At the Courthouse: Insight provided into Forde marriages
Mitigation specialist Margaret DiFrank spent some time Thursday going over the five marriages of Shawna Forde to give jurors an idea of what she was like following her traumatic childhood.
At 19, Forde got married after a “fast courtship” to Jack Darling. The couple moved from Washington to Alaska, where they had a baby girl who died three weeks later.
DiFrank said Darling was abusive to Forde and while still married to him, she married her friend Gustavo Acevedo, a man from Nicaragua who wanted to stay in the country.
Although Forde’s marriage to Darling did eventually end in divorce, her marriage to Acevedo was never dissolved, DiFrank said.
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DiFrank didn’t mention it, but John Forde was shot in late 2008 and prosecutors say Shawna Forde was considered a suspect. He survived and recently told prosecutors his former wife is a “master manipulator.”
The mitigation expert also told jurors Thursday that Forde has tried to kill herself three times with prescription drug overdoses — in 1987 after the baby died, in 1990 and again in 1995. (There was testimony earlier she also tried to commit suicide as a teenager.)
The defense has one more video to show jurors and then prosecutors are expected to put on an hour’s worth of rebuttal evidence.
It looks like the attorneys will begin arguing whether or not Forde deserves the death penalty shortly before lunch.
This woman has been a mess her whole life. How can we keep people like that from becoming a threat to more than themselves?
