(Court TV) — Jurors in Justin Barber's capital murder trial listened Wednesday to a recording of the Guns N' Roses song that prosecutors say mirrors the defendant's murderous feelings toward his wife.
Barber downloaded "Used to Love Her," a song about a man who kills his mate, the night of his wife April's murder on a deserted beach in 2002.
Barber, 33, maintains a mugger attacked them as they strolled along the water, shooting his wife once in the head and him four times.
A computer examiner from the state police laboratory, Christopher Hendry, told jurors Barber obtained the song and 15 others from an Internet file-sharing site about five hours before the murder. About three weeks after the shooting, the file was deleted, the examiner said.
At the direction of prosecutors, Hendry used a laptop to play the music file for jurors.
"I used to love her, but I had to kill her/ I had to put her/ Six feet under/ And I can still hear her complain," the song began.
As Guns N' Roses frontman Axl Rose sang, jurors followed along with lyrics displayed on an easel in front of the jury box.
When Rose sang the second verse, "I knew I'd miss her/ So I had to keep her/ She's buried right in my backyard," April Barber's aunt dabbed her eyes with a tissue and stared across the court at Barber, who was writing on a legal pad.
On cross-examination, Hendry acknowledged that he could not say whether Barber listened to the song that night. He said the defendant had almost 1,700 songs saved on his computer.
"And out of those, we brought this one into the courtroom," defense lawyer Robert Willis asked.
"Right," Hendry said.
Assistant State's Attorney Matt Foxman asked Hendry if Barber deleted any other songs after the murder. He said "Used To Love Her" was the only one he found deleted.
The computer analyst also testified about several Internet searches Barber conducted about six months before his wife's murder. In one on Valentine's Day 2002, Barber used his company issued laptop to search Google for "trauma cases gunshot right chest," Hendry said.
A week later, he searched for "medical trauma gunshot chest." Prosecutors have suggested he was researching ways to survive shooting himself.
The analyst also told jurors he found an undated search for "Florida divorce."
Following Hendry's testimony, jurors began watching a three-hour videotaped deposition Barber gave in a civil suit filed by his wife's relatives.
In it, Barber said that he and his wife had a good relationship despite maintaining residences in different cities.
"It was a normal marriage. We had our ups and downs," he said.
He acknowledged brief affairs with three women, but said his wife did not know about the relationships. He also said he thought the couple's $2 million life insurance policy had lapsed at the time of the murder and was surprised when he later learned it was still in effect.
