The 20-year-old daughter of dentist James Craig and his wife, whom he’s accused of poisoning to death, testified in court on Thursday. She revealed that her father had asked her, then a teenager, to create a deep fake video to prove his innocence following his arrest for the alleged murder.
James Craig, age 47, has entered a plea of not guilty to charges of first-degree murder related to the poisoning death of his wife Angela in March 2023. The mother of his six children passed away after suffering from unexplained symptoms over several weeks. Craig was taken into custody immediately following her death.
Prosecutors claim that Craig saw his wife as an obstacle in his life. Allegedly, he poisoned her using a mix of cyanide, arsenic, and a chemical found in eyedrops. This was supposedly part of his plan to start anew with a mistress and resolve his financial issues.
Then he continued hatching criminal plots from behind bars, allege prosecutors, who added charges of solicitation to commit first-degree murder, solicitation to commit tampering with physical evidence and solicitation to commit perjury.
Craig’s third-oldest child, Annabelle, testified Thursday about one of those plots.
Her father called her from custody shortly after his arrest to ask her to bond out another inmate, she said.
Craig told her the inmate, Jonathan, was a cousin she didn’t know – something she didn’t immediately query given her extended family’s large size. The dentist also gave her instructions of how to find a bail bondsman, and she drove to the detention facility, she testified.
While there, Annabelle admitted in a phone call to her older brother what she was doing, and he arrived at the jail with their paternal uncle.
The teen had already successfully bonded out Jonathan, however, who passed along a letter from her father on ‘pieces of printer paper… taped together by masking tape.’
The 20-year-old daughter of dentist James Craig and the wife he’s accused of fatally poisoning told the court on Thursday how he’d asked the then-teenager to create a deep fake video exonerating him after his arrest for murder
Craig’s two oldest daughters testified in his trial on Thursday, telling jurors how he tried to get one to create a deep-fake video to clear him and how he opposed an autopsy on his wife
Outside the jail, she read it aloud in the car to her brother and uncle. The letter admitted to past infidelities and told Annabelle that her parents had been playing a ‘game of chicken’ – with Craig claiming that Angela had asked him to order fatal poisons.
Craig wrote to Annabelle that ‘we need a deep-fake video of Mom saying she asked [Craig] to order cyanide, arsenic and oleander, and she was going to take it herself,’ the 20-year-old testified.
The letter also offered numbered instructions that included buying a cheap laptop, installing a VPN, using the dark web, setting up an anonymous email account and buying a prepaid visa gift card, the court heard.
Craig provided ‘a guideline of what should be said in order for [the deep fake] to be inarguable … that it needs to be believable,’ she said.
The dentist instructed her to burn the video onto thumb drives, tell investigators the teen had found them among her mother’s things, then destroy the laptop, the court heard.
Before she took the stand, her older sister, Miriam, testified through her tears that Angela Craig had adored being a mother, lived for her six children and was in no way suicidal.
James Craig, 47, has pleaded not guilty to the murder of his wife and mother of his six children, Angela, whom prosecutors say he fatally poisoned in March 2023
Craig was seen crying during opening statements and also dabbed his eyes on Thursday as his oldest daughter, 21, described her loving with her relationship with her mother through sobs
Her father, seated at the defense table, dabbed his eyes as his Miriam described the loving, close relationship she had with her mother.
His lawyers have tried to paint a picture of Angela as ‘manipulative’ and struggling, with Craig claiming his wife wanted the drugs herself to end her life.
Miriam, who married six months before her mother’s death, told the court that her mother had been ‘frustrated’ with a mystery illness that began in early March.
As she got progressively sicker, Miriam testified, her mother wanted nothing more than to return to her children, including her two youngest daughters Angela had recently begun homeschooling.
‘She wanted to get back home,’ Miriam said. ‘She wanted to stop sleeping in the hospital beds; they made her butt hurt. She just wanted to get back to her girls.’
After Angela was declared brain dead on March 15, 2023, Miriam told jurors about an unusual conversation she had with her father before his arrest.
Craig asked his second-oldest daughter, then a teenager, to buy a cheap laptop, access the dark web and create a deep-fake video in which Angela asked him to get poison for her, the 20-year-old testified on Thursday
‘When we went to say goodbye to my mom … we were walking out of the hospital, and I asked my dad if they could do an autopsy and find out what was wrong with her,’ Miriam testified. ‘He said he didn’t want them to.’
The 21-year-old said Craig told her he didn’t want to ‘satisfy their curiosities – if they couldn’t figure it out while she was alive, they shouldn’t be allowed to poke around at her if she was gone.’
She protested that the illness could be hereditary – asking Craig: ‘What if it happens to’ her youngest sister?
‘What if something happens to her? Wouldn’t you want to know?’ Miriam said Thursday. ‘And he just stayed quiet.’
She said that, knowing her parents’ marriage had struggled in previous years, she felt in the months before Angela’s death that the union had improved so much she wanted to model her own relationship with her new husband on it.
Relatives in the courtroom cried and wiped their eyes as she explained how Angela loved animals, looked forward to being a grandmother and fantasized about fixing up homes with her oldest daughter.
‘We were making plans,’ Miriam said, sobbing.
‘She’d talk to me about how fun it’d be when I had kids of my own … how excited she was to be a grandma.’
Craig has pleaded not guilty to all charges. The trial continues on Friday.
