The former legal guardian of Jeffersonville homicide victim Kelly Bagshaw broke down in regretful tears as she recounted how Bagshaw told her to come looking for her if she didn’t return in a little while.
Shelly Gaines testified Tuesday that Bagshaw, 30, lived with her in Louisville during most of the time in 2011 after she filed for divorce from husband Edward “Dale” Bagshaw, now her accused murderer.
On the night before her death, Kelly Bagshaw and Gaines, 43, went to Shenanigan’s Irish Grille and Bagshaw asked for her to accompany her to Dale Bagshaw’s apartment the next day to pick up their two young children.
“I really don’t know why,” a weeping Gaines said in response to defense attorney Perry McCall’s question of why she didn’t go with her, later adding that Kelly Bagshaw “acted like she didn’t want me to go.”
Gaines, who also took Kelly Bagshaw into her home as a teenager because “her and her mother weren’t getting along,” was the first of several witnesses to testify against Dale Bagshaw during his murder trial on Tuesday, following opening statements from Clark County Deputy Prosecutor Jeremy Mull and McCall.
Bagshaw, 47, allegedly used a pocket knife to stab Kelly Bagshaw 43 times inside her car after an argument in front of his Jeffersonville apartment in the 1500 block of East 10th Street.
Gaines said the Bagshaws had reconciled each time they had separated previously and that she was not seeing another man at the time of her death, contrary to what her estranged huband told police.
Buffy Jackson and William Johnson, who lived in the Lafayette Square Apartments near Dale Bagshaw, testified they were carrying laundry from his truck to their third-floor apartment on Nov. 13, 2011, when they heard muffled screams then saw Kelly Bagshaw lying face down on the ground next to her car.
Then they noticed a young girl watching from a living-room window of a nearby apartment, a child who was the Bagshaws’ daughter.
Jackson stood between the window and the car to try to shield the child’s view.
“She just kind of had a blank face,” Jackson said. “She wouldn’t leave the window.”
“There was just so much blood, like an animal had been slaughtered,” Johnson said, adding the child “could see everything.”
McCall is pursuing an insanity defense for his client and is asking that the charge be reduced to manslaughter because of the “sudden heat,” or rage experienced that day by Dale Bagshaw, who isn’t expected to testify.
“He genuinely has no memory of what happened,” McCall told jurors.
Other witnesses are expected to testify today, such as Jeffersonville police officers and detectives who responded to the scene, as well as a pathologist.
Mull said no professional will testify that Dale Bagshaw was legally insane and Kelly Bagshaw didn’t provoke him to “sudden heat” that would have sufficiently obscured his judgment.
Reporter Charlie White can be reached at (812) 949-4026.
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