A key witness did not show up for a high-profile murder trial at the 19th Judicial District Courthouse in Baton Rouge up Monday, and the judge is threatening to issue a bench warrant for her arrest.
Meshell Hale, 54, is in the second day of her first-degree murder, which would bring a life sentence if convicted. She is accused of poisoning her former live-in boyfriend, Damian Paul Skipper, 41, with barium acetate in June 2015.
Samantha Huber, a forensic pathology for the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office, was slated to take the stand to testify in the case Monday, but she was not in the courtroom, according to a notice for the court-ordered arrest warrant by District Judge Raymond Bigelow. Bigelow said he had written the warrant but would not issue it if Huber appeared in court Thursday.
Hale waived her right to a trial jury and Bigelow will decide her guilt or innocence at end of her trial, which is expected to continue through the week. The judge’s warrant would give deputies in East Baton Rouge Parish and beyond authority to drag Huber into Bigelow’s courtroom to explain why she shouldn’t be held in contempt of court for failing to appear Monday.
Skipper was killed about nine months before authorities found the remains of Hale’s 42-year-old husband, Arthur Noflin Jr. He was found burned to a crisp inside a vehicle in New Orleans in March 2016.
The cause and manner of his mysterious death remain unclassified, but prosecutors from the East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorneys office pulled no punches Monday when they told Bigelow that Hale likely killed Noflin in the same fashion she did Skipper.
Huber was expected to testify Monday about her findings from Noflin's autopsy.
Hale was arrested in June 2018 in connection with Skipper’s death. He was her live-in boyfriend and Hale claimed they were married. But when he died in June 2015, she was actually married to Noflin, according to court testimony.
Assistant District Attorney Dana Cummings, the lead prosecutor, explained that Skipper’s death was originally ruled to be natural. But after disturbing similarities came to light in symptoms he and Noflin exhibited before they died, authorities exhumed Skipper’s body and tested it for a rare compound, barium acetate.
“What they found was that in his organs, in his brain, in his liver, in his gastric, he had horrible barium levels — in some cases thousands times more barium — than would be normal,” Cummings said in her opening statement Monday.
The manner of death was changed from natural causes to homicide by poisoning at that point and the murder investigation officially got underway.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the date Huber was supposed to testify and clarify the judge's order.