DALLAS, Ga. (Court TV) — Jury selection is underway in Georgia for a woman accused of killing her husband — but she says the alleged victim took his own life.
Lacy Boles (Paulding County Sheriff’s Office)
Lacy Jolee Boles, 43, has pleaded not guilty to malice murder, felony murder and aggravated assault in the death of her husband, Daniel Akers, 36.
Akers died on Dec. 22, 2019, after suffering a gunshot wound at the couple’s home in Paulding County, Georgia. In a news release announcing the charges, investigators said that Boles called 911 to report that her husband had shot himself. But officers said they noticed inconsistencies in Boles’ account of what happened when compared to the evidence in the house.
The case was delayed, in part, by the COVID-19 pandemic. While Akers was pronounced dead in December 2019, the report for his autopsy wasn’t made available to detectives until May 2020. That autopsy report determined that the gunshot that killed Akers was not self-inflicted and ruled that his cause of death was homicide.
Investigators struggled to gain access to the alleged victim’s cellphone. After taking custody of it at the scene, detectives were unable to “break” or “open” the device without a passcode. The phone was then disconnected from software and deemed “impossible to access” until a new search warrant was signed in March 2025.
In pretrial filings reviewed by Court TV, prosecutors said they were able to access a 13-minute audio recording from Akers’ phone that “appears to capture a conversation” between him and the defendant. That conversation allegedly contains statements suggesting that Boles had cheated on her husband; Judge Dean Bucci ruled that part of the recording to be hearsay and barred prosecutors from introducing that portion as evidence in Boles’ trial.
Boles was released on a $100,000 bond in 2020 and has remained free pending her criminal trial. She had initially faced an additional charge of possessing a weapon during a crime; prosecutors declined to pursue the charge after a clerical filing issue forced them to drop it.
Boles is represented by high-profile attorney Brian Steel, who previously represented Sean “Diddy” Combs and Young Thug in their criminal trials broadcast on Court TV.
