Jury in case of NJ wife slaying will not be told of husband's previous murder conviction

foxnews.com:

A judge has decided that jurors who are asked to decide whether a man killed his wife in New Jersey will not be told that he was convicted earlier of having killed his first wife in Ohio.

NJ.com reports that the decision last week by Judge Peter Warshaw is a significant blow to Mercer County prosecutors trying to convict 71-year-old John David Smith III of having killed 49-year-old Fran Gladden-Smith in 1991 when they lived in West Windsor.

Her body has never been found, but a grand jury indicted Smith in 2019. At that time, Smith was in prison in Ohio for killing 23-year-old Janice Hartman decades earlier.

Prosecutors alleged that he killed Hartman days after their five-year marriage ended in 1974 and kept her body in a box for a few years before dumping it on a rural Indiana road, where it was found in 1980.