POMEROY — Paula Rizer was found guilty Tuesday of murdering her husband, Kenneth Rizer, Sr., in April 2009.

The jury in Rizer’s second trial returned the verdict after six hours of deliberation. Rizer was unemotional as Meigs County Common Pleas Judge Fred W. Crow III read the verdict, and she was escorted from the courtroom under tight security.

Rizer will be sentenced today (Wednesday). She is represented by Herman Carson and Glenn Jones, both of the Ohio Public Defender’s Office. Prosecuting Attorney Colleen Williams and Assistant Prosecutor Matthew Donohue represented the state.

This was Rizer’s second time before a jury on charges she murdered her husband on April 3, 2009, at their home on Lovett Road in Portland, Ohio. Rizer’s body was discovered by one of his sons in a reclining chair. He had been shot five times.

The jury was seated on Jan. 7. After hearing six days of testimony from both the prosecution and the defense, as well as state’s rebuttal witnesses, opening statements, and closing arguments, jurors began deliberating around 10 a.m. Tuesday.

The jury did not accept Rizer’s self-defense claim, testimony from a psychologist who determined she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as the result of abuse at the hands of her husband, or a famed forensic pathologist’s assertion that Kenneth Rizer was standing above her when she shot him.

Rizer told members of this second jury her husband had threatened to strike her with a paddle in the moments before she fired the shots that killed him. She said they had been arguing most of the day over family matters, and that he had insisted on teaching her to use a 9-mm semi-automatic handgun just before she shot him.

Dr. Michael Baden, a New York-based forensic pathologist, said his interpretation of the autopsy reports and photographs prepared by the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office led him to conclude the victim was standing over his wife, leaning toward her, when he was shot.

However, Prosecuting Attorney Colleen Williams continually questioned Rizer’s credibility, because she added new elements to her story between the time she was first interviewed by investigators, her testimony in her first trial by jury, and this re-trial. Rizer family members testified that the two had a happy marriage — a claim Rizer herself made to Dep. Scott Trussell and Ohio BCI Agent Larry Willis the day of the shooting.

Rizer was indicted on a count of aggravated murder in the days after her husband’s death. In November, a jury acquitted her of that charge, but failed to reach a unanimous verdict on the lesser charge of murder.

Rizer has been housed in the Washington County Jail since her arrest on April 3, 2009.