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Trigger Point

Trigger Point 42:47

In 2004, a woman named Jenny Eisenman shot her estranged husband Drew in her apartment. The soft-spoken elementary school teacher claimed she had suffered abuse at the hands of her husband for years, and that the shooting was in self-defense.

But prosecutors say Jenny was a woman scorned and shot her husband out of anger.

Was Jenny - described by many as gentle and caring - a victim or, as prosecutors asserted, a woman capable of cold-blooded murder?

Correspondent Richard Schlesinger reports.

When detectives Larry Davis and Mark Reynolds arrived at Jenny Eisenman's apartment in May 2004, they were in for surprises. Expecting a homicide scene, Reynolds says the home was pristine and looked like nothing had happened: there was no blood, and there was no body.

Jenny was also there, sitting quietly on the couch; Jenny and Drew's eight-month-old baby Jackson was in his crib. It was just like nothing happened, just like the slender second grade teacher hadn't just shot and killed her husband, a high school basketball coach.

Reynolds says his gut was telling that there was a story here, but before investigators could start to unravel that story, they first had to answer a big question: where was Drew's body?

Jenny told police the body was outside, and investigators searched for her husband's body all around the apartment complex. Eventually, police found it in a green storage tub next to his truck.

So how did a slight, 120 pound woman kill a man nearly twice her size and drag his body down a flight of stairs to the curb? And more importantly, why? What drove her to it? What really happened inside the apartment the night Jenny shot Drew?

Police whisked Jenny away to the police station for interrogation; the baby was turned over to Jenny's sister Carrie.

Wrapped up in a blanket, she told detectives she didn't need a lawyer and proceeded to tell them quite a tale about a fight that night and everything that led up to it.

Det. Davis wanted to start from the very instance that the couple had met. "When I first met Drew we were in college. It was a storybook romance. Drew was athletic, very beautiful human being, fun to be around and very charming," Jenny told investigators.

Her parents, Vonda and Jim Harvey, remember the happy times when she and Drew first met. "We liked Drew. Tall, good looking guy. He can be very charismatic and he was," Jim tells Schlesinger.

And the Eisenman family, especially Drew's parents Tom and Becky, were delighted when their son married Jenny. "Seemed very compatible. Shared an interest in education and children," Becky recalls.

Everyone who knew Drew and Jenny was shocked when they heard what had happened. Jenny's parents were out of the country when her brother reached them the night of the shooting. "He said 'Drew's gone.' What do you mean Drew's gone? 'She shot him. Drew's dead,'" Jim recalls.

"It's not that she just shot him. She emptied a gun on him," Drew's father Tom comments.

But Jenny told police she had to shoot Drew that night. "He came at me, then he just kinda he fell back, then he kinda got up like to come at me again," she told police.

She says it was self-defense. They were separated, the divorce was getting ugly, they argued, and he attacked her, she claims.

Six gunshots were fired, and Jenny says someone would have heard the shots and that she expected police would soon arrive. But no one came.

Jenny did not call 911 for hours. Instead, she told police, she started to tidy up. "I didn't want it to be awful when people came over. I knew they would knew what I'd done. But I don't know. I was just so freaked out," she said.

But the biggest problem was what to do about Drew's body. "I didn't know what to do. He was on my couch and I was freaked out. So I have a green tub," she said.

Jenny decided to drag her husband's body, now stuffed inside the storage tub, out of the apartment and down the stairs. As strange as it sounds, Jenny said she planned to take Drew's body to the police station. But there was one problem: she couldn't lift him and load him in the truck.

Det. Reynolds says there were even neighbors who walked by who offered to help Jenny with the load.

"'Are you sure I can't help you out with this box. I'll help you put it in right now.' She goes 'No, no, no,'" Danny Martin remembers, who was moving into his new apartment that night.

The next day, Martin heard what was really going on. He says he didn't have a clue that there was a body in the box.

And at first, Jenny didn't have a clue, about how much trouble she was in. "Do you think I'll go to jail?" she asked during her interrogation.

"Without an attorney present, I just talked," Jenny remembers.

But Davis says he didn't believe a word she said. And that was before they found out there was something Jenny didn't say.

"Emotionally she did not come across as being very distraught," Davis remembers.

After telling police she shot and killed her husband, Jenny passed the time reading in the interrogation room. She also accepted an offer of a snack from an officer.

"Who's able to do that? Who's able to go through a traumatic event like this and actually have an appetite?" wonders prosecutor Mia Magness, who found Jenny's behavior odd. "You would think that that would be the furthest thing from her mind to have a little snack."

But what really got the prosecutor's attention was what Jenny did immediately after shooting Drew: she went to Wal-Mart about an hour after the killing.

It was a shopping trip she failed to mention to police. "She didn't tell us about Wal-Mart. The way that we found out about Wal-Mart was just through some really good police work," Magness says.

