Miriam Meservy couldn’t hold her tears back after taking the stand Thursday afternoon in the murder trial of her father, accused of killing her mother. Neither could hardly anyone else in the Arapahoe County courtroom.

The oldest daughter of James Craig, the former Aurora dentist on trial for felony charges alleging he fatally poisoned his wife, Angela in 2023, Meservy teared up while describing her relationship with her mother.

“She was my best friend,” Meservy said, wiping her nose with a tissue as she pet a black lab sitting on the ground beside her. “We were very close.”

The lab, named “Fancy,” was a comfort dog provided by the court.

Her father, dressed in a black suit with thin white pinstripes, sat just about 10 feet in front of her, doing his best to keep his eyes dry. Even when she was asked to identify him for the record, she could barely look at him for more than a split second.

Craig, 47, faces six felony counts related to the 2023 death of his wife, including first-degree murder, solicitation to tamper with physical evidence and solicitation to commit perjury. The trail entered its third day of testimony and is expected to last another two weeks. 

Meservy, her red puffy eyes unobscured by her long crimson hair tied back in a ponytail, was the first of Craig’s children to testify in the trial so far. The second was the next witness.

Annabelle Craig recounted the night her father — in jail after his arrest on March 19, 2023, on suspicion of first-degree murder in connection with her mom’s death — asked her to post bond for another inmate, whom he claimed to be her cousin. She followed his instructions, and the man delivered her a letter with handwriting she identified as her father’s.

Within the contents of that letter were direct instructions for Annabelle to find someone on the dark web to produce a deepfake video of her mother asking Craig to order cyanide, arsenic and oleander. Craig also said in the letter that he had ordered those drugs for his wife a few weeks before her death.

Just a few hours before the daughters testified, Cassie Rodriquez — a customer service representative with Midland Scientific, a laboratory products distributor — took the stand. Rodriquez said that she began a lengthy email correspondence with someone who bought potassium cyanine on March 9, 2023, after they asked to pick it up, something the distributor generally does not allow for chemical orders.

That person used the email address jimandwaffles@gmail.com and identified themselves as Dr. James Craig, she said. Craig had previously used that same address to communicate with Karin Cain, a woman he was seeing outside his marriage.

Cain is scheduled to testify during the trial, possibly Monday, that she fell in love with Craig after only three weeks, but that he lied about the state of his marriage.

Rodriquez added that Craig told her he was teaching a two-day course — on Friday, March 9 and Saturday, March 10 — and wanted to do a demonstration with the cyanide. She also noted that his order requested the shipment be addressed to “Jim Craig – personal.”

A package addressed to Craig in the exact same format arrived at Summerbrook Dental Group in Aurora, the dentist’s practice, on March 13. It came with an invoice that was addressed to him in the same format and listed the contents as potassium cyanide, said the location’s office manager, Caitlin Romero, during her testimony on Wednesday.

Romero also said that Craig had asked her to be on the lookout for a “personal package” addressed to him in that manner, and told her to place it on his desk without opening it, a request she found unusual as there hadn’t been any personal packages delivered to the office during her time working there.

Rodriquez was the third witness to testify in the proceedings on Thursday. The first two were Det. Bobby Olson and former Agent David Lee — both of whom worked on processing the digital evidence gathered from Craig’s and his wife’s cell phones, as well as a computer and DVR — walked the jury through the process they take to preserve the data during its collection.

Olson still works for the Aurora Police Department; Lee now works for the U.S. Secret Service.

Angela died on March 18, 2023, at Denver’s University Hospital from lethal doses of several toxins, including cyanide, arsenic and tetrahydrozoline — the active ingredient in red-eye removing products like Visine. In the week leading up to her death, she had visited the hospital multiple times, feeling weak and dizzy.

Three days before she was taken off life support, Angela was rushed to the hospital after collapsing, where she lost consciousness, was placed on a ventilator and later pronounced brain dead that night.

Two more testified Thursday afternoon before the daughters took the stand. The first, Ashley Donohue, was a former warehouse supervisor at Midland Scientific’s Aurora warehouse. Donohue said that he saw Craig walk up to him dressed in blue scrubs on March 13 and ask whether the location still had a storefront.

Donohue recounted telling him that the location’s storefront previously had sold beakers and chemical products on-site but was closed during the COVID-19 pandemic and never reopened afterward, he said. Craig then got into a car and left.

The other was Darvin Harrell, a crime scene investigator with APD who testified of his process for photographing Craig’s residence and collecting evidence within. After the defense highlighted that one item collected in evidence — a clear plastic shaker bottle with a pink lid — was not in his list of items he reported as collected from the house, Harrell noted that he had made a mistake, which can happen during the collection process.

Both the prosecution and defense admit that Craig’s extramarital affairs go back years with several different women, though they disagree on whether his relationship with Cain was a motive to kill his wife.

The trial will continue on Friday at 8:30 a.m. in the Arapahoe County courthouse’s Room 201.