FBI witness tells about suicide notes

GALVESTON, Texas (AP) — A couple accused of beating the woman’s 2-year-old daughter to death and dumping the body out to sea wrote suicide notes expressing remorse, witnesses in the woman’s capital murder trial testified Thursday.

An FBI handwriting expert said he was able to lift the impression of the suicide notes from an underlying sheet of a notebook seized from the suburban Houston home of Kimberly Dawn Trenor and Royce Clyde Zeigler II.

Both have been charged with capital murder in the death of Riley Ann Sawyers, whose mother had moved from Mentor, Ohio, to be with Zeigler in Texas. Zeigler was the toddler’s stepfather and will be tried later. Trenor, 20, is on trial this week.

Gabriel Watts, an FBI forensic document examiner, told jurors the suicide notes were written on the same page.

Trenor’s brief note read: “My heart is black dead. There is nothing left. I can’t live with myself after Riley. I go to be.”

Zeigler’s note, said he was taking his life “because of guilt for past sins which I have confessed ... My wife, Kimberly Zeigler, is innocent and lived in fear because of thought of what I would do to her.”

Neither Trenor nor Zeigler in their notes directly said they were responsible for Riley’s death.

Prosecutors say Trenor and Zeigler beat Riley, pushed her head in a bathtub filled with cold water and ultimately threw her across a room, fracturing her skull during a daylong discipline session on July 25, 2007, designed to teach her proper manners.