In his opening address, defense attorney David Ruhnke indicated that Rogers was innocent and that his fingerprints on bags indicated only that he had carried something in them at some point. Other people’s fingerprints were on these bags as well. William Heisler, the Assistant Prosecutor and chief trial attorney for Ocean County, was confident that the state would prove its case, despite not identifying the actual crime scenes. (Rogers’ condo had yielded no evidence of murder or dismemberment.)
The first witnesses were those men who’d discovered the victims’ remains in trash bags. Lisa Hall, from the Five Oaks Bar, confidently identified Richard Rogers as the man she’d seen with Sakara. Rogers’s employment records showed that he’d taken days off from his job as a surgical nurse at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital during times that coincided with the four victims going missing. He had no alibis for his whereabouts during the times of the murders. The police described what they’d found in Rogers’ condo, and scientists and technicians described the process of lifting and matching the fingerprints. In addition, there was testimony that the same machine that had cut the bags that wrapped the body parts had also cut the bags found in Rogers’ home. The implication was that they had all come from the same box.
John O’Brien, for the Staten Island Advance, described Rogers’s demeanor during the final stretch of the trial. It “seemed as though he were beginning to crack,” he observed. He “wrung his hands, bounced his legs and grimaced at his attorney.”
On November 10, Rogers indicated he would not take the stand to testify on his own behalf. Ruhnke said he would not call any witnesses on Rogers’s behalf. Instead, he argued about problems with the fingerprint testimony. Both sides rested and the judge gave instructions to the jury.
What the jurors had not heard were details about the case from 1973 in Maine in which Rogers had been acquitted, as well as details about a suspected fifth murder in Florida, that of Matthew Pierro, who had been discovered in 1982. Although Pierro had not been dismembered, an odontologist had matched a bite mark on his body to Rogers, who’d been in Florida at the time.
The jury found Rogers guilty of the first-degree murder of Thomas Mulcahy and Anthony Marrero. He received life in prison, with no possibility of parole for at least thirty-years. He stared without expression, probably thinking that he should have taken the deal.
Rogers remains the only suspect in the two murders that helped to convict him, as well as one in Florida. It’s likely that he also murdered his roommate in Maine.
Separation Anxiety
ON APRIL 30, 2004, someone parked Bill McGuire’s Nissan Maxima in Atlantic City, outside the Flamingo Hotel. A few days passed and people who knew him began to wonder where he was. No one had heard from him. The sociable, loquacious thirty-nine-year-old computer programmer at the NJ Institute of Technology had suddenly gone silent. His wife of five years had her own story to tell.
Melanie McGuire, 34, was a nurse at a fertility clinic. She’d had two sons with Bill and they had just closed a deal on a $450,000 house in Warren County so they could move out of their cramped Woodbridge apartment. On April 28, Bill had called to arrange a transfer of their utilities. But he hadn’t returned a call later that day to the house’s seller. This was uncharacteristic. He’d always been quick to answer or call back.
The following day, Melanie told a friend that after they closed on the house, Bill had slapped her, stuffed a dryer sheet into her mouth, and left their apartment. He’d told her he was not coming back. She didn’t know where he’d gone. She applied for a protection from abuse order and moved into a motel for a few days. She wanted him to stay away from her. Apparently, he did.
A phone call went from Bill’s phone to a friend of his, but Bill did not leave a message, as he usually did. He’d left an emailed message for a supervisor that he wouldn’t be at work.
Then a zippered black nylon suitcase popped up on May 5 near an island by the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, many miles to the south. The fisherman who dragged it into his boat found plastic-wrapped human remains and called the coastal patrol. The officer peeled back one of the black trash bag and saw the lower part of a human leg, cut off at the knee. The other lower leg was there as well.
Three days later, in an unrelated move, McGuire’s car was towed from the Flamingo Motel to a police impound lot. McGuire was not at the motel and had never checked in there. Police were unaware of the discovery in Virginia, other than hearing the sensational news reports.
On May 11, a matching suitcase washed up on the shore at Fisherman’s Island. A graduate student out looking at birds found it. Inside were a human head, torso and arms, wrapped in a trash bag. The victim wasn’t readily identifiable, so the police created a sketch and published it. A friend of Bill McGuire’s identified the sketch as that of the missing man, so Virginia law enforcement turned the investigation over to New Jersey.
By this time, a third black suitcase had come ashore, containing the rest of the parts. Someone had shot this man twice, in the head and chest, with a .38-caliber weapon and dismembered his remains.
Despite how gruesome this was, the prime suspect was McGuire’s wife. She was taken in for questioning. She proposed that Bill had a gambling problem and that he’d angered someone in organized crime. That’s who’d killed him. Numerous media outlets covered this case, but the episode about it on 48 Hours included a video diary that McGuire kept. On the day that her husband’s remains were identified, she’d signed papers to initiate divorce proceedings.
