Dead Men Talking

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  Then police tracked down James Finn, the on and off again boyfriend of Melanie’s. Finn was a gun enthusiast. Weeks before he killing, she had emailed him, saying, ‘There has been a lot of weird stuff going on at home,’ and she wanted advice about buying a gun for protection because she was worried about Bill’s growing paranoia.

  Finn told her that she could buy a gun in Pennsylvania in only one day. Now the police wanted to know where the gun was, and they persuaded Finn to call Melanie – the conversation would be taped:

  Finn: Throw me a bone…where’s the gun?

  McGuire: The gun was in the lock box when he [Bill] first left…I put it into the storage unit. Of course, I went later and looked and it’s not there.

  A missing gun that couldn’t be tested as a possible murder weapon – how convenient for Mrs McGuire!

  But what was the motive for killing her husband? To try and answer that question, the police contacted Dr Bradley Miller, Melanie’s boss at the RMA fertility clinic. Here they learned that Miller had been involved in an extra-marital affair with Melanie for three years. And the doctor told the cops a lot more, too. He told the investigators Melanie had admitted a crazy story; how after the fight with Bill, after getting that protection order against him, she had driven two hours to Atlantic City. Once there, she had somehow managed to find his Nissan car and, out of spite, moved it to the out-of-the-way Flamingo Motel, at 3101 Pacific Avenue. ‘A security camera may have caught me doing it,’ she had told her lover. She explained that, exhausted she had taken a taxi ride back home. The next day she took another cab back to Atlantic City to retrieve her own car.

  The detective thought that this story was ‘incredible’. He even checked with every cab company in Melanie’s area. None had receipts for a taxi drive that would have cost hundreds of dollars, besides, if she was so exhausted, why didn’t she simply book into an Atlantic City hotel that night. It just didn’t add up at all.

  Moreover, Melanie also told Miller that she had been shopping for furniture in Delaware, not far from the Chesapeake Bay, the day before the first suitcase surfaced.

  Detective Dalrymple convinced the good doctor to confront his lover in secretly taped telephone conversation:

  Miller: The trip to Delaware. They [the police] want to know what you were going down there for and what furniture stores you were looking for there and seem to believe that you went with your father.

  McGuire: There was nobody else in that fucking car with me… I think that they’re… when it comes to, like, the mythical second person. I think they’re talking shit.

  Miller: I think they’re either gonna come down on me or come down on your father. That it was, you know, the one that helped you, uh, do the murder.

  The evidence police had, circumstantial though it was, looked damning all the same: a missing gun, trash bags, strange trips, bullets, and a blanket – what exactly did it all add up to, and would it all end in an arrest?

  The evidence presented to you in this case presents an absolutely crystal-clear picture of this defendant’s participation in her husband’s death.

  Prosecutor Patti Prezioso’s opening speech to the jury at McGuire’s trial.

  Thursday, 2 June 2005; it had been almost a year since Bill’s shocking murder, and Melanie McGuire was getting back to her old routine. She dropped her two kids off at the Kinder Kastle day care centre and was in a rush to get to work, to see her patients. But on that particular morning, New Jersey had other plans for Widow McGuire; state police finally had made their move and she was arrested in the Middlesex County borough of Metuchen. She was charged with murdering her husband and she pleaded not guilty. There was no direct evidence, no eyewitnesses, but certainly the investigators had amassed a great deal of circumstances that pointed to one person – her.

  Nearly two years after Melanie’s arrest, during which time she was free on bail, prosecutor Patti Prezioso prepared to convince a jury that all those circumstances pointed to Melanie McGuire’s guilt. The picture she painted was while her husband slept; she shot him, dismembered him, dumped his remains like garbage into the bay, and then ditched his car at an out-of-the-way motel to distract police.

  ‘When Bill was engrossed in purchasing the house, and all the fine details involved with closing the deal,’ Prezioso said, ‘the defendant was planning his death.’

