A spurned lover riding his motorcycle late in the night. A stranger slipping past a gate into a quiet community. Prosecutors say the two were the same man β Fred Cooper, a year-old former Bonita Springs motorcycle mechanic charged with killing a young Lee County couple in their bedroom more than three years ago.
They also listened to eyewitnesses describe seeing a man like Cooper in their Gateway neighborhood on the night before the bodies were found. Kellie Lynn Ballew, 29, told jurors that her boyfriend was distraught, if not devastated, when she ended their relationship in December He wrote personal notes for her and left them around the Bonita Springs home they shared.
He threatened to kill himself at one point, grabbing a gun and ammunition from a closet and running to the basement. She talked him out of it.
Ballew hid her new relationship with Steven Andrews, 28, a married coworker, from Cooper. On the night of Dec. The bodies of Steven and his wife, Michelle, 28, were discovered in their Gateway bedroom the next morning. Steven died of a gunshot wound to the head. Michelle was badly beaten and asphyxiated to death. Cooper, if convicted of the killings, could face the death penalty. His first trial, in October, ended when a Lee County jury failed to reach a verdict. The case was moved to St.
Petersburg to escape heavy media coverage. Shortly after Ballew returned from meeting Steven that night, Cooper left on his motorcycle, she testified. When she reached him by phone between 11 and p.
