Ashley Swift always regarded her father as a supportive, attentive parent.
He showed her how to change the oil in her car. He helped her find her first job, she said, and then drove her home from there. When it was time for college, they discussed the pros and cons of going to college right after high school.
But two years ago, David Swift, 56, was charged with murdering someone else who had an outsized influence on Ashley’s life: his wife – Ashley’s mother. Karen Swift’s mysterious and violent death had been unsolved for more than a decade, and Ashley, then 20, was stunned by her father’s arrest.
Then came another development. David, who has maintained his innocence, was acquitted at trial earlier this year of the most serious charges: first-degree murder and second-degree murder. But the jury was deadlocked on the lesser crime of manslaughter. Weeks after a judge dismissed the case, David was charged with manslaughter and remains in jail awaiting a retrial.
The ordeal lasted more than half of Ashley’s life.
“It’s something that’s really hard at first, and it’s still hard, but I feel like over time you deal with things,” she told “Dateline.” But “over and over again, everywhere I go, in every school I went to, in every workplace I have worked in – it shows up.”
Two turbulent decades together
Karen, a 44-year-old mother of four, disappeared on October 30, 2011, after picking up Ashley early from a sleepover and falling asleep with her at their home in Dyersburg, a small town about 80 miles (130 kilometers) north of Memphis. Dyer County. District Attorney Danny Goodman told the jury in May.
Shortly afterwards, Karen’s SUV was found nearby with a flat tire, as were her two phones. They were both damaged, Terry McCreight, lead investigator with the Dyer County Sheriff’s Office, told “Dateline.”
In interviews with local authorities, David said he wanted to help however he could, and described the couple’s turbulent 20 years together, the recordings show. They had two children after their marriage in 1989, then divorced after he had an affair, he said. They later remarried and had two more children – including Ashley – before Karen had an affair, David said.
When she went missing, David thought she was having a midlife crisis.
She had started drinking, sometimes heavily, he said, and partying with new friends. Weeks before her disappearance, he said, she had filed divorce papers with him.
Even though he believed she was “lost,” he said in one of the interviews, “I still love her and care about her.”
While David told authorities that Karen appeared to have withdrawn from their relationship, her friends told “Dateline” that she had become more independent, sociable and confident in the last months of her life.
To Ashley, who was 9 at the time, her mother was a parent who went to every game and dance competition — “all the things, she was there,” Ashley said. Although she also noticed a change in her mother, she said. Karen went out so often, Ashley recalled, that she tearfully begged her mother to stay home.
Lack of evidence
Six weeks after Karen disappeared, her remains were found near a local cemetery, Dyer County Sheriff Jeff Box told “Dateline.” The medical examiner determined she died of blunt force trauma to the head.
Authorities focused on what they saw as possible evidence linking David to the murder. Karen had obtained one of her two phones to prevent her husband from eavesdropping on her and had tried to keep it secret from him, Goodman said during the trial. David told investigators he knew nothing about Karen’s second phone, but authorities found the device number programmed into David’s work phone, the prosecutor said.
And during his interview with authorities, McCreight said, David seemed unable to focus on anything but his wife’s behavior.
“That was just a sign to me that this man is hiding something,” McCreight said. “He’s hiding something.”
Despite these suspicions, there was no physical or eyewitness evidence linking David to the murder. The investigation stalled.
David moved to Alabama and remarried, Ashley said, and her father remained an involved parent, taking her to her grocery store job and teaching her to work on her Jeep. As Ashley grew older, she said she wanted to know more about what happened to her mother, but became increasingly hopeless at the prospect.
“I reached an age where I realized I would never know what happened,” she said.
Try to put together a puzzle
Two years ago, when David was arrested and charged with her mother’s murder, Ashley recalled how distraught she was over the development. Her father and stepmother had separated, she said, leaving Ashley struggling to find care for her younger sister. She was confused too.
“I was trying to figure out why,” she said.
