Page 199 of The Woman By the Lake

This detective, uneasy for years about this case (and on top of that being a big thriller reader, and Roosevelt Lincoln was one of his many faves), went after it like a mad dog.

Therefore, he uncovered a bartender at Lincoln’s hotel who had witnessed Lincoln and Sharon arguing at the bar the evening Lincoln supposedly committed suicide. The bartender remembered it because he recognized Lincoln after the big brouhaha of his arrest and confession, and because they were having said argument, which he described as extremely heated on Sharon’s part, but Lincoln appeared quite calm.

Though, he had to admit he didn’t see Sharon slip anything in Lincoln’s drink. However, he hadn’t been watching them the whole time because he was at work and had a job to do.

Further damning was the investigator tracked down a hotel employee who saw Sharon come out of the elevator later that night. She remembered this because Sharon seemed mildly disheveled, which was odd, because it was a very nice hotel, so it caught her attention.

It kept her attention when, halfway across the lobby, Sharon started laughing rather maniacally—at nothing—and that stuck in the employee’s brain, because she thought it was super weird.

The hotel had no record of Sharon being a guest, ever. And Sharon could not produce evidence that she was there to visit someone she knew. So she had no reason to use the elevators at all, as the bar was on the lobby level.

She just said she wasn’t there, but was in Misted Pines, home alone with her dogs, which wasn’t a stellar alibi, especially when two people who didn’t know her, and had no motive to lie, pointed her out in the courtroom with no hesitation.

But the smoking gun was that a friend of Sharon’s had come forward to admit she’d procured a bottle of arsenic at Sharon’s request. Sharon had told her she’d been having issues with mice and rats getting in her house, and she needed it to poison them.

This, even though rat poison, which was not arsenic, was easy to find.

This friend further admitted that she wondered for years, not only because Sharon could have gotten her hands on what she needed herself, but especially after Lincoln died in that manner, and she knew Sharon had “a serious thing against Lincoln.”

She just couldn’t believe her friend would do something like that. And Sharon, at the time, had been significantly distressed and was behaving in an agitated manner, because Lincoln had been released. Therefore, her friend felt Sharon might not have the wherewithal to follow through with an easy errand. Not to mention, she’d been complaining about having trouble with rodents for weeks.

Though, what she could do was identify from pictures the bottle discovered at the scene as being the one she procured.

Truman, Kennedy and Jefferson all testified at that trial as well, reiterating their alibis and the nature of their visits with Lincoln prior to his death. Jefferson adding that his dad had taken him aside and shared that he was going to work with him to help him deal psychologically with what had happened at the lake.

They explained Lincoln seemed sad, and tired, but not morose, and he definitely had plans for his and their family’s future.

And they were all firm in relating that he did not seem to be a man who was about to take his own life, and that they had all retained open communication with him and visited him as often as they could in prison. Though all of this, he’d never given indication this was at hand.

At this juncture, it was almost cruel how deep a pile Sharon was under (though, not cruel to her, because she was a snake), when the prosecution produced Kennedy’s ex-boyfriend, who Kennedy was living with at the time.

He testified that he’d been home the night of Lincoln’s demise, when Jefferson had arrived to have dinner with his sister, because they were going to talk about Lincoln’s visit and the possibility of returning to the lake with him. The boyfriend had eaten dinner with them, hearing this discussion, and testifying that both of them intended to make arrangements to go back to the lake to spend time reconnecting with Lincoln. He left to have drinks with his buddies, because one of them had been promoted, but when he got back a little over an hour later, Jefferson was still there.

And where they lived, neither Kennedy nor Jefferson could have gotten to the hotel, forced arsenic down Lincoln’s throat, and gotten home in time.

Adding insult to injury for Sharon, the prosecutors then called on a woman from Misted Pines who shared she’d not only been retained by Lincoln, but she had also gone to both the big house and the cabin to clean them, as well as stock the big house with food. And the day of his death, Lincoln had arranged payment for her efforts.

He requested this of her because, Lincoln told her, he intended to arrive the next day, and he’d shared, due to his big grocery order, the children would be coming that very weekend.

Not incidentally, she, too, had made it clear she’d been astounded to learn he’d committed suicide. So astounded, she reported her concerns to the local sheriff, but when nothing came of it, she just figured she was wrong.

Information and photographs from the hotel and the autopsy were presented, showing that the bruising around Lincoln’s jaw was consistent with not only the size of the pads of Sharon’s fingers, but the spread of her hand and where those pads would rest on a man’s jaw (this was rebutted, rather well, because it was weak, but the damage had been done).

And an expert testified to what arsenic poisoning would do to a body, and the peaceful manner in which Lincoln had been arranged was not at all indicative of how a body would be found after dying from taking that poison (this was rebutted, poorly, and possibly hurt an already crumbling defense).

And to the vehement objections of said defense, the prosecution was able to enter into evidence Sharon’s activities at the lake when Riggs caught her.

This evidence was provided by Riggs and Bubbles, and even Bubbles, who for some reason dressed all in black—black suit, shirt and tie—and thus it made him look like a member of the mob or an unimaginatively dressed bouncer, delivered damning testimony. Because by that time, Sharon would have no reason ever to be at that lake, definitely not swinging around a metal detector at three in the morning.

Truman surmised in his testimony, and the prosecution bore down on it in their summation, that Sharon had arrived at the hotel to demand to know the whereabouts of the last manuscript, and Lincoln may have taunted her with it, but he didn’t give that information to her even after she drugged him, so she killed him out of obsessive-fan fury.

Sharon had different attorneys during this trial, and she’d either learned to keep her mouth shut and her dramatics under wraps, or her attorney had her on a tight leash, because she sat stoic throughout the proceedings.

It didn’t matter.

This time, it took only thirty minutes of deliberation for the jury to reach their guilty verdict.

For the murder of Lincoln Whitaker, Sharon Swindell was sentenced to life, without the possibility of parole.

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