A daughter is affected by her mother’s unsolved death, while her father maintains his innocence from prison

Ashley Swift has always seen her father as a supportive and caring parent.

He showed him how to change the oil in the car. He helped her get her first job, she said, then drove her from there to home. When it came time for college, they talked about the pros and cons of going straight out of high school.

But two years ago, David Swift, 56, was charged with murder in the murder of someone else who had a huge influence on Ashley’s life: his wife – Ashley’s mother. Karen Swift’s mysterious and violent death remained unsolved for more than a decade, and Ashley, then 20, was stunned by her father’s arrest.

Then another development followed. David, who has maintained his innocence, was acquitted at trial earlier this year of the most serious charges – first- and second-degree murder. But the jury was deadlocked on the lesser charge of manslaughter. Weeks after a judge declared a mistrial in the case, David was charged with manslaughter and remains in jail awaiting a new trial.

The ordeal lasted more than half of Ashley’s life.

“It’s something that at first, it’s very difficult, and it’s still difficult, but I feel like over time you deal with things,” she told “Dateline.” But “over and over and over, everywhere I go, every school I’ve been to, every job I’ve worked — it comes up.”

Two troubled decades together

Karen, a 44-year-old mother of four, disappeared on October 30, 2011, after picking Ashley up early from a slumber party and sleeping with her at their home in the small town of Dyersburg about 80 miles north of Memphis, Dyer County. Prosecutor Danny Goodman told the jury in May.

Shortly after, Karen’s SUV was found nearby with a flat tire, as were her two phones. Both were injured, Dyer County Sheriff’s Office chief investigator Terry McCreight told Dateline.

In interviews with local authorities, David said he wanted to help in any way he could and detailed the couple’s tumultuous two decades together, records show. They had two children after marrying in 1989, then divorced after he had an affair, he said. They later remarried and had two more children – including Ashley – before Karen had an affair, David said.

When she disappeared, David thought she was having a midlife crisis.

He had started drinking, sometimes heavily, he said, and hanging out with new friends. Weeks before her disappearance, he said, she had sent him divorce papers.

Even though he thought she was “lost”, he said in one of the interviews: “I still love her and I care about her”.

While David told authorities Karen appeared to have withdrawn from their relationship, her friends told Dateline that in the last months of her life she had become more independent, social and confident.

For Ashley, who was 9 at the time, her mother was a parent who went to every game and every dance competition — “everything, she was there,” Ashley said. Although she also noticed a change in her mother, she said. Karen goes out so often, Ashley recalled, that she tearfully begged her mother to stay home.

Short of evidence

Six weeks after Karen disappeared, her remains were found near a local cemetery, Dyer County Sheriff Jeff Box told “Dateline.” The medical examiner determined that she died of blunt force trauma to the head.

Authorities focused on what they believed to be possible evidence linking David to the murder. Karen obtained one of her two phones to avoid being monitored by her husband and sought to keep it a secret, Goodman said at trial. David told investigators he didn’t know about Karen’s second phone, but authorities found the device number programmed into David’s work phone, the prosecutor said.

And during his interview with authorities, McCreight said, David seemed unable to focus on anything but his wife’s behavior.

“That was just a sign to me that this guy was hiding something,” McCreight said. “He’s hiding something.”

Despite these suspicions, there was no physical or eyewitness evidence linking David to the murder. The investigation has stalled.

David moved to Alabama and remarried, Ashley said, and her father remained an involved parent, taking her to her job at the grocery store and teaching her to work on her Jeep. As Ashley got older, she said she wanted to know more about what happened to her mother, but became increasingly hopeless at the prospect.

“I got to an age where I realized I would never know what happened,” she said.

Trying to put a puzzle together

Two years ago, when David was arrested and charged with her mother’s murder, Ashley recalled how upset she was by the development. Her father and stepmother separated, she said, prompting Ashley to seek care for her younger sister. She was also confused.

“I was trying to figure out why,” she said.

