Murder on Birchleaf Drive
Page 11
The entire group, including Jason’s mother, piled into Sheriff’s vehicles and headed in that direction. They arrived at the park and waited.
It had been more than a year since any law enforcement officers had personal contact with Jason. Sergeant Spivey relished the opportunity to look into his eyes to see for himself whether he looked the part of a cold-blooded killer.
Jason finally arrived in his Ford Explorer. He was wearing business attire, looking more the part of a professional salesman than a cold-blooded killer.
Sergeant Spivey handed him the search warrant and explained what they were looking for. Upon the officer’s request, Jason hiked up the bottom of his slacks and showed him his dark, lace-up shoes. He then permitted the detective to search his vehicle. No Hush Puppies Orbital shoes were found.
“I really appreciate how courteous and respectful you’ve been to my mom,” Jason said, his gratitude seemingly sincere despite the difficult circumstances.
“Thanks,” Sergeant Spivey replied. “Jason, we sure would like to speak with you about all this.”
But Jason didn’t respond. Instead, he took the search warrant, folded it in half, tossed it onto the dashboard of his Explorer, and said goodbye. His attorney had advised him not to speak with anyone about the murder—especially not the police. And he was following that advice to the letter.
• • • • •
As part of his investigation, Sergeant Spivey spent some time getting to know Michelle Young’s father, Alan Fisher. Alan informed him that Jason, Pat, and Cassidy had flown up to New Jersey the week before Cassidy’s third birthday in March 2007. They stayed with Alan, and his wife June, for four days.
Alan told him he and June had turned half of their dining room table into a shrine to Michelle—pictures, a photo album, and newspaper clippings, all focused on the amazing life she led. Birthday presents for Cassidy were set out near that end of the table. June had placed them there deliberately, Alan explained, so Jason would have to confront the “Michelle shrine.”
On their first day in New Jersey, Pat walked over to the table, on her own, and slowly took it all in. She became very emotional.
When Alan walked into the room, Pat instinctively reached out and hugged him, her eyes welling up with tears. “But Jason made it a point not to go near that table,” Michelle’s dad told the detective.
When Cassidy began opening her gifts, Jason “stayed far away from that end of the table,” he continued. “It’s like he couldn’t face it. Now why would someone that had nothing to do with this avoid that? If that were my wife and I had nothing to do with it, I would have been over there looking at everything.”
“Jason and I spent some time one-on-one with just Cassidy,” Alan said. Jason “had every opportunity” to tell him he had nothing to do with his daughter’s murder. Michelle’s father told the detective that he would have done exactly that had their roles been reversed. “I would have said, ‘Look, off the record I just need you to know, I shouldn’t be talking about it, but you need to know that I had nothing to do with this and I could never do this and I feel horrible and you know I have advice from my attorneys and I can’t talk. You need to know that I wasn’t involved.’”
But during the four days they were together, Alan lamented, Jason never pulled him aside to say anything like that. And that made he and his wife that much more suspicious of Jason.
“He can be a very smart boy,” Alan continued, now showing a hint of anger. “There’s a side of him that, some sides of him that I found after the murder that I never knew existed … He has the personality that—we’re convinced he’s a chameleon. He is what you want him to be and he’s got multiple personalities and he leads you to believe that that’s the person he is. The minute he’s out of your presence, he’s a chameleon to someone else.”
Michelle’s father told Sergeant Spivey he knew it was tempting to believe Jason wasn’t smart enough to have pulled off the murder without leaving any forensic evidence behind. “That’s what he wanted you to believe,” Alan said. “He’s very smart to get away with this … He is very capable of doing this and thinking that he can get away with it.”
Sadly, Alan Fisher would never learn the outcome of the investigation. He succumbed to prostate cancer on July 31, 2008. The quest for justice for his daughter would have to carry on without him.
