Lawyer who fled to Cuba after shooting girlfriend has been convicted of murder

NEWARK — James Ray III, a New York City attorney and former police officer, was convicted Friday of murdering his girlfriend of nine years in the home they shared in an affluent New Jersey suburb.

The jury verdict came after just a few hours of deliberation, more than four years after Mr. Ray fired the deadly gunshots at his six-bedroom home in Montclair, a commuter town about 20 miles west of Manhattan.

A former Marine, Mr Ray, now 60, had insisted he acted on military instinct and shot Angela Bledsoe, 44, in self-defense after pointing a gun at him.

After the October 22, 2018 shooting, Mr. Ray spent hours at home alone, according to testimony at the six-week trial. He printed a will, wrote checks, and typed a letter to his brother.

He then dropped off the couple’s daughter, Alana, then 6, with his brother and left his car at Newark Liberty International Airport before taking a taxi to Philadelphia. The following week, Mr. Ray hitchhiked west across the country and into Mexico before being arrested trying to enter Cuba, a country with no extradition treaty with the United States.

“You don’t just kill someone one day and find your way to Cuba six days later,” Assistant District Attorney Michele Miller told jurors during her closing arguments. “This has been thought about.”

Mr. Ray did not testify in his own defense or provide an explanation for his dramatic journey across the country or the 18-page diary he wrote along the way and labeled ‘On the Move’.

The jury of 11 men and four women, including several alternates, found Mr. Ray guilty of murder and gun possession hours after Ms. Miller finished her closing argument.

The trial portrayed both Mr. Ray and Ms. Bledsoe as unfaithful partners and took on a soap opera character as sexually explicit text messages and audio recordings were entered as evidence at trial before Judge Verna G. Leath in the Essex County Superior Court.

Brooke M. Barnett, one of Mr. Ray’s attorneys, had pointed to Ms. Bledsoe’s longstanding affair with a former college classmate, who testified about the relationship, and what Ms. Barnett described as a lax criminal investigation.

Detectives, she said, had not analyzed the contents of Ms. Bledsoe’s phone or taken into account the woman’s frequent trips to the shooting range when evaluating Mr. Ray’s claim of self-defense.

“She picked up that gun not once, but twice and pointed it at James Ray,” Ms Barnett told jurors on Wednesday, adding that Mr Ray believed “he had no choice but to shoot or be shot.”

Mr. Ray, who grew up in Brooklyn and spent two years as a police officer in New York City before getting his MBA and going to law school, had claimed he was cleaning his guns when the couple started arguing that Monday morning.

However, Ms. Mitchell encouraged jurors to consider an inconsistent fact: that the cleaning kit found in the home after the shooting was for a gun, not the gun found in the couple’s kitchen.

Friends and relatives of Ms Bledsoe, including her parents, observed much of the process, sitting in the front rows of the gallery of buttons bearing the photograph of the slain woman.

Ms. Bledsoe’s sister, Lisa LaBoo, who testified at the trial, was not immediately available for comment after the jury reached its verdict. But in an interview last month, she described her sister as “beautiful inside and out.”

Alana, now 10, lives with Mrs. LaBoo and her husband in Florida.

Mr. Ray discussed his love for Alana in messages to his brother and in a lengthy last phone conversation with a close friend, he called twice after the shooting.

Ms. Mitchell repeated that appeal to the jury on Thursday.

“Sometimes,” Mr. Ray said during the taped conversation, “you have to protect people in a way that’s unconventional, that goes against the normal fibers.”

“It takes a certain person to understand it,” he said.

Mr Ray faces life in prison if convicted on June 22.