MOBILE, Ala. (RNS) Once a traveling evangelist leading church revivals, Anthony Jujuan Hopkins on Monday (April 5) faced a courtroom of potential jurors who will hear prosecutors attempt to prove that Hopkins killed his wife and stuffed her body into a freezer.

Hopkins, 39, killed his wife after she discovered him sexually abusing his stepdaughter, prosecutors said.

Hopkins faces charges of murder, second-degree rape, second-degree sodomy, second-degree sex abuse and incest.

Hopkins’ 19-year-old stepdaughter came forward in 2008 and told authorities her mother, Arletha Hopkins, kicked her father out of the house in December 2004 because he was abusing the stepdaughter, according to court records.

The next morning, the girl told police, Anthony Hopkins asked her to help hide her mother’s body.

After burying Arletha Hopkins near a church in Jackson, Ala., Anthony Hopkins later moved the body into a freezer in the utility room of their house in Mobile, prosecutors said, where it was stored until police found it in July 2008.

Mobile County Assistant District Attorney Ashley Rich said prosecutors will show a “continued pattern of abuse and sex and mind games and control” that resulted in the stepdaughter not reporting the killing until four years later.

Defense attorney Jeff Deen asked potential jurors whether anyone thought preachers should be held to a higher standard of behavior.

“He’s charged with murder,” Deen said later. “He’s not charged with having a body in a freezer.”