“And one of the things you were asked was, ‘Was he bald- headed or did he have hair,’ correct?”
“Correct,” the witness responded.
“And your answer was, ‘I think he had a little bit. I can’t remember right off the bat.’ That was your answer, correct, about the hair?”
“Right,” Dahms agreed.
The defense lawyer then got her to admit that, at the pretrial hearing, she couldn’t recall anything about the man’s hair color. Finally, he reminded Dahms she was also asked at the hearing whether she remembered anything about the man’s height or weight.
“And you said, ‘He was just a little bit taller than me,’ correct?”
“Correct,” she responded.
“About how tall are you, Ms. Dahms?”
“I’m about five foot.”
“So this person was a little bit taller than you,” Klinkosum asked again, for emphasis.
“Yes,” she replied, as Klink glanced at the jury box with a wry smile, hoping jurors understood how badly he had just undermined her testimony that Jason—a lanky six foot one—was the customer she saw that morning.
During her redirect examination, Holt did her level best to bolster Dahms’s identification.
“Why did you remember your dealings with the defendant on that day?” she asked.
“I don’t forget anybody that cusses me,” Dahms responded. “I’ve been through my ex cussing me and stuff like that, so I don’t forget nothing like that.”
Holt ended by asking her whether she was “sure that the defendant sitting here today is the same man that came into your store early morning hours of November the 3 and cussed you out because you wouldn’t turn on the gas pump?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Dahms answered, nodding her head, trying to project confidence.
Having completed her testimony, the State’s star witness stood up and walked down from the witness stand, a mere 53 minutes after swearing to tell the truth. Whether she had in fact done so, however, would surely be the subject of intense discussion and debate when the jury finally was set free to deliberate on its verdict.
12
Other Women
Michelle Money would have preferred to have been any other place on Earth. Yet on June 14, 2011, she found herself on the witness stand in a Wake County courtroom, Jason Young staring at her from one side of the room, and Linda and Meredith Fisher from the other. Not to mention the dozens of spectators or the TV camera that would capture every word of her testimony and stream it live across the internet. She had been dreading this day for years.
As she took her seat, Money’s evenly-parted, light-brown hair fell naturally upon her shoulders, framing her long, oval-shaped face. She wore just a hint of eye shadow and dangling earrings. While discussing her background, she flashed a broad smile as she recalled first being attracted to N.C. State by North Carolina’s warm weather. She quickly settled into the rhythm of Becky Holt’s questioning, projecting considerable poise and composure.
Money testified she and Michelle Fisher “hit it off” from the moment they met on the rush bus, as they realized they shared the same name and were both from Long Island. Their sorority sisters at ADP affectionately referred to Money as “Little Michelle” and Michelle as “Big Michelle” or “Fish.” The McBroads’ clique would occasionally substitute “McBroad” as their own surnames, she testified—Michelle Fisher was therefore “Fish McBroad.”
She described Michelle as “very loving and very caring,” “very organized,” and “meticulous.”
Money first met Jason when he attended her wedding in 2001 as Michelle’s date. Yet she didn’t get to really know him until 2006, when spouses and children were first invited to attend McBroads’ beach trips.
They both attended a Myrtle Beach outing during May 2006, and then again around the July 4 holiday. During the latter, Money testified, she confided in Alexis Anderson and Jason she was having troubles in her marriage to her husband Steve and suspected he might be having an affair.
Some of the McBroads next got together in Raleigh for the N.C. State-Boston College football game in late September, Money said, noting they all stayed at the Youngs’ Birchleaf Drive home.
While playing hide and seek that Friday night in the backyard, she found herself in the same hiding spot as Jason. They started chatting about her marriage, she testified. Jason “seemed to be fairly concerned and very supportive.”
The next day, Money told the jury, Jason told her he had observed “several interactions” between Steve Money and one of the McBroads that “confirmed my worries of an inappropriate relationship.”
By the time she was back home in Florida, she found herself talking to Jason every day. “It basically grew very quickly,” Money explained. “We just started talking all day about anything—football, potty training, mortgages—anything that you would talk to a friend about.” As their conversations continued, Money confessed, “Jason and I expressed interest to be more than friends.”
They discussed the possibility of him coming to Florida for a visit, as Jason had already reserved the weekend of October 7-8 for a guys’ outing in Wilmington, North Carolina. He could just tell Michelle a business trip to Florida had suddenly come up instead, Money testified. They vacillated for several days about whether his coming to Florida was a good idea, but ultimately decided they really wanted to see each other.
“He flew in on a Saturday,” Money recalled, “and I believe that, as late as Thursday night, I was saying, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t come. This is wrong.’”
The prosecution witness testified she and Jason spent the entire weekend together while her husband was at a NASCAR race in Alabama. “We basically just hung out at the house,” she told the jury, “and we had an intimate relationship for the two days that he was there.” Holt didn’t ask her for more graphic details. Considering the subject, Money didn’t volunteer any.
Not long after that weekend, she and Jason discussed the possibility of getting together again the first weekend in November when her husband was next scheduled to be away.
