Murder on Birchleaf Drive

by Steven B Epstein

  Jason had left his house between 7:00 and 7:30 p.m. the evening of November 2, she told jurors, “purportedly to go out of town.” Holt traced his steps to the Greensboro Cracker Barrel and Hillsville Hampton Inn, where he checked in just before 11:00 p.m. “What you’ll also learn is that an hour later, just before midnight, that the defendant is caught on camera at the Hampton Inn wearing completely different clothes and carrying two bottles of water. What you’ll learn during the course of this case is that the defendant left that hotel and that he went to murder his wife.”

  “But there were a few things that didn’t go according to plan,” the prosecutor told jurors. “He didn’t expect that when he got to that residence that there would be a fight. He didn’t expect that there would be blood.” Jason had planned a surprise attack on Michelle, Holt argued, expecting to “strangle her to death. But that’s not how it happened. He struck her and struck her and there was blood all over the place. He left evidence that he didn’t expect to leave.”

  She recounted Jason’s stop for gas in King, North Carolina on his way back to the hotel. And how the woman inside the convenience store “requires either an ID or a driver’s license or a credit card or cash payment. He becomes irate, he throws a $20 bill at her, and curses at her. He made an impression. She didn’t forget him.”

  Holt described the lengths to which Jason went to sneak out of the hotel without anyone noticing. How he propped the back door open with a rock and unplugged the security camera in the stairwell. How, after hotel staff had plugged the camera back in, “it had been pushed up so it no longer was facing the door to capture the image of anyone that came through.”

  “The defendant had a plan. His plan was to murder his wife. His plan was to get away with it,” Holt concluded. “Listen to the evidence in this case that’s presented over the next couple of weeks. Find the defendant guilty of first-degree murder. Don’t let him get away with it.”

  Klinkosum delivered the opening statement for the defense. He placed his notes on the lectern, walked a bit to his right, and then held up his right hand, palm facing the jury. “Right now, none of you can say you’ve seen my hand,” he began. “Now I know all of you are sitting there going, ‘What is he talking about? He’s holding his hand up right in front of us.’”

  “The reason I say none of you can say you’ve seen my hand is because none of you can say you’ve seen my hand,” he continued, turning the back side of his hand to face the jury, “until you’ve seen the other side of it. Ladies and gentlemen, Jason Lynn Young did not murder his wife. He did not murder their unborn son, and this case has not been solved.”

  Klinkosum focused first on the two distinct sets of shoeprints in the master bedroom, “one belonging to a shoe that they believe was a size 12 and that they tried to match to shoes Mr. Young once owned, but also a size 10 Franklin athletic shoe, a size of shoe two sizes smaller than what Mr. Young wears.”

  He told the jury that Jason’s sister, Kim, had hired an investigator named Dr. Maurice Godwin to examine the crime scene after investigators had released it. Between Kim and Dr. Godwin, he stated, they located one of Michelle’s teeth investigators had missed as well as a hair found on a picture frame. He foreshadowed that a witness from the SBI would testify that the hair had been ripped out of someone’s head, but that its DNA profile matched neither Jason’s nor Michelle’s.

  That wasn’t all the investigators had missed, Klink added. Dr. Godwin also found two cigarette butts in the house, one in the garage and another in the doorway leading into the kitchen, both of which were sent to the SBI for testing. Pausing for emphasis, Jason’s lawyer told jurors that “the DNA came back to two separate male individuals who have not been identified.”

  There was even more evidence that didn’t fit the prosecution’s theory, he continued, noting the jewelry box with two missing drawers was swabbed for DNA and, “just recently, the prosecution sent those DNA swabs to LabCorp, a genetic testing company … and what they found was that it was a mixture of DNA, containing at least two individuals whose DNA doesn’t match Michelle and it doesn’t match Jason.”

  Klinkosum then grabbed an enlarged North Carolina roadmap to show the jury that Hillsville, Virginia is nearly a three-hour drive from the Youngs’ home in Raleigh.

