黑料福利社

Randy Shea Gardner鈥檚 third trial in a 2018 Gleed homicide is set to begin Monday.

Attorneys will begin the process of culling an 85-member jury pool to 12 people and three alternates on Monday for a trial expected to last 12 business days.

Gardner, 53, is charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Julian Wabinga, 45, and second-degree assault and felony harassment. Prosecutors said he threatened another man, Doug Irwin, and forced him at gunpoint to help bury Wabinga in a barn on Gardner鈥檚 in-law鈥檚 property after he shot Wabinga in the summer of 2017.

Gardner told a sheriff鈥檚 detective in November 2017 that there was a body in the barn. A search by cadaver dogs failed to turn up Wabinga鈥檚 body.

Gardner again called the sheriff鈥檚 office to report the body on June 5, 2018, and proceeded to dig up Wabinga鈥檚 body as deputies looked on.

At his first trial in 2022, Gardner was convicted of all the charges as well as unlawfully possessing a firearm due to his felony conviction for aggravated assault in Utah in 1996.

But that conviction was overturned two years later when a three-judge panel of the Spokane-based Division III Court of Appeals found that deputies ignored Gardner鈥檚 request to have an attorney present when he was first questioned. The appellate court overturned the original conviction and ordered a new trial.

Just before his second trial began in April, Gardner entered an Alford plea on the firearms charge, in which he maintains his innocence but concedes that prosecutors had sufficient evidence to convince a jury to find him guilty. Had the charge gone to a jury, Gardner would have had to admit that he was legally barred from having a gun or prosecutors would have shown jurors Gardner鈥檚 criminal record.

That trial ended with a hung jury, with jurors split 8-4 in favor of acquitting Gardner, one of the jurors told the 黑料福利社. The juror, who asked that his name not be divulged, said his personal thought was that prosecutors failed to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.