BTW, as an example of content:
[url]http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/3621564p-4647611c.html[/url]
[b]Horrific video shows hanging was no suicide[/b]
By Wayne Wilson -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Thursday, July 18, 2002
It was ruled a suicide by hanging.
But Nancy Mae Paul's mother, Shirley, didn't believe for a moment that her daughter had killed herself.
"I told them that was a lie. I knew in my heart that was not the truth," she said last week, reflecting on the incredible twist in the story of Nancy Paul's short life and sudden death.
Initial reports suggested that the 27-year-old mother of two, reported by her boyfriend to be despondent over the death of an acquaintance, had stepped off a chair with a knotted rope around her neck.
Arthur Gene Lane said he'd found his girlfriend suspended from a beam in a side room off the Power Inn Road home they shared with Lane's mother, Harlene.
But the horrifying truth emerged a month later on a videotape that showed Lane kicking the chair out from under Paul and then joking into the camera as she struggled desperately for her last breath.
Lane, 31, has admitted taping Paul's May 21, 2001, death and is charged with first-degree murder.
He has pleaded not guilty.
The videotape, at the center of the state's case, was played in open court at a preliminary hearing last November.
As the tape unfolds, it shows Lane and Paul standing on a wooden chair, engaged in teasing with the rope.
After the noose is placed over Paul's head, Lane suddenly jumps to the floor and kicks the chair out from under the woman, leaving her dangling by the neck.
With what the prosecutor described as an "obvious look of surprise on her face," Paul cries out, "I'm going to die!"
Those are her last words.
At first, Paul's feet can be seen touching the floor, but Lane grabs them to ensure, the prosecutor said, "the full effect of the hanging."
As the dying woman struggles for life, Lane positions himself so he can mouth, "poor baby" to the camera. He then adds, out loud, "Get a load of that ... that'll make a (expletive) man out of you."
After the tape was played in court, Sacramento Superior Court Judge Talmadge R. Jones ruled "there's more than substantial evidence" for Lane to be tried for murder.
Lane's attorney, assistant public defender John S. Perkins, declined to comment on the videotape.
He said Lane has "had a long history of psychiatric problems since he was a teenager" and his mental state will be a factor at trial, which is scheduled to begin in September.
If convicted, Lane could be sentenced to life without parole.
In pretrial motions, Perkins argued that "it is clear from the tape that Ms. Paul actively participated in her own death."
He said she "voluntarily stood on a chair beneath a noose," and when the noose became entangled in her hair as Lane placed it over her head, "she helped him disentangle it."
Perkins suggested Paul "knew exactly what was about to happen" and should not be regarded "as an unsuspecting victim of an immediate surprise attack."
Deputy District Attorney Steve Grippi rejected the idea that Paul's death may have been akin to an assisted suicide.
"The surprise on the victim's face and her scream, 'I'm gonna die,' show that she was taken unawares by Lane's conduct," Grippi argued.