Goodman, the prosecutor, said he believed his predecessor had been waiting for evidence that would make the case against David a “slam dunk.” But four years ago, the Covid pandemic slowed down the cases, giving prosecutors time to review 30 large files of files on Karen’s murder, Goodman told “Dateline.”
They did not discover what Goodman called the “one big thing” that could be used in the effort to prosecute David, he said. What they found instead, he said, was a puzzle with a clear motive.
“I think he saw that he was losing control,” Goodman said. “Because in the past he could control everything Karen did, wherever she went.”
“He saw that starting to slip away,” Goodman added.
David was so infuriated by Karen’s drinking, partying and impending divorce that he violently plotted her death, prosecutors said when they tried the case earlier this year.
After Karen returned home from picking up Ashley, the two fell asleep in the same bed, according to Goodman. Goodman claims that at some point that evening, David placed Ashley in the same room as her younger sister and then dragged Karen from her bedroom to the garage.
The medical examiner had attributed Karen’s cause of death to a skull fracture resulting from a kick, and in court Goodman told the jury that David had used such force in the attack that the fatal blow “collapsed her skull.”
David then allegedly loaded Karen into a car, dumped her body in the cemetery and staged the crime to make it appear she had been kidnapped, Goodman said.
During the trial, prosecutors detailed the circumstantial evidence that came to light more than a decade ago — the possible lie about Karen’s secret phone and David’s “demeaning” comments about Karen to investigators — and said there was no evidence she was plan was to go back outside after picking up her phone. Ashley. Karen’s autopsy revealed that she had taken a sleeping pill, prosecutors said, and that her phones were inactive after she returned home.
Prosecutors also revealed an important new detail about Karen’s secret phone. Although there was no activity on her devices after she slept with Ashley, a forensic extraction found that hours later someone used the secret phone to call the device’s voicemail, prosecutors said.
That call was made at 9:55 a.m. on Oct. 30 while the phone was connected to the family’s home Wi-Fi network, Dyer County Assistant District Attorney Tim Boxx told the jury. Karen was already missing at that time, but her phones had not yet been found.
“We know that there was one adult in the Swift home at 9:55 in the morning,” Boxx said.
Questioning the evidence
In court, defense lawyer Daniel Taylor said David was not overly controlling but genuinely concerned about his partner.
There was no evidence to support the state’s description of the killing, Taylor said: no blood in the garage or car and no evidence that David ever left the house. Even the medical examiner, who provided Karen’s cause of death, told the prosecutor he no longer believed she had been fatally beaten, Goodman told “Dateline.”
The conclusion that a phone call had been made at the Swifts’ home that Saturday morning was based on unreliable evidence, Taylor said. He added that David’s physical condition would have made it impossible to commit the type of crime Goodman alleged. At the time of Karen’s death, David had re-injured his knee and was on crutches, Taylor said.
During the trial, David’s physical therapist testified that he would have had extreme problems walking and lifting. (Goodman accused David of faking the re-injury, saying he had seen hay bales moving the day before the murder.)
Ashley, who testified at the trial, also disputed the accuser’s allegations. It wasn’t David who moved her that night, she testified. It was her mother.
“I’ll go to my grave knowing it was my mother,” she told “Dateline.”
Ashley believed that her father’s injury was the strongest piece of evidence that cast doubt on the prosecution’s case. Her mother was athletic, Ashley said, and she couldn’t imagine someone in her father’s condition easily passing and moving her.
After five days of testimony and two days of deliberation, the jury reached a decision acquitting David of murder, but still deadlocked on the manslaughter charge. A date for his retrial has not yet been scheduled.
Ashley, now a dental hygienist in Alabama, recalled how difficult it was to wait for the verdict and — after it was handed down — initially believe the case was over. Then she heard that wasn’t the case. David is innocent, Ashley said, and she believes her father is wrongly imprisoned pending a retrial.
That reality makes her struggle to move forward.
“I want justice for my mother, and I want my father to come home,” she said. “But I want to live a normal life.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
