For the fourth time, Suffolk County’s chief trial prosecutor today recounted the sequence of events that allegedly led a pair of drug-fueled killers to rob a 49-year-old woman of her bank card, then slash her throat and shoot her boyfriend in the face when they learned she only had $40 in her account.

“Evidence will be clear and you will know beyond a reasonable doubt that WILLIAM WOOD and QUINCY BUTLER committed these terrible acts,” Assistant District Attorney Patrick M. Haggan said at the start of the two men’s fourth trial. Two previous jury trials ended in deadlocks with majorities favoring conviction; a third was halted when the presiding judge took ill.

Wood (D.O.B. 4/17/74) and Butler (D.O.B. 3/14/74) are charged with first-degree murder for slashing Betsy Tripp’s throat with a kitchen knife and attempted murder for the near-fatal shooting of her live-in boyfriend, then 47, during the early morning hours of Feb. 13, 2004. Both are also charged with a litany of robbery, kidnapping, and gun-related offenses stemming from their alleged actions before, during, and after the deadly home invasion on Monsignor Lydon Way.

Haggan described the horror that unfolded that night, detailing how Wood entered Tripp’s home, “picked up Betsy, took one of the kitchen knives and slit her throat wide open.”

“She was screaming for her life,” Haggan said.

Haggan said the male victim – who worked as a handyman doing odd jobs in the neighborhood and survived on a monthly disability check – was robbed at gunpoint by Butler and Wood in the hours preceding the murder. They were visiting a mutual friend at the time, and the duo allegedly demanded he take them to the home he shared with Tripp.

Sometime after midnight, evidence suggests, the two men arrived at Tripp’s home, dragged her out of her bed, hogtied her and the surviving victim with a phone cord, and demanded her ATM card and access code.

The assailants told Tripp they would kill her if there was no money in her account, Haggan said.

“That was a promise that they kept,” he told the jury.

Butler allegedly stayed with the victims while Wood allegedly took the bank card to a cash machine to withdraw money.

Haggan told the jury that, like many people, Tripp didn’t have much money. Haggan said that at the time of the robbery, she only had $40 in her bank account.

“And that made them mad,” he said, pointing at the defendants.

Within forty minutes, Haggan told jurors, Wood returned to the apartment and slashed Tripp’s throat. When her boyfriend broke free from his ties and tried to help her, Butler shot at him twice with a .357 caliber pistol, hitting him once in the face. The bullet penetrated through his eye, permanently maiming him.

“When those two men left the apartment, they thought [the victims] were dead,” Haggan said. “They thought they left no witnesses.”

Butler and Wood left the scene in the same car that they had forced Tripp’s boyfriend to use to drive them to her home. A few blocks away from Butler’s Fuller Street apartment, they allegedly set the car on fire. After doing so, they allegedly went to the nearby home of Butler’s girlfriend.

Unbeknownst to them, however, the shooting victim survived. He gathered his strength and stumbled to a neighbor’s door with his left eye hanging from its socket. Neighbors called police. When they arrived, he told them who had attacked him and Tripp, using the nickname by which he knew one of the assailants.

“Q shot me,” he said, referring to Butler. “Will slit her throat.”

Despite their efforts to destroy evidence of their crimes, Haggan said, “they made mistakes.” Haggan described how the defendants went to Butler’s girlfriend’s home covered in the victims’ blood. The two allegedly detailed their crimes to her and threatened to kill her children if she shared her knowledge with police.

In the days that followed, Wood enlisted female friends to use Tripp’s ATM card at different cash machines.

“He has his girlfriends use a dead woman’s card – a murdered woman’s ATM card – again and again over the next eight days,” Haggan said. “He continues to use a murdered woman’s card – a woman he murdered,” he said, pointing to Wood.

“Two murderers sit before you,” Haggan told jurors, before asking them to find the defendants guilty.

Butler is represented by attorney Larry Tipton and Wood by attorney Michael Bourbeau. Proceedings are ongoing before Judge Patrick Brady in courtroom 815 of Suffolk Superior Court.