Standing before the judge, hands twisting in front of her and hair braided neatly down her back, Angela Craig’s eldest daughter fought through tears to ask for justice.
“I was supposed to be able to trust my dad,” Mira Meservy, 21, said during Wednesday’s sentencing hearing for James Craig. “He was supposed to be my hero, and instead, he’ll forever be the villain in my book.”
James Craig, 47, will spend the rest of his life in prison for murdering his wife, Angela Craig, through 10 days of repeated poisonings in March 2023. When all other attempts failed, prosecutors said the Aurora dentist gave his wife a dose of cyanide while she was hospitalized south of Denver.
Arapahoe County District Judge Shay Kara Whitaker sentenced Craig to life in prison without the possibility of parole on the first-degree murder charge, a mandatory sentence. He received an additional 33 years to run consecutively on five other felony charges rooted in his attempts to cover up his role in his wife’s death.
After nearly nine hours of deliberation, the jury on Wednesday afternoon found Craig guilty of first-degree murder, solicitation of first-degree murder and two counts each of solicitation of tampering with physical evidence and solicitation of perjury, according to the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office.
The sentencing hearing started just minutes later.
Angela Craig’s six children and nine siblings will never get to see her again, a pain akin to “losing a limb,” one of her sisters, Kathryn Pray, testified.
“Her loss is a void in my life that can never be filled,” Angela Craig’s eldest sister, Toni Kofoed, said. “No more phone calls, no more texts, no more trips together where we talk and laugh through the night. You have taken away our ability to grow old together.”
Kofoed described her sister as a “fierce protector” and berated Craig for the image he and his defense painted of her during the two-week trial.
She called the dentist a cheat, a coward and a “heartless excuse of a human being.”
“Her life was not yours to take,” Kofoed said, turning toward Craig. “Angela had a love and a passion for life. She loved her children and, unfortunately, she loved you.”
Craig and his attorneys declined to make any statements before he was sentenced. No one else volunteered to speak on the dentist’s behalf.
‘You watched her slowly die’
Angela Craig died March 18, 2023, during her third trip to the hospital in a little over a week. She died from lethal doses of cyanide and tetrahydrozoline, an ingredient found in over-the-counter eyedrops, according to the coroner.
She spent the days leading up to her death in pain and researching the cause of her puzzling symptoms.
“You not only purchased the weapons of her death, but you watched her slowly die,” Kofoed said, addressing the table where Craig sat hunched over.
James Craig was arrested shortly after his wife’s death. From the beginning of the case, police called it “a heinous, complex and calculated murder.”
Prosecutors claimed Craig purchased nearly 20 bottles of eyedrops containing that lethal ingredient during a two-day span that aligned with his wife’s symptoms. He also tried to order other poisons online.
Craig told others that his wife was suicidal and had asked him to order the poison.
While Craig’s defense team tried to claim that Angela Craig killed herself, calling the poisoning “an ongoing game of chicken” that went too far, the jury disagreed.
“The jury said it loudly: Angela was not suicidal. She had no knowledge of or participation in what happened to her,” prosecutor Michael Mauro said after Wednesday’s sentencing hearing.
Craig poisoned his wife’s smoothies and cups, and replaced a bottle of prescription pills with poison, prosecutors said.
He also encouraged Angela Craig’s brother to give her the deadly capsules under the guise of medication and used a communal work computer to conduct hundreds of internet searches about poisons.
Craig tried to convince his daughter to create a deepfake video of Angela Craig asking him to order the poison and saying she planned to take it, Mauro said during the trial.
He also tried to cover up his role in Angela Craig’s death by asking people to forge additional journal entries to plant with his wife’s journal, arrange fake witnesses to testify on his behalf and kill key players in the case, including the lead detective and a jail informant.
Dentist mounted no defense
The prosecution and defense both rested their cases Monday and delivered closing arguments Tuesday, two weeks after the trial began.
Craig’s attorneys did not present a defense before resting and called no witnesses to the stand, but suggested Angela Craig played a role in her own death and faulted police for focusing solely on the dentist as a suspect. Prosecutors called nearly 50 witnesses throughout the trial.
Prosecutors argued Craig wanted to kill his wife to get out of a marriage he felt trapped in, adding he didn’t want a divorce so he could protect his money and image.
He tried to claim three conflicting narratives — that she was suicidal, that she took the “game of chicken” too far and that she was trying to set him up, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said photos from a hospital security camera shown in court depicted Craig holding a syringe before he entered Angela Craig’s room. After administering the fatal dose through her IV, Craig walked out and texted a fellow dentist with whom he was having an affair, Mauro told jurors during closing arguments. His wife’s condition quickly worsened.
One of Craig’s attorneys, Lisa Fine Moses, told jurors earlier this week that the image was blurry and syringes that investigators recovered did not contain any poison. She also said the couple wasn’t in financial trouble, and that Craig’s cheating had been going on for years and had never been a motivation for murder.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Updated 5:45 p.m. July 30, 2025: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of the Craigs’ daughter to Miriam “Mira” Meservy.
