KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — UPDATE (MAY 17): A jury found a man guilty of all counts in the murder of Desheena Kyle. They also sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
John Bassett was found guilty of first-degree murder, abuse of a corpse and tampering with evidence on Wednesday.
He took the stand Tuesday and asked Knox County jurors to believe a long string of facts that fly in the face of common sense.
He testified the righthanded Desheena Kyle, 26, put a gun to the left side of her head and deliberately or accidentally pulled the trigger in June 2021 while backing up in a moment of duress.
The 30-year-old told jurors he then "panicked", cleaning up blood in her apartment, ditching her phone, ditching the gun, hiding evidence, wrapping and binding her body in sections with duct tape and garbage bags before deciding some six days later -- on her birthday -- to hide her body in the crawl space of a Sam Tillery Road home once occupied by his great grandmother.
"There's a lot I did," he testified.
But he didn't kill her, he said. And as the months passed that summer he never told anyone where she was or what happened to her.
Knoxville police ultimately found her corpse stuffed in a toolbox under the vacant house in late September 2021.
The jury started deliberations Tuesday afternoon before electing to go home and start anew Wednesday morning.
The defense argues Kyle could be mentally unstable and violent towards Bassett. She stabbed him once, they argued. In late 2020, defense attorney Josh Hedrick told jurors, a family member called 911 fearful because Kyle was bipolar and threatening to harm herself.
She had a history that suggested she was capable of suicide, he said.
The jury could go ahead and convict him of tampering with evidence and maybe abuse of a corpse, said Hedrick, who represents Bassett with attorney Cullen Wojcik. But he wasn't guilty of murder, he said.
Bassett told jurors when he took the stand Tuesday that Kyle woke him up in the middle of the night as he slept in her room June 19, 2021. She was upset and declared that he'd be happier if she just killed herself.
He said the gun went off as she backed up against a chair and he lunged to try to stop her.
Bassett said he couldn't let anyone know what had happened to her because no one would believe him. He was a felon on probation for cocaine sales whose story would be dismissed by everyone, he said.
"Be realistic here," Hedrick told jurors in his closing argument. "John's trying to hide. John's trying to find a way out."
On cross-examination, prosecutor Rachel Hill started pulling at his testimony as if it were an afghan of loose yarn. Repeatedly, Bassett was unable to explain conflicts in his story or details about what he did after Kyle died.
Bassett's testimony Tuesday consisted of "lies, lies and more lies," Hill said.
The prosecutor, who tried the case with Joanie Stewart, reminded jurors that the medical examiner discounted the possibility based on medical evidence that Kyle took her own life.
"Use your common sense, use the evidence we've shown you, and find him guilty -- because he's guilty," she said.
