Hey, honey, do you need help?
It's okay.
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation.
Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murder.
We'll start with September 13th of 2013 in a suburb of Atlanta, DeKalb County.
At around 2.33 in the morning, a call comes in to the 911 center.
We have emergency 911.
What is the address of your emergency?
Now warning, what you're about to hear is not only disturbing, but very raw.
My eggs can't be in anything.
He raped me, and I shot him, and I don't think he's okay.
Ma'am, calm down.
What's the problem there?
He tried to rape me again.
He's done it many times.
He's not supposed to be around me and he raped me again and I tried to ask him to stop and I shot him.
You shot him?
Yes.
I can actually picture what I think she's doing.
And I picture her crouching in a corner with her hands over her head and not knowing which way to look or to turn.
And that is what I hear in her voice as she's talking.
Now, I've responded to calls just like this when I was in uniform.
And it is so critical for the 911 operator to obtain and relay as much information as possible.
And in this case, we already know the offender is down.
EMS is already on the way.
But where is the weapon?
Where is the caller located?
Is she inside or outside of the home?
And are there others in the house?
These types of situations Anastasia, are so high anxiety.
The more detail the operator can get, the better.
What's your name?
Victoria.
Her name is Victoria Rickman.
Very attractive, 30-year-old mother, divorced mom of one.
She had an 8-year-old daughter.
She was a marketing consultant.
And at this point, she was living in the area, staying with a friend.
You said your ex-boyfriend tried to rape you?
No, he didn't.
And I shot him.
I just kept shooting and shooting and shooting and shooting.
You shot him where?
I shot him all over.
As I'm listening to the caller saying I shot him and I shot him, I shot him.
I'm already torn between my prosecutor hat and my person hat.
Because, as a prosecutor, I know that if we're talking about self-defense, you're only allowed to use that much force.
And normally that's not shot him, shot him, shot him.
But as a person, as a woman, I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, this woman is also reporting a rape.
And if you are being abused and attacked, I can see it.
And I'm putting my hand over my head saying, what did you do?
What did you do?
How many times did you shoot him?
I don't know.
We have to be very cautious about dissecting these calls and trying to put ourselves in their positions, because everybody reacts differently in these situations.
And until you're in that situation, it's really, truly hard to judge.
True.
But when I look at it as a prosecutor, I know the law and I know in a courtroom what I have to prove.
And what we might all think is justifiable under the law is not.
Where is he in the house?
He was laying on the bed.
I don't think he's okay.
Ma'am, is he breathing?
Is he breathing?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know what to do to help him, but he was The 911 operator decided to put an EMS worker on the phone.
I don't know.
He raped me and I couldn't.
Even during that exchange between the 911 operator, the EMS worker and Victoria Rickman, it was very difficult to communicate with her.
You can tell she was extremely distraught.
She said she's unable to do CPR.
He's too heavy to move, and when she touches him, more blood comes out.
I hear the noises, and I don't want to hurt him anymore.
I didn't mean to.
I just.
He raped me and it's been going on and on and I've been trying to get out, but he just won't stop.
The attacker in the alleged sexual assault is Victoria Rickman's on-again, off-again boyfriend, Will Carter.
The first officers on scene were met at the front door by Victoria Rickman and just as she was on the 911 call, she was hysterical and repeatedly telling those officers that Will Carter sexually assaulted her.
Now, here's the thing.
I mean, we are talking about very murky territory.
I mean, there is no more invasive crime than sexual assault.
And everyone reacts differently.
Of course, there's no one size fits all.
But what we have learned as prosecutors and victims, advocates and law enforcement people that deal with these cases all the time, is that while there, of course, is no actual shame in being victimized by sexual assault, the survivor, the victim, usually feels that.
It is very rare that someone wants to continually tell you what happened to them in terms of the sexual assault or attempt.
And that's what officers faced here in and of itself.
It doesn't prove anything, but it does have you start to tilt your head at least a little.
So, at the point that the scene was rendered safe, it was important to get Victoria Rickman to the hospital, not only to make sure that she was okay, but to gain evidence of this alleged assault.
