During cross-examination, however, he agreed with Klinkosum that, despite that argument, Jason and Michelle appeared to be getting along just fine later that weekend.
“Like nothing had happened, right?” Klink asked.
“That’s probably how I would describe it, yes,” Fitzgerald agreed.
The defense lawyer also asked Fitzgerald about a visit he and a couple of Jason’s friends made to the Youngs’ Birchleaf Drive home after the crime scene had been released. Jason’s sister Kim was also there at the time. Klinkosum asked if Kim had shared with him any information about what she had found in the house. Fitzgerald replied Jason’s sister told him she had found what appeared to be a tooth in one of the bloody areas in the master bedroom.
“And this was after the crime scene had been released?” Klink asked, hoping the jury would recognize the apparent sloppiness exhibited by investigators.
“Yes,” Fitzgerald replied.
• • • • •
The time had finally come for Linda Fisher to take the stand. She had been fighting for justice for Michelle for more than four and a half years. It had been a long, frustrating journey. Above all else, she wanted the jury to get to know her daughter. Nearly as important, she wanted jurors to understand the deeply troubled nature of her marriage.
Linda described Michelle’s childhood, her migration to North Carolina to attend N.C. State, her education, and her career in accounting. When she learned her daughter was pregnant, and Jason had asked her to marry him, Linda told him bluntly, she testified, “‘If you don’t love her, then don’t marry her. She will survive.’”
By 2006, Linda was keenly aware of the difficulties in her daughter’s marriage. She told the jury—in her thick New York accent—Michelle “seemed to be more unhappy than happy. She was always talking negative about things. Things weren’t going right. And then, when a date came that something was good, she was just like, ‘Oh, you should see how great it was.’ And then it was gone.”
Linda explained she and Alan were in marriage counseling for thirteen years, off and on, and she didn’t want Michelle to have to go through that.
Jason and Michelle “were always arguing,” she testified. “It felt like there was no sweetness between the two of them. Most of the time, you know, Michelle would call me and tell me about a different fight. But in terms of actually witnessing, you know, I did see them fight more than I saw them being nice to each other.”
She told the jury she spoke with her son-in-law about the state of his marriage. “He had said to me that ‘things aren’t good because she doesn’t want to have sex’ … and I was telling him, you know, that you don’t want to go down the path of having another woman on the side and, you know, it would definitely end the marriage; there would be no hope.”
She also told him, “You can’t just expect sex without, you know, love.”
Michelle had confided in her mother that Jason didn’t “make love” to her when they had sex, but “was rather perverted in his behavior.”
Holt asked whether she had seen a change in Michelle over time. “She was defeated,” the former schoolteacher replied, becoming increasingly emotional. “She had so much to offer. There was so much about Michelle that was just … She was an N.C. State cheerleader. I mean, she had that pep, that energy, that vivacious …” Her answer trailed off as tears began streaming down her face. But Linda wasn’t just sad. She was angry. “She loved life and he took it away from her—just took it away from her,” she sobbed.
The prosecutor asked Linda to describe how she learned of Michelle’s death. She was driving home from getting her hair done, she responded, when Meredith called and told her Michelle was “D. E. A. D.” She had spelled out the word because Cassidy was listening.
Sobbing once again, she continued, “And I’m like, ‘What do you mean? That can’t be. Did she just pass out? Maybe she just passed out.’”
But Meredith insisted that Michelle was in fact dead. Linda testified she caught the first flight out of New York and was at Meredith’s home in Fuquay-Varina—which she had recently purchased for her younger daughter—when Jason and his family arrived.
“What do you recall about when he got there?” Holt asked.
“Like cold air,” Linda answered, in a disgusted tone. “There was no hugging. There was no ‘Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry.’ There was no crying. It appeared to me when I looked at him, his head was down and he looked like a five-year-old boy.”
“Did you try to talk with him or have any conversation with him?” Holt followed up.
Bitterness now rolling off her tongue, Jason’s mother-in-law replied, “I tried to talk to him and he told me, ‘My lawyer told me I can’t talk to anyone, not even you.’ And that’s a quote. And he also said, ‘I’m going to take a hit on the house.’ Those are the two things he said to me. Period.”
After the funeral, Linda testified, she invited everyone back to Meredith’s house. Jason didn’t accept the invitation. “I could understand them not coming back at that point to the house,” she explained. “But just to take Cassidy away—like they just took her away. She was gone. That I couldn’t accept.”
Linda described the difficulties she and Meredith had visiting with Cassidy. While at Pat Young’s home in Brevard one day, “we were given an ultimatum,” she told the jury, “and what we needed to do was to stand behind Jason. And if we didn’t stand behind him, they were going to cut off all visits with Cassidy.”
From that point forward, Linda said, not only was Jason denying them visitation with Cassidy, so was Pat. “And anything that I ever asked of Pat was like, ‘Well, I have to check with Jason first, you know. He is the parent.’ I understand that but, you know, for another grandmother not to understand you want to be with your grandchild, my only grandchild, I can’t understand that. I just can’t understand how she could do that to me.”
As she neared the end of her direct examination, Holt asked the former schoolteacher if she had discussed with her daughter the topic of divorce.
“Yes,” Linda answered.
“And what did you tell her?”
“You know, she deserved to be happy and she was not. She just—there was a void in her and I hated seeing her like that. And I know, like, divorce is not the answer for, you know, right away, you know. You want to try to work on it. You want to try to make it better. But they’ve gone three years, and three years, they were not headed in the right direction.”
“Did you express those feelings to your daughter?” the Assistant DA asked.
“Absolutely,” Linda replied.