• • • • •
By December 2009, prosecutors in the DA’s Office decided they had enough evidence to submit to the grand jury. Sergeant Spivey, their first witness, highlighted the key evidence. Before prosecutors could even call their next witness, the foreperson signaled he and his fellow grand jurors had heard enough. He scribbled his signature on the indictment, charging Jason with first-degree murder.
Sheriff Harrison assigned Sergeant Spivey to lead the contingent of officers heading to Brevard to make the arrest. At about 1:30 p.m. on December 14, a caravan of Wake County Sheriff’s Office vehicles pulled up to the curb near an auto repair shop in Brevard.
The group had been tipped off that Jason was there having some work done on his Explorer. Sure enough, they spotted him leaving the shop with his mother, approaching her car. As he was about to enter the driver’s side of the car, Sheriff’s deputies swarmed the vehicle, telling Jason to put his hands up high and remain still. Jason complied, offering no resistance at all.
The Jason Young officers encountered that cold December afternoon couldn’t have looked more different from the professionally dressed salesman Sergeant Spivey met with in February 2008. His blond hair was greasy and had grown down to his shoulders. He was wearing a khaki and black baseball cap, blue Nike T-shirt, jeans, and a thick, gold rope necklace.
As handcuffs were placed on Jason, Sergeant Spivey informed him he had been charged by the grand jury with the first-degree murder of his wife, Michelle Young. He then read Jason his Miranda rights and directed him to the backseat of another white Ford Explorer—owned by the Sheriff’s Office. The five-hour journey back to Raleigh was eerily reminiscent of Jason’s backseat ride across North Carolina in his own Explorer the evening of the murder.
This time, though, the Explorer’s destination was the Wake County Public Safety Center in downtown Raleigh, where the magistrates and county jail were located. The irony was lost on no one that this was the very location where—six years earlier—Jason had cemented his relationship with Michelle “till death do us part.” Poetic justice if ever there were any, the officers must have thought as they readied Jason for his perp walk.
Sergeant Spivey ushered Jason into the building, where Sheriff Donnie Harrison had been patiently waiting for hours. The Sheriff broke out in a huge smile as the detective, striding alongside the handcuffed Jason Young, came into full view.
As Jason stood before the magistrate and was formally informed of the charges against him, a slew of uniformed deputies and Sheriff’s officials looked on, satisfied they had gotten their man. Jason was then booked, issued an orange-and-white striped jumpsuit and slippers, and assigned to the jail cell he would call “home” for the next eighteen months while awaiting trial.
That evening, an exuberant Sheriff Harrison met with reporters in his office. Grabbing the photo of Michelle he had kept on his desk the last three years, he explained it was there to remind him why he and his staff had been working so hard and for so long.
“Her mother gave it to me, and it was a reminder every day that we had a case to solve, and we’ve been working diligently to solve it,” he said. “It makes me feel good today to look down at the picture and say we’ve gotten one part of that puzzle.”
Part II
Trial
10
Opening Statements
Donald W. Stephens had served as a Wake County Superior Court judge for 27 years, the last ten as “senior resident.” His no-nonsense style and acerbic comments from the bench were well-known to the practicing bar.
He wasn’t averse to sarcasm or even a tongue lashing if, in his judgment,
a lawyer had misstated the law or embellished the facts. He especially frowned on hyper-technical legal arguments that ignored logic and common sense.
Judge Stephens was famous for the “look” he would transmit from his perch on the bench when something had been said or done that displeased him. He would glare icily over the top of his wire-rimmed reading glasses with his piercing, grey-blue eyes, making the lawyers below him want to crawl under the counsel table and hide. He expected—demanded—that attorneys coming before him be prepared, and parties and witnesses respect his authority.
The judge had been involved in the Jason Young case since its inception, signing several search warrants in the immediate aftermath of the murder, conducting status conferences and preliminary proceedings with prosecutors and defense counsel, and also presiding over the hearing that resulted in the civil judgment that declared Jason to be Michelle’s slayer.
