When Montclair police first responded to James Ray’s house on the night of Oct. 22, 2018, they went in with guns drawn and expecting to see the worst. They were not wrong.
Through a door in the rear, Montclair detective Charlie Cunningham and four police officers entered the fashionable home on North Mountain Avenue around midnight. On the kitchen floor, lying in a pool of blood, was Angela Bledsoe, 44, Ray’s live-in girlfriend and the mother of his six-year-old daughter.
In the pool of blood, about three feet from the body, police spotted a .9mm handgun. On the coffee table in the living were more guns – two, .22 caliber revolvers inside a box that was meant to hold a .45 that was missing, and two gun-cleaning kits. Upstairs were two 12-gauge shotguns, according to police testimony on the third day of the Montclair attorney’s murder trial at the Essex County Courthouse.
Cunningham, who supervised the initial stage of the investigation, testified that he got called to the Montclair attorney’s million-dollar home at 11:54 p.m. Minutes earlier, police had received a frantic phone call from Ray’s brother Robert, who said Ray had written him a letter describing how he’d shot Bledsoe earlier in the day, claiming he’d pulled the trigger in self-defense.
“We entered the home knowing that someone was possibly deceased due to gunshot wounds,” Cunningham testified Tuesday. Cunningham said cops searched every room until they were satisfied that no one was home.
On the kitchen floor, police discovered a shell casing. And in the kitchen sink, there was a more curious find: a clock that had stopped at 11:14, Cunningham said.
The prosecution says that on the morning of the shooting, Bledsoe had an 11:30 a.m. appointment to meet with a realtor. Assistant Prosecutor Michelle Miller told the jury during opening arguments that Bledsoe, a financial advisor, had decided to end the relationship and move out.
“She was moving out and taking their child with her,” Miller told the jury. The prosecution contends that Ray killed Bledsoe in a fit of rage, then set up the crime scene to make it look like she grabbed a gun and came at him.
The defense counters that Bledsoe was having an affair, and that Ray had no choice but to open fire when she pointed a gun at him. The prosecution contends that Ray fired four shots from a .45 handgun that was never found.
During cross-examination, defense attorney Thomas Ashley posed a hypothetical question to Cunningham: what would he have done if, while searching the house, someone had popped out of a corner and pointed a gun at him?
Cunningham initially tried to deflect the question as hypothetical, but Ashley dug in with further questions. He got Cunningham to admit that he had two choices to either back off and take cover, or to open fire and use deadly force.
“You don’t know how you would react to that?” Ashley asked. “No, I don’t, " Cunningham replied. “No further questions,” Ashley responded.
Testimony in the trial, which is being held in Superior Court before Judge Verna G. Leath, is expected to run through the end of April.
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Richard Cowen may be reached at rcowen@njadvancemedia.com.