Donna Moonda, left, and Damian Bradford Click photo for larger image.

For 14 months, the two suspects in the shooting death of Dr. Gulam Moonda stuck together, even as one walked free and the other sat in jail.

Each remained close-mouthed. Both relied on lawyers to profess their innocence.

Their alliance dissolved last week when Damian Bradford agreed to plead guilty to being the triggerman who killed Dr. Moonda on the Ohio Turnpike on May 13, 2005.

He sent word from his jail cell that he would finally tell the truth. In implicating himself, Mr. Bradford turned against Donna Moonda, the doctor's wife of 14 years and an eyewitness to his violent death.

Mr. Bradford, 25, says he conspired with 47-year-old Mrs. Moonda to kill her husband, a Mercer County urologist whose estate was worth an estimated $6 million. Twenty percent of the money would have gone to Mrs. Moonda, who was having an affair with Mr. Bradford.

Mr. Bradford was to stand trial tomorrow in federal court in Akron, Ohio, but instead he will admit his guilt in return for what he hopes will be a prison term of about 18 years. He could have been sentenced to life if he had gone to trial and been convicted.

Mrs. Moonda has not yet been charged.

Oddly enough, her continued silence may have led Mr. Bradford to implicate her so he could help himself.

She planned to invoke her Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions when called as a government witness at Mr. Bradford's trial.

Until last week, Mr. Bradford may have hoped that she would answer at least one question in a way that would help him. For instance, if his lawyers asked Mrs. Moonda if she could identify her husband's killer and she said no, she might have created reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors.

In statements before she stopped cooperating with police, Mrs. Moonda never linked Mr. Bradford with the killing.

Last week, though, Mrs. Moonda said she would not respond to questions when placed under oath at his trial. Her lawyer, Niki Z. Schwartz, filed court papers saying she had nothing to gain and everything to lose by testifying.

Mr. Schwartz proposed that Mrs. Moonda be allowed to take the Fifth either in writing or outside the jury's presence, something he said would make Mr. Bradford's trial fairer.

"In light of the government's theory of the case, that Mrs. Moonda conspired with Bradford to have her husband killed, her assertion of her privilege against self-incrimination in open court ... would be extraordinarily prejudicial to Bradford," Mr. Schwartz said.

But U.S. District Judge David Dowd did not seem inclined to excuse Mrs. Moonda from the trial. He said prosecutors were duty-bound to put her on the witness stand or risk confusing the jury.

"She's there when the homicide takes place. If they don't call her, the jury's going to wonder, 'Have they lost their minds?' " Judge Dowd said.

He said Mrs. Moonda was free not to answer questions that might incriminate her, but he would not allow her to make a blanket statement in which she refused answer anything.

Once it became clear to Mr. Bradford that Donna Moonda could hurt his case by taking the Fifth Amendment, he began trying to make a deal. A flurry of meetings between the prosecution and his defense team in Youngstown, Ohio, led to the framework of his plea bargain.

Still unclear is whether Mr. Bradford knew Dr. Moonda, who at 69 was gregarious and energetic. Dr. Moonda's last years, though, had been difficult ones because of domestic problems.

Donna Moonda was prosecuted in 2004 for stealing fentanyl, a powerful painkiller, from the hospital in Greenville, Mercer County, where she worked as a nurse anesthetist. She told police she smuggled the drug home and used it there.

Out of a job and charged with a crime, she entered a drug rehabilitation program in Beaver County. In rehab, police said, she met Mr. Bradford, a local who said he had a cocaine problem.

He was 22 and she was 45. They began an affair that would last for approximately a year.

In one statement Mrs. Moonda gave to police, she said she was with Mr. Bradford on May 12, 2005. The gunman killed her husband the next evening, Friday the 13th.

Mrs. Moonda and her mother, Dorothy Smouse, now 76, witnessed the killing.

The two of them were with Gulam Moonda on what was supposed to be a 200-mile family trip from Hermitage, Mercer County, to Bowling Green, Ohio. Donna Moonda did the driving in a way that cast police suspicious on her almost instantly.

Gregory A. White, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, said the Moondas and Mrs. Smouse left Hermitage at 4:30 p.m. A fare ticket showed that their vehicle entered the Ohio Turnpike at 5:09 p.m. At 5:30 p.m., they stopped at the Portage Service Plaza to eat and left 30 minutes later.

She stopped twice more in the next half hour. First she bought a bottle of water. Then after driving only about five more miles, Donna Moonda pulled into an emergency lane of the turnpike. She said her husband was to take the wheel there.

Instead, he was robbed and killed -- the first such crime in the 50-year history of the Ohio Turnpike.

Because of its unusual nature, the case became high profile and the Ohio State Highway Patrol threw its resources into the investigation.

Soon, police in Pennsylvania were involved, too, focusing on Mr. Bradford. His rehab romance with Mrs. Moonda was no secret in Beaver County.

He intrigued police in other ways. Mr. Bradford had no job, but police found 19 $50 bills in his apartment a week after the killing. He also had six cell phones, leading to speculation by police that he was still involved in the cocaine trade, one way or another.

Police seized the phones, money and some of Mr. Bradford's clothing. Dr. Moonda had bled heavily, but DNA testing of the clothes yielded no connection to the homicide. But the cell phones would crack the case.

Ohio investigators pulled all the phone records for Mr. Bradford and Donna Moonda from December 2004 until just after Dr. Moonda's death six months later.

Tower tracking of one of Mr. Bradford's cellular phones showed him following the Moondas the day of the killing. If Mr. Bradford tried to suggest that somebody else had his phone, prosecutors could point out that it also was used to communicate with Donna Moonda.

Cell phone evidence, plus the prospect of Mrs. Moonda walking out of court after taking the Fifth, may have prompted Mr. Bradford to make the best deal for himself that he could.

No longer will he say he had nothing to do with Dr. Moonda's shooting. He plans to take responsibility for part of the crime in open court tomorrow, hoping that his cooperation will set him free from prison before he turns 45 years old.