Goodman, the prosecutor, said he believed his predecessor had been waiting for evidence that would make David’s case a “slam dunk.” But four years ago, the Covid pandemic caused a slowdown in cases that gave prosecutors time to review 30 large cases involving Karen’s murder, Goodman told “Dateline.”

They did not uncover what Goodman called “one big thing” that could be used in the effort to try David, he said. What they found instead, he said, was a puzzle with a clear motive.

“I think he saw that he was losing control,” Goodman said. “Because in the past, he was able to control everything Karen did, wherever she went.”

“He saw that it was starting to slip away,” Goodman added.

David was so enraged by Karen’s drinking, partying and impending divorce that he violently plotted her death, prosecutors said when they tried the case earlier this year.

After Karen returned home after picking up Ashley, Goodman said, the two fell asleep in the same bed. Goodman claims that at some point that night, David put Ashley in the same room as her younger sister, then dragged Karen from her bedroom to the garage.

The coroner attributed the cause of Karen’s death to a skull fracture that had been stepped on, and in court Goodman told the jury that David had used such violence in the attack that the fatal blow “popped her skull”.

David then allegedly loaded Karen into a car, dumped her body at the cemetery and staged the murder to make it look like she had been kidnapped, Goodman said.

At the trial, prosecutors detailed circumstantial evidence discovered more than a decade ago — the possible lie about Karen’s secret phone and David’s “degrading” comments about Karen to investigators — and said there was no evidence she intended to return after taking it. Ashley. Karen’s autopsy showed she had taken a sleeping pill, prosecutors said, and her phones were inactive after she got home.

Prosecutors also picked up an important new detail about Karen’s secret phone. Although there was no activity on her devices after she got into bed with Ashley, a forensic extraction found that someone used the secret phone several hours later to call the device’s voicemail, prosecutors said.

The call was made at 9:55 a.m. on Oct. 30 while the phone was connected to the family’s home Wi-Fi, Dyer County Assistant District Attorney Tim Boxx told the jury. Karen was already missing at that time, but her phones had not yet been found.

“We know there was an adult in Swift’s home at 9:55 in the morning,” Boxx said.

Challenging the evidence

In court, defense lawyer Daniel Taylor said David was not overly controlling but was genuinely concerned about his partner.

There was no evidence to support the state’s description of the crime, Taylor said — no blood in the garage or car and no evidence that David ever left the house. Even the medical examiner, who provided Karen’s cause of death, told the prosecutor he no longer believes she was hit to death, Goodman told “Dateline.”

The conclusion that a phone call was made to the Swifts’ home that Saturday morning was based on inconclusive evidence, Taylor said. He added that David’s physical condition would have made it impossible to commit the type of crime Goodman alleged. At the time of Karen’s death, David had injured his knee again and was on crutches, Taylor said.

At trial, David’s physical therapist testified that he would have had extreme difficulty walking and lifting. (Goodman accused David of faking the injury and said he was seen moving hay bales the day before the killing.)

Ashley, who testified at trial, also disputed the prosecutor’s allegations. It wasn’t David who moved her that night, she testified. It was her mother.

“I will go to my grave knowing that she was my mother,” she told “Dateline.”

Ashley believed that her father’s injury was the single strongest piece of evidence to cast doubt on the prosecution’s case. Her mother was athletic, Ashley said, and she couldn’t imagine someone in her father’s condition outrunning her and moving her easily.

After five days of testimony and two days of deliberation, the jury reached its decision, acquitting David of murder but deadlocked on the manslaughter charge. No date has been set for his retrial.

Ashley, now a dental hygienist in Alabama, recalled the difficulty of waiting for the verdict and, once it was handed down, initially thinking the case was over. Then he found out it wasn’t. David is innocent, Ashley said, and she believes her father is being falsely imprisoned pending a new trial.

That reality left her struggling to move on.

“I want justice for my mother and I want my father home,” she said. “But I want to live a normal life.”