Prosecutor: Winter Springs woman shot her husband, hoping to collect $200,000 in life insurance: Kimberly Boone, 44, also is accused of trying to kill her husband in a fire [The Orlando Sentinel, Fla.]

July 13--SANFORD -- A prosecutor today told jurors that a Winter Springs woman on trial for attempted murder was an embezzler desperate to find money to pay back her boss, from whom she'd stolen more than $700,000.

Last year, Kimberly Boone, 44, shot her husband as he peered into their garage before dawn.

She was beneficiary of two life insurance policies worth $100,000 each on her husband, said Assistant State Attorney Tom Hastings, and that's why she pulled the trigger three times.

It wasn't her first murder attempt, Hastings said. Kimberly Boone had tried to kill Robert Boone in a house fire three months earlier, but a neighbor had pulled him to safety.

Kimberly Boone is charged with two counts of attempted murder, one for the shooting, a separate one for the fire. She's on trial this week only in the shooting.

Defense attorney Francis Wesley "Buck" Blankner Jr. told jurors the shooting was an accident. No one knows, he said, what started the fire.

On Tuesday, Robert Boone, told jurors that the day he was shot, March 29, 2009, his wife awoke him about 6 a.m., a .357 revolver in her hand, saying she'd heard something in the garage, he said.

They checked the garage and found nothing amiss, he said, so he went back to bed.

He heard her voice again, went to look for her, called her name several times, got no response, tried to flip on the garage light, but it didn't work. As he stood in the doorway between the house and garage saw a muzzle flash.

He was hit in the chest with a bullet, he said.

He went to the bedroom, grabbed a shotgun and tried to load it when his wife appeared behind him. She was calm and unemotional, he said. He asked her to help with the shotgun, he said, but she didn't.

He asked her to call 911.

"I had to ask her two or three times," he said.

While on the phone with a 911 operator, "I recall asking my wife if she'd shot me. ... She responded, 'Sweetheart or Honey, I didn't shoot you.'"

Blankner told jurors Tuesday his client was arrested following the shooting because she was a liar -- not because she's a killer. The first two times Seminole County deputies questioned her, Kimberly Boone told them the shooter was a burglar, but later that day, she told them she had opened fire, thinking her husband was an intruder.

In court Tuesday, Hastings laid out the state's theory about the shooting: Kimberly Boone had been caught stealing from her boss, was fired and had promised to repay him if he didn't go to authorities.

In an email to her boss in late 2008, as she negotiated repayment, Kimberly Boone wrote that she suffered from bi-polar disorder and had been under the care of a psychiatrist for more than two years.

In a recorded voice mail message, she told her boss that her husband didn't know about the embezzlement, and if he found out, he'd take away their two young boys. One month later, she tried poisoning or sedating her husband with her Xanax, a prescription anti-anxiety medication, Hastings said.

She then set the couple's home on fire while her husband was napping, Hastings said.

Adam Rodriguez, a neighbor, saw her hauling belongings from her house to her SUV that day, Dec. 18, 2008. She then drove off. Within moments, that same neighbor heard Robert Boone call for help. Rodriguez smashed a window, he told jurors, wrapped his arms around Robert Boone's midsection and pulled him to safety.

Robert Boone, a former firefighter, told jurors he was in bed, heard a smoke alarm, woke up and saw the nightstand and wall in flames. The house was filling with smoke, he said, but he moved through its rooms, checking for his two young sons and wife, couldn't find anyone, and "I got down on the floor and began crawling."

Fire investigators initially treated the fire as an accident. After the shooting they reopened the case and recommended that Kimberly Boone be charged with attempted murder and arson.

She's to be tried later on those charges. Testimony in the shooting case is expected to continue today.

Rene Stutzman can be reached at [email protected] or 407-650-6394.

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