And what that means is to start a rape kit and start to collect evidence.
Did the rape actually occur?
And if it did, what evidence can they gain from that assault?
So we have a homicide, but this case is so much more than a homicide right from the get-go because it's also a rape case.
And that adds all sorts of complexities because she killed someone.
And was that justifiable or was it murder?
One thing we know is that it's not a whodunit, because we all know that Victoria Rickman is the person who killed Will Carter.
But there is so much more to this case and nothing about this crime is ultimately what it seems.
I mean, when I first read about this case, I had very certain ideas in my head about what it was and what it was going to be.
But I had no idea how complicated it truly is.
And with that I spoke to the prosecutor who handled this case, Sheila Ross, and she had lots to say about what this case isn't and what it is.
The first thing I want to do, as a woman and as a prosecutor who has fought for women my entire career is I want to believe her.
I want to believe Victoria Rickman when she tells me she was raped and she had to shoot this guy.
So, before we could step further into this event, to this homicide, we really need to know about the relationship, what it really was, between Will and Victoria.
Victoria Rickman is a 30-year-old, very attractive single mother.
And Will, not much older than that, also a very good-looking guy.
They seem like a great couple.
She had been married before and had a son from her previous marriage.
She had worked prior in real estate and she had actually even worked with Will at his insurance company.
And you know, when you think about couples and we all have seen various couples and had different thoughts over the years we often think to ourselves well, how did this one end up with that one?
For whatever our criteria is,
You know, when you look at these two and I'm talking solely just physically for a moment they are pretty like in kind.
But they met through a mutual friend, and were instantly drawn to one another.
You know, as prosecutors, we read into body language a lot.
And every picture that I see when I'm looking at the two of them together, I mean, they are tight.
Their faces are touching.
Their shoulders are touching.
There's lots and lots of pictures of them here that I'm looking at.
They were pretty happy to be together, and they look pretty happy to me.
They had a good relationship, probably for the first six months, but then it just quickly turned toxic.
Looking at Will a little more closely, he was a successful business owner.
And he built it from scratch by himself to a 30 person company.
He was a good employer.
His employees said that he was really good to all of them.
But there was more to Will Carter, because he was also someone who had struggled with drugs for years.
And when I say struggled, by some accounts, that's an understatement.
And he was just beginning to climb out from many, many, many years of drug addiction.
However, Victoria Rickman, at times, would text his mother that Will was using.
And there's still more.
You know the happy couple we talked about that smiles ear to ear, as they are tight shoulder to shoulder.
Well, they weren't always so happy.
At some point, she did live with Will, and then he kicked her out.
At some point, they had a place together, and then they didn't have it anymore.
And just a year earlier, Will had been arrested for assaulting Victoria.
At 7.45 p.m., a 911 call is made to the Cobb County Police Department.
They respond to Rickman and Will's apartment, and she appeared to be in distress.
The apartment was in disarray and she said that she had been attacked by her boyfriend and that he had forcefully groped her breast and touched her vagina with his hand and held her down on the bed when she was trying to get away.
And that she only escaped by hitting him in the head with a hammer.
I mean Scott, just hearing that that he had tried to sexually assault her and that she'd only escaped by using a hammer.
I mean, what is going through your mind at that point hearing that?
To me it sets up a pattern or practice of violence, not only between them, but someone who had to defend themselves and grabbing a hammer to fend him off.
Everyone knows that saying, you never know what goes on behind closed doors.
But with this couple, the doors weren't always closed.
I mean, they had opened it to law enforcement before.
And on that day, when law enforcement took action, it was Will Carter that they arrested.
I can't tell you how many times I've been in situations where you're talking to a victim of domestic violence and someone else.
They ask the question is why didn't you just leave?
And that's a frustrating question, because there are so many reasons why either they can't, or they're confused, or they don't.
And I almost think it re-victimizes them in a sense, because you make them feel like they're doing something wrong over and over again.
And it's a very difficult situation to be in.
It's not that easy.
Now there's another incident that happened between these two in May 2013, just a few months before the shooting.
Is it a female yelling?
Yes.
