Murder on Birchleaf Drive

by Steven B Epstein

  While they were on the deck, she said to Jason, “‘I don’t believe that this is real.’ I told him, you know, ‘You can stay here as long as you like. I’m here for you. If you need me to watch Cass or anything, you know, we’re here.’ He ultimately gave me a hug then and shook and made the sounds as if he were crying, but when he pulled away, his eyes were not bloodshot and no tears fell. It seemed to me it was a fake cry.”

  A little later, officers repeated to Meredith—a third time—they needed to speak with Jason, who again refused. This time, she said to him, “‘They just want you to listen to what they have to say. Just listen. You don’t have to go out. Just to listen.’”

  But Jason responded “that he wasn’t willing to have any contact with the police until he had his attorney.” He told her he would discuss the matter with his lawyer the following Monday “and answer any questions that they had once his attorney was present.”

  He later told Meredith, however, his attorney told him not to discuss the matter with anyone, “‘not even you.’” And it wasn’t long thereafter when she concluded, “He killed my sister.”

  Holt shifted gears again to discuss with Meredith the difficulties she and her mother had visiting with Cassidy in the months and years that followed. When their family-law attorney informed them Jason was agreeing to give up custody of his daughter, Meredith testified, “I was shocked. That’s not what I was going for. I wanted visitation. I wanted to be able to see her and have some schedule enforced so that the plug couldn’t be pulled at will.”

  Before turning the witness over to Collins, Holt played the voicemails Jason had left on Meredith’s cell phone the morning of November 2 and early afternoon of November 3. At the prosecutor’s prompting, Meredith told the jury that before those calls, her brother-in-law hadn’t called her on her cell phone a single time since she ended her service as Cassidy’s nanny in the summer of 2005. And Pat Young—who also called Meredith’s cell phone the afternoon of November 3—had never called her before.

  Bryan Collins handled Meredith’s cross-examination. He treated her gingerly, not wanting to give the jury the impression he was pouncing on the victim’s grieving sister. He got Meredith to agree that Michelle could sometimes “scream and holler” at Jason and she “gave just as good as she got” when they fought. She agreed Michelle was “no shrinking violet.” Meredith also confirmed she had informed investigators the day of the murder that she found Cassidy “shockingly clean” in view of all the blood on the second floor.

  The Public Defender then shifted his focus to the morning of the murder. Meredith admitted she was drinking at the Carolina Ale House until after 2:00 a.m. on November 3—perhaps as many as five drinks.

  She conceded her alcohol consumption left her a little concerned about driving home and she therefore sat in the parking lot for a while before driving off. She even considered stopping by her sister’s house, she testified, as she wasn’t sure she could successfully drive all the way back home to Fuquay-Varina.

  She ended up at a Sheetz gas station near her home, where she ordered a pretzel. The security cameras revealed she was there from 3:37 to 3:59 a.m. Even when she finally got home, she didn’t go straight to sleep. Rather, between 4:00 and 4:30 a.m., Meredith testified, she placed calls to her bank and cell phone carrier to pay bills.

  Though Collins didn’t make clear to the jury why he was asking these questions, he was subtly suggesting that Meredith’s own whereabouts at the time of her sister’s murder were unclear. She didn’t arrive at the gas station until 3:37 a.m. The Carolina Ale House closed at 2:00 a.m.

  Had she stopped at her sister’s house—as she acknowledged she was considering? If so, what had she done while she was there? And with all the alcohol she drank, was there the slightest possibility that she had behaved irrationally, perhaps even violently? Jason’s lawyer didn’t ask those questions. He wanted jurors to make—or leap to—their own conclusions.

  Toward the end of his cross-examination, Collins had Meredith recount how she had taken Cassidy to Target the afternoon of the murder to get her some food and buy her new clothes to wear.

  Meredith changed her niece into the new clothes in the Target bathroom, she testified, and brought her pink fleece pajamas and undershirt home to put in the wash. Thus, if Cassidy’s clothes had any blood or DNA on them, Meredith had made it disappear in the wash. Which Collins was perfectly happy to have the jury consider along with the other curious circumstances surrounding Michelle’s younger sister.

