Trial Begins for Fla. Man Who Told Wife He Was Rich — and Allegedly Killed Her When Lie Was Exposed

Shanti Cooper-Tronnes was beaten and strangled to death in the Orlando home that she and her husband were renovating in 2018

When Shanti Cooper-Tronnes married her husband David Tronnes, she believed he had inherited between $4 and $6 million dollars from his father.

But after the wedding, she kept getting stuck with all the bills — her millionaire husband not helping with so much as the groceries, people close to her recalled after she was brutally beaten and strangled in the Florida home they were reportedly renovating for the reality TV show “Zombie House Flipping.”

Her husband — who initially claimed his wife slipped and fell in the bathtub — headed to court Wednesday for the start of the murder trial. Tronnes, who previously pleaded not guilty to a single count of first-degree murder, was found mentally competent to stand trial earlier this year despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Related: Fla. Man Told Wife He Had a Vast Fortune — and Allegedly Killed Her When She Learned He Was Lying

Jurors selected for the trial this week were asked about how they would be affected by allegations of domestic violence, WESH 2 reported.

Tweeting from inside the courtroom, reporter Emily McLeod of News6 WKMG, said that in opening statements prosecutors said that the couple began fighting in 2017 over their home renovation project, which prosecutors coined a “money pit.”

On the first day of trial, prosecutors called several witnesses including the 911 operator, a GEICO employee specializing in insurance fraud and a crime scene investigator and expect to call as many as 25 witnesses to the stand, McLeod reported.

Authorities have alleged that Tronnes killed his wife of about a year in their Orlando neighborhood after she learned he not only did not have the millions she thought he did, but he also allegedly had a penchant for going to bathhouses for anonymous sex with men. PEOPLE has been unable to identify Tronnes’s lawyers.

Related: After Allegedly Murdering His Wife, Fla. Man 'Fake Cried' for Hours During Interrogation: Police

“We all thought we knew David Tronnes,” a friend of Tronnes previously told PEOPLE. “Come to find out, what we knew was a facade. He was living a total lie.”

In interviews with police, friends and relatives have called Tronnes “a miser” and claimed the wife that married him for his money ultimately “bought everything.” Tronnes even refused to pay more than one-third of the rent on a house they had previously shared because her young son also lived there, her friend ​​Melissa Burzinski later alleged to police.

“Dave was doing things that was [ticking] her off as it pertains to money,” Burzinski told police.

Then on April 24, 2018 Tronnes — who was 11 years older than the single mother he had met on Match.com — called 911, reporting that his wife had slipped and fallen in the bathtub. The call, which was played on the first day of trial, featured a “sobbing/ wailing” Tronnes, reporter McLeod tweeted.

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Tronnes later told police that he had pulled her from the tub and carried her to the living room — although they were both dry when emergency responders arrived minutes later.

A medical examiner later found that Cooper-Tronnes died from blunt force trauma to the head and strangulation. Four months after her death, her fake millionaire husband was arrested and charged with her murder.

“Not one tear came out of your eyes — not one,” Detective Teresa Sprague told Tronnes in a police interrogation video obtained by the Orlando Sentinel in which she accused the husband of “fake” crying for “about seven or eight hours.” The detective added: “There is not a lick of remorse for what you did to this woman.”

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