Accused killer’s ex-wife testifies

PALMER — If anybody knows what Stacey Johnston’s relationship with Frank Adams was like, it’s probably Kristine Foley.

Foley testified Monday in Adams’ murder trial about the tempestuous two years she spent married to Adams.

“He told me that if I ever left him he would kill me or no one would ever want me after he was done with me,” Foley testified. “He said he had a place in the mountains where he would bury me.” Adams, 47, has been on trial for the past four weeks for Johnston’s murder. He was arrested in July of 2007 when officers stopped him on suspicion of drunken driving and found Johnston’s beaten, bloodied body in the back of his red hatchback.

Monday, Foley told jurors she married Adams in 1994 and left him in 1996. Her divorce was finalized the following year. They met in Anchorage and lived there and in Colorado Springs, Colo.

When they met, she said, he was, “very charming, very nice, very attentive, very giving,”

But somewhere along the way that attentiveness, she said, turned to jealousy.

“He wanted to be everywhere I was,” Foley said. She couldn’t have her own friends. Every man she met or spoke to was an object of suspicion.

At one point in Colorado, she said, he trashed her house, smashing photos off the wall, slashing furniture with a knife and stomping her stereo to pieces.

Then there was the time they were leaving a gathering and he got mad.

“He pulled like a baseball-sized swatch of hair out of my head and then slammed me up against the truck,” she said.

Now and then, when things got bad, she’d call the police on Adams. He’d try and beg or threaten her to keep her from calling. Afterwards he’d apologize, beg her to return, and they would reconcile.

The night she left him, Foley said, they’d been heading out to watch fireworks. It was the Fourth of July, 1996. Adams got angry as they drove. She got out of their pickup at a gas station and walked away.

“He did follow me and tried to run me over with the truck,” she told the jury.

Eventually she made her way home but early the next morning, 2 a.m. or 3 a.m., he came barging through the door.

“He came in the door yelling, ‘Where are you, b——? You’re dead, b——,’” she said.

Adams taped her mouth shut, held her down, and threatened to kill her with a syringe. Eventually he calmed down and fell asleep and she left. She drove to her sister’s house, then left Colorado entirely to start over in Las Vegas.

Prior to her testimony for the jury, Foley gave mostly the same account to Superior Court Judge Beverly Cutler. Adams’ attorney, Scott Sterling, opposed allowing Foley to testify, saying, among other arguments, that the past incidents were too far removed from Johnston’s death to be relevant at trial.

Prosecutor Rachel Gernat said she planned to put on evidence showing a continued pattern of violent relationships in Adams’ past, starting with Foley and continuing through Johnston.

Cutler sided with Gernat but ruled that photos Foley brought with her, as well as any conversations which she did not witness, could not come into evidence.

Adams’ trial is expected to last into tomorrow and possibly through the week.