  Pointing to the map, he continued, “They’re going to try to convince you that he drove almost three hours to Hillsville, Virginia, stayed up there for about an hour … and then drove almost three hours back to his house, beat his wife to death in the most brutal and bloody way possible, that his little girl Cassidy walked around in this blood so much so that whoever did this must have picked her up or walked her to her bathroom across the hall, set her down and she made little footprint impressions in her mother’s blood in her bathroom.”

  “They’re going to try and convince you that he made this three-hour trip back,” Klink stated, “did all that, cleaned himself up, cleaned her up, got her back to bed somehow and then got in his Ford Explorer and went back to Hillsville, Virginia, without getting one drop of blood in his Ford Explorer … without getting any blood anywhere in his hotel room, and without transferring any fibers from the carpet of the hotel room back into his house.”

  Klinkosum then shifted gears to acknowledge Jason’s shortcomings, suggesting the prosecution would try to convict his client because he wasn’t a great husband. Confronting that likelihood, he told jurors that the defense team agreed Jason wasn’t a good husband—not at all. “He could be obnoxious. He could be juvenile. He would get drunk at parties and embarrass his wife.” At times, Klink conceded, Jason acted “like an immature jerk. That’s the only way to describe some of the things he did. It’s the only way to describe it but that does not make him a killer.”

  But there was also another side to Jason, his attorney explained. “He was a great father.” That came across in the interviews conducted by Sheriff’s investigators—even from those who considered Jason to be a jerk. Why was that important? Klinkosum asked. Because the prosecution wanted to convince the jury “that he killed his wife in the most brutal way possible while his child was in that house, let her walk around in the blood, and then cleaned her up and left her in the house for her to be found almost ten hours later.”

  He then transitioned to the evening of November 2, 2006, and Jason’s internet searches to find his wife a Coach purse for their third anniversary. He told the jury Jason had taken grief because he hadn’t done much for their anniversary other than give Michelle a card. Both Linda and Meredith had given his client a hard time about his lack of thought, Klink explained. “And so, because this was the leather anniversary, he thought it would be a neat thing if he got her a leather Coach purse. He prints off these eBay papers just to get examples and leaves them there. He forgets about it because he’s busy packing.”

  Jason left about 7:30 p.m. that night, he continued, and drove to Hillsville, Virginia. At about midnight, “he went out to his car to get some more paperwork, smoke a cigar—because Michelle didn’t like him smoking cigars in the house—and so he snuck a cigar while he was in Hillsville, and then he went back to his room and went to sleep. Got up the next morning and made the trek to Clintwood, Virginia.”

  After his sales meeting, Klinkosum told jurors, Jason headed toward his family’s home in Brevard, refueled, and, at some point, remembered he left the eBay printouts on the printer. He called Meredith, whom he knew had a key to the house, and asked her to retrieve the printouts before Michelle saw them.

  Jason’s attorney then told jurors how Meredith found Michelle’s body and how Cassidy popped out from under the covers. “You’ve heard, ladies and gentlemen, that she walked around in the blood, that she had blood on her feet, and that there was blood in her bathroom from her footprints but, oddly enough, when Meredith found her she was clean, she didn’t have any blood on her feet, there was no blood on the side of Jason’s bed where, according to Meredith, she popped out from.”

  He described how Jason lear
ned of Michelle’s death later that afternoon, when he arrived at his mother’s home in Brevard. Painting the picture, Klinkosum told the jury that his mom “put her arms around him, she said, ‘We love you,’ and he looked at her and said, ‘What’s up?’ and she told him that his wife was dead. And the man dropped to his knees and started sobbing, and one of the first things he said was, ‘My little boy is gone. My little boy is gone.’”

