User Reviews

***MAJOR SPOILERS*** Ture and shocking true story about a black widow like murderess who knocked off two husbands to get her hands on their life insurance money with the police and local D.A's in both cases overlooking the very obvious facts that let her get away Scot-free with 1st degree murder.

That until the killer Bridget Smith Michael, Jaclyn Smith, screwed up when she was told to react her second husbands death, that she claimed was accidental, on video tape and the awful truth suddenly became very obvious that she blew him away in his sleep with a .25 caliber handgun! The same thing she did to her first husband Larry Smith two years earlier! As for husband #2 the popular and beloved high-school basketball coach Russ Michael, Timothy Carhart, whom Bridget married on the rebound after he divorced his wife Joanna, Diana Scarwld, he at first thought the world of her in how good she was in handling the family expenses and her deep and incisive knowledge of financial matters.

It's after checking out the family bank and checking account Russ soon realized he was being bled white of all his savings by Bridget who covered her tracks by hiding the bills sent to the Michael in the mail. Bridget had her putting on an act as a God fearing church going woman that helped for a while. That's in her fooling those in the very church going town that she and Russ lived in by getting loans from the bank and and lending agencies which of course she never paid back.

It's when Russ, now a shell of his former self, started to put his suspicions on audio tape about what he felt Bridget was up too and planning for him, like what he felt she did to her late husband Larry Smith, that brought, after Larry was dead, the full force of law down on her. Put on trial for 1st degree murder in Russ' death Bridget tried to wiggle out of paying for her crime by acting as if she by being so religious and God fearing could have never committed the both criminal and Goddess acts that she's been charged with.

****SPOILERS**** The trial that shook the entire town, and those who live in it, to its very foundations in finding out what a monster the church lady really was ended with a lighting quick conviction,it took the jury only 44 minutes to deliberate, of Bridget on the count of 1st degree murder and sent her straight to death row! The death penalty was later overturned by a higher court to life imprisonment but, for some strange reason, with possible parole in 20 years which was denied, in 2009,the first Bridget applied for it!

Very factual story despite a change of venue from North Carolina where the story actually took place to Colorado "Before He Wakes" shows just how evil a person could be in murdering in cold blood someone who did everything to make both her and her fatherless son Mark, Clyton Taylor, lives much better then they were. Russ Michaels tried to make a go of his marriage with Bridget even when he found out what a lying and conniving creep she really was and finally waited for the end to come with as much as not lifting a finger to stop it! As for Bridget she at first thought that she got away with murder, like she did before, but Russ had a secret insurance policy made out to him that she never counted on. An audio tape that he kept hidden in his coach's high-school locker that recored his thought about her financial crimes and what he expected from her after he found out about them! A slug in the back of his skull! Which in fact predicted exactly what was later to happen to him!

This made for TV Movie is based on the true story of Barbara Stager, a Durham, NC woman convicted of the murder of her second husband, Russ Stager, a popular high school baseball coach. The script keeps the basic outlines of the true story, but inexplicably changes just enough details to make Jaclyn Smith's character more attractive and sympathetic than her real life counterpart. In this case, the true story is both stranger and more frightening that the fictional counterpart.

The movie suggests that for days after the shooting, Barbara Stager was not suspected of complicity in her husband's death. The truth was that her story began unraveling with the first telling, and by the time police asked her to recreate the shooting on videotape, they had accumulated considerable evidence of her guilt and motives. The subsequent discovery of audio tapes, in which the husband "spoke from the grave" about his fears that he would be killed by his wife in a shooting made to look accidental, was much more chilling in real life.

I, (name witheld), am the nephew of Russell Stager, the man who was murdered in this movie (can't remember name of character), the grandson of Doris Stager. A couple of corrections to your essays, she will actually be up for parole in the year 2009, (my graduation year), as I was born roughly 3 years after Barbara killed my uncle. One thing the movie got wrong, the man who connected all the pieces and solved the crime was in fact the lawyer, whose real name was Eric Evenson, if you've read the book. Second, my mother, Russell's sister, wasn't a character in the movie, but she was at the trial. I never met my uncle, and I won't till the day I die, and she robbed me of him. I've never even met my uncle. Trust me, this 'woman' deserves death.