Events surrounding one of Butler County's most notorious criminal cases were hotly debated Wednesday during a hearing about repealing the double murder conviction against the defendant.

In 2011, Colin Abbott, 49, of Randolph, N.J., was charged with the killings of his wealthy father and stepmother. By 2013, Abbott pleaded no contest to two counts of third-degree murder in the deaths of Kenneth Abbott, 65, and Celeste Abbott, 55, at their home on 25 sprawling acres in Brady Township.

He was sentenced to a 35-to-80-year prison sentence. In exchange for the plea, prosecutors took the death penalty off the table. Since then, Abbott has made multiple attempts to back out of the deal and have a trial.

That attempt was made again Wednesday during a hearing in county court in which the time between his conviction and plea was scrutinized by prosecutors and Abbott's most recent lawyer, J.W. Hernandez-Cuebas.

In February, Hernandez-Cuebas filed a post-conviction relief motion to Judge William Shaffer, and Wednesday a hearing was held on that motion with testimony from most of the players in the original case.Hernandez-Cuebas argued that Assistant District Attorney Ben Simon, who prosecuted Abbott, acted inappropriately between 2011 to 2013 by allegedly sowing chaos between Abbott and his lawyers at the time — Wendy Williams, a private attorney, and Chief Public Defender Kevin Flaherty, who was appointed to represent Abbott during the sentencing phase in case the death penalty was still on the table.All of the lawyers testified Wednesday, often presenting conflicting stories. At one point, Williams claimed that Simon made a feigned attempt to slam a door against her face and whispered “I hate you” to her. Simon denied the incident happened.Assistant District Attorney Patricia McLean represented the prosecution at Wednesday's hearing, questioning Abbott and others who testified.Abbott is being held at the medium-security State Correctional Institution in Somerset, but he was transferred to Butler County Prison for Wednesday's hearing.Investigators believe that for years before the slaying, Abbott had been scamming his father, who made his fortune — estimated at more than $4 million — from selling a pharmaceutical business. The couple's remains were found burned and scattered on their Brady Township estate July 13, 2011. The day after, Abbott was charged with the murders and originally faced the death penalty if he was convicted.

Abbott testified Wednesday that he began to have “misgivings” about Williams almost immediately when she missed a hearing for the case June 22, 2012.“She literally wasn't doing anything,” Abbott said. “After August, I had the feeling she wasn't preparing.”But Williams said she “allegedly” missed only one hearing, early on in the case.Williams said that when she missed that meeting, Simon “dug up” her elderly father's phone number and told him that his daughter was missing.“He got my entire family in an uproar. My dad's impression was that I was missing,” Williams said. “I was extremely angry. I couldn't imagine why he would do something so disruptive.”Simon countered this claim and said he had a calm and cordial conversation with Williams' father. He said he called her father because that's the number that Williams provided him.“I would never do that,” Williams said.Williams said she told Abbott this incident had put the case on a “bad footing.”As part of the defense at the time, Williams planned to visit the crime scene and requested a tour from Abbott's mother, Deborah Buchanan of New Jersey.Williams said that Simon told her Abbott's mother hated her and asked her why she would bother getting her a tour of the crime scene if the mother hated Williams so much.The request was denied by the court, and Abbott said the relationship between his mother and Williams began to deteriorate.

During his pretrial period, Abbott and his mother spoke by phone regularly.Abbott spoke via the Butler County Prison phone system, which records every conversation a defendant has. Multiple phone recordings were discussed during the hearing. Simon said those recorded phone calls were collected by a county detective who would deliver requested material to Simon to build his prosecution case.“It was the biggest potpourri of madness you could ever listen to,” Simon said, observing that Abbott spoke to his mother almost daily.During at least one of those phone calls, Abbott testified that he said “disgusting things” about Williams and Flaherty. And those things apparently made their way back to Williams the next day when Simon played the phone call for Flaherty, who relayed the message to Williams.“I didn't think it was right for Simon to take these calls and interfere with the attorney-client relationship,” Abbott said. “It was really hurting our relationship.”Abbott said their relationship continued to sour.“In my mind, she was tainted from that phone call,” Abbott said.“I was furious,” Williams said.By now, they were “moving toward trial in a runaway train,” Williams said, noting that as a trial lawyer she prides herself on taking most of her cases to trial instead of reaching a plea deal.

Williams said that Abbott asked her to file for prosecutorial misconduct, but she said she thought the move wasn't a good one.“Frankly, the defense team thought Simon was too close and too angry at Abbott and we wanted him to stay on because we thought he was off his game and likely to make a mistake,” Williams said.Williams said she was so mad at Abbott's mother that she filed a criminal case against her for not paying the remainder of Williams' lawyer fees.“I was mad. I felt unappreciated. I wanted paid and I didn't care what I'd have to do to get it,” Williams said, noting that she eventually did get paid.McLean asked Williams, “Did the calls get in the way of you representing him to your full ability?”“That's not for me to decide,” Williams said. “That's for the court to determine.”But she conceded that “everyone had hard feelings. Everyone involved in this case was on edge. In this case, the perception of Abbott being depicted as a monster permeated the whole case. I don't think I was above that.”Hernandez-Cuebas asked Abbott, “Would you have taken a plea deal if you knew what prosecutorial misconduct meant?”“No,” Abbott said, and added he would have wanted Williams to file a motion against Simon.

Abbott also alleged Flaherty didn't treat him well.As part of Flaherty's representation of Abbott, he had to prepare for the possibility that Abbott would be sentenced to death. Flaherty went to New Jersey, where Abbott is from, to look for people who would say positive things about Abbott and help him avoid the death penalty.“Flaherty lied to me,” Abbott said, claiming that Flaherty told him that he couldn't find anybody in New Jersey. “There were plenty of people who were willing to talk.”But in Flaherty's testimony, he said he was able to find people and relayed that information to Abbott.Abbott said there were issues surrounding payments to Williams. He said she charged him a total of about $65,000. The payments were originally agreed to be made in three installments through checks, but Williams later decided that she wanted cash instead.“I don't ever ask for cash,” Williams testified.Abbott also claimed that Williams wanted an additional $10,000 to hire another attorney, but there never was a second attorney even after he paid her for it.With all of these complaints against his lawyers, Abbott never raised these issues during his plea in front of the judge. McLean noted that he would have had the opportunity to do so as part of the plea hearing.“He entered this plea because he knew it was the right thing to do,” McLean said. “It saved his life.”

Almost immediately after Abbott was sentenced, he attempted to withdraw his plea deal.McLean said he did this to “garner publicity” for his mother's book.McLean's claim was originally made April 5, 2013, when Simon raised the issue. Buchanan, a murder mystery writer, didn't deny at the time that she was shopping for a book or movie deal about her son.A phone recording between Abbott and his mother was used to support Simon's argument.Shaffer said he would take further arguments from Hernandez-Cuebas along with a request for relief and then decide on the matter.