Detectives Reynolds and Davis found evidence of Jenny's shopping trip in her apartment.

Wal-Mart still had surveillance video which shows Jenny walking through the store with Jackson along for the ride. She had made a shopping list and the store provided a detailed receipt; and what she bought was, to say the least, suspicious.

"White paint, her interior walls are white, brown paint, the exterior walls are brown, plastic trash bags, spackling," Reynolds explains.

And Jenny bought one more thing that night: a gas can. Detectives think they know what she was going to do with that. "Had she been able to get him in the truck, him and his vehicle were gonna end up burned. She was gonna hope that the police thought it was just a vehicle accident of some sort," Reynolds theorizes.

"I was in such shock that the Wal-Mart incident occurred. And I can't even attempt to explain it, because none of it makes any sense. But it was almost like I was just going through the motions," Jenny said.

Police didn't believe her for a minute, and arrested Jenny that night.

How did she react?

"'Arrested? For what?'" Reynolds remembers.

The charge was murder. A judge released her on $30,000 bail until trial.

"I remember I talked to her on the phone before the trial and she said, 'Shauna you know me and you know I would never hurt anybody. I was just defending my life and the life of my son,'" Shauna Sullivan, who believes Jenny must have been in serious danger when she shot Drew, recalls. "I don't believe for a second she did it out of anger. It had to be self defense."

It was only after the killing that Jenny started talking openly about what she says was a secret she kept about her marriage: that Drew was abusing her. She agreed to make a statement to "48 Hours" only if we agreed not to ask her direct questions. It was the only way she would consent to tell her side of the story.

She says behind closed doors Drew was a controlling, demanding, sometimes violent husband - not at all the kind, caring man people thought he was.

Jenny says she first saw Drew's dark side early in their marriage when she left their dog outside against Drew's wishes. "He backhanded me. And it just kind of took me back. I didn't know how to react to that," she says.

According to Jenny, the first few times Drew hit her he apologized, and promised it would never happen again. "He was always big about appearances, appearing like we were this perfect happy couple," she says.

But Jenny now says, as time went on, she was becoming more and more isolated. "Slowly but surely I began stepping back from my family and not only my family, but my friends as well," she says.

Some of Jenny's good friends, like Joy Ricke, began to notice some changes in her. "She'd become so skinny. And she barely spoke above a whisper," Joy recalls.

One evening, Joy says she noticed some bruises on Jenny and asked her about them. "'Jenny did Drew give those to you?' And she said, 'No, No. I told you. I ran into something. 'And she just really wouldn't look at me," Joy says.

Jenny now says the abuse continued throughout her marriage, and escalated to a new level of violence in 2002 when Drew read some e-mail exchanges between her and a male friend. "He accused me of having an affair on him, which could not be farther from the truth. He was just so irrational and so out of control, that several times he hit me, pushed me down. At one point took my head and slammed it into the floor," she says.

It was one of the few times, Jenny says, that there was evidence of the abuse she was suffering. "He kicked an enormous hole in the wall," Jenny remembers.

Ron Watson was a close friend of Drew's, so close he named one of his children after him. And he says after that fight, Drew admitted to him that things had gotten violent. "He admitted to pushing her against the wall or shoving her against the wall, he admitted getting physical with her, that was the word he used," Ron says.

Jenny says Drew abused her sexually, too. And Jenny says in the midst of all that abuse, while she was pregnant, she found out about another woman.

The "other woman" was Michelle Weaver, a girl's basketball coach at Drew's school at the time. And when Jenny read Drew's e-mails she learned that things had gone way beyond just having lunch. "Very intimate e-mails talking about how they loved each other, about things they'd done," Jenny says.

Drew denied the affair at first, but Jenny met Drew's mistress at the worst possible time.

The day after the birth of their son, Jenny's husband Drew brought some friends to Jenny's hospital room. One of them was his mistress, Michelle Weaver.

"They walked into the room and I'm sitting there just horrified and trying to keep it together, because this woman is sitting across from me. At one point, Drew came over and took Jackson from me and he placed Jackson in her arms and he got the camera and took a picture," Jenny says.

It was, according to Jenny, one of the most humiliating moments of her troubled marriage to Drew. "As soon as they left I just fell apart because it hurt so much for that to happen, they would do that to me," she recalls.

But Drew's family says Jenny took that picture and put it in her scrap book. "Strikes me as funny, if it was such a painful moment and such a painful thing to see why she would keep that in a scrapbook that was on their coffee table that she showed to everybody that came by," says Drew's sister Alissa.

Five months after Jackson was born, Jenny and Drew moved into separate apartments in the same complex. They wanted to stay nearby so Jackson could grow up with both his parents. But while Jenny and Drew were close geographically, emotionally the marriage was over. "I wasn't trying to take his son, I wasn't trying to take anything from him. I just wanted out," she says.