  Pacing slowly around the courtroom, the prosecutor carefully explained: ‘Starting with the gun. She bought the .38 special just two days before her husband’s murder. She only told friends about the pistol after Bill’s death, and even then shifting stories. She told some friends that it was Bill who wanted the gun, but she told Mr Finn that she wanted it for her protection against her husband.’

  Then the black, plastic bags. Forensic scientist, Tom Lesniak, used a laser pointer to show the jury the visual similarities between the rubbish bags that were found with the victim, and the ones she used to give away her husband’s clothes in. His conclusion? They were all manufactured on the same production line and on the same extrusion run.

  But what the prosecution found most suspicious was what Lesniak didn’t find when he and his team meticulously searched the McGuire’s apartment, including its bathroom. They hadn’t been able to find a speck of blood, no DNA material whatsoever, no trace at all, in fact, that the McGuires had ever lived there.

  ‘Who scrubs a bathroom that well when they’re leaving an apartment?’ asked the prosecutor.

  However, the forensic expert went on to say that Melanie might not have covered her tracks as well as she thought she had, because he found traces of the crime scene somewhere else.

  ‘I found particles that to me looked like, um, it could be human tissue,’ Lesniak told the court. Indeed, he had found particles of Bill McGuire’s human tissue in the vacuuming taken from the floor of Bill’s car. It was another significant find, and we remember that Melanie had already admitted moving the Nissan to the parking lot at the Flamingo Motel that night.

  Prosecutor Prezioso said that it all added up. Melanie had probably picked up traces of Bill’s tissue on the soles of her shoes when he had been cut up, that she had transferred that tissue to his car when she had driven it to Atlantic City.

  Next, the prosecutor explained about other important evidence that showed that the murder had been carefully planned – all of it captured on the McGuires’ home computer.

  A forensic computer expert told the jury about incriminating internet searches that had been made during the days before Bill’s death.

  ‘There were several searches,’ she testified. ‘They involved things like names of chemicals and poisons. There were searches that involved guns (one of which was www.nvastore.com), gun laws and things like that.’

  The expert told how someone browsed the internet for advice on how to commit murder, and then there was a Google search for chloral hydrate – a powerful but uncommon sedative. There was also a search for a nearby Walgreens pharmacy.

  Hooking it all up to the computer, the searches led police to Walgreens and a very significant prescription in the name of an RMA patient – RMA, as in the clinic where Melanie worked. The prescription was for chloral hydrate, and it was filed at the pharmacy just a mile from the day care centre where Melanie always dropped off her children.

  There was something else about that prescription too. It featured the signature of Dr Bradley Miller – Melanie’s boss and former lover. He was also the state’s star witness. Under examination:

  Prezioso: Sir, did you write the prescription?

  Miller: No, I did not.

  Prezioso: Are you familiar with the handwriting on the prescription?

  Miller: Yes.

  Prezioso: And, whose handwriting do you believe it to be?

  Miller: It appears to be Melanie’s.

  Melanie McGuire glared at her former lover. Her face crumpled up and the corners of her mouth dropped.

  Certainly Melanie had written prescriptions for Dr Miller in the past, and she wo
uld be familiar with doing that, and had access to the pads. And then the prescription had been picked up on 28 April – just hours before Bill disappeared. A phial of the very same chloral hydrate had been found in the deceased man’s car by police.

  The prosecutor said that Melanie had used the sedative to knock him out before shooting him, but the jury must have been privately asking themselves, what had motivated the defendant to commit such a brutal, such a calculated crime?

  Dr Miller said, ‘Melanie and I were hoping to be together in the future and to have kids together,’ future plans that Melanie felt would never come true while Bill was still alive.

  In her summing up, Patti Prezioso told the jury:

  All of this evidence together leaves you no doubt that she participated in his murder. While drinking wine to celebrate his new home, Bill had no idea that the drink was laced with chloral hydrate, and his wife wanted to grow old with her lover, and not him. The next day, the kids out of the way and at the day care centre, she shot the still sleeping man, a pillow muffling the noise. The dead man is cut up in the bathroom, stuffed into bags and suitcases. She drives to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and tossed the suitcases in the air and into the water.