The primary reason that didn’t happen, Money explained, was because Jason “had a business meeting that he said he couldn’t get out of.” She also knew he and Michelle would be staying at her house after their trip to Disney World in mid-November, when all of the McBroads were planning to gather in Orlando for a spa weekend to celebrate their thirtieth birthdays.
Ironically, when Jason called Money on his way to the Hampton Inn the evening of November 2, she was watching Grey’s Anatomy. She recalled their conversation being interrupted by two calls Jason received on his end—one from Michelle and a second from Meredith.
After Jason arrived at the hotel, he and Money spoke again, the call ending with Jason telling her he was about to go to sleep. She called him once more, she told jurors, just to say “good night.” Although Jason didn’t pick up then, he called back a couple of minutes later, told her that he was sorry he missed her call, and said “good night.”
Money next spoke with Jason the following morning, she said, while he was on his way to his sales meeting at the hospital. During that call, they discussed the Coach purse printouts Jason had left on his home printer—he told Money he didn’t want his wife to see them.
Later that afternoon, during another conversation following Jason’s sales meeting, he told her he had asked Meredith to retrieve the printouts. Money recalled that Jason “sounded a little bit distracted” during that conversation “and I don’t know if frustrated is the right word, but he didn’t get the account. The hospital wasn’t looking for what he was proposing to them.”
When she learned of Michelle’s death later that evening, Money testified, she immediately booked a flight and traveled to Raleigh early the next morning. She and other members of the McBroads gathered at Meredith’s house. She recalled hugging Jason on the front porch, though not much about their conversation.
Later that month, when the McBroads were in Orlando fo
r their spa weekend, Money told jurors, Wake County Sheriff’s officers showed up unexpectedly and took the fingerprints of each woman. Detectives confronted her about the more than 400 phone calls and text messages she had exchanged with Jason in the weeks leading up to Michelle’s murder.
She told them everything they wanted to know about the affair, she testified.
As Holt neared the end of her direct examination, she asked Money about a meeting she had with Jason in Myrtle Beach in June 2007—over six months after his wife’s death. The two sat on the beach talking for hours, Money testified. Jason confided in her that “some days were harder than others.” They discussed how some people had taken to the internet “saying things that were just absurd and not true.”
Holt asked her witness why she had met with Jason.
“I really felt that he was the only one that suffered the way I suffered,” Money explained, “in the sense of just that trauma of the media showing up at my home and invading my life and, I don’t know, I kind of felt like I needed closure, actually needed to like see him and talk to him and know it was okay.”
After that meeting, she and Jason continued to have contact by phone, occasionally talking about Michelle.
Money finally cut off all contact with Jason in January 2008, she told jurors, after an SBI agent dropped by her Florida home and told her she was an “idiot.” The agent told her, “I needed to never speak to him again,” she recalled, “and I was going to get myself in trouble if I did. And I sent Jason a text message saying I needed to put my life first and I can’t do this. And he wrote back that he understood.”
During his cross-examination, Mike Klinkosum had Money focus on the media frenzy to which she and her family had been subjected in the months following Michelle’s murder. She testified how “the national TV shows started to put my name up there, ‘the other woman,’ and all this kind of stuff and it was just horrible, I mean, it just broke me, broke me down to feel, I don’t know, so violated.”
Klink drilled down deeper on her interaction with the SBI agent who told her she was an idiot for speaking with Jason. She recounted being told that “he would take me down as an accessory if I continued to have contact with Jason.” The defense lawyer also had Money confirm that, in all of her communications with Jason the day before and day of Michelle’s murder, “it was just regular Jason,” not someone who appeared to be plotting a murder—or who had just committed one.
All in all, Money’s testimony turned out to be less than advertised, as Holt ultimately left several arrows in her quiver. She never showed Money—or the jury—the email Jason sent her six days before the murder, gushing:
i feel lucky just to know you, much less love you, but i do.
And that whatever “pain in my future” their affair might cause, “you are so worth it, even if it’s only for a ‘blink’ in time.”
The Assistant DA didn’t review with Money the phone records that demonstrated the increasing frequency and duration of her communications with Jason in the days leading up to the murder. Even Money’s description of their sexual activity was so brief and innocuous, it barely would have qualified for a PG-13 rating.
• • • • •
It was evident from the moment Carol Anne Sowerby took the witness stand she was a tortured soul. She was choking back tears before Holt asked her first question, painful discomfort etched into her face. She knew she was moments away from revealing a dark, shameful secret she had been suppressing for nearly five years.
Sowerby discussed meeting Jason as a six-year-old camper when he was her kayaking instructor. She stumbled through Holt’s background questions, unable to recall precisely when she transferred from the University of Georgia to the University of Montana or when she graduated. She testified she had seen Jason four to five times between moving to Montana and Michelle’s death.
The prosecutor quickly pivoted to Sowerby’s visit to Raleigh in October 2006—less than two weeks before the murder—and asked if she had met Michelle prior to that visit. Oddly, that question evoked a puddle of emotions, with Sowerby having difficulty getting the words out. Finally, through her streaming tears, she was able to say, “I was excited to meet Michelle and Cassidy.”
