Doris E. Tucker's trial on federal fraud charges wasn't about whether her name was properly spelled in all caps or other oddball tax defier schemes. It wasn't about a kickboxing champ, sometime movie actor and purported financial adviser named Dennis Alexio.

Technically, it wasn't even about the $90,000 Mercedes-Benz S550 that Tucker tried to acquire from a Roanoke dealership.

But all of that was in the mix Tuesday as a jury in U.S. District Court in Roanoke heard a day of testimony, deliberated about three hours and finally acquitted Tucker, 56, of Roanoke, of charges of mail fraud and creating a false, fraudulent financial document in her attempt to gain the luxury sedan.

Afterward, a tired-sounding Paul Beers, the Roanoke attorney who represented Tucker, said he and his client were "grateful and pleased," and that Tucker was glad to get back to her life after more than three years of investigation and prosecution.

It had started in August 2006, when Tucker, known to her friends as "Dot," went to a luxury car dealership, told a salesman and manager she was inheriting money, then tried repeatedly to persuade them to let her take the Mercedes in exchange for unusual-looking documents that she and her financial adviser said were vouchers for some sort of federal payment.

To Assistant U.S. Attorney Pat Hogeboom, when Tucker gave the car dealership a supposed federal 1099-OID -- a form usually used to report profits from bonds -- she seemed to be following the tax defier tactic of trying to use the form to claim the government owed her money. And on other forms, Hogeboom said, Tucker seemed to be asserting that spelling her name in all caps referred to someone different than when standard capitalization was used, an argument also employed among tax defiers.

To Beers, none of this was more than the unfortunate outcome of Tucker's bipolar depression and bad advice from Alexio, who lives in Hawaii and who Tucker apparently met online. Alexio, known as "Terminator" in his fighting days and a cast member in the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie "Kickboxer," several times telephoned a car dealership manager. He was recorded insisting that a document listing the car's price was a contract that meant its keys should be given to Tucker immediately.

But the paperwork Tucker tried to trade for a car was "just gibberish," Beers said, and dealership workers were never even close to letting Tucker drive away.