  The first day of evidence also included testimony from the Medical Examiner, Dr. Thomas Clark. In response to David Saacks’ questions, Dr. Clark testified a tremendous amount of force had to have been used to cause the deep lacerations to Michelle’s head. He estimated it would have taken at least thirty blows to inflict that much damage.

  Michelle’s jawbone had sustained a very clean, sharp break—the fractured bone had pierced through the skin on her cheek. Most of the wounds, Dr. Clark stated, couldn’t have been made by a hand or fist—though the blow that knocked out her teeth and cut through her lips could have been.

  For the rest of her wounds, he testified, some kind of weapon had to have been used—likely a heavy, blunt object. The Medical Examiner’s opinion was that Michelle’s death had been caused by blunt-force trauma to the head.

  As jurors sat on the edges of their seats, the Medical Examiner displayed one gruesome autopsy photo after another on a large TV monitor, pointing out his findings. Linda and Meredith quietly stepped outside the courtroom, finding the grisly carnage displayed in the photos too much to bear.

  Dr. Clark testified there was extensive hemorrhaging in the soft tissue of Michelle’s neck, in the muscles nearby and around the thyroid gland. That meant her killer had either hit her with a blunt object in that area or wrapped his hands around her neck tightly enough to burst the blood vessels. Michelle also had bruises and swelling on her hands, signs that she had tried to try to deflect her attacker’s blows.

  The Medical Examiner told the jury he also removed a gestational sac that contained a male fetus, approximately twenty weeks in gestation.

  During cross-examination, Mike Klinkosum had Dr. Clark confirm the fingernail marks on Michelle’s neck were most likely made by her own fingers—not her assailant’s—as she attempted to pry his (or her) hands from her neck.

  Oddly, neither Saacks nor Klinkosum asked the Medical Examiner for an approximate time of Michelle’s death. Considering the extremely tight timeline on which the prosecution team was relying, jurors were surely left to wonder why no one asked such an obvious question.

  • • • • •

  The second day of testimony featured Michelle’s best friend, Shelly Schaad. Shelly described her relationship with Michelle, starting from when she was her little sister in the ADP sorority to the pair becoming best friends, roommates, frequent lunch companions, and running partners.

  When Holt asked her to describe Michelle’s relationship with Jason, Shelly responded, “Um, volatile. Good days, bad days, but it seemed to be a lot more bad, then worse. A lot of arguments, I guess is how I would sum it up.” She also testified, “Jason made it very well known that, you know, he was upset about the lack of sex in the relationship.”

  Shelly described the events surrounding her October 2006 wedding—how Michelle was very upset the entire weekend, though tried her best to put on a brave face so as not to spoil her best friend’s festivities. That was in stark contrast to a lunch she had with her during the summer.

  Shelly recalled Michelle as “just bursting at the seams, very happy, and she said, ‘I’m pregnant.’” Michelle was on a similar high on October 26, when she picked up Shelly and Ryan from the airport following their honeymoon in Italy. “She was very happy, you know,” Shelly said. “She was pregnant and … on cloud nine a little bit that night.”

  Holt then focused on the evening of November 2, when Shelly came over with Italian food to catch up with Michelle and watch Grey�
�s Anatomy. The prosecution witness recalled telling Jason there was plenty of food for him, but he responded he planned to stop at a Cracker Barrel for dinner. “I just remember him saying, ‘I’m driving three hours to Virginia’—for some reason Galax stands out in my mind—and then he was getting up and driving two hours the next morning to a 10:30 meeting.”

  Shelly also recalled Jason stopping by while Cassidy was in the bathtub—luggage in hand—before he left the house. They discussed whether he would return in time for the N.C. State game that Saturday. Jason told her his plans were somewhat up in the air, she testified, and hinged on whether Alan Fisher would be able to come down from New Jersey, given his recent prostate cancer diagnosis.

  The Assistant DA asked her witness whether she saw “any interaction between the defendant and Michelle at that time.”