She's like, someone please help me, please help me.
And she says, stop, stop trying to rape me.
And I see like the guy running around and here comes this girl.
And what about the guy?
He ran into the house around the back of the house.
Can you still see the female?
Yeah.
She's trying to hide.
Like she's trying.
Hey honey, do you need help?
Come here.
Are you okay?
It's okay.
What's the matter?
What's she telling you?
What happened?
She's telling that it's her ex-fiancé and he was trying to rape her and he was shoving her into the dirt her face in the dirt.
And she doesn't have her phone.
He took her phone and all that kind of stuff.
And a police officer just pulled up.
Okay, go ahead and slide down, okay?
Okay.
My first thought when I hear that is I love that neighbor.
I mean, you all might know the story of Kitty Genovese when people see an attack and they don't do anything,
And here this neighbor saw something, heard something and called to get some help.
That's the very first thing.
I just wish people would get more involved like this neighbor.
But now let's look about what it is that she's talking about.
We have another situation here where there is a violent confrontation between Victoria Rickman and Will Carter to the point where she had to flee his apartment and scream to the neighbors to call 911.
Again the skeptic in me, the prosecutor who is starting to unpack and try to figure out where the truth lies in all this.
Is it someone who just can't keep herself away from him even though she is being serially abused?
Or is it starting to be almost like the fable, The Boy Who Cried Wolf?
So knowing all of this history about Will and Victoria, let's go back to the shooting.
So after she is examined at the hospital, Victoria Rickman is taken down to the precinct.
And now the police want to talk to her and get every bit of information that they can.
They photograph her and then they interview her.
But she doesn't talk for very long.
When the detective comes in, the first thing they start talking about is the seizure of her phone.
And Rickman makes it very clear that she does not want the detective to look at her phone, that she's not going to give her consent to go through her phone.
Detective Benton lets her know that she is going to cede her phone pursuant to a search warrant.
And Victoria Rickman doesn't want to give her her phone.
Well, after being held at the precinct for a few hours, Victoria Rickman was arrested for murder.
When you hear the fact that detectives decided to place Victoria Rickman in custody, you may be thinking to yourself wait, here's a woman who told police she shot and killed her boyfriend who allegedly had sexually assaulted her.
So why is she in custody?
And while they are not saying she wasn't sexually assaulted, what they are saying is it appears to them the use of deadly force was not justifiable.
Here's the thing.
You hear that and right away it's like, ick, but much stronger than ick.
You know, ick times a thousand.
But you have to talk a little bit more about what self-defense means under the law.
You're only allowed to do two things.
You're able to respond with like force or just enough needed to save yourself, which means that once the threat is stopped ie you have fired once and they stop, or twice and they stop, maybe three times and they stop.
Under the law, it's over.
You're done.
You're not justified from that point.
You also have the duty to retreat if you can.
Now, that changes if you're in your own home.
Some states do it a little differently, but that is by and large the way it's looked at.
And it's going to be incumbent on her defense team down the road to prove that.
I mean, the investigation needs to be surgical at this point because you're pulling apart real incidents that occurred.
And I think crime scene science will be a big player in this equation.
So going back to the crime scene, when investigators show up at the door, they were met by Victoria Rickman.
They met Victoria Rickman at the front door holding a small dog.
They observed that her hair was wet, she was clean, and she was dressed in her pajamas.
She did not appear to be injured, nor did she complain of any injuries to the officers when they arrived.
You can look at that two ways.
You can look at that as unusual.
Or, on the flip side, you can look at that of a woman who has just been sexually assaulted and wants to rinse herself off.
That makes total sense.
And please, you know, for a second, anyone out there that's thinking that we are not being compassionate enough for sexual assault victims.
No, not at all.
Because, of course, there is no way anything's supposed to look.
And we've certainly come across cases that the survivor of these attacks doesn't have those physical signs.
However, as investigators, as prosecutors, we need to be critical to figure out where the truth lies.
When they got inside the house, there was no signs of struggle in the room.
There was no forced entry into the house.
She had had a book about domestic violence in the room.
They were able to see Will on the bed and he was shot nine to ten times.
