Nov. 10--SANFORD -- Anita Smithey says she is a rape victim who shot and killed her attacker while he was still on top of her.
Prosecutors this week will tell jurors a very different story.
The "rapist" was her estranged husband, Robert Cline III, with whom, she concedes, she'd just had consensual sex.
To hear Assistant State Attorney Stacey Straub Salmons tell it, Smithey grew tired of their late-night roughhouse sex, wanted Cline to go home, and when he didn't, pulled a .38-caliber pistol and shot him twice.
She then took an hour or so to stage the crime scene -- her bedroom -- stabbed herself in the side, then went screaming to the front door of a neighbor, crying for help, according to Salmons.
Jurors will have to sort it all out. Smithey, 46, of Oviedo, is in the courtroom. She's charged with second-degree murder.
Jury selection began shortly after 10 a.m. Forty potential jurors were called into the courtroom. Attorneys must pick six.
After questioning began, Circuit Judge Kenneth Lester Jr. this morning dismissed a half dozen potential jurors. One was a woman who is undergoing chemotherapy. Another is a man who's facing a misdemeanor criminal case and has his own court date later this week. A third was a woman who has a child with special needs.
Still among the possible jurors is a male nurse, a retired corrections officer, a private investigator and a woman who sued her bosses over a slip-and-fall.
The trial is expected to last two weeks. A CBS News crew from "48 Hours" has set up two cameras in the courtroom. It plans a feature on the case.
Jurors can expect to hear evidence that will be sexually graphic and violent. Much of it was laid out two years ago for the judge, who at the time rejected Smithey's stand-your-ground claim.
At that hearing, Smithey told the judge that in the early morning hours of May 4, 2010, after they had had consensual sex and she took a shower, Cline tossed her back onto her bed, climbed on top of her, punched her, chipped a tooth and held a knife to her throat.
He then raped her with his fist, she said.
She reached under a pillow, where she had hidden her handgun, pointed it at him and pulled the trigger, she said.
That didn't stop him, she said. He came at her again, and she pulled the trigger again.
Defendant's story changes
"I shot him in the chest in self-defense," she told the judge.
But that is not what Smithey told police the night of the shooting. Back then, she said the gun went off by accident.
It is one of several key points on which she has given different versions.
Another is how she got that knife wound in her side. She initially said Cline stabbed her, but during a long interrogation at Oviedo police headquarters during which officers repeatedly accused her of stabbing herself, she eventually agreed, saying that, yes, she stabbed herself.
At the stand-your-ground hearing Aug. 1, 2012, however, she called that confession a false one, a capitulation to police who would not leave her alone.
She did not remember how she got the stab wound, she testified.
One of the state's most important witnesses is Peter Faracci, an Oviedo firefighter and one of the first-responders who checked Cline for signs of life.
He was not breathing, Faracci told the judge, the blood around him was already coagulating and the body "was cold to the touch."
That suggests he had been dead for an hour or more, Salmons argued, and that Smithey spent that time concocting her "rape" story and self-defense claim.
Another key piece of evidence will come from a state crime scene expert, who's expected to testify that bullet trajectory evidence indicates that Cline was moving away from Smithey when he was hit by one of her bullets.
Downhill spiral
Defense attorney Rick Jancha is expected to portray Cline as a domineering, jealous, sex-obsessed man who liked to overpower his much smaller wife.
He was 6-foot tall and weighed 200 pounds, a medic and Iraqi war veteran. Smithey was a 5-3, 125-pound data analyst.
They met in 1999, according to friends. They both worked at LeapFrog Smart Products, a now-defunct Maitland company that specialized in smart card software. Cline was in sales, Smithey in data analysis.
They were married to other people at the time. But over the years, she got a divorce and his wife died. In 2007, they were married.
Things quickly went bad, Smithey testified. They had sex every day, she said. Cline was obsessed with it, and he liked things rough, she said.
He choked her and sometimes left her bleeding, she testified.
They separated after a blow-up six months before the shooting. She had told him she wanted a divorce, she said, and he had bashed in a shower head then grabbed the phone, refusing to allow her to call police, according to a police report about the incident.
The night of the shooting, according to Smithey, after consensual sex, Cline accused her of seeing another man and turned violent, hitting her, raking a knife across her throat and nicking her cheek with it.
Prosecutor Salmons concedes that Smithey wound up with bruises, scratches on her neck and cheek, a chipped tooth and vaginal injuries.
Jancha described her as "a woman who was attacked in her home and brutally raped and sodomized. ... She defended herself. She was entitled to defend herself."
rstutzman@tribune.com or 407-650-6394