  Melanie McGuire had murdered her husband, and the evidence seemed overwhelming. It might have looked like a convincing case against her, but it rested on circumstantial evidence – there was no direct evidence and no smoking gun.

  The prosecution’s case is circumstantial at best, yet utterly unconvincing.

  Joseph Tacopina, McGuire’s attorney.

  Desperate whispered words: ‘I didn’t fucking do anything. I didn’t fucking do anything,’ she told James ‘Jim’ Finn over the phone. ‘Then why are they all over you?’ he asked. ‘Hello, because I bought a gun…because I had an affair,’ she replied.

  But could it all be so simple?

  For five weeks the prosecutor had depicted this petite young mother, a woman whose vocation since college was nursing, as a ruthless, determined killer. But her attorney, Joe Tacopina, said the investigators had got it all wrong; that they had zoomed in on Melanie from the start, focusing on evidence that incriminated her while disregarding other leads.

  ‘Was there any forensic proof that she had committed this crime?’ he asked the jury. ‘No! And, no eyewitness, absolutely no motive whatsoever.’ At least that’s the way Tacopina saw it.

  Tacopina’s strategy was to tear down the prosecution’s witnesses on cross-examination, and convert them into witnesses for the defence. Case in point: the forensic scientist who searched the McGuires’ apartment four times for evidence of the crime and found nothing.

  Tacopina: Well, you looked hard, didn’t you?

  Lesniak: Yes, I believe we did. Yes.

  The prosecution had argued that there was no evidence because Melanie had carefully scrubbed away all traces of her crime. Was it possible to commit such a brutal murder and cut Bill up in the apartment and not have left any sign? ‘It’s impossible,’ said Tacopina. ‘Absolutely impossible.’

  The defence said there was a much simpler explanation as to why there were no traces of blood in the apartment – the murder never happened there.

  But what about the particles of skin in the victim’s car? The prosecutor claimed that the killer likely stepped in Bill’s remains, transferring the human tissue into his car and Melanie had admitted being in Bill’s car.

  The defense attorney made another plea for common sense, although a weak one at that: ‘Why wouldn’t traces of Bill’s own skin be found in his own car?’ And, in cross-examination of Lesniak, the expert conceded that there was no proof that the tissues had come from a dead body. But what was the defence’s explanation for Melanie being in her husband’s car at all after he had disappeared?

  Tacopina said that she was just turning the tables on her husband – playing a little trick Bill had previously played on her after an argument. Bill had moved her car so that she didn’t know where it was, or so she said.

  Then the defence grilled Dr Bradley Miller, Melanie’s boss and former lover, and the man, the prosecution claimed, embodied her motive for murder. Miller had previously testified that they had been having an affair for three years; they wanted to be together and have children. Joe Tacopina pounced, and now somehow Dr Miller’s story sounded different.

  Tacopina: Dr Miller. Never once, not before or after the death of her husband did Mrs McGuire ever ask you to leave your wife?

  Miller: No.

  Tacopina: Nor did she ever insinuate to you, doctor, either directly, or indirectly, that, ‘Hey, look I’m available now, wanna get together?’ She didn’t, did she?

  Miller: No, she did not.

  Joe Tacopina also revealed to the jury that even though Dr Miller had told police he would secretly tape his telephone conversations with Melanie for them, he hadn’t told the investigators that he was still sleeping with the woman. This brought a hushed gasp from the public gallery. This man who says he loves this woman so much is secretly recording their telephone chats and sharing the same bed?

  But, Tacopina believed that Dr Miller did Melanie a favour, for not only did she not incriminate herself she was saying things that screamed out innocence:

  Miller: You swear you had nothing to do with this [the murder]?

  McGuire: Yes.

  Miller: On your children’s lives, ’cause I’m standing by you.

  McGuire: Yes.