  While Jason and his family were on their way back to Raleigh, Klink explained, they received a call from Ryan Schaad alerting Jason that “law enforcement is already investigating this, they’ve been investigating it for several hours.” Even more alarming, Ryan told him, “‘They think you did it. They’re looking at you as a suspect. You need to get a lawyer—you need to get a lawyer before you talk with them.’ And that’s exactly what Jason did. And his lawyer told him, ‘Do not talk to the police.’”

  And in the days and weeks that followed, not only did Jason have to endure Michelle’s funeral—where he was throwing up in the bathroom—“he also endured a lot more,” Klinkosum added. The police were constantly making him and his lawyers aware they wanted to speak with him. The press “descended on him.” There were media trucks parked outside his house. He had to get a new cell phone because he was getting so many calls.

  “It got so bad that people started blogging about this case—they started writing blogs about him. They started driving by 5108 Birchleaf and taking pictures. And also his family’s home in Brevard. People were posting pictures of both houses on the internet. And at that point,” Klink stated, “he just shut down. He knew people were after him—the mob wanted him and he shut down and he didn’t talk to anybody.”

  The prosecution would make a “big deal about him not talking to the police and that he didn’t cooperate,” Klinkosum predicted. “Well, it’s true, he didn’t talk to them—he followed his lawyer’s advice to the letter and he didn’t talk to them.” But Jason, he noted, did cooperate with “non-testimonial identification orders for him to give hair samples, saliva samples, blood samples.”

  “They brought him down to the City-County Bureau of Investigation and took pictures of him. And at one point during that process, they had him strip naked—naked, no underwear, nothing—make him stand up straight and they took pictures of his naked body from all angles. And not once, not once did he ask his lawyers to stop this, to try and do something to stop any of this. Not once.”

  The defense lawyer tried to take the sting out of one of the punches he knew the State would land. He told the jury his client was having an affair with Michelle Money, his wife’s friend. And that on his way to Virginia the night before the murder, he was on the phone with Money constantly.

  “You’re going to hear that she was having problems with her marriage, he was having problems with his marriage, and they kind of were sounding boards for each other about what was going on and they had a sexual relationship. That doesn’t make him a killer, ladies and gentlemen,” he insisted.

  Klinkosum suggested it was okay for jurors to dislike Jason because of his affair. And because his wife was pregnant during the affair. “It’s okay to not like him, maybe even despise him for the things you’re going to hear when he was acting like an immature jerk. But that while he may not have loved his wife like a lot of us think of love, he did love her in a way. She was the mother of his little girl. She was the mother of little Cassidy and they were trying to make it right.”

  He told jurors they would also hear about a different side of Jason, about the emails he and Michelle would send each other joking about their communication issues, “where she would say things to him about, ‘I wish we could talk like this when we’re face-to-face,’ and he would say, ‘I know, and I really want to work things out ‘cause I do love you, JY.’ That’s how he ended his emails.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, at the end of this case,” Klink concluded, “when you look at everything, when you look at this case in the objective light of day and realize there’s no physical evidence linking him to this, you’re going to understand, ladies and gentlemen, that this man did not murder his wife and his unborn child, and you’re going to be compelled to find him not guilty. Thank you.”

  The themes on which each side would rely throughout the trial were now established. The prosecution would focus on Jason’s relationships—with Michelle, Linda, and Money—and his desire to live a life unshackled from responsibility and adulthood.

  The defense, while candidly conceding Jason’s flaws as a husband, would focus on the forensic evidence—the absence of evidence connecting him to the crime scene as well as the presence of evidence that pointed in other directions.

  The battle lines now drawn, it was time for the State to attempt to convince the jury that Jason Young was the monster who had savagely bludgeoned his wife to death.

  11

  Evidence Begins

  By long-standing custom, trial attorneys in North Carolina examine witnesses while seated at counsel table, rather than standing at a podium or roaming the courtroom like Perry Mason—or Ben Matlock.

  Thus, when Becky Holt called Meredith Fisher as the State’s first witness, she remained planted in her seat next to David Saacks, her notes carefully spread out before her. She plodded slowly and deliberately through the myriad of topics she planned to cover with Michelle’s younger sister.

