Recovering from neck surgery and charged with domestic violence, Kacy Bohannan found himself locked up in the medical unit of a Colorado jail – only to come face-to-face with an affable dentist who seemed out of place.
‘What are you in for?’ Bohannan asked his new jail mate in spring 2023. The man replied: ‘M1.’
He didn’t know at the time he was speaking with James Craig, who had recently been accused of killing his wife by poisoning her protein shakes.
‘I was thinking he meant misdemeanor 1, like I am,’ Bohannan, 45, told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview Thursday. ‘And he goes, “No, murder one.”
‘I kind of backed off at first,’ Bohannan recalled of their first conversation at the Arapahoe County Jail.
‘That’s certainly not what I expected from this blond-haired, blue-eyed, seemingly educated, kind of nice-looking white dude.’
Craig, 46, is due to appear Friday for a preliminary hearing in Arapahoe District Court, where prosecutors will present some of the evidence against him including a murder-for-hire he allegedly plotted from jail.
He faces a total of six charges, including first-degree murder for his 43-year-old wife Angela’s death.
All others relate to his time in jail, where he has allegedly tried but failed to mastermind a coverup, using his dental office charm to schmooze fellow inmates including Bohannan.
He allegedly offered cash and even dental services in exchange for planting evidence, framing his wife for suicide, and targeting law enforcement.
Records show he attempted to persuade inmate Nathanial Harris to kill an Aurora police detective investigating the case, for which he was charged in November with solicitation to commit murder.
He was also accused of trying to persuade a woman Harris had lived with to lie under oath, for which he was charged with solicitation to commit perjury.
In another head scratcher from early last year, Craig was slapped with another count of solicitation to commit perjury after he allegedly tried to recruit another inmate, William ‘Billy’ Walbon, to procure young, attractive women who would be willing to lie under oath that they were his mistresses.
He wanted these women to say that Angela confronted them and then tried to convince them to frame her husband for her attempted murder, court papers state.
Walbon’s own mother was dragged into this scheme with a promise that Craig would give her a free set of teeth, DailyMail.com can reveal.
Speaking exclusively with DailyMail.com on Wednesday, 57-year-old, denture-wearing Rebecca Waldon described herself as feeling duped.
She had her first conversation with the ‘killer dentist’ last spring when her son Billy, 38, phoned her from jail and put Craig on the line.
‘Craig told me he’d give me a brand-new set of teeth when he got out,’ she told DailyMail.com. ‘He said, “I know I’m going to get off this case because I didn’t kill her”.’
She said she initially rejected his offer.
‘No, I’m ok,’ she recalled telling him.
But her son lobbied for Craig. And the conversation was no longer just about her teeth.
‘Billy’s like, he’s going to help us, he promised us $10,000 to help him out,’ she said.
‘My son is very naïve and when it comes to $10,000, he’s going to do whatever,’ she said.
‘I looked this guy Craig up and said there’s no way I’m going to have anything to do with this f***king guy.’
Soon after, the son got released from jail. Without his own home, Walbon gave Craig his mom’s address as a point of contact.
Craig then mailed her a letter providing them instructions for the scheme, which she said included them getting fake IDs and burner phones.
But the letter never arrived. The son gave Craig an old address, so it got kicked back to the jail, where staff intercepted it.
Within days, panic set in, with Craig incessantly phoning the mom, she said.
‘He kept asking if we got the letter,’ Rebecca told DailyMail.com. ‘One time my son was with me and I gave him the phone. All Craig did was ask him if he got the letter and Billy told him no.’
Later, the mom got a call from a detective, who read her the letter.
‘I started getting calls day after day from detectives, but when they got in touch with Billy, he hung up on them,’ the mother said.
‘Billy doesn’t like cops. None of us do. But I told him you’ve got to talk to these detectives to get yourself cleared. He finally did.’
Both of them are now cooperating with the prosecution.
So is Kacy Bohannan, who is now back home in Englewood, Colorado, where he spoke with DailyMail.com.
Craig had a different plan for him.
In spring 2023, just months after Craig’s arrest, he asked Bohannon to plant fake journal entries in either his garage or truck at his home.
Craig wrote the letters himself to appear as though they were written by his deceased wife.
They were meant to show that Angela knew about her husband’s affair and felt suicidal.
Craig allegedly offered to have Bohannon’s bond paid so he could carry out the plan. But Bohannan declined.
‘I was like, how are you going to bond me out when you’re in here for murder?’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘I was like, whatever.’
Because of his high profile, Craig was moved into the same medical unit in rapahoe County Detention Center in Aurora – the same place that James Holmes was assigned after he killed 12 people during a screening of Batman at a nearby movie theater in 2012.
What struck Bohannan most about Craig was how he seemed so nonplussed for a guy who’d been accused of murder.
‘He was very talkative, came off as a nice guy,’ Bohannan said. ‘Most of the time, he would just sit back, watch TV, hang out.
‘He didn’t seem worried,’ he added. ‘He was very cavalier, like this wasn’t a big deal. He acted like he wasn’t guilty. He said his wife wanted to kill herself.’
He said Craig was making similar approaches to other inmates as well.
For the Bohannan scheme, Craig was charged with solicitation to commit tampering with physical evidence.
He faces two of those counts. The other is for allegedly smuggling a letter out of jail with an inmate bonded out by one of his adult daughters. It asked her to make a fake video of Angela asking Craig to get poisons for her.
For Friday’s hearing, Craig will be appearing with his third set of lawyers, Rob Working and Lisa Moses.
In November, the judge allowed Craig’s second lawyer, Harvey Steinberg, to withdraw after he cited a professional conflict just as Craig was about to stand trial.
Police have described Craig’s alleged plot as a ‘heinous, complex and calculated murder.’
The couple had been married for 23 years and had six children together. But according to the arrest warrant, their marriage had been strained for years with Craig having multiple affairs and Angela repeatedly saying she wanted to leave her husband.
Craig started an affair with 49-year-old Texan orthodontist Karin Cain at a dental conference in February 2023.
Prosecutors say that within days, he started researching and buying deadly poisons, wanting to kill Angela so he could start a new life with Cain.
The orthodontist allegedly flew into Denver twice while Angela’s was hospitalized, and police said the email exchanges between her and Craig were ‘intimate in nature and contained sexually explicit conversations.’
His online search history included the phrases: ‘how to make murder look like a heart attack’ and ‘is arsenic detectable in an autopsy?’
He ordered arsenic metal on Amazon for $13. Angela allegedly began feeling unwell after drinking a shake that her husband made her on March 6.
She visited the hospital multiple times over the following week and complained of nausea and dizziness.
He later ordered 25 grams of potassium cyanide and told the supplier he was a surgeon who was performing a ‘craniofacial reconstruction,’ prosecutors allege.
On March 15, Angela’s brother took her again to the hospital where she had a seizure and lost brain function. She died March 18.
According to the coroner, she died from cyanide and tetrahydrozoline, the latter a substance found in over-the-counter eye drops.
Craig’s defense attorneys claim that there was no direct evidence showing he had put the fatal dose of poison in his wife’s drink and claimed Craig had been searching online for ways to take his own life.
The first person to raise suspicious against Craig was his business partner, Ryan Redfearn, who told staff that the dentist had ordered cyanide, but the practice has no reason to use it.
After her death, Craig told a case worker that his wife was suicidal and had previously overdosed.
He also told them he believed her toxicology report would come back positive, but he wasn’t sure for which substances.
Their six children did not mention that their mother was suicidal or depressed and the case worker suspect the dentist was ‘attempting to build a cover story for what really happened to Angela.’