Charles Stephens, freed from prison last year, will stand trial on a f
Vivid testimony came from an accused killer's wife Wednesday at his preliminary court hearing in Oakland County, Halston Herrera reports at WDIV:
The wife of a man who is charged with murder in the death of a Troy mother testified Wednesday that he told her he had killed someone and asked her to clean a knife with bleach.
Tonia Stephens said her husband, Charles Stephens, told her "shit just got real" when he came home on March 21 and threw a knife on a bed in their home in the Somerset apartment complex on Golfview Street.
Kalpana Murali-Babu was found dead . . . from several slashes to the neck.
Charles Stephens, freed from prison last year, will stand trial on a felony murder charge. (Photo tweeted by Mike Campbell of WWJ)
Stephens, a 53-year-old released from prison last August, was bound over to stand trial on a felony murder charge.
Witnesses on Wednesday morning also included a pawn broker from American Jewelry and Loan in Detroit, who said Charles Stephens received $1,250 for a gold necklace that he brought in the day of the slaying. "The victim’s husband [identified it] as her mangala sutra, a necklace that a Hindu groom gives to his bride as a symbol of their marriage," WDIV's digtal news editor posts with a 25-minute video of the court session.
The 37-year-old victim and defendant were neighbors in the same building.
Murali-Babu's husband, a General Motors executive, was in South Korea on business at the time. Her daughters Lipika and Sanjay, 7 and 10, went to another neighbor when their mother wasn't at the school bus stop that afternoon and didn't answer the doorbell. They attend Martell Elementary School in Troy.
Troy detectives said earlier that Stephens was an immediate suspect because he had been suspected of several area larcenies.
His state prison record shows six convictions for crimes in Wayne and Oakland from 1987-2002..
-- Alan Stamm
Earlier coverage:
