UPDATE 10:20 AM: Prosecutors say Clarke Raines strangled his mother — angry she spent all her inheritance money — but the Defense says they can’t prove he killed her. The state describes Clarke Raines as an entitled son whose parents paid all his bills, including several trips to rehab, insurance and other expenses. Prosecutor Ashley Rich said Clarke Raines felt he was entitled to Kay Raines’s inheritance. Kay’s husband and Clarke’s father died unexpectedly in 2006 and Kay got $500,000 from life insurance and years later $2.3 million from the sale of their Destin beach home.

The state says the victim chose to enjoy her inheritance and became a big spender at regional casinos, eventually spending all the inheritance money. They claim this angered Clarke Raines, and when she returned from her job at a Home Depot in Mississippi on Jan. 29, 2017, they say that’s when Clarke strangled his mother. Then, for the next several days, he allegedly tried to get money through MoneyGram fraud, a bad check, and using his mother’s credit cards.

A month after Kay Raines went missing Mobile police placed a GPS tracker on Clarke’s car, and eventually saw him make an unusual trip to a wooded area in Baldwin County where they found her body. If he didn’t make an extra trip to the body, the state says they may never have found her.

Remarks from the defense in opening statements were brief — less than 10 minutes. The defense says the state can’t prove Clarke Raines killed his mother, can’t prove where she died, said he needed his mother alive, and asked the jury not to assume someone is a bad person just because they’re a drug addict.

The trial is expected to last the entire week or longer because of mounds of evidence.

MOBILE, Ala. (WKRG) — Opening statements are expected to begin in the murder trial of a man accused of killing his mother back in 2017. Clarke Raines allegedly strangled Kay Raines and buried her body in a wooded area in Baldwin County. Her body was discovered weeks later in a shallow grave between Spanish Fort and Stockton.

Kay Raines went missing in early 2017. Friends organized a search for her after she wasn’t seen after a trip to Biloxi. At the time, friends of Kay Raines pointed out that Clarke Raines was conspicuously absent from their informal search effort.

From the moment Kay Raines went missing, people close to her were convinced her son had something to do with it. Friends of Kay describe Clarke Raines as a young man who could switch from being a petulant child to mean and violent at any moment. Some just stayed away while Clarke was around. Clarke Raines has an arrest record stretching back more than a decade with arrests in Walton County Florida and Okaloosa County for crimes like burglary, domestic violence, and trying to fraudulently obtain a controlled substance. Before his mother’s death, Raines was also arrested in Mobile for allegedly breaking the windows of a neighbor’s home.