I couldn't really tell at that point.
His clothes are just like neatly in a pile by the bed.
So to the police, it just looked like they were going to bed and he was shot multiple times.
So the lack of any sign of struggle inside that house, I mean, did this attack even occur?
And instead of a justifiable shooting, are we talking about actual murder?
But Anastasia, if you look at the flip side, and if Victoria Rickman was really planning on just murdering Will Carter, would she have done a better job in planning?
Why wasn't the room in disarray?
Why wasn't the clothes just thrown about as if it was ripped off of her?
Why didn't she do more to play the part of a real victim?
You're right, I think.
And it's something that I often say to the jury when you're talking about statements of defendants or defenses, or what they're claiming is that wouldn't they have done a better job right?
And that's it.
I mean, how tough is it to scratch yourself or to throw stuff around the house?
It seems to be almost like fake a murder scene, fake a sexual assault scene 101 if you were trying to do it.
And It does start to make you shake your head, because certain signs say that there's more to this, but other ones say well, maybe it just doesn't fit the mold of what we think it's supposed to be.
The first thing they do is talk to Will's father.
And they had to notify him that his son was murdered.
And they told him who did it.
And he immediately told them about the prior murder violence that Victoria Rickman had inflicted upon Will while they were dating.
Will's parents were able to provide a snapshot into the relationship.
That things would be great, and then they would turn ugly.
Now let's go back to that January 2012 incident that we started off by talking about, which is when Victoria escaped that attempted sexual assault by having to hit Will in the head with a hammer, and that he ultimately was arrested for.
Well, Will's parents were spoken to, and they had a very different take on that event.
They said that their son, Will, came to their home right away, just incredibly upset and distraught.
And he was bleeding.
She had gotten angry at him.
She had attacked him and he tried to restrain her.
And that then at some point she took the hammer and hit him on the side of the head and that she bit him on his shoulder.
She told him that she was going to have him arrested, that she was going to say that he had tried to attack her, and that then he was so concerned about this happening to him that he asked his parents to go back to the home with him, which they did, and that when they went back to the home, that's when the officers were there, and that they were shocked that, at the end, it was their son that was arrested, instead of Victoria.
You have to put aside All of our preconceived notions about gender.
And you have to look at the evidence.
And when you do that, it becomes abundantly clear that she is in control and that he is just too nice to quit her.
I mean, the real victim is Will.
Will had a cut on his head, and Will was the only one who's showing injuries.
Victoria was the aggressor.
Victoria was the armed person in that violent attack, and Will was the victim.
She ends up dropping that case, but only after she basically extorts him and writes a very long letter of her list of demands of tropical vacation on her birthday of a place of her choice.
He's going to have to pay her vet bills.
She just makes a long list of demands, of things that she wants from him before she'll agree to drop the charges.
We're talking about what you've already termed the first incident between them, but now we know that they're still together, at least a year later.
It's so not uncommon to see this back and forth, even when there has been violence and police reports between two people.
I would even call it an epidemic in this country.
And it's more than just a criminal justice issue.
It is a societal issue of trying to make sure that there are services for women and, of course, men to be able to escape from domestic violence.
But often people find themselves going back to these toxic relationships.
There is no rational explanation for for this relationship.
It is unexplainable.
It is unexplainable why she is with him.
It is unexplainable why he would go back with her when she falsely accused him of raping her.
It really sounds like she put Will through so much during that time, but yet Will kept giving her another shot.
Because he just never wanted to give up on people and he would never give up on people.
And that was a hangover, if you will, from his addictions.
He just didn't want to quit people and didn't want to put people out, even though his friends were telling this girl is bad news.
You cannot, you should not be with her.
These relationship cases are so difficult to decipher at times and to figure out because again, like you, just don't know what goes on behind closed doors.
Well, remember that incident that happened in May?
Well, part of that incident was caught on video.
Why are you naked?
Why are you taking pictures of me?
Why are you naked?
Who are you on the phone with?
Dude, I'm going to need you to get out of here.
All you are is a toxic web of lies.
Stop it.