When you watch her talk, you get the impression of a tormented wife. There’s nothing about this woman that indicates she’s implicated in a shocking murder. Yet all of the evidence points to her being the person who planned and executed the murder and who then severed limbs from the body of her own husband before packing it into matching suitcases and dumping them into the ocean. She seems to have an emotional disconnect. She claims she hadn’t grieved her husband’s death because she hadn’t had a chance and didn’t know how. Even today, she’s still fighting to prove her innocence. But let’s look at the evidence. It’s a confusing trail, but taken all together, it’s compelling.
Virginia law enforcement turned over the investigation to New Jersey, having concluded that the murder took place there. These investigators grabbed Bill’s car. From the surveillance video from the Flamingo Hotel, they could see a figure that resembled Melanie parking Bill’s car there, just after he’d last been heard from. When they asked her about it, she had an answer: she’d done it as a prank. She “didn’t yet know” he was missing. Yet why was she “pranking” the man against whom she had just gotten a restraining order? And why had she told this to no one?
And there were other odd things.
Four days before she parked the car, Melanie had purchased a .38-caliber handgun, across the border in Easton, Pennsylvania, at John’s Gun and Tackle Room. She’d also purchased wad-cutter-type bullets, which are usually used for target practice because they’re cheap. A medical examiner said that wad-cutters had been shot into the body. There was evidence from fibers on one of the fragments that the bullets had been shot through fabric, such as a pillow. Melanie had placed on the form for the restraining order just a week after her gun purchase that there was no gun in the home. The gun she’d purchased, which she would say that Bill had asked for, was not located. She did not know where it was. She thought Bill had locked it into a box in a storage area. It was not there.
A Delaware tollbooth had recorded Melanie’s car going through two days after Bill disappeared. (She said she’d been furniture shopping, because the state has no sales tax, so it’s a better place to find deals.) Bags found in her home matched the type of bag that had encased the body parts, and she had other pieces of luggage from the same set as the three suitcases, all of which were missing from her set. A forged prescription was discovered for the sedative chloral hydrate, seemingly signed by her boss and filled on the day of Bill’s disappearance. The drugstore was close to where
Melanie had dropped off her kids, and had been picked up moments after she’d come into the area.
In addition, McGuire’s computer showed numerous suspicious searches just before Bill was killed. Among the phrases were: “undetectable poisons,” “fatal insulin doses,” “how to commit murder,” sedatives,” “chloral hydrate,” “state gun laws,” and “how to commit suicide.”
Finally, police discovered the icing on the cake: Melanie had been unfaithful. She’d been having an affair for three years with Dr. Bradley Miller, a coworker at the clinic. He admitted to it and thought that Melanie had been working on a separation from Bill. He’d been surprised when they closed on an expensive house. He also said he had not written the prescription that bore his name. A handwriting expert affirmed this.
A year following Bill McGuire’s murder, on June 2, 2005, police had worked up enough evidence to arrest Melanie and charge her with first-degree murder. She was held in the Middlesex County Adult Correctional Center. She pleaded not guilty and made bail. However, that October, a grand jury issued more charges. She paid more bail and remained free.
Someone sent police letters to the effect that Melanie was being framed. Evidence pointed to her being their author, so she endured charges of obstructing an investigation.
Her trial commenced on March 5, 2007 at the Middlesex County Courthouse. The prosecution had 64 witnesses to support the theory that Melanie McGuire had purchased a gun, searched for how to commit a murder, drugged her husband, shot him through a pillow, and dismembered his body. She had then parked his car in a seedy hotel on Atlantic City to make it appear that someone else had committed the murder during one of Bill’s frequent gambling trips. She’d told people about Bill’s abuse, to make her story stick, and applied for a restraining order to back it up. She’d emailed Bill’s workplace using his phone and had also called a friend of his, leaving no message, so as to make it appear that Bill was still alive the day after he’d left her. She’d killed him so she could be with her lover, Dr. Bradley Miller.
Melanie’s attorneys, Joseph Tacopina and Stephen Turano, used sixteen witnesses to refute the prosecution’s evidence and spin a narrative that Bill McGuire was a compulsive gambler who’d drawn the attention of organized crime syndicates in Atlantic City. They had killed and dismembered him, not his abused wife.
Hundreds of exhibits were shown to the jury over the course of the twenty-three day trial. Among them were medical reports, the forged prescription, the computer searches, autopsy photos, gun shop records, surveillance tapes, and wire-tapping results.
Dr. Miller testified that one day his life went from just being a partner at a fertility clinic to being deeply involved in a murder investigation. He admitted that he’d been in love with Melanie and they’d talked about leaving their spouses so they could be together. On the day that the McGuires had closed on the house, Miller had urged Melanie to rip up the papers. He didn’t think she should move into a new house if she intended to divorce her husband. She’d assured Miller that “everything would be fine.”
On April 29, Miller called McGuire and she told him about the fight they’d had. She said she was staying at a motel because she didn’t want to go home. He wrote her a prescription for Xanax, to help calm her nerves. She had seemed very upset. She told him she wanted to file a restraining order. She told him she had found her husband’s car and cellphone on April 28, and in anger she’d thrown the phone away. She’d taken a cab back to Woodbridge, because she’d been too tired to drive. The next day, she’d returned to Atlantic City to drive her own car back to the motel.
