After quick guilty verdict, Tabitha Birdsong’s family no longer has to live in fear | Opinion

It took a Jackson County jury less than four hours on Monday to find 47-year-old Gene Birdsong guilty of first-degree murder in the stabbing death of his estranged wife, Tabitha Birdsong, who died with her umpteenth protective order against him in her back pocket.

When I asked a juror on her way out of the courthouse after the verdict was announced how they’d finished so fast, she said, “It didn’t feel fast. It felt like forever.”

I’m sure it did; serving on the jury in a murder trial is serious business. But for the victim’s family, forever has felt even longer.

It’s been 4 1/2 years since 40-year-old Tabitha’s body was found in Roanoke Park by a neighbor out on her morning walk. She’d been stabbed more than 100 times, suffering 73 sharp force trauma injuries. These included 35 stab wounds on her head, neck and face, some of them delivered with such force that they had penetrated her skull and broken the bone under her eye.

She also had a number of defensive wounds on her hands and arms, cuts she’d gotten trying to stay alive. And the coroner testified that Tabitha seemed to have been attacked while she was already on the ground.

Mother afraid daughter’s abuser would go free

Since that day, Nov. 6, 2018, Tabitha’s mother, Diana Ingram, has often told me how terrified she’s been that her daughter’s tormentor would somehow get off and get out again, just as he had so many times before.

She showed me some of Tabitha’s blood-stained clothes, presumably soaked during earlier attacks, and some of the many notebooks that her daughter had filled with phone numbers of domestic violence shelters, lists of safety strategies, and heartbreaking entries about loving, fearing and feeling she ought to help Gene, who was arrested on domestic violence charges dozens of times in multiple states, but found her wherever she ran.

At the time of her death, an Overland Park police detective told me that she’d been calling him three times a week to report her husband’s violations of her protective order.

I’d tried to assure Diana that after coming home drenched in his wife’s blood, Gene wasn’t likely to ever walk away again. And after Monday’s verdict, he isn’t going to: Though his formal sentencing is set for April 13, the jury has recommended life without the possibility of parole.

But after the nine years Diana had spent trying to help her daughter survive her marriage, expecting the worst was not exactly irrational.

In court for closing arguments on Monday, she was wearing a ring made of some of Tabitha’s ashes. When they showed the grisly photos of her daughter’s injuries, she looked down, rocked back and forth in her seat, and finally fled the courtroom in tears.

When the guilty verdict she feared she’d never hear was announced around 3 p.m., she sobbed in relief and said she was so, so tired.

“But this,” she said, “will give me peace of mind for the kids” — Tabitha’s kids, including 26-year-old Spencer Ingram, who was in court on Monday, too, along with a bunch of other family members. “I’m happy to finally have justice,” said Spencer, a mechanical engineer who has a little girl of his own now.

Defendant told jury: ‘I didn’t kill my wife’

Gene chose not to testify in his own defense, and everyone who has seen even a snippet of Alex Murdaugh, the South Carolina lawyer accused of killing his wife and son, testilying on his own behalf knows why that was a good call from his perspective.

But after the guilty verdict against Tabitha’s husband was read, Gene turned and informed the jury, “I forgive you, but I didn’t kill my wife.”

When Judge John Torrence asked the prosecutor and defense counsel if they had any further issues to raise before court was adjourned, Birdsong spoke out of turn again, asking the judge why he hadn’t been called as a witness.

“That is a ridiculous question,” Torrence told him.

Right after Tabitha’s death, I wrote that domestic violence hurts not just the victim, but a whole world of people who care about that person. Actually, it’s even bigger than that, and hurts people who never even knew the victim in life: “ It only took 4 1/2 years, but justice has been served,” said Jan Chapman, the woman who discovered Tabitha’s body, then flagged down a neighbor who checked for signs of life and called 911.

Intimate partner violence, which we still treat all too lightly until a homicide has happened, also hurts the perpetrator. Gene Birdsong should have been stopped long before it came to this. And it hurts that person’s loved ones, too.

Gene’s Aunt Susan, Linda Sue Harper, who said she’d been taking out the trash at about 6 a.m. on November 6th of 2018 when he rolled in covered in blood and saying he’d been attacked, testified that after Tabitha died, she’d called her to let her know that it wasn’t Gene who had killed her.

The prosecutor, Danielle Sediqzad, used phone records to show that no, there had been no incoming calls from heaven after the time we know that Tabitha died. But she was also kind in court, telling the jury that she didn’t see Aunt Susan as a liar, but as someone who was desperate to convince herself that her nephew wasn’t responsible for his wife’s death.

Husband Gene’s history of domestic violence

I also have to give credit to the defense attorney, Josh Peter, who despite having no case gave it a really good go, undeterred by the considerable frustration that his client had to have caused him. Two years ago, Gene had agreed to accept a deal under which he would plead guilty to second-degree murder and serve 23 years.

But then, at the hearing I attended via Zoom, Gene backed out of and back into and then back out of the deal several times. He insisted that he and Tabitha had both been attacked that night, blamed her for her own death, and blamed his lawyer for failing to find the true killer.

He stuck with that story, and his attorney did his best to sell it.

This, though, was just plain false: “They had their ups and downs,” Gene’s attorney said, “but there was no history of violence.” In fact, his client’s long history of violence against his wife included several months spent behind bars in Kansas earlier in 2018.

The lawyer said that maybe the reason that his client left his wife bleeding in Roanoke Park was that he feared police “wouldn’t do a thorough investigation and would blame him, and that’s what happened.” Much as I appreciate the vigorous defense that every murderer deserves, no, it isn’t.

Danielle’s voice shook with righteous anger as she delivered her closing argument. Gene must have thought he had silenced his wife, she said, “but Tabitha spoke to us this week most loudly and fervently through her body,” from the chipped nails that showed how hard she had clawed her attacker to the hair in her hands because “she would have had her hands in her hair fighting for her life” while her skull was being stabbed.

Aunt Susan and Gene’s other relatives left the courtroom right after the verdict was read; they didn’t wait to tell him goodbye. But he brushed right past Tabitha’s family on his way out, and that frightened them.

The only good news here is that as of Monday, that will never happen again.