Bear with us as we're going back to an incident we had already talked about.
The incident is from May 2013.
This is the incident where the neighbor had helped Victoria after an alleged rape.
Police were called.
They came and they questioned them both.
Will said, no, no, she tried to come into my house.
I never touched her.
Here she is scratching me.
Look at the scratches.
I got her out right away.
Victoria said absolutely the opposite.
She said she had been raped.
He tried to rape her, raped.
But now Will also told investigators something else very interesting.
He was able to determine that Victoria had her cell phone and she was videotaping the entire incident.
Why are you naked?
Why are you taking pictures of me?
Why are you naked?
Why are you?
Who are you?
Who are you on the phone with dude dude?
She starts the interaction with why are you naked?
And she's accusing him of cheating on her.
I'm gonna need you to get out of here.
No no no no no no no no, no.
You are not coming in my house.
I have no clothes on you.
Just put your hands on me again, dude.
You just showed up at my house and i told you not to be here.
She is at his doorstep, his doorstep.
She is forcing her way into his home.
All he is doing is trying to make her go away.
You told me to come here.
Tori, I didn't tell you to be here.
Get the out of here, dude.
I'm scared of you.
You terrify me.
You're already doing this.
Get out of here.
Why are you acting like this?
I don't want you in my life anymore dude, unless you sign documents that negates everything you've done.
I'm serious.
Fine.
Fine.
Give me him.
Okay.
Come back and we'll do it.
Right now.
Open the door.
No.
No, it's not.
All my stuff is upstairs.
There's nothing upstairs.
All you are is a toxic web of lies.
Stop it.
She's trying to bait him into hurting her.
Get off of me.
Stop.
I'm not letting you in my house.
If you do this, I promise.
I'm going to call the police.
Do it.
Get the out of here.
Seriously?
Go.
Go, Tori.
Do it.
Go.
Do it.
I don't want to do anything but get you out of here, dude.
Stop it.
I didn't let you in my house.
You hear her say several times, do it.
Just do it.
She says it just like that.
She's trying to tempt him to do something to her physically.
And he just keeps saying, I don't want to do anything.
I want you out of my house.
When he's not engaging with her, she wants to take it to another level.
She wants him to harm her on video so that she can then do exactly what she did do, which is run and tell the police that he beat her up when he didn't.
This time, Victoria was arrested.
She was arrested for battering Will and for filing a false police report.
You know Scott, when we look at this May incident you know all you out there it's pretty rare to have an actual documented case of a false sexual assault allegation.
Talk about documented.
How about self-documented?
I mean clearly.
Sometimes you have witnesses to an assault or even surveillance video of an assault that occurs.
But police actually have her videotaping herself in this incident.
Let's just talk about how this plays in to what she's now saying about shooting Will.
The false allegation of rape was still open, so perhaps Will's murder wasn't self-defense.
Maybe it was revenge.
She had a motive to want to kill him.
In May of 2013, is charged with falsely accusing him of raping her.
There was another incident on September 10th of 2013.
Will and Victoria are at it again.
The last report between the two of them was made actually just 24 to 48 hours before the murder occurred.
She shows up at his house and they have a fight like they normally do.
And she's trying to involve Susan, that is the mother of Will's child.
And she's involving other men, too.
And finally, Will calls the police.
The Cobb County police show up and they make her leave the house.
And when she left the house, Victoria started texting the mother of Will's child, saying that Will was an abuser and Susan, his ex, should not let him see his daughter.
In return, Susan tells Will and Will tells Victoria that he will not be dropping charges in the May assault, a conviction that would risk Victoria's shared custody with her son.
And police now believe that could have been the motive for murder in the making.
Up until this point, she was holding all the power.
This damsel in distress thing was working for everybody around her, but it no longer worked for Will.
Maybe she's mad because, you know, she's lost control.
Maybe she's mad because he's not going to have anything to do with her anymore.
But she is certainly also not wanting to lose her kids.
So now the pieces are falling into place and you're starting to get a clear picture of what happened, but not so fast.
Because when investigators really dug into the shooting event, they learned that before police arrived at the house there were actually three people at the house.