Miller talked to her multiple times over the next few days, but did not see her until May 1. At this time, she’d seemed fatigued. He didn’t know that she had purchased a gun until later that summer, supposedly at her husband’s request. He’d urged her to get records from the cab company about her two trips, to corroborate her story with proof. She told him she couldn’t. (Detectives who checked found no records for these trips.)
Miller had agreed to let police put a wire on him for a face-to-face encounter with Melanie. He believed she was innocent. She swore to him that she had not killed her husband. That’s all he was able to get. But police wiretapped her home.
At trial, the ballistics evidence was disputed and proof that Melanie herself had filled the prescription for chloral hydrate was circumstantial. Still, it had been written for a patient of the man with whom she was having an affair, and his signature had been forged. Melanie McGuire was the one with the password to Dr. Miller’s records, and the patient for whom the prescription was written had not filled it or ever been in that drugstore. Whereas, a search for that type of drugstore was found on McGuire’s computer.
In addition, a paint chip was lifted from tape used to seal one of the trash bags that contained McGuire’s parts, and it was identified as nail polish. Although this implicated a female, it was not matched to nail polish in the McGuire home.
One more piece of circumstantial evidence involved the E-Z Pass charges. Virginia detectives had asked Melanie about E-Z Pass records and Bill’s possible use of a transponder. One day later, she had called E-Z Pass customer service to tell them that charges on her account for May 2 and 18 near Atlantic City, each for just 45 cents, were incorrect. E-Z Pass refused to remove them. The prosecutors believed that Melanie had been paying cash for her trips on toll roads, so as not to leave a record. When the E-Z Pass cameras recorded her anyway, she’d been upset and wanted to remove this proof of her trips. Who would otherwise bother with a 90-cent expense?
Despite her apparent answer for everything, the jury found her guilty of first-degree murder, desecration of human remains, and weapons possession for unlawful purposes.
Shortly after her conviction, Melanie appealed for a new trial. She said that she’d heard from a jailhouse informant that agents of organized crime had intended to kill her husband over his massive debts. The prosecutor objected, saying that the informant she’d named was entirely unreliable. The informant quickly recanted his tale. Melanie’s attorney withdrew her request for a new trial.
She received a sentence of life in prison.
But she still had options. She appealed again, based on evidence that her attorney, Tacopina, had been high on prescription painkillers when he represented her. Thus, she’d had “inadequate representation.”
On September 25, 2014, Melanie went to court to argue that the evidence in her case should be reviewed again. Her new public defender, Louis DeJulio, went through a number of small discrepancies and argued that, taken together, they were significant. Among the issues were the lack of an expert to rebut the weapons evidence and insufficient representation at her trial.
Assistant State Attorney General Daniel Bornstein thought this was ridiculous. “Ms. McGuire wasn't convicted because of an ineffective assistance on behalf of her trial attorneys,” he stated, “she was convicted because there's overwhelming evidence of her guilt."
The judge has not yet ruled. Melanie McGuire is persistent. It’s likely that, if the decision does not go her way, she’ll continue to try to regain her freedom.
*****
THE GARDEN STATE HAS A VARIED HISTORY OF CRIME, and I didn’t even include organized crime in these pages, aside from the hint of it in some cases. Given its proximity to New York City, its position on the East Coast corridor between New York, Baltimore, and Washington, DC, and its dense population, it will continue to be a source for unique crime narratives.
Photo Archive
Authur Seale and Irene Seale
Bruno Richard Hauptmann
Hall Mills
Howard Unruh
John List
Joseph Kallinger
Le Blanc Trial Book
Melanie McGuire
Ocey Snead
Richard Rogers
Richard Biegenwald
Charles Cullen
Hall Mills
Melanie Mcguire
Crimes of the Century:
&nb
sp; Murder in New York
Katherine Ramsland
Copyright 2015 by Katherine Ramsland and Gregg Olsen
All Rights Reserved
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Map by Brad Arnesen
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Published by Notorious USA
From the Notorious USA Team
WELCOME TO THE LATEST INSTALLMENT in the New York Times bestselling series of stories about America’s most notorious criminals. That’s right. No matter where you live, you’re in the middle of Notorious USA
Here, you’ll find them all… this time we’re talking New York.
The Empire State has witnessed many unique and perverse crimes. Quite a few triggered international headlines. This is where the phrase “serial killer” was born—for good reason! From killers to violent child molesters, New York has it all. We also find the demented assassinations of Stanford White and John Lennon, the strange case that inspired Edgar Allen Poe, murders that enthralled filmmakers, scandalous crimes that altered journalism, and even a murderous writer. Let’s not forget Amityville and the missing Judge Crater! But we must warn you: Don’t read this book at night!
When you're done with this volume, be sure to pick up Bodies of Evidence, Darkest Waters, Overkill and other box sets available as an ebook on most formats, as well as in paperback and audio books.
Shadows of Death (True Crime Box Set) Page 7