James Craig displayed hardly any emotion on Wednesday afternoon as the jury delivered a unanimous verdict — guilty of murdering Angela Craig, his wife of 23 years.

He was also found guilty on five other counts: two for solicitation to commit tampering with physical evidence and three for solicitation to commit perjury in the first degree.

The verdict, read by 18th Judicial District Judge Shay Whitaker, came after more than 10 days of testimony, 48 witnesses and eight hours of jury deliberation at the Arapahoe County Courthouse. 

It was a day both his family — and Angela Craig’s — had been waiting for since she died in 2023 and he stood accused of killing her.

The tension in the courtroom grew as family members, including several of Angela’s brothers and sisters, many of whom had showed up daily for the trial, filtered into the gallery.

Many shed tears as Whitaker read the verdict. Both parties then requested an immediate sentencing.

“It’s been a hard thing,” said Toliver Craig, the defendant’s oldest son, his voice audibly breaking, before his father’s sentence was read. “It’s hard to lose your mom, three days after that lose your dad, and then have to spend the next two years untangling whatever he tells you.”

Siblings recount sister’s final days in James Craig trial

Several of Angela’s siblings also spoke about their sister before Miriam Meservy, Craig’s oldest daughter, got up to speak. 

“I was supposed to be able to trust my dad,” Meservy said, crying throughout her statement. “He was supposed to be my hero, and, instead, he’ll forever be the villain in my book.”

At that point, Craig, visibly emotionless earlier, began sobbing. Defense attorney Ashley Whitham put her arm around his shoulder to console him.

Many members of the jury entered the courtroom after Whitaker read the verdict. Some also visibly shed tears while listening to the statements.

Craig received a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole for the first-degree murder count, as well as 33 additional years served consecutively for the additional counts.

The sentence was the maximum possible based on the charges, said Senior Chief Deputy District Attorney Michael Mauro at a news conference after the sentencing.

“Clearly, Craig wanted out of his marriage, but was unable to face the consequences of divorce, especially a divorce initiated by him,” Mauro said. “He gave in to greed and cowardice, ultimately treating Angela as an object, an obstacle to the life he wanted.”

Angela died on March 18, 2023, at Denver’s University Hospital from lethal doses of several toxins, including cyanide, arsenic and tetrahydrozoline — the active ingredient in Visine. In the week leading up to her death, she had visited the hospital multiple times, feeling weak and dizzy.

Throughout the trial, jurors heard testimony from investigators, family members, jail inmates, Craig’s extramarital partners, and emergency personnel who treated Angela in the hospital.

The defense rested their case without calling a single witness to the stand.

Prosecutors said that Craig had administered fatal doses of those poisons to his wife over the course of 10 days leading up to her death, pointing to evidence of him researching the toxins and receiving shipments of them to his house and office.

The prosecution also alleged that Craig injected her with cyanide while she was dying in the hospital, just hours before she was declared brain dead.

The defense sought to refute those claims, painting Angela as broken and possibly suicidal from Craig’s history of extramarital affairs, and to create reasonable doubt during witness cross-examination. 

James Craig murder case jurors begin deliberations

“The jury said it loudly: Angela was not suicidal,” Mauro said at the news conference. “She had no knowledge of or participation in what happened to her, which is that James Craig murdered her.”

“You don’t know who put the tetrahydrozoline in that cup,” Defense Attorney Lisa Moses had told the jurors during the trial. “They want you to guess. You don’t get to guess. You don’t know if this was voluntary or involuntary ingestion.”

After he had been arrested on suspicion of Angela’s murder, Craig asked multiple people to plant evidence to support the idea that she had asked him to order her the poisons for her, witnesses said on the stand.

One of those witnesses was Craig’s own daughter, Annabelle, who recounted how her father had sent her a letter with a 10-step list of instructions on how to hire somebody on the dark web to make an AI deepfake video of her mother, before her death, asking Craig to help her kill herself with the poison.

One witness, Nathaniel Harris, Craig’s former cellmate, said that Craig had asked his separated wife, Kasiani “Kasi” Konstantinidis, to testify on his behalf as one of Angela’s friends and affirm the victim had been suicidal.

Craig also offered Konstantinidis $20,000 for each other false witness she found, Harris said.

The defense painted Craig’s actions while in jail as those of an anxious, desperate man who made poor decisions while reckoning with both his wife’s death and a police investigation that zeroed in on him as the suspect without, his lawyers insisted, enough evidence to support the idea.

Additionally, defense attorneys insisted on the potential unreliability of testimony from other inmates. They especially questioned the motive of Harris, who had previously spent over a decade in prison for a past crime.

In the end, the jury found Craig guilty of all charges issued.

“Dr. Craig unleashed a path of destruction as wild as a tornado and just as devastating,” Whitaker, the judge, said before reading Craig’s sentence. “He damaged his children, damaged his family, damaged his home. None of the individuals in this courtroom today will ever be the same.”

The prosecution, during the news conference, discussed the unique nature of the case, noting they relied on a significant amount of circumstantial evidence and noted how the jury was legally instructed to consider it the same way as direct evidence.

“The idea that searches are showing up on his computer, that’s circumstantial, but you add in the circumstantial evidence that he traveled to his office at the same time as these searches are happening helps show that he was doing it,” said Deputy District Attorney Osama Magrebi.

“Add in the fact that he’s seen by another staff member in the dark on that particular computer, that’s another piece of evidence the jury can consider,” Magrebi added.

Prosecutors also highlighted the actions of Caitlin Romero, the front desk representative at Craig’s dental office, who, they said, put pieces of the story together and alerted others that he may have played a malicious role in Angela’s illness.

James Craig’s oldest daughters take stand in emotional third day of testimony

“This was Angela’s husband poisoning her, causing her to die a slow death,” said District Attorney Amy Padden during the news conference. “It wasn’t something done in the heat of passion. It was deliberate, it was over the course of days.”

Denver Gazette reporter Kyla Pearce contributed to this report.