‘Living in this nightmare.’ Benefield testifies about the moment she killed her husband

An emotional Ashley Benefield told jurors Friday she was in fear for her life the night she shot and killed her husband.

The judge called recess twice when the ex-ballerina lost her composure while describing the events of the night she said she had to shoot her husband dead in self-defense. Tears streamed down Benefield’s face and she fought to keep her voice steady during her testimony.

The second break happened after the state asked Benefield to step down from the stand and demonstrate what happened the night of the shooting. Benefield began to shake after she stepped away from the podium to re-create a pose where she held her gun out in front of her and said she asked Doug Benefield to stop as he got into a “fighting stance.”

The Lakewood Ranch woman described the way her husband, Doug Benefield, stood in the doorway of her bedroom with a menacing look.

“He was looking at me, it didn’t even look like Doug,” Ashley said. “His eyes were black.”

“He said, ‘You’re (expletive) done,’” she added.

As he lunged at her, Ashley Benefield said she shot her husband in self-defense. When he didn’t stop, she shot him again, but couldn’t recall how many times, describing that moment as “a blur.”

Ashley Benefield testifies in murder trial

After an argument over how their belongings were arranged in the moving truck, Ashley said she thought Doug was going to kill her that day.

Ashley said Doug became angry as they were packing for a planned move to Maryland. When she said she didn’t like how their stuff was mixed together in the back of a moving truck, Doug became offended.

“It shouldn’t be your stuff, my stuff, your house, my house,” Ashley Benefield said he told her. “He said I needed to start acting like a wife.”

As Doug became angrier, she tried to change the subject and suggest they should wrap up for the day, but said Doug “completely disregarded” what she was saying, instead bumping into her multiple times so hard that she almost fell.

Ashley said he began screaming, preventing her from leaving, and then he smacked her in the head.

“He had never hit me before,” Ashley said.

All this, she said, led to the encounter in the bedroom of her mother’s Lakewood Ranch house that she re-created for the state Friday while trembling, triggering the second recess of the day and ending the prosecution’s aggressive line of questioning that challenged Ashley’s claims of self-defense and her status as a victim of domestic abuse.

Benefield describes husband’s ‘fits of rage’

During cross-examination, prosecutors showed photos from the Benefield’s wedding reception. Assistant State Attorney Suzanne O’Donnell noted that the wedding happened shortly after Ashley claimed that Doug threw a gun at her.

“Were you scared here of Doug?” O’Donnell asked Ashley while showing cheerful photos from the couple’s wedding reception. “You said you were living a nightmare. Were you living the nightmare here?”

“Oh no, not at that moment. It was a very nice day,” Ashley said.

Earlier in the day, Ashley sat with her head down on the counsel table as jurors and spectators exited during the first recess of the day. When they returned a few minutes later, she described from the witness stand a relationship that seemed ideal to her at first but over time had soured into abuse.

“He wasn’t anything like I thought he was. I thought I made a really big mistake marrying him. It was like I was living in this nightmare,” Ashley said.

The nightmare, Ashley said, came in the form of what Doug called “fits of rage” where he would yell, scream, curse, break things and “come at me like he was going to hit me,” she said.

“He told me I was lucky he punched walls instead of me,” Ashley said.

During her testimony, Ashley described allegations of Doug’s abuse in great detail. She recalled times when he punched their dog, threw their cat down the stairs, trapped her in a closet, punched holes in the walls, smashed things, screamed at her, flipped a table over and threw a chair at her, punched holes in the walls and fired a bullet into the ceiling.

Doug admitted to several of those violent outbursts in text messages, said Neil Taylor, Ashley’s defense attorney.

Prosecutors downplay self-defense claims

But prosecutors and the defense disagreed over whether Doug had been violent with Ashley in the lead-up to the shooting.

“So in between the time of 2019 to 2020 when you shot him, was there any physical violence?” O’Donnell asked.

“Sometimes he’d be a little rough,” Ashley said, referring the times he punched holes in the walls.

“So punching a hole to you was violent?” O’Donnell asked.

Ashley said she thought it was.

O’Donnell asked whether Doug ever punched, choked, kicked her, or came at her with a knife, club or baseball bat. Ashley said no.

But when asked whether Doug ever pointed a gun at her, Ashley said he “waved one at me.”

The prosecution has argued throughout the trial that Ashley’s motive for killing Doug was not self-defense, but rather an upcoming custody hearing that was set to be held just three days after the shooting occurred.

During that hearing, the prosecution said the results of Ashley’s and Doug’s psychological evaluations were going to come out. Those results would reveal that Ashley had no intention to reconcile her relationship with Doug, prosecutors say.

But Ashley testified Friday that she had multiple conversations with Doug where she made it clear they were not moving to Maryland to be together.

When prosecutors asked why Ashley would be comfortable having this conversation with Doug in private and not in front of mental health professionals, who earlier testified that Ashley behaved one way during sessions with Doug versus without him, Ashley said she “didn’t want to make him look bad in front of somebody else” or “disagree with him in front of anybody.”

Taylor has argued throughout the trial that Ashley’s responses to Doug are consistent with domestic abuse victims. Mental health professionals told the court Wednesday that Ashley expressed fear of retribution by Doug to them and said she told them multiple times that she would go along with him because she was afraid of him.

Defense shares husband’s text messages

During Ashley’s testimony, Taylor asked his client to read internet searches she made several months before the Sept. 27, 2020, shooting that included “how do I co-parent with an abuser?” and “6 tips to help you co-parent with an abusive ex.”

Taylor also read a series of text messages from Doug to Ashley in an attempt to highlight what Ashley described as a “possessive, controlling, manipulative, aggressive, scary, unpredictable” nature.

In the series of texts, Doug talks about how hearing “jerks arguing” put him in a “sheer murderous mood” and described them as “rats” that he desired to “exterminate.”

Ashley told O’Donnell during cross-examination that the series of texts stemmed from a phone call between her and Doug while she was on a cruise. During the call, Ashley said Doug overheard some men over the phone, prompting the text messages.

“God made you for me,” Doug wrote in one of the text messages to Ashley.

In another instance, Ashley said Doug put a tracker on her car and showed up at her house unannounced.

A domestic abuse expert is set to testify for the defense on Monday.