Kimberly Tittes died from a shotgun blast to the face in September 2003.
Her boyfriend, James Jones, told police that she had committed suicide.
From the outset, Jones claimed that 32-year-old Tittes pulled the trigger while they were drunk and tussling over the gun. But Scottsdale police detectives thought that the barrel was too far from Tittes' face when the gun went off for her to have pulled the trigger, and they sought charges against Jones instead.
A Maricopa County Superior Court jury found Jones guilty in the death, but not for second-degree murder, as charged by prosecutors.
Instead, they found him guilty of endangerment.
And on Thursday, a Superior Court judge sentenced him to three years in prison.
According to court testimony, Jones, 29, was living in Tittes' apartment on Granite Reef Road in Scottsdale. On Sept. 28, 2003, they spent much of the day drinking, then went to a country-and-Western bar in the East Valley, where they got into a quarrel. Jones got so angry that he punched and cracked a car windshield in the bar's parking lot.
When they got back to the apartment, Tittes told Jones to leave.
And in court, Jones said that in his drunken state, when she told him she was going to kill herself, he even loaded the shotgun for her, thinking it was an idle threat.
Then, he maintained that he tried to take the gun away from her, but she managed to pull the trigger.
But according to court records, Scottsdale police determined that the barrel was at least 16 inches from her face when it went off - too far for her to have reached the trigger - and the position of her body suggested that she was trying to escape.
Jones first went to trial in fall of 2007, but that jury could not reach a verdict and a mistrial was declared. He has since married another woman and moved to Montana.
The retrial began in April in Judge Joseph Heilman's courtroom.
Jones' attorneys contested the police conclusions about the gunshot. More problematic for the prosecution was a series of conflicting statements by Tittes' husband, Jasen Tittes.
According to what Jasen told police, he and Kim were still legally married and remained friends, although they were living apart at the time of Kim's death. In January 2004, Jasen told police that Kim had a history of suicide attempts and had brandished weapons at least two times in his presence.
He recanted those statements during the first trial and could not be located for the second trial; Heilman had him arrested, but he did not testify. Jasen's earlier remarks were read into the record.
The jury had the option of finding Jones guilty of second-degree murder, manslaughter, negligent homicide or endangerment. On June 17, the jury chose endangerment, the least serious of the possible verdicts.
Heilman sentenced Jones to the maximum sentence of three years in prison.
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