Remember, Jenny agreed to make a statement to "48 Hours" only if we agreed not to ask her direct questions. And here in her own words is how she describes what happened the night Drew came to her apartment, the night she shot him.

"Upon seeing his face when I entered the door, I should have known at that point just to turn around and go. I should have known, but I didn't, 'cause it was my home, my apartment," she says.

Jenny says Drew rifled through her apartment and discovered that she had copies of cell phone records and romantic e-mails between him and Michelle. It was proof of the affair that, she says, Drew was desperate to keep secret from everyone, even his own family.

She says she put Jackson in a back bedroom, to shield him from the fight. "That's when Drew really lit into me. I asked him several times to leave my home and he would not leave. And when I tried to get to the door that's the first time he pushed me down," she says.

But the worst was yet to come. Jenny says in the midst of the fight, she told Drew she might be pregnant again. Remember, she says he was forcing himself on her regularly. "And for someone who's already on the edge, he really lost it and that's when he proceeded to really kick me. I curled up in the fetal position and he was kicking my hands and my legs. And I was just trying to protect my belly and I was trying to protect my head. I was scared. I was scared for my life," she says.

And she says she was also scared for her son, because Drew made a threat to take Jackson away from her.

The fight, she says, was escalating quickly. "At one point he flipped the coffee table over. I yelled at him to get out. I told him I was calling the police. I told him to get out. He wouldn't go. He wouldn't calm down," she says.

That's when Jenny went for the gun her brother gave her. "And I told him to leave and at first he kind of laughed it off. And then he said, 'I could take that, and use that on you,'" she says.

According to Jenny, she stood in the living room of her apartment pointing a loaded revolver at Drew, afraid for her life and afraid of what would happen next.

And that was the moment, says Jenny, when she made her decision. "I fired a warning shot," she says. "I told him to get out again. And that's when he lunged and everything happened and it happened so fast."

"I remember falling to the floor in such pain and shock and I'm rocking because I knew someone was gonna come to the door. Someone had to have heard us arguing all night, but no one came," she says.

Jenny's father, Jim Harvey, says photos of Jenny's bruises prove she's telling the truth about what happened that night. He took pictures a few days after the shooting and included a newspaper in the shots to try to prove when they were taken.

Police believe Jenny got those bruises while she was dragging the tub with Drew's body down the stairs from her apartment.

To bolster her claim that she was pregnant the night of the shooting, Jenny claims she suffered a miscarriage a few weeks later, but the prosecutor and the police don't believe that either.

Det. Davis doesn't think Jenny was ever attacked, beaten, or abused. A stack of e-mails is a big reason why police doubted her. They were written around the same time Jenny claims Drew was sexually abusing her repeatedly. A few are flirtatious, in one Drew writes, "You are a tease." Jenny responds, "I can do more than tease. A lot more...."

Drew's younger brother A.J. believes his sister-in-law's story about rape and other abuse is nothing more than a collection of lies invented by a murderess. "Talking about a person that took a gun and killed someone, dragged the body down, tried to dispose of a body, and when that wasn't able to happen, sat there and lied to police. Does that sign like a credible person to anyone?" A.J. wonders.

All of Drew's family insists he would never have harmed Jenny in any way.

"I think it certainly makes for a much better story if Jenny Eisenman was an abused woman. I don't accept that," says prosecutor Mia Magness, who has her work cut out for her.

She has to convince a jury that this second grade teacher with no history of violence, whom practically everyone considered gentle and caring, is a scorned woman capable of cold blooded murder.

Throughout Jenny's trial, the only mystery left is why she shot her husband. If she killed Drew in self defense, it isn't murder.

Prosecutor Mia Magness argues Jenny was angry enough to kill because Drew had threatened to take their son Jackson. And then, according to Magness, Drew, while staring down the barrel of Jenny's gun, made a fatal error.

"He didn't hit her. He did something worse. He sat down and he laughed at her," Magness says.

Jenny's defense attorney, Wayne Hill, has a job no lawyer would envy. He has to convince a jury that Jenny was driven to violence by years of abuse, even though there's no hard evidence that Drew ever hit her.

"Their marriage included emotional, physical and sexual abuse," he says.

But Jenny never reported any abuse to police. Not once. She tried to explain why in the statement she made to "48 Hours." "You're in such shock that it happened in the first place. It's almost like you don't believe it really happened. And so after you don't report it the first time, each additional time after that it just becomes habit. You become used to it. It's part of your marriage," she says.

Mia Magness thinks Jenny's own words prove she's lying. She wants the jurors to read those e-mails Jenny wrote to Drew. "Anyone who finally finds the courage to separate from their abuser does not speak to their abusers in e-mails in sexually suggestive ways," she points out.