Will, Victoria, and another man.
Let's talk about the gun that Victoria used to murder Will Carter.
Police did run a trace on it, and there was some debate if it was her gun.
The gun was a .40 caliber handgun that she had been given by a sheriff's deputy named Rick Price.
Victoria met Rick Price way before the shooting, when she was attempting to file a restraining order against Will.
He... believed that she was a victim, which is why he gave her the gun.
She told him that she had this volatile relationship with her boyfriend and Price right away said he wanted to help her.
He admitted to taking her to the firing range, teaching her how to shoot the gun.
The relationship between these two is so close that the night of Will's death, Rick shows up at the crime scene before police.
It turns out that Victoria Rickman called Deputy Price before that dramatic 911 call.
And Rick Price, the sheriff's deputy, left his county and came into the city of Atlanta and was at the crime scene before the lead detective, Summer Benton, could even get onto the crime scene.
And when he was there...
He had a conversation with an Atlanta Police Department sergeant that as a sheriff's deputy, he knew that Will was abusive and that he had given her a gun.
But he says that the caliber of the gun he gave her was a 38.
But in fact, the gun that was used was a 40 caliber.
Here you have an actual member of law enforcement that's in the mix, but yet he's kind of acting the role just like anyone else with close ties to somebody else.
By all accounts, it appears that Rick Price is a pawn in what investigators believe was a premeditated opportunity to shoot and kill Will.
And I think about it like how sinister to really play as many people as you can.
You know, you have the Rick Price in play.
Remember she's living with a roommate at the time who had been told very similar stories, with all this abuse that she had endured at the hands of Will.
And if it's all to help give credibility to her side of the story well, it's all about to play out at the trial.
Putting together all of this incredible forensic evidence and circumstantial evidence, in this case, Sheila Ross would walk into the courtroom.
She was confident, but she had a lot of challenges, Anasika.
This is really a totality of the evidence type of case.
There's no one piece of evidence that you could point to to say, aha, you know, that's it.
Each piece of evidence was a brick, and when you put them together, it's an unbreakable house.
First of all, it's so voluminous, the amount of what she had to present to the jury.
There wasn't just one act that we were litigating.
It was two years worth of acts between the two of them.
And also the biggest thing she had to deal with was the second.
We hear that someone is a survivor of sexual assault or we hear someone start to tell their story.
I mean, our heart goes out to them.
It's a horrible crime.
I've spent most of my career on the side of the women in those situations.
And so I understand how jurors will just automatically decide, be inclined, in a dispute between a man and a woman, to take the woman's side.
And so my biggest challenge was deprogramming that initial instinct where you are always going to believe the woman is telling the truth.
Because who would falsely claim rape?
I mean, that's just disgusting and not anything that you would think that people are capable of doing.
You really have to kind of take preconceived notions and put them out of your mind.
As a woman and as a female prosecutor, we are always on the other side of this equation, right?
And when a man kills a woman, it's really easy for us to say well, he killed her, because if he can't have her, nobody else can.
Well, for her, it's very much so the same.
You've got to get out of your gender role.
So is this cold-blooded murder, or is it a case of self-defense?
So here are some of the pieces that the jury was introduced to.
The home that they were in was the home of her childhood friend, whom she was living with at the time.
He was supposed to be home that night, but around 7 pm she had texted him not to come to his home because she didn't.
Now, if that's not a big red flag Anastasia, I don't know what is.
Well, here's a bigger one.
When police then seized her phone and recovered some of her deleted text, that they could see that immediately after that text there's another call to Will.
And they start communicating with one another again.
And then she invites him down to Atlanta, where he does go shortly after midnight.
And also, there's this back and forth between the two.
And then in the end, you have Will texting Victoria, I love you.
I wish you weren't the way that you are.
You need help.
Yet we also know he's on his way over.
But what that proves is that he didn't go over there without an invitation, the way that she originally claimed.
Now, police also learn a lot more from her cell phone.
Using that roommate's phone.
She changed the contact Will's name and then sent messages to herself.
In total, police would recover more than 66,000 text messages.