  Meredith testified about growing up in Sayville, New York, her parents’ divorce, Michelle going off to college at N.C. State and obtaining her master’s degree in accounting, and the progression of her career from Deloitte & Touche to Progress Energy. She described her own relationship with Michelle growing up, fighting like “sisters do, but we always got along, we always, you know, teamed up when it counted.” They became closer as adults, she noted.

  She told the jury about her sister’s involvement in the ADP sorority and the McBroads’ clique, including how the group stayed close following college and would attend each other’s weddings and vacation together. She described how Michelle was a planner and would, “in every area of her life, in work, at home, really tried to think things through.”

  Meredith testified she relocated from New York to Raleigh the day Cassidy was born. She agreed to be Cassidy’s nanny for a year while working nights at the Lucky 32 restaurant, hoping to enroll in a master’s program in social work. She lived with Jason and Michelle in their

  Arete Way townhome the first three months, she told jurors, before moving to an apartment. Her mother briefly relieved her of nanny duties in July 2004. After Linda retired from teaching in June 2006, Meredith testified, she wanted to purchase a beach house on the Outer Banks. Michelle was planning to reduce her work schedule to Tuesday through Thursday once Rylan was born. The plan was for their mother to care for Cassidy and Rylan on days Michelle was working. Linda would then return to the beach or stay with Meredith on days her elder daughter was off.

  Holt led her witness through the tensions building up between her sister and brother-in-law during 2006. Meredith testified that “they just would continue to fight and not be able to resolve problems. Michelle would ask me if I would mind kind of playing the role of counselor after they had been to marriage counseling that hadn’t worked.”

  Because Meredith was planning to specialize in marriage counseling, Michelle thought it would be good practice for her sister to help her work through her problems with her husband—even though Meredith believed those problems were significant enough to require a professional, she agreed.

  She told jurors, “Michelle’s main issues were Jason being more responsible, helping out around the house, understanding her more. And his main concern was their lack of sex life, and that Michelle would immediately, after an argument, either call my mom or me. That made him mad, too.”

  Jason confided in her, she told the jury, saying, “‘Sometimes I just want to throw in the flag and forget it and divorce her.’” But he would ultimately conclude that “it would be even worse being divorced from
her.”

  For her part, Michelle “really wanted to make it work,” Meredith added. “She didn’t want Cassidy to grow up with divorced parents. She wanted to at least give it a good effort.”

  Holt eventually turned to the events of November 3, 2006. Meredith testified she was awakened by her cell phone ringing at 12:14 p.m. that afternoon. In his voicemail, Jason asked her to go to his house to retrieve some papers he had inadvertently left on the printer, so they wouldn’t spoil his surprise about the Coach purse he had been planning to buy for Michelle.

  When she got to her sister’s home, Meredith recounted, she noticed several unusual things outside the house and then red streaks on the walls and footprints on the floor. She then turned and saw her sister’s lifeless body beside the bed. Fighting back tears, she testified Cassidy popped out from under the covers and stared at her. “She said, ‘Mommy has boo-boos everywhere. She needs a washcloth,’ and she kept asking for band-aids to help mommy and her boo-boos.”

  Through a steady stream of tears, Meredith described her call with the 911 dispatcher and her fruitless efforts to aid her sister. When the Assistant DA played the 911 recording for the jury, the courtroom fell dead silent, while Meredith sobbed softly.

  Holt then shifted to Meredith’s interactions with Jason at her home later that evening. She testified that not long after Jason and his family arrived, and after he had gone to lie down with Cassidy in her bedroom, the police came to her front door. They wanted to speak with Jason. She went back to her room, where her brother-in-law was lying in her bed with her niece, and informed him the police wanted to speak with him. But Jason responded that he was staying right where he was, Meredith told the jury.

  When officers later insisted they had to speak with Jason, she went back to her room a second time and asked to speak with him on the back deck.