Both Jason’s defense team and the prosecution team were composed of a pair of attorneys. Because he had run out of money by the time of his arrest, Jason was no longer able to afford the services of Roger Smith, Jr. To his good fortune, however, Bryan Collins, Wake County’s Public Defender, had been appointed to represent him.
Collins also hailed from the North Carolina mountains, though his hometown of North Wilkesboro was a good 135 miles northeast of Brevard.
Like Alice Stubbs, Collins had received his undergraduate education from Davidson College and obtained his law degree from the UNC School of Law.
After graduating from law school in 1985, Collins began his career, coincidentally enough, at Tharrington Smith. While there, he learned criminal law from Wade and Roger Smith and civil law from a young personal injury attorney named John Edwards—the same John Edwards who would later become a United States Senator and candidate for both Vice President and President before falling from public grace as the result of his own torrid affair.
After a few years at Tharrington Smith, Collins struck out on his own as a criminal-defense lawyer. Because Wake County didn’t yet have a Public Defender, it relied on private practitioners, like Collins, to volunteer to represent indigent defendants at a modest hourly rate paid by the court system. Collins accepted many such indigent cases—in addition to cases in which he was privately paid—and appeared regularly before Judge Stephens and his brethren in Wake County courtrooms.
Collins was a gifted courtroom lawyer. His tall frame and imposing presence complemented his baritone voice and deep Southern twang, which bore an uncanny resemblance to actor Andy Griffith’s. Indeed, his folksy courtroom demeanor was cut from the same cloth as the Matlock character Griffith portrayed in the late 1980s. He was smart, thorough, and quick on his feet.
Collins had developed such a good reputation representing indigent criminal defendants that, when the Wake County Public Defender’s Office was established in 2005, he was the natural choice to fill it. He had served in that role for nearly six years when Jason’s case came on for trial in May 2011.
Collins was joined at the defense counsel table by Mike Klinkosum, an excellent defense attorney in his own right. Ironically, “Klink”—as he was better known among his colleagues in the bar—first became interested in becoming a lawyer marveling at Andy Griffith’s portrayal of a folksy and sharp-witted criminal lawyer during episode after episode of Matlock. And just like Collins, he was reared in the mountains of Wilkes County. The similar roots and upbringing between the defense lawyers and their mountain-boy client allowed them to develop a quick and easy rapport with Jason.
After beginning his career as an Assistant Public Defender in Chicago, Klink returned to Wilkes County, where he had a private, criminal-defense practice for five years, followed by another four as an assistant capital defender—working exclusively on cases in which prosecutors were seeking the death penalty. He joined Collins as an Assistant Public Defender in March 2007. In early 2010, he helped exonerate a man named Greg Taylor, who had spent 17 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
Though he had recently gone back into private practice in Raleigh, Klinkosum agreed to continue representing Jason at the court-appointed rate.
District Attorney Colon Willoughby had assigned Howard Cummings as lead prosecutor shortly after Michelle Young’s murder. When the case came on for trial, however, Cummings was exhausted and needed a break. He had just completed a highly complex eight-week murder trial—in which he had obtained a murder conviction against a man named Brad Cooper, who had also been charged with killing his wife.
As a result, Assistant DA Becky Holt—who had worked with Cummings on Jason’s case from the beginning—was elevated to lead prosecutor.
Holt and Collins had a lot in common. She too grew up in North Carolina, though in Jacksonville, near the beach. She was a sophomore at Davidson College when Collins was a senior and a first-year student at UNC Law when he was a “3L.”
Like Collins, Holt spent her first few years of law practice learning from experienced lawyers at a private law firm in Raleigh. She had built her own reputation over twenty years as a prosecutor, both in Wake County, and for a short stint from 2008 to 2009 with the United States Attorney’s office in Raleigh. Because she had been assigned to Jason’s case since 2006, made several trips to the murder scene and Hampton Inn, and participated in interviews of key witnesses, Holt had mastered the factual details long before Collins had been appointed as Jason’s counsel.