Wayne Hill has an explanation. He says the e-mails are just part of a difficult negotiation between Jenny and Drew over custody of their son. "She tries to keep Drew calm during this time period," he argues.

But as difficult as it is to deal with those e-mails, Jenny's trip to Wal-Mart just after she killed Drew is even harder to explain.

Jenny's attorney says she was in shock and desperate to keep Jackson from being taken away by authorities.

As strange as it seems, experts in domestic violence say almost everything Jenny claims she did fits a pattern they've seen before; even that trip to Wal-Mart, they say, can be explained.

"It may very well be that after she killed him she was in shock. She knew what she had done at this point and now she's gotta do something to clean it up. It doesn't mean that he never abused her before hand. It doesn't mean that they didn't get into a fight where she had to pull a gun on him. It doesn't mean that at all," explains Shelby Moore, a law professor and an expert in domestic violence.

Moore says many women never tell police when their husbands abuse them. "Women don't often tell until something tragic happens, or something serious happens, or the abuser almost kills her," she says.

Professor Moore wasn't involved in the case. In fact Jenny's lawyer, who declined to be interviewed for this story, did not call one expert to explain Jenny's behavior. Instead, he called Jenny's friends and family, who appeared as character witnesses. The judge did not allow "48 Hours" to record audio of any testimony.

Jenny and Drew's friend, Ron Watson, also testified, but Watson was not allowed to testify about the potential bombshell: his claim that Drew told him he had gotten physical with Jenny. The judge ruled it was hearsay.

Michelle Weaver took the stand and said she was reluctant to go into Jenny's hospital room and she doesn't remember who put Jackson in her arms. "A horrible judgment on Drew's part. But does it make him a wife beater? It is not enough that she murdered him that night, now she's murdering his reputation?" Magness wonders.

But the star witness was Jenny herself. Again, the judge didn't allow "48 Hours" to record the testimony, but hers was intense, emotional, and for the most part uncorroborated. She told the jury what she told "48 Hours" that Drew had attacked her and she had no choice but to shoot her husband.

So was Jenny forced to kill her husband in self defense, or is she just a murderess with a made-up tale of abuse she hopes will convince people she had to kill?

"Jenny Eisenman is manipulating you. Can you feel it?" the prosecutor tells the jury.

"Understand who Jenny is. She's a caregiver, teaches children," her defense attorney argues.

Both sides have made their case, and the jury is about to decide Jenny's fate.

Since shortly after the killing, Jenny was out on bail. She and her son Jackson were living with her parents. "I have no doubt that my daughter was defending herself and her child," he mother said.

But Drew's father says Jenny is a "liar."

Drew's family is fighting to clear his name and hoping the jury will reject Jenny's portrayal of him as a wife beater.

But what will the jury think?

They didn't have to wait very long: jurors reached a verdict in just 90 minutes, finding Jenny guilty of murder, as charged.

"My poor daughter, it's unfair," Jenny's mother reacted.

Unfair, because they insist there was evidence of abuse that the jury never heard.

After the trial, seven members of the jury agreed to talk to "48 Hours." If Jenny ever had a chance with these jurors, it was when they saw the picture of Michelle Weaver holding the baby.

"Pretty much showed him to be a cad," a female juror remarked.

"Did it make it easier for you to believe that he could have beaten her?" Schlesinger asked the group.

"Absolutely, yes, absolutely," a number of jurors replied.

"He was quite possibly capable of doing just about anything," a female juror remarked.

"That maybe makes him a jerk but not necessarily an abuser," another commented.

But the jury didn't get to see all of the photos of Jenny's bruises that her father says were taken a few days after the shooting. "I think he might have kicked her that night but it doesn't change what she did and it doesn't change our decision," a female juror says.

And there was something else. Remember, jurors were not permitted to hear Ron Watson's claim that Drew had told him he had gotten physical with Jenny.

The jurors say they would've wanted to hear that. "To hear a close friend of Drew's say that, I think I would have had to weigh it a little bit more," a female juror commented.

Juror Ann Robey says if she had known then what she knows now, it could have changed everything because she could not have voted to convict. "What I now know? I don't think so. It probably would've been hung," she says.

It could have been a hung jury. "I would have really held my ground," Robey says.

While it only took an hour and a half to convict Jenny, it took nearly seven hours to agree on a prison term. After deliberating nearly all day, jurors recommended a sentence of 23 years. Jenny will be middle-aged when she gets out of prison.

"One way or another I'm going to walk out of here. And be the mother and the daughter and the friend that I am," she says.

"She was sentenced for taking Drew's life, but she's taken so much from so many other lives," Drew's sister points out.

"Even if she serves 23 years she has a whole life ahead of her. She robbed Drew of whatever was coming on in the rest of his life," Drew's brother A.J. says.

And Drew's dad Tom says, "I still don't understand why she had to murder him, and I don't think I'll ever understand that."

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