Pryor was convicted in May 2002 of murder. Prosecutors say he was to be paid about $15,000 to kill Stephen Craven. Pryor didn't agree to testify against Mrs. Craven until after the hung jury, in exchange for a sentence of life in prison.

Craven will also have a new defense team. Gone are Covington attorneys Deanna Dennison and Linda A. Smith. The new attorneys are William R. Wilson and Kenneth L. McCardwell, both former public defenders.

They will be paid by the state to represent Craven, who has been declared indigent.

McCardwell, of Louisville, mainly practices criminal law. He has represented John Patrick McCreary of Trimble County, in the slayings of his cousin and her boyfriend, Jessica Hawkins and Joel Blevins, at their Jefferson County home last year. The jury recommended a life sentence instead of the death penalty sought by prosecutors.

Wilson, an attorney with the law firm Burress McAfee & Wilson of Shepherdsville, mostly handles civil cases.

Dozens of witnesses

During the last trial, the prosecution spent three weeks calling five dozen witnesses and entering 229 exhibits.

The prosecution called Ms. Craven's beautician, her marriage counselor, her neighbors and her sister to try to establish that she was in a troubled marriage, talked of having her husband killed and acted strangely on the day of the killing.

But the star prosecution witness was Mrs. Craven's former lover, Russell "Rusty" McIntire. The 35-year-old Erlanger resident had begun an affair with Mrs. Craven after he was hired to remodel the Cravens' basement.

"I talked with her (Adele) about different ways to ambush Stephen," said McIntire, who reached a plea agreement in June 2001 that required him to testify against Ms. Craven to avoid the possibility of being sentenced to death. "Options included on a bike trail, on his boat and in the house. She even discussed killing him herself."

The defense

Mrs. Craven's former defense team argued during the first trial that Craven ended the affair with McIntire before the murder, but the two remained friends. They said that set off McIntire, who had emotional problems, and that Adele Craven was not part of the plot to kill her husband. Dennison suggested that McIntire and Pryor ganged up on Mr. Craven together while his wife was out of the house.

"He was losing her, and he knew it," Dennison told the first jury.

Mrs. Craven has remained in the jail on no bond since her arrest less than two weeks after the murder.

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E-mail jhannah@enquirer.com