The same, however, could not be said for David Saacks, the Assistant DA who sat beside Holt at the prosecution counsel table. Saacks had joined the Wake County DA’s Office less than a year before Jason’s trial began, after spending eighteen years as a prosecutor in neighboring Durham County. He had been on the prosecution team that had obtained a conviction against Durham novelist Michael Peterson in the “staircase murder” of his wife Kathleen—a case that garnered national and even some international media attention.
Because he had only recently replaced Cummings on the Young case, Saacks was a solid step behind the other lawyers, finding himself drinking from a water cannon as the trial neared.
On June 7, 2011, after a week of jury selection, seven women and five men were empaneled as the group who would eventually deliberate on Jason’s guilt or innocence and render a verdict. Jason—to whom the prosecutors would frequently refer as the “defendant”—sat at the far end of the defense counsel table. He had exchanged his orange-and-white striped jumpsuit for a sharp-looking suit. His hair was neatly cropped—much shorter than the day of his arrest.
The courtroom gallery was packed with spectators filled with anticipation. Pat Young and Jason’s sisters, Kim and Heather, sat in a pew directly behind Collins and Klinkosum. Sergeant Spivey, the lead detective, sat right behind the prosecution counsel table, in front of the gallery. Linda and Meredith sat behind him, in the gallery’s first row. Jack Michaels, the lawyer who helped the pair with the wrongful death case, was one row farther back.
Judge Stephens gave jurors several instructions and admonitions and then asked the State to proceed with its opening statement. Holt stood up, walked over to a lectern centered before the jury, and readied her notes. She looked up, and with a stern expression, began her remarks.
“Michelle … Marie … Fisher … Young … was just 29 years old when she was strangled and brutally beaten to death by her husband, Jason Young, in their bedroom on Birchleaf Drive in the early morning hours of November 3 of 2006. At the time of her murder, Michelle Young was five months pregnant with a little boy that she had already named Rylan. Just down the hall from where she lay was her two-year-old child, her two-year-old daughter Cassidy.”
“After the defendant beat her to death,” Holt continued, “he fled the home and left Cassidy behind. And it was Cassidy Young that found her mother. Cassidy Young placed a doll baby by her mother’s head to comfort her as she lay in a pool of blood in her bedroom. It was Cassidy Young who walked through her mother’s blood into the closet and into the bathroom just down the hall.”
Jason had planned to kill his wife, the prosecutor asserted, because he “didn’t want to be married.” Instead, he wanted “to live as if he were single again, to go to parties, to go to the football games and the tailgates, to get drunk, to spend time with his friends.”
“Things began to get more tense,” Holt contended, after Michelle became pregnant with Rylan and when she tried to make plans for Linda to move down from New York to help take care of their children. “But that was a problem for Jason Young, because Linda Fisher, Michelle’s mother, wasn’t going to put up with his antics. She told him, ‘Don’t mess up your marriage like I messed up mine. Don’t do the things that I did.’”
The Assistant DA told the jury that Linda and Michelle had talked about turning the third floor of the Birchleaf Drive house into a little apartment for Linda. But Jason, she said, “wouldn’t have any of that. Absolutely not.” In the fall of 2006, “pressure began building and building.” There were disagreements about the upcoming holidays, she explained. “Jason wanted to spend Thanksgiving with his family in Brevard, and there was some back and forth about Linda Fisher, Michelle’s mother, and her being invited to go to Brevard. And he said, ‘Absolutely not. She is not going to Brevard.’”
Holt described the four-hour counseling session with Meredith the Friday before Michelle’s murder, noting that all that talking had not resolved the couple’s problems. “So what you’ll learn is that at the end of October and the first of November, that the defendant had a plan. This plan was to murder his wife and get on with his life on his terms.” When Alan Fisher canceled his plans to come to Raleigh on Friday, November 2, she contended, “Jason Young saw his opportunity.”