By John Monk
jmonk@thestate.com

COLUMBIA -- Minutes after a police detective told a jury that murder defendant Theodore Manning IV had sex with the girlfriend who helped him burn Nikki McPhatter's body, one of Manning's lawyers jumped up and demanded a new trial.

"Your honor, it's hard to imagine anything more prejudicial than to say these two committed these horrible crimes ... and then had sex!" declared an outraged 5th Circuit assistant public defender Fielding Pringle.

Judge Thomas Cooper denied Pringle's motion.

That action - on the opening day of Manning's murder trial for McPhatter's 2009 death in an Internet romance gone wrong - characterized what is shaping up to be one of the most bruising courtroom battles in recent years in a Richland County courtroom. As prosecution lawyers put up witness after witness, defense lawyers raise objection after objection, trying to limit evidence the jury can hear.

Manning, 30, is charged with the murder of McPhatter, 30, a Charlotte airlines employee who drove to Manning's Bluff Road house on May 6, 2009, to break up with him after a several-months-long relationship.

None of McPhatter's friends or family knew Manning, so when she disappeared that day and didn't report to work as usual at US Airways in Charlotte, she effectively vanished without a trace.

"This case drips with malice," prosecutor Barney Giese told the jury in an opening statement Wednesday. He is seeking life without parole.

Manning, said Giese, "took a gun, shot her in the back of the head, and watched her die. He didn't call 911, he didn't call law enforcement."

Then, Giese said, Manning stuffed her body in the trunk of her 2003 black Honda Accord, drove it to rural Fairfield County, doused the car with gasoline and set it on fire.

Defense attorneys are trying to convince a jury that at most, this was a crime of passion and, if anything, Manning should be found guilty only of manslaughter, which carries a far lesser sentence than murder.

"Not every killing is a murder," said assistant public defender Jim May, who in his opening statement acknowledged that Manning did in fact kill McPhatter but it was in self-defense after an enraged McPhatter came at him with a gun in his Bluff Road house.

"He will take the stand and tell you what happened," promised May.

In other testimony Wednesday, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police investigator Blair Fitch, the first detective to find McPhatter's burned car, testified he walked to the wreck, peered through a hole in the trunk and saw a skull. It turned out to be McPhatter's.

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