"I don't mind telling you this isn't a case where there was anything damning that didn't come out," McComas told the Homer News after leaving the courtroom. "This is not a case where I thought Jay might have done it and got off. That's not what we're talking about here. It was a sad thing that happened."

Immediately after hearing the verdict, Wanda Darling's family placed calls to family and friends in Alabama. News of the verdict was received with shock and disbelief, according to Kaelin.

"We are disappointed, real disappointed," Kaelin said outside the courthouse. Adding there was never a doubt in her mind that Jay Darling had killed her sister, Kaelin said, "I feel sorry for the jury. ... They have just let a murderer loose. I hope he doesn't kill somebody else."

On Monday, nearly three weeks after the trial began, the original jury of six men and nine women listened to closing arguments from state prosecutor Crandon Randell and the defense team of McComas and Strout. Three jurors, two men and one woman, were dismissed as alternates before the deliberations began.

According to instructions from Judge Savell, the jury's role was to determine if testimony and evidence presented in court proved beyond a reasonable doubt that:

• Wanda Wood Darling died at or near Homer, on or about Aug. 24, 1997;
• Jay Darling intended to cause the death of Wanda Wood Darling; and
• In acting on that intent, Jay Darling physically caused the death of Wanda Wood Darling.

Darling, a physical therapist, and Wanda Wood, a registered nurse, married in Tennessee in April 1997. A week later, Darling attempted to take out State Farm life insurance on himself for $3 million and his wife for $500,000.

He also applied for life insurance policies from Allstate for himself and his wife in the amount of $1 million each. Witnesses testified and Darling admitted during the trial that he had a plan to fake his own death in a kayaking accident and use his wife to obtain the insurance money.

Darling and his wife moved from Mississippi to Anchorage on Aug. 19, 1997. Four days later, the couple's kayak capsized near Jakalof Bay, spilling both Darling and Wanda Darling into the water. He made it back into the craft and towed her to shore. Darling's actions that day saved his wife's life, the defense contended.

The prosecution offered another interpretation: Wanda Darling survived. In the couple's hotel room later that night, Darling said, he suggested they have their four-month-old marriage annulled if Wanda Darling couldn't forgive him for the kayaking incident. He said he believed their conflict drove Wanda Darling to throw herself off the bluff at the secluded location where they stopped to take pictures the following afternoon. But he said he had since come to believe her reaction to medication she was taking may have caused her to fall to her death from the top of the sheer bluff face that is interspersed by jagged veins of coal.

In addition to the once-believed suicide, Darling also had other explanations for his wife's death, according to testimony given by witnesses during the trial: she stumbled and fell; she was picking flowers on an Alaska mountain and fell off; he turned around and she was gone. Rescue workers found her body later that day some 800-feet below the point where it went over the edge. Pieces of clothing were gone, a portion of her head was missing and she had suffered multiple bruises, cuts and broken bones.

On Aug. 25, 1997, a day after his wife's death, Darling called State Farm and Allstate insurance agents to check on the status of the life insurance policies, failing to mention Wanda Darling was already dead.

In September 2002, a federal grand jury indicted Darling on five charges of mail and wire fraud for his scam to obtain life insurance on himself and his wife. In January 2003, he pleaded guilty to one count as part of an agreement in which four counts were dismissed. Darling was sentenced to 40 months in prison. In April 2005 a grand jury in Kenai indicted Darling for first-degree murder in Wanda Darling's death.

"She knew she had to act or resign herself to life at home, caring for others," Strout told the jury. Darling, the defense attorneys said, offered his wife-to-be an alternative. Her marriage and their "normal-type relationship" were signs that Wanda Darling was "a woman coming into her own," Strout said.

Randell, however, said what Jay Darling had in mind was a plan for "making a lot of money so he didn't have to work ... to fake his own death and go off and live in Mexico or somewhere and just disappear ...Here was a guy willing to cut himself off from all human interaction."

Distilling the case to two points, Randell referred to accounts from witnesses that Wanda Darling's fear of falling prevented her from using elevators and escalators.

"She never, ever would have been at the edge of that bluff on her own free will," Randell said, adding the second point, "The insurance." McComas criticized actions by former Alaska State Trooper Lary Kuhns. "He decided it was murder that same day," McComas said of Kuhns' questioning of Darling on Aug. 24, 1997. McComas also challenged Kuhns' handling of evidence and his "pathetic effort to account for two months of what he did with (Wanda Darling's) clothes."

Then McComas leveled criticism at Alaska State Trooper Investigator Timothy Hunyor's treatment of witnesses and interviews. "(The defense) goes after Kuhns and Hunyor by citing all the terrible things the police officers did, but the problem is that this has nothing to do with what this guy (Darling) did -- kill his wife," Randell told the jury in his rebuttal.

As Judge Savell released the jury after reading the not guilty verdict, he acknowledged that they had "sacrificed a lot" and commended them for "serving admirably." Questionnaires given to the jury before the trial indicated that 42 percent of those asked thought Darling was guilty of killing his wife, according to McComas.

"I didn't go back to see if any of those people were on the jury," he said, laughing. "We liked the jury. ... An interesting part of deliberations is they had paid such careful attention, taking notes, even on cross-examination. ... I think it was a right verdict."