Now, not all of them were between Will and Victoria, but on the key dates they were able to highlight many of the exchanges between this toxic couple.
She had manufactured threatening text messages from will in her phone and she showed them to the police as if they were real.
She's like look see, will is threatening me and if you look at the screenshot that she had saved in her iphone, it appears that there is a message from will carter saying threatening things that he's going to kill her.
She screenshotted them, saved them and then sent them to will as something that she can hold over his head.
Prosecutors also went back to that 911 call, that dramatic call.
She vacillates on the 911 call between he raped me or he tried to rape me.
But she couldn't even get that detail right, which is a pretty important detail.
Every rape victim I have ever interviewed has known the difference, unless they were incapacitated by drugs or by violence.
Has known the difference between he raped me or he tried to rape me.
She was not giving a consistent story within that 911 call.
It was those type of details that made it clear that she was lying and that she didn't shoot him because she had to, as that, she shot him because she wanted to murder him.
And the most telling piece of evidence in this twist and turny story is the autopsy of Will.
It really isn't the number of times that Will was shot that was so significant, because clearly if she were in fear and her fear were reasonable, she could shoot him really as many times as she wanted to, but it was the location of the shots.
He was shot at least three times in the back.
They determined that the first shot was to Will's back.
And one of the three projectiles punctured his lungs, filling it with blood.
And how do they know that?
Blood spatter or a spray pattern mixed with Will's saliva was on the wall as he was facing.
He coughed and gasped for air.
He falls back.
And lying on his back and facing away, he is shot six more times, including in the head.
And what that suggested was that this was not self-defense.
I mean, you have this woman who has previously cried sexual assault more than twice.
So we know that's her MO when she isn't getting what she wants.
But yet here, she just happens to tell the guy whose house she's living in, don't come home.
Yet the next phone call is to Will luring him there.
She has the gun in place.
She has no one else in the house.
Lo and behold, hours later, he is naked.
He's defenseless.
He is shot multiple times, including three times in the back.
The police answer the door.
She calls 911.
Hey, I was raped.
I had no other choice.
I mean, it lays itself out perfectly to unravel the web that she had tried to paint for everybody else.
The three shots to the back and the fact that she's not injured in any way, she's not hurt in any way.
She can't really describe how he raped her or if he even raped her, by the way.
But now it was going to be time for the jury in that case to make their own decision.
With all this voluminous evidence prosecutors laid out to the jury and obviously, the self-defense defense that Victoria Rickman had, the jury was out, but for only 45 minutes.
They found Victoria Rickman guilty as charged.
They found her guilty of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of felony.
I mean if you would look up the word premeditated in a legal book.
I mean, this case screams of that.
Why?
Being able to set this thing in motion, for the reasons why she did it, and then, on top of it, taking a deep breath and making that 911 call.
I mean for me, Anastasia.
That 911 call is a slap in the face for all real domestic violence victims who call police for help.
That was orchestrated and that was rehearsed and she even had the time to call Rick Price first before she called police.
That is horrible.
It's just so vicious.
He's going to send him to his grave, falsely labeled as a rapist.
And this is a guy who is the father to a young daughter.
So you're not only ending his life and ruining his parents and their life, but you're stealing any kind of favorable memory of him from his child.
Just bring it back to Will for a moment.
Here is a guy who had pulled himself out of such serious struggles and, by all accounts, was just almost too nice for his own good.
Remember, he is a guy who just wants to give back the way that he was helped with his own struggles.
He went so far as to hire other recovering addicts in his now very successful insurance business.
But in the end, it was that kindness, that overly trusting, that just wanting to see the best in everyone, that just might have been the thing that, in this case unfortunately, cost him his life.
You know, Will's parents described how he took his 10-year drug addiction head on, turned his life around and wanted to be the best father he could for his daughter.
But the one thing he couldn't escape was a volatile and toxic relationship with Victoria.
And that relationship may have been Will's last addictions.
Tune in next Wednesday when we'll dissect another new case on Anatomy of Murder.
Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original, a Weinberger Media and Forseti Media production.
Sumit David is executive producer.
