Murder defendant Qiu Feng Ke testified in his trial on Wednesday in Pasco County, Florida, and insisted he didn’t kill neighbor Edward Lee Tudor out of premeditation. Under cross-examination, however, prosecutors confronted him with evidence showing the defendant previously calling the feud a “war,” and the victim a “primary target.”
Ke shot and killed Tudor back in January 2018, say deputies. According to authorities, he admitted to doing it and insisted it was because his neighbor was incredibly noisy. The defendant also said he was going to kill another person, said the criminal complaint obtained by Law&Crime. Thing is, he has openly acknowledged what happened, and has previously asked for the death penalty.
Prosecutors are only going for a life sentence, however. The question now is whether jurors will convict Ke of first-degree murder, as charged.
During direct examination, Ke insisted his neighbor Tudor was noisy and wanted to keep him from sleeping. He affirmed that he and the victim were at “war.” The defendant asserted that there was no planning or plotting ahead of the killing.
Under cross-examination, however, Ke acknowledged that he had problems with other neighbors at different times. His only major interaction with Tudor was when Ke approached him for making noise, said the prosecution. Never did the victim approach the defendant saying they were at “war.”
The prosecution also confronted Ke with a 2017 letter, in which he called Lee Tudor a “bully,” and his “primary target.”
“Lee knows that he is not getting an upper hand in this war, and we are in a deadlock,” said the letter. Asked on the stand, the defendant said that he believed these were his words.
The prosecution kept reading what the defendant. Ke said that he was going to “fight this to the end,” and called Lee “cunning and manipulative.” He wrote that he worried that a possible neighbor who moved into Tudor’s home would be the same. In the writing, Ke said that the worst scenario would be a murder-suicide, stated that he purchased a rope from Home Depot (one of the proposed suicide methods was hanging), that he needed to get a document done so everyone would know why this “murder-suicide” happened, and that he had to finish his will.
The defendant confirmed on the stand that these were his words.
[Screengrab via the Law&Crime Network.]
