Posted 7:26 AM by steve

As he did plead guilty to manslaughter, David Gabriel Watson may have indeed killed his wife during a honeymoon scuba trip... but if all the police had to go on was what was reported in this story, count me among the unconvinced...

So after her death he called the insurance company inquiring about her life insurance policy? Why wouldn't he do so? If he thought he was the beneficiary, is he just supposed to wait and assume the insurance company learned of her death and wrote him a check? Did he violate some standard for how long he was supposed to wait before calling? (thought: he's got to pay for the funeral, it might have occurred to him to use the insurance money for that?)

And evidence of motive was provided by the wife's father's uncorroborated report that the husband asked his soon-to-be wife to make him the beneficiary and increase the amount of coverage.... excuse me? Doesn't it make sense that a husband is the beneficiary of the wife's insurance... and vice versa? And I don't know how much the policy was for, but it doesn't strike me as terribly amiss that, in discussing their soon-to-be-joint finances, and especially if they were thinking of starting a family, that they agree to raise the amount of their insurance coverage.

And he was an experienced diver and she was a novice... so what? Being an experienced diver means you're less likely to kill yourself, it doesn't mean that you're going to be able to keep someone else from having difficulty... or be able to save someone who is having difficulty (it's not as if one regularly, or even occasionally is in a position of needing to assist another diver, so if and when such a situation arises, even so-called expert divers may find themselves in a situation they've never been in before).

As I said, maybe he did do it... but there's nothing in the story that would have made me vote guilty if I were serving on the jury.