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A Brevard County jury convicted Florida Realtor Sheila Graham-Trott of first-degree premeditated murder on Sept. 16, 2014, in the hammer killing of Kelly Brennan, 46, and Judge James H. Earp sentenced her to life in prison that evening.

Brennan, a nurse at Holmes Regional Medical Center, disappeared from her home on Cypress Street in Indialantic on the evening of Feb. 15, 2010. Prosecutors said she was attacked from behind in her own front yard between a phone call she made at 7:48 p.m. and about 8:15 p.m., when she would normally have left for an appointment with a personal trainer. She was reported missing after she failed to meet her boyfriend, former Indialantic Mayor Dan Trott, at a gym.

Graham-Trott, 44, was Trott's estranged wife and a friend of Brennan, who had begun a relationship with him. That night, Graham-Trott came home from what she had told her sons was a trip to Walmart. Her sons said she was dizzy, shaking and acting strangely. Paramedics were called twice, and she was taken to a hospital, where routine tests found nothing of medical significance and she was released, Assistant State Attorney Samantha Barrett said at trial.

In the early hours, back at the house, Graham-Trott called her younger son into her bedroom and told him she had dreamed that Brennan had been hurt, Barrett said. She then drove with both sons to a beach access at Mark's Landing in Melbourne Beach, where they saw a body lying in the brush.

The sons telephoned their grandmother, Margret Byers, who drove over and found her daughter shaking on the bed. Deputies learned of the death only after Byers called 911. "I think there's been a murder," she told the dispatcher. "My daughter has had a nervous breakdown and she's saying she killed somebody." Asked where it had happened, Byers said, "It's down, Mark's Landing."

A Brevard County Sheriff's Office helicopter pilot, John Coppola, spotted Brennan's body from the air on the morning of Feb. 16 and landed nearby. Investigators said Brennan had been struck in the head with an object. Graham-Trott was arrested and charged with first-degree murder less than two days after Brennan vanished, and a judge denied her bail that week.

Graham-Trott spent four and a half years in jail awaiting trial. She pleaded not guilty and maintained she had nothing to do with the killing. Her attorneys argued that investigators had no DNA, fingerprints or witnesses linking her to the crime, that a blood sample taken from Brennan's yard came back negative at the lab, and that Brennan's estranged husband had his own motive. No weapon was ever recovered, though the associate medical examiner testified that Brennan's head injuries were consistent with a hammer. Prosecutors opened their closing argument by playing Byers' 911 call.