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PASCAGOULA — A woman on trial for killing her husband told police in a taped interview that her spouse over the years beat her, stabbed her in the leg, put a pillow over her face and poured hot grease over her shoes.
Jennifer Benton, 43, said the alleged abuse at the hands of her husband, James Benton, 47, occurred at different times during the course of their 21-year marriage.
“All the time, I got that,” Benton said in the interview played in Jackson County Circuit Court on Tuesday. “Stabbed me, cut me, all that stuff.”
Benton is on trial for the May 12, 2005, murder of her husband, whose body was found the same day inside the couple’s white Chrysler New Yorker at Lucedale City Park. He died of a gunshot wound to the head.
Jennifer Benton told police that the shooting occurred shortly after she picked her husband up from work in Jackson County.
She said James Benton was driving, and she was a passenger, when he allegedly pulled a .9-mm handgun from their vehicle’s glove compartment and fired. She told police that she thought she’d been hit because her ear was ringing, but she hadn’t been shot.
She said the two tussled over the gun after the first shot was fired, and the gun went off again, fatally wounding her husband.
She told police she and her husband started arguing after stopping at a Pascagoula convenience store, and her husband started questioning her about a man who’d walked up to ask her for directions while she sat in their vehicle.
“...So, we kept fussing and passing licks back and forth, and I hit him back..,” she said before later adding in the interview just days after the killing, “I wouldn’t intentionally kill him but yesterday, no to tell the truth the whole week, I just snapped.”
Benton said she “snapped” after a woman called their home the Sunday before the shooting to allegedly say that she was having a relationship with James Benton.
Benton’s defense attorneys, George Shaddock and Calvin Taylor, claim that their client acted in self-defense.
Lucedale Police Chief Barry Lambert was among those who took the stand Tuesday, saying that the murder weapon was found in the car along with the spent shell casings. In addition, police said that about 20 bullets were found in Benton’s purse in the backseat of the car.
At the scene, police said Jennifer Benton indicated that relatives of the victim planned to rewrite a letter she’d written to say that she planned the killing.
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