(Tribune News Service) — The police investigator who searched James Ray’s Montclair home on the night police discovered the bullet-riddled body of Angela Bledsoe says he noticed two things that were unusual about the crime scene.

Frank Ricci, a crime scene investigator with the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, testified Wednesday at Ray’s murder trial being held in Newark. He told the jury he saw no blood on the top side of the 9mm pistol found in a pool of coagulated blood next to Bledsoe’s body on the kitchen floor of the stately North Mountain Avenue home.

“I found it peculiar that there was no blood on that firearm,” Ricci said near the end of his second day on the witness stand in Superior Court. Ricci never explained his rationale to the jury as the defense objected, but he seemed to infer that if Bledsoe was pointing a gun at him when Ray shot her at close range, there should have been blood spatter on the firearm.

Ricci told the jury that he also found it odd that three .45 shell casings that police recovered at the crime scene were found neatly lined up on the coffee table in the living room, alongside three other firearms that Ray claims he was cleaning at the time of the shooting.

“I find that very out of the ordinary that all three shell casings were lined up next to each other,” Ricci told the jury before stepping off the witness stand. Ricci added that during his long career in law enforcement, he’d investigated “hundreds” of crime scenes, but had never seen shell casings so neatly lined up.

After Ricci left the stand, the state presented Antonio Badim, the ballistics expert who studied the shell casings found at the scene. Badim testified that the shell casings were all fired from the same .45 handgun, although Ray allegedly disposed of the gun after the shooting and it has not been found.

The prosecution contends that on the morning of Oct. 22, 2018, Ray, a Marine Corps veteran and former cop with the NYPD, shot Bledsoe multiple times with a .45 automatic handgun on the first floor of the home. Bledsoe, a successful financial advisor, was in the process of moving out with the couple’s six-year-old daughter, the state contends.

On the morning she died, Bledsoe was looking for a new house and had an 11:30 a.m. appointment with a realtor. The Montclair police officers who discovered the woman’s body about 12 hours later noted that a clock had fallen off the wall and into the kitchen sink and had stopped at 11:14.

Ray’s defense is that Bledsoe was having an affair, and he was cleaning his guns on the coffee table in the living room that morning when the couple began to argue. Ray, who kept a journal detailing the shooting that has been admitted as evidence, contends that during an argument, Bledsoe picked up a 9mm handgun and pointed it at him, and he shot her in self-defense.

Ray then wrote a note to his brother, Robert, in which he gave his account of the shooting and explained his intention to flee the country. Ray slipped the note into his daughter’s suitcase, and later that day, dropped the girl off with his brother at a steakhouse in Piscataway.

Ray then fled to the Texas border, where he crossed into Mexico and boarded a plane to Havana, Cuba. He was arrested six days after the shooting by Cuban authorities and turned over the U.S. Marshals.

Ray, 60, was charged with murder and has been in the Essex County Correctional Facility ever since. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

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