  The defence also tackled a critical piece of evidence – the gun. The prosecutor had claimed that it was highly suspicious why Melanie couldn’t get her story straight on why she’d bought the weapon. But Tacopina countered that she couldn’t tell people the real reason was because Bill was a convicted felon who could not legally purchase a firearm for himself.

  ‘Melanie was really committing a crime by purchasing the gun under her name with the intention of letting somebody else use it,’ the immaculately turned-out Tacopina told the jury. Indeed, one of Bill’s closest friends even testified that buying a gun had been very much on Bill’s mind in the weeks leading up to his vanishing act.

  The defence now called its own professional witnesses to knock down the remainder of the state’s case. A computer expert suggested there was just as much evidence to show that Bill had made the online incriminating searches as Melanie. For example: a search for data of undetectable poisons had been made a mere twenty seconds after a search for information on gambling – Bill’s pastime.

  A plastics expert thought that the prosecution’s analysis of the rubbish bags from the victim, and the bags that had Bill’s clothes in them from the apartment, were not from the same extrusion run, and no match whatsoever.

  And, finally came the ‘Melanie experts’, friends who said that she was no killer. Technically character witnesses, and as they were called by the defence, they depicted Melanie in glowing colours.

  ‘It’s like watching your next-door neighbour. It’s just so surreal,’ said Jennifer Collese. ‘There’s no way, not the Melanie I know…absolutely not.’ She went on to say that as she was trying to get pregnant in early 2005, she made her nurse, Melanie, promise her something: ‘I want you to promise me that you’ll not leave this clinic until I am done,’ to which Melanie replied: “Don’t worry, they won’t drag me out until I am 85”, and I said “okay”.’

  Linda Smith weighed in with: ‘Melanie’s dedication and commitment to bringing life into this world makes her the last person capable of murder…Someone who is in the position of giving life and helping people achieve life, there’s no way you can take life so carelessly.’

  Melanie’s old friend, Alison McCausley, went a step further. She said the very idea that Melanie could dismember her husband defied common sense. ‘His whole torso, essentially, in one of those suitcases had to weigh 150lb, or more. She’s going to throw that in a car, drive down to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge…and how big is Melanie? I think Melanie was slightly over 100lb, if that.’

  But, if her staunch supporte
rs weren’t buying the prosecution’s scenario, the Rices, her former friends, were. By now John and Susan Rice were convinced Melanie had murdered their friend, Bill, and they could recall a time when Melanie had fought strong waves to save John, who was drowning.

  ‘I hear that this petite little person couldn’t do something like Bill’s size and be able to carry the suitcases and dump them in the Chesapeake Bay – absolutely she could. I am that confident.’ said Susan Rice.

  After deliberating for four days, the jury foreman announced they had reached a verdict. McGuire was guilty of six of the ten counts.

  ‘Melanie began pulling me on my arm and my lapel,’ remembers Joe Tacopina. ‘She was saying and sobbing: “I didn’t do it, I didn’t do it….my babies, my babies,” meaning her two sons.’

  Melanie McGuire was sentenced to 30 years to life with no parole. Unless her appeal is successful, she will die in jail.

  Even Bill’s friend, John Rice, felt a pang of something as he watched Melanie almost collapse when the sentence was read to her. But his feelings were tempered by the outrage at what she had done. ‘I really thought I’d be happy,’ he said afterwards. ‘There was no win in this at all.’

  Clutching John’s arm, Susan Rice stood firm: ‘Bill loved those boys. They were his crowning achievement, and maybe one day he would have brought them to Chesapeake Bar, so blue and so peaceful. Melanie could have filed for a divorce, but I think that’s the choice she is going to have to ponder now.’

  People say that Bill McGuire had loved Virginia ever since his days as a young man in the Navy. They even say he wanted to return and live there. Instead, he drifted back, lost and broken on the waters, his shattered body in need of a place to rest. Chesapeake Bay – ever accepting – gave that to William T. McGuire, if only for a moment, may his soul rest in peace.