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Only after a recess and a reminder from Witzel that he was under a federal subpoena to testify did Brown finally admit to being separated from Sands for a few minutes that morning. "It was a watershed moment," says Witzel. "It countered everything they'd said until then."

Yet there remained one last piece of the puzzle. For 38 years Gail had kept a diary, and now — like the missing ladder — all seven volumes of the journals had disappeared.

Sands never mentioned the diaries to the police. Witzel and Kanzler only discovered their existence when, out of curiosity, they asked him if his wife kept a journal. Sands at first denied their existence but later acknowledged giving the diaries to Donna Campbell, a friend of Gail's to whom he had grown close in recent years.

Campbell lived in Dothan, Alabama, a half-hour drive from his Florida farm. One of Sands' biggest apologists, she wrote letters to the sheriff's office and others encouraging them to clear him of his wife's murder. So trusting of Sands was Campbell that she shared with him the hiding spot for her house key.

Campbell's son, 30-year-old Brent Spink, says Sands told his mother he was too heartbroken to go through the journals. Campbell, though, planned to read it all and tell Sands what his wife had written. Spink now believes his mother found something in the diaries implicating Sands as Gail's killer. He recalls the phone call he received from his mother the evening of June 17 last year.

"I think she'd put two and two together," says Spink. "She was angry and said she was going to call Sands."

Donna Campbell died a few hours after hanging up the phone with her son that night. After not hearing from his mother for several days, Spink broke into her home to find her naked body lying in a pool of blood in the bathroom. He recalls the room having the strong odor of bleach. The medical examiner ruled that the 55-year-old woman suffered a stroke and hit her head as she fell to the floor. Spink doesn't think so.

Based on the vomit he found alongside his mother's corpse, he believes Sands poisoned her. Spink notes that the hidden key — which only he, Sands and one other person knew about — was missing from its secret location, forcing him to break a window the day he discovered his mother's body. In addition, Gail's diaries were nowhere to be found. To this day their location remains a mystery.

The case was finally scheduled for trial in early January. Although Witzel and Kanzler felt confident they'd prevail, it was far from a sure thing. Sands' Tallahassee-based attorney, Sid Matthew, deftly convinced the judge to bar from the jury much of the dirt the attorneys dug up on his client's past. Gone were the statements from ex-wives and lovers and the incredible kidnapping tale that Gail's attorneys believed best demonstrated Sands' violent streak. Banned, too, was any mention of Brown's criminal past.

Instead of trying to disprove that Sands killed his wife, Matthew would argue that no murder ever occurred. He'd do so by picking apart the credibility of the medical examiner who ruled Gail's death a homicide. According to court filings, Dr. Michael Berkland lost his license to practice as a medical examiner in Missouri for "issuing erroneous death certificates certifying 'homicide' in cases where the probable cause of death was not actually homicide." His license was later suspended in Florida as well.

Figuring the trial might last three weeks, Witzel and Kanzler rented a condo near the federal courthouse in Panama City. With computers, fax machines and filing cabinets ferried down from St. Louis, they soon transformed the place into a functioning law office. They were in the process of hiring a temporary legal assistant when, out of the blue, the judge postponed the trial to January 29.

Disheartened, the lawyers packed their bags for St. Louis, but not before launching one final legal volley. In late November the judge dismissed AXA Equitable Life from the lawsuit. With the plaintiff no longer in the picture, Witzel and Kanzler argued the case now fell under Florida's "slayer statute" — which stipulates that a person cannot profit from causing another's death. Such cases, argued the attorneys, do not require a trial by jury. On January 3 the judge agreed.

For Sid Matthew, the news couldn't be worse. "A lot of the evidence was not coming in under a jury trial — the adultery, the other marriages, the kidnapping. The jury wouldn't know about any of it. But the judge had heard it all," explains Matthew. "I'd say at that point, the odds of us winning were not good."

Moreover, Matthew was now concerned that if Sands lost, the state would follow up with criminal charges. "If you have a federal judge ruling that someone killed his wife, you don't think a prosecutor is going to take notice? By trying this case we ran the risk of some pretty far-reaching consequences."

On January 16 Sands filed a motion to dismiss his claims to his wife's life-insurance policy. Nine days later — January 25 — the judge granted Sands' motion to dismiss the case and ordered that Sands pay Gail's family court costs to the tune of $30,000.

Matthew recalls his client conceding defeat with the same "unreasonable optimism" he'd exhibited since beginning their legal battle nine months earlier. "He was not vindictive, vengeful or angry," says Matthew. "I certainly didn't get the impression that he was going to go commando."

On Tuesday, January 30 — the day after his re-scheduled trial was set to begin — Lionel Sands loaded Dan Brown's beige Crown Victoria with latex gloves, bleach, duct tape and plastic handcuffs. He wore an outfit of camouflage fatigues and combat boots and was disguised with a wig, false moustache and cosmetic make-up.

The notoriously sloppy Brown was dressed like a character from the Blues Brothers, in a dark suit, tie and hat. Sands carried on his person a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and another .38-caliber Taurus pistol. Brown held with him a .22-caliber handgun.

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