The prosecution witness told the jury Michelle was on a business trip when she arrived in Raleigh. She described how, on her first night at the Youngs’ Birchleaf Drive home, she had fallen asleep on the couch. When Jason woke her, he was laughing and told Sowerby to go look in the mirror. She told the jury, “There was like marker drawn on my face.”
Holt then asked her what had happened the following night. Sowerby immediately hung her head, in obvious shame, and began sobbing, raw emotion bubbling to the surface. The courtroom fell silent as she struggled, for what seemed like an eternity, to respond.
Finally, she raised her head just long enough to reveal, with a contorted, painful expression, she and Jason had sex on the living room couch while Cassidy was asleep upstairs. Her body began to quaver, her head sank low again, and she continued to sob.
Holt soldiered on, asking Sowerby if she and Jason discussed keeping their indiscretion a secret from her husband.
“I remember telling him that we couldn’t tell him because I didn’t want to hurt him,” she responded, revealing she hadn’t told her husband until just before the trial.
The Assistant DA then shifted to the topic of a dinner at the Youngs’ home a couple of nights later, after Michelle had returned. Sowerby testified that while they were seated at the table, Jason asked to see her wedding ring.
He then took the ring, put it in his mouth, and either pretended to swallow it or actually did—she wasn’t sure which. When she asked for the ring back, Jason said she couldn’t get it back until it passed. Though he gave it back the next morning, he wouldn’t give her a straight answer as to whether he had actually swallowed the ring and retrieved it from his stool.
Treading very gingerly, Klinkosum had Sowerby acknowledge Jason had told her Michelle was an “unbelievable mother.”
“It seemed that Cassidy meant everything to him,” she told jurors, “and he talked about how excited he was about being a dad … because it was such an amazing experience.”
Three questions into Holt’s redirect examination, Sowerby broke down again, this time sobbing uncontrollably. As an act of mercy, the prosecutor abruptly ended her questioning.
• • • • •
The State then called Genevieve Jacobs Cargol to the stand.
Before Cargol even had a chance to state her name, Collins jumped to his feet, seeking permission to approach the bench. In their sidebar, the Public Defender explained to Judge Stephens that the defense intended to object to much of her testimony as being unfairly prejudicial to Jason.
To prevent that prejudice, he insisted, the judge would first need to hear her proffered testimony outside the presence of the jury. Reluctantly, the judge excused the jury so that the State could preview her testimony.
With the jury out of earshot, Holt began her questioning.
Cargol testified she became engaged to Jason in October 1999. Later that year, she and Jason traveled to Grapevine, Texas to attend a wedding. Prior to the trip, the couple had reached an agreement that Jason wouldn’t drink very much because his behavior had been “out of control when he was drinking,” she testified. But at lunch the day before the wedding, a friend challenged him to go “beer to beer,” and he drank heavily.
Cargol sensed that her fiancé was unhappy with her for judging the amount he was drinking, recalling, “He had a scowl on his face.”
When they got back to the hotel, Jason immediately passed out on one of the two beds in their room. After he awoke, she began questioning him about why he had broken their agreement about drinking.
Jason became irate, telling her, “If I’m going to be such a horrible husband, give me back my ring.” Cargol couldn’t oblige Jason’s request, she testified, because her engagement ring was too small and wouldn’t come
off her finger.
Jason started grabbing her hand, attempting to pull off the ring. His fiancée tried in vain to get away from him.
“I didn’t get very far,” she testified. “He grabbed me by the arms and the shoulder and began throwing me around the room … I was thrown from one bed to the other, kind of slipping in between and trying to get back to the beds because I felt I’d be safer that way. And he was jumping on top of me, repeatedly pinning my arms as far as they would go behind me.”
She recalled crying, yelling, screaming, “and begging him to get off of me.” Jason eventually pulled the ring hard enough to remove it, cutting her finger in the process. They continued to struggle, with Cargol climbing on Jason’s back and putting him in a choke hold until he finally relented.
For a moment, she stayed in the room, sobbing in disbelief about what she had just been through. She then ran out of the room to find refuge in a friend’s room. Cargol testified she had bruises on her body from the fight. Though she stayed in Texas with Jason and attended the wedding with him, she broke off their engagement two weeks later.
She acknowledged, however, they continued to date off and on for another year or so.
Holt asked whether, during the altercation, Cargol had noticed anything unusual about Jason’s face or his expression. She responded that Jason’s “eyes were blank. There was no emotion there. I felt that his eyes were glazed over.”
Eventually, Cargol testified, she moved to the Washington, D.C. area to attend graduate school. While living there, she received a group email—on which Jason was also included—about an upcoming Wolfpack football game at the University of Maryland.
Even though he knew she was in a committed relationship with her boyfriend Eric, Jason emailed Cargol separately prior to the game, propositioning her to spend time alone with him in his hotel room. She rejected his overture. The morning of the football game, Jason spoke with her by phone to let her know he would be attending the game with his girlfriend—Michelle Fisher—whom he had been dating.
Murder on Birchleaf Drive Page 14