The sixth day of testimony in James Craig’s murder trial featured love letters, The Bellagio and one big lie.

Karin Cain, the woman Craig was seeing outside of his marriage, affirmed her belief that the former Aurora dentist was already divorced when the two began seeing each other as she took the stand for the first time in the trial Tuesday morning.

Craig, 47, faces six felony counts in connection with the death his wife, Angela Craig in March 2023, including first-degree murder, solicitation to tamper with physical evidence and solicitation to commit perjury. Prosecutors allege he killed her with fatal doses of poison.

Assistant District Attorney Ryan Brackley walked Cain through some of the nearly 4,000 text messages her and Craig exchanged in the three weeks between when they met and Angela’s death.

“I wish this was not our reality, I wish I had met you longer after your actual divorce,” Cain wrote in one of her texts. “I don’t want to watch her heart break so mine can find joy.”

As she sat on the stand on the right-hand side of 18th Judicial District Judge Shay Whitaker, Cain started to softly cry as some of the texts were read back to her by Brackley, using tissues to wipe her tears away.

“This is scary,” Cain wrote to Craig on Feb. 28, 2023. “I don’t want to be a reason a marriage is breaking up, I didn’t want to be in the middle of everything.”

Cain testified that she first met Craig was while attending a conference at The Bellagio in Las Vegas in late February. The two were waiting in line for a dinner and starting chatting with one another.

Within minutes, she said, she had opened up about her previous marriage and how difficult the divorce process had been on her and her children, she said. As she testified, she glanced briefly at Craig. He hardly looked in her direction.

Craig told her that he and his wife were going through similar struggles, and that they had agreed on divorcing and had told their kids as well, she told jurors, adding that their shared experience made him easy to talk with.

“My marriage had not been a really safe place, so when I felt all this safety, I felt seen and heard and it was extremely comforting and drew me in,” Cain said, her voice wavering.

This was a lie, both the prosecution and defense admit. It was one of several lies Craig told Cain. Another included that he and Angela would switch off living at home with their children and in a nearby apartment and that he had. That apartment did not exist.

Cain said that she invited him to her hotel room that night and the two had made out, but nothing further happened. The two exchanged cell phone numbers and began text messaging back-and-forth before even leaving the airport to fly home.

“I’m conflicted because I’m missing you like crazy, but my self-control is not present right now,” one of Craig’s messages to Cain read. “I need a woman who needs me in that way, and I want it all. I love you.”

As Angela got sick, beginning on March 6, 2023, Craig texted Cain three separate times that she was blaming him for her illness, she testified.

“I’m undergoing an onslaught of how I must have poisoned (Angela) right now,” a text from Craig to Cain on March 7 read. “She’s absolutely convinced that’s what must be happening to her. I don’t even know how to address this.”

Brackley also walked Cain through several letters Craig wrote to her from prison. Within them, the dentist described his feelings for her in innate detail.

“Despite the way you have taken up so much real estate in my mind, distracting my thoughts and memories during the day and beautiful dreams at night, I still do not know what to write,” Craig wrote in a letter dated April 28, 2023. “I need you to know that I love you as much as I never did, a thousand times more than I ever thought possible.”

During her cross-examination, Cain pushed back against how the defense characterized her relationship with Craig.

“This three weeks of back-and-forth was infatuation. It felt good, that desire, you felt like a silly high school girl — a lot of things you had not gotten from your marriage,” said Defense Attorney Lisa Moses. “It was not love.”

“I would disagree with that,” Cain replied.

Cain was the fifth person to take the stand on Tuesday, and was on the witness stand for nearly three hours between her testimony and cross-examination.

After giving her testimony the day before, Arapahoe County Corner Kelly Lear was called back in for cross-examination Tuesday morning. While on the stand, she was questioned by Moses on how she declares the manner of death to be a homicide, as she did in the case of Angela.

Lear said that she takes investigative information into account — including text message exchanges and information from law enforcement — when determining whether a death was accidental, a suicide or a homicide.

Moses countered by noting that Lear would not know whether if Angela was suicidal or not based on that information, as those conversations could have been held in the privacy of her home. Lear agreed.

Brackley then redirected to note that, if Angela was indeed suicidal, that message should have come up in the texts exchanged between her and Craig — as well as others that should have referenced her asking him to order the arsenic, cyanide or Visine.

“There is nothing in the texts from James Craig I reviewed that mention suicidality,” Lear said in response.

Mark Simon, who was working as a medical toxicology fellow, testified earlier Tuesday morning that he saw Angela when she was admitted to the hospital on March 15, 2023.

Upon arriving at the medical intensive care unit, he observed her as being “severely ill,” and was told by other nurses and attendants that there was a possibility of her having cyanide in her system, he testified. Medical staff had already administered a dose of hydroxocobalamin — an antidote used to treat cyanide poisoning — before he got there.

The symptoms he observed Angela as having were consistent with that of cyanide exposure, he said, adding that the story he was told by other nurses sounded “bizarre.”

The next person called to testify was Dr. Natalie Held, a pulmonary critical care doctor who also spends time working in the intensive care unit. She said that she made the determination on March 18, 2023 to pronounce Angela brain-dead, though she continued providing full medical care up until that point.

After her was Jason Brewer, a chemist and forensic examiner who analyzes evidence sent to the FBI’s laboratory in Quantico, Virginia.

Using mass spectrometry and gas chromatography — methods of vaporizing liquids and better understanding their chemical makeup — he said he was able to identify tetrahydrozoline in the yogurt-like substance contained within the pink blender bottle recovered from the Craig’s home, the bottle prosecutors say was Angela’s.

The final person to testify on Tuesday was Kasey Bohannon, who was an inmate in the Arapahoe County Jail when Craig was admitted. Bohannon said that Craig asked him to place a journal entry in Angela Craig’s journal.

Bohanan said that Craig told him Angela had been journaling about her daily life and her feelings before she had died, and the dentist was trying to rewrite the entries.

He then testified that Craig asked him to place the entries somewhere within his house, even drawing Bohanan a map and telling the man the home’s door codes. Bohanan said that he ripped up the map and told police what had happened when he was released.

“I just had this feeling, almost sick like I knew something,” Bohanan said. “It just wasn’t right that I knew what he told me, and I felt like I needed to reach out and tell someone.”

Craig’s trial will continue at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday at the Arapahoe County courthouse.