The bizarre trial of Dr. Leon Jacob is underway.
Newly released evidence in the ongoing saga of a Texas doctor's alleged attempt to have his ex-girlfriend killed has somehow made the story all the more bizarre.
Staged photos have now emerged of the woman police say Dr. Leon Jacob wanted dead in which she pretends to have been kidnapped by her "hit man."
Only he wasn't really a hit man. Jacob had actually asked a U.S. Army veteran-turned-police operative to kill ex-girlfriend Meghan Verikas, according to prosecutors with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.
Testifying against Jacob Wednesday, Verikas described the experience of faking her own kidnapping photos with the undercover operatives to aid in the murder-for-hire sting.
"I sat in a chair in a warehouse and they zip-tied my hands and my feet and put duct tape around my mouth to make me look as if I had been kidnapped," Verikas said, according to CBS News.
Verikas was one of two alleged targets. The other was a man named Marion "Mack" McDaniel.
Investigators say that McDaniel's ex-wife, veterinarian Valerie McDaniel, was dating Jacob at the time of the alleged plot.
The case against Jacob alleges that he wanted Verikas dead because the stalking charges she'd filed against him could end his career as a surgeon. Investigators believe Valerie McDaniel wanted her husband dead because the two were involved in a bitter child custody dispute.
Jacob and Valerie McDaniel allegedly offered the undercover officer $20,000 in cash and two Cartier watches to have their former partners murdered.
Just as Verikas says she helped stage photos of her own kidnapping, Mr. McDaniel says he helped stage his own death to aid the case against his ex.
Jacob has pleaded not guilty.
"I'm innocent and as a human being and as a physician, that thought of killing somebody else is, just goes against everything in my nature," Jacob told CBS News last year.
Valerie McDaniel took her own life by jumping from her seventh floor Houston condominium home before she was due to appear in court last year.
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