  “Yeah. I mean, I think they gave each other a little, like a hug,” Shelly recalled. “Not like a big bear hug. They said ‘goodbye’ and he left.” She testified that Alan Fisher called not long thereafter and informed his daughter he wouldn’t be coming to Raleigh that weekend after all.

  Shelly found her best friend to be “very sad and very down and for a good reason—her father was just diagnosed with cancer, and we talked a lot about that and then she kind of went into detail a little bit about an argument her and Jason had had. To my knowledge, it was the day before, and Michelle mentioned that, you know, Meredith had mediated a fight for them and it was about Linda and the holidays.”

  She found Michelle’s depression very upsetting. “She was just sad, um, and almost to a point where I just couldn’t reach her,” Shelly told jurors. “She was just in a dark hole and, you know, she just kind of turned off.”

  Shelly also testified about a strange interaction she had with Jason hours after Michelle’s funeral. She had gone to his hotel room to give Cassidy a Barbie doll—unaware that Heather and Joe had already taken her to the mountains. While they spoke, Jason asked her something she found both odd and troubling. “‘If something happens,’” he said, “‘do you think the living will will stand?’”

  During cross-examination, Klinkosum had Shelly confirm she had told investigators that, although Jason wasn’t a great husband, he was a great father. He also got her to acknowledge that though Michelle arrived for her wedding festivities complaining about her difficulties with Jason, that situation improved significantly over the course of the weekend.

  Agreeing with Klink, Shelly testified, “By the end of my wedding, you know, Jason was hanging all over her. He’s like, ‘My wife’s crazy, but I love her.’ That’s what he said.” Finally, Shelly told the jury, when Jason left the Birchleaf Drive home on November 2, she didn’t notice any tension between him and Michelle and saw them embrace as he was leaving—even giving his wife a “peck on the cheek.”

  • • • • •

  Next to take the stand was a succession of witnesses who worked at the Hampton Inn in Hillsville, Virginia in November 2006.

  Keith Hicks, a young man who worked the third shift, testified that sometime between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. on November 3, he noticed an emergency exit door leading to the side parking lot was propped open with a small landscaping rock. He also noticed the security camera facing that door was unplugged. Hicks considered those circumstances “weird.”

  He had worked at the hotel for more than three years and had never seen anything like that before. He kicked the rock out from the doorjamb to make sure it closed and had the maintenance man, Elmer Goad, grab a stepladder to plug the camera back in.

  Then, while scanning the various security camera feeds in the office later that morning, Hicks noticed the same camera was now pointed toward the ceiling. “Someone had come in—I’m assuming it’s whoever unplugged the camera … and they took their hand and they shoved it up into the ceiling,” Hicks testified, adding this discovery gave him an “uneasy feeling.”

  During cross-examination, Collins had the prosecution witness confirm he would have personally placed Jason’s check-out receipt under the door to Room 421 sometime between 3:30 and 4:00 a.m.

  Since the checkout receipt was found in Jason’s Explorer when it was seized later that evening, that had to mean, Collins and Klinkosum would later argue, Jason was in his hotel room that morning.

  Saacks next called Elmer Goad, an older gentleman, who by then had been the maintenance man at the hotel for nine years. He testified he reconnected the security camera—the video feed connection rather than the power—which Hicks had described as being unplugged.

  He then confirmed on the monitor in the office that the camera was pointed at the bottom part of the stairwell, as intended. But within an hour of fixing the camera, the monitor displaying its feed was showing something fuzzy, rather than the stairs.

  When Goad went to investigate the problem, it appeared to him “somebody reached up and smacked it and flicked [it] up.” In his entire nine years at the hotel, that was the only time Goad could recall such an event occurring.

  Saacks also asked the witness about records the hotel kept of when rooms had been accessed with their keycards. Goad confirmed that Jason’s room had been unlocked with a keycard only a single time during his stay, prior to 11:00 p.m. on November 2.

  Jennifer Marshall, the hotel’s general manager, testified next. Saacks had her review documentation confirming Jason didn’t have a reservation that night. Rather, Marshall testified, he was a walk-in.

