Almost five years after Susan Van Note allegedly murdered her father and his girlfriend in the Lake of the Ozarks, the trial against the Kansas City-based lawyer began Monday in Laclede County.
Van Note, a 47-year-old Lee's Summit native, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder for the October 2010 shooting deaths of William Van Note, 67, and Sharon Dickson, 59, at their vacation home in the Lake of the Ozarks. Dickson died at the scene, but William Van Note lived for a few days after the incident.
Susan Van Note also faces a first-degree felony charge of forgery for allegedly giving herself power of attorney over her father's life with a false document of her own design. The state will argue she used that power to take him off life support after he fell into a coma from his injuries during the shooting.
After being named the representative of her father's estate in early 2011, Van Note lost that power in September of the next year when she was charged with his death.
Van Note used money from her father's estate to pay her $1,000,000 cash bond before control was transferred to the new representative, David Holdsworth. Holdsworth demanded she repay what she had taken from the estate, but she claimed to not have the finances to do so.
She was found in contempt of court in July 2013 when her $1,000,000 cash bond had been swapped with a $250,000 criminal bond, meaning Van Note actually did have the finances to refund her father's estate.
In December 2013, Van Note earned the right to a different judge, and the following January, she won a change of venue appeal to switch from the Camden County Circuit Court to the Laclede County Circuit Court. In January, she officially pleaded not guilty to Judge Ken Hayden.
In front of that judge again Monday, Camden County Prosecuting Attorney Michael Gilley and assistant attorney general Kevin Zoellner clashed with defense attorneys Tom Bath Jr., Tricia Barr and Tim Cisar over a wide range of motions during the pretrial conference.
The defense won on a few fronts. Perhaps most importantly, the state was overruled on a motion to disallow the defense from providing another suspect in the murders.
Cisar, Barr and Bath also won on sustaining a motion to limit statements of one of the emergency medical technicians who transported William Van Note to the hospital, namely statements regarding his dying declarations. These words usually constitute hearsay but are often submitted as evidence as they are the final testimony of a dead person.
The defense successfully argued that because Van Note believed himself healthy before slipping into a coma, he did not have any true dying declarations that could be submitted into evidence by the EMT in question.
Now that the guidelines of the trial have been set, jury selection begins this morning with opening statements occurring later in the day today or early Wednesday.