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This trial is like a mosquito in a nudist colony

Chavez, 32, is accused of shooting his 26-year-old wife, Tera Chavez, with his department-issued gun in 2007 at their Los Lunas home and then trying to make her death look like a suicide.

Prosecutors have depicted Chavez as a philanderer whose marriage was crumbling, and say he killed his wife after she found out that he had staged the theft of his pickup truck valued at more than $20,000 to collect the insurance proceeds.

The defence says the death was a suicide by a woman unraveling over her failed marriage and relationships. Chavez’s lawyer says he could not have killed his wife in October 2007 because he was with another woman at the time.

Tera Chavez was also having an affair with an Albuquerque police officer who was married to the maid of honour in her wedding, witnesses said. They had sex in the back of a hair salon where she worked, according to testimony.

“This trial is like a mosquito in a nudist colony,” said Tom Garrity, owner of the Albuquerque-based public relations firm The Garrity Group. “Where do you begin?”

The case is nearing the end as defence attorney David Serna calls final witnesses this week.

Serna, who has long represented clients in high-profile New Mexico homicide cases, was able to convince the judge to bar statements Tera Chavez made about her husband and his “cop buddies” staging the theft of Levi Chavez’s 2004 Ford F-250 truck as part of an insurance scam.

Now Serna is working to show how his client was a victim of a larger effort to paint him as a monster.