  • • • • •

  The next morning began with one of the prosecution’s most important witnesses, Gracie Dahms Bailey—recently divorced and now going by “Dahms.”

  Holt was well aware Dahms’s testimony held the potential to win the case for the State, virtually single-handedly. That was because if Jason had been at the Four Brothers BP station in King, North Carolina at 5:30 a.m. on November 3, there was only one explanation for him being there—that he had killed his wife in Raleigh and needed more gas to make it back to the Hampton Inn to preserve his alibi.

  If jurors believed Dahms’s account of Jason cursing and throwing a $20 bill at her, it was pretty much “game over” for his defense.

  But Dahms wasn’t a strong witness—and Holt knew it. She had little formal education and even less poise—precisely why she was working third shift at a gas station in the middle of nowhere that cold November morning.

  She had a very thick, country accent and spoke in monosyllabic language with very little inflection, poor grammar, and somewhat of a speech impediment. The Assistant DA had her work cut out for her. Mike Klinkosum, on the other hand, was licking his proverbial chops, ready to pounce when his turn came.

  Holt asked Dahms whether she recalled anything unusual happening at the gas station during the early morning hours of November 3.

  Her answer well-rehearsed, the convenience-store worker testified, “A white SUV come through. It went to the far pump of the gas station where I couldn’t see what the license plate was or anything—tried to get me to cut the pumps on. I wouldn’t cut the pumps on and he come in. When he come in, he asked me what happened and I told him. I said, ‘Either you got a credit card or ID. I can’t cut the pump on without either one of them.’ And he threw a twenty at me and told me that he was going to get twenty and he only got fifteen. And as soon as he got fifteen, he drooved off, around the McDonald’s to the other exit and out the road.”

  This incident, Dahms told jurors, occurred between 5:00 and 5:30 a.m. She was alerted to the far pump when the man pressed the nearby button three to four times, which repeatedly set off a buzzer inside the store.

  One of her “regulars” was there, she testified, and he stepped outside to tell the man at the pump he had to come inside and pay. When the man finally came inside the store, Dahms said, he was angry. He got right in her face, close enough for her to touch him.

  “He asked me what was up,” she continued, “and I told him, I said, ‘Either you got to have a license or credit card or cash before I was able to cut the pum
ps on,’ and he started cussing at me and stuff. And I told him, I says, ‘Well, that’s my job.’ And he threw a twenty at me.”

  Holt asked the prosecution witness if there were security cameras at the gas station back in November 2006. Though there were, Dahms answered, they weren’t functioning at the time. The prosecutor asked her if some police officers stopped by the gas station a few days later asking about a white SUV. Dahms replied they had, and showed her a picture of a white SUV, which she told them appeared to be the same one she saw on November 3.

  “Did they ask you to look at a photo and see if you recognized a person?” Holt asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the witness responded.

  “Ms. Dahms, as you sit here today, do you recognize the person that came into the Four Brothers convenience store at about 5:00 or 5:30 and cussed at you and had the discussion that you’ve described here today? Do you recognize that person?”

  Dahms replied that she did, and pointed her finger at the defense counsel table, in Jason’s direction. “Let the record show the witness has identified the defendant,” Judge Stephens announced.

  To cement Dahms’s identification, the prosecutor handed her the photo of Jason investigators had shown her on November 6, 2006. Dahms confirmed she told the investigators the person in the photo was the one who cursed and threw a $20 bill at her. With that, Holt turned Dahms over to Klinkosum for cross-examination—and held her breath.

  Right out of the gate, Klink began poking holes in the approach Sheriff’s investigators relied on to get Dahms to identify Jason.

  “Ms. Dahms, before they showed you that photo,” he asked, “they did not ask you to describe the person you saw, correct?”

  Dahms acknowledged she didn’t recall investigators asking her to provide any description.

  Klinkosum followed up by establishing that, in three additional meetings Dahms had with investigators and prosecutors—in April 2009, October 2009, and May 2011—she also wasn’t asked to provide any description. He then directed her—and the jury’s—attention to a pretrial hearing at which she had testified on May 20, just before jury selection began.