Collins cross-examined Linda for only a few minutes. He asked her whether she had told detectives Jason was a great dad. She responded by saying, “Jason loved to play with Cassidy. He was down on the ground with her or out with the swings or on a bike ride. Yes, he loved to play with Cassidy.” But she wouldn’t give Jason—or his family—the satisfaction of agreeing that made him a great dad.
Mike Schilawski, Linda and Meredith’s family-law attorney, testified next. He told the jury about their numerous attempts to establish a schedule of visitation with Cassidy—all of which were unsuccessful.
Holt led him through the filing of the custody lawsuit and Jason’s eventual agreement to enter into a consent order that transferred Cassidy’s custody to Meredith.
She asked Schilawski whether, had no agreement been reached, Jason would have been required to testify under oath about the circumstances surrounding Michelle’s death. And whether Jason could have been subjected to a psychological examination.
Schilawski testified that in the normal course of affairs, he would have pursued both avenues. Jason’s agreement to give up custody of Cassidy, he explained, was conditioned on him not having to testify or be subjected to a psychological examination.
• • • • •
Sergeant Richard Spivey was the State’s 37th and final witness. Holt had him walk the jury through video footage obtained from the Cracke
r Barrel in Greensboro, Hampton Inn in Hillsville, and the various gas stations at which Jason purchased gas. The Cracker Barrel video was the only one in color. As that video proceeded frame by frame, the detective pointed to Jason’s brown, slip-on, casual leather shoes.
Holt questioned him extensively about video footage from the Hampton Inn. The first video segment showed Jason at the hotel’s front desk just before 11:00 p.m. Sergeant Spivey pointed out that the clothes he had on then appeared identical to what he was wearing at the Cracker Barrel. At 11:58 p.m., however, Jason appeared at the front desk a second time, wearing different clothes. He had on some type of dark sweater with a thin, white stripe across the chest. He also appeared to have a bottle of water in his hand.
The next video segment showed a hallway leading to a glass exit door next to the western stairwell. Immediately to the right of that door was another door, which the detective explained was “like the fire door or a solid door there, and that’s the door where people working at the hotel said they found a rock lodged in that door propping the door open.”
Just a few seconds before midnight, Jason appeared in the video, in the hallway, headed in the direction of the two doors. Sergeant Spivey again pointed out his sweater—with the stripe across the chest—his shoes with a rounded toe, a bottle of water in one hand, and some type of open booklet in his other. He testified he believed the booklet was the road atlas found in Jason’s Explorer.
The detective also testified about his analysis of Jason’s cell phone records. He told the jury that during the evening of November 2, there were several phone calls between Jason and Michelle Money. Jason had also called his home phone at 10:59 p.m. That call lasted just under five minutes. His last call that night was at 11:43 p.m.—to Money—which lasted about two minutes.
The following morning, Sergeant Spivey told jurors, Jason’s first call was to his mother’s home phone at 7:40 a.m. At 7:49 a.m., Jason placed his first of several calls to Money. His phone records also revealed that between 7:40 a.m. and 1:37 p.m., there were 28 different calls between his phone and his mother’s. They also reflected Jason’s call to his home phone at 7:49 a.m.—while he was already on the line with Money—and to Meredith’s cell phone at 12:10 p.m. and 1:37 p.m. After eliciting this testimony, Holt abruptly ended her direct examination.
Klinkosum picked up right where Holt left off. He first had Sergeant Spivey confirm that those same cell phone records established that Jason called Michelle’s work number at 12:02 p.m. on November 3.
He then focused on the detective’s analysis of the cell towers Jason’s phone connected with each time he made a call. Klink asked whether Jason’s 7:40 a.m. call to his mother pinged a cell tower near Wytheville, Virginia.
“Yes, sir. It shows that it’s bouncing off that tower. Yes, sir,” Sergeant Spivey replied.
Klinkosum circled back to the Four Brothers BP station—in particular, investigators’ numerous interviews of Gracie Dahms. And in all those interviews, he asked the witness, there was only one time when she provided a description of the customer who threw the $20 bill and cursed at her.
“I believe so, yes, sir,” the detective responded. “I don’t know if she was actually asked any more, but yes, sir.”
Jason’s attorney asked him about the Tylenol bottle found in Cassidy’s hutch. “It’s one of those medicines where the cup comes with it and it sets over top of the actual cap of the Tylenol bottle, correct?”
“It appears so. Yes, sir,” Sergeant Spivey replied.
“That medicine cap was actually tested for fingerprints, correct?”
“I believe it was. Yes, sir.”
“And I believe you heard the testimony that the fingerprints on that cap didn’t match to Jason Young, correct?” the defense attorney probed.
“Best of my recollection of the testimony, that’s correct,” Sergeant Spivey agreed.
“In fact, it didn’t match to anyone for whom standards—known fingerprint standards were submitted, correct?”
The detective agreed no match had been made.
Klinkosum next focused on Meredith, asking Sergeant Spivey whether there were inconsistencies in statements she had made to investigators.
“Throughout the statements, there may have been some. Yes, sir,” the detective agreed.
One significant inconsistency related to where Meredith left her car keys when she entered the Birchleaf Drive home on November 3. Sergeant Spivey acknowledged he and other investigators were trying to clarify where her keys had been placed, agreeing with Klinkosum they had been photographed on the hood of Michelle’s Lexus.
“And Ms. Fisher had said that she had left her keys on the kitchen counter at 5108 Birchleaf, correct?” Klink inquired.
“Yes, sir,” Sergeant Spivey agreed.
“But you later came to find out that the keys on the Lexus were actually Ms. Fisher’s keys, correct?” Klinkosum asked, in apparent disbelief.
“The ones in the photograph, that was my understanding. Yes, sir.”
Jason’s lawyer also got the detective to acknowledge that, in September 2007, he observed Meredith through a closed-circuit TV while investigators interviewed her. Though he didn’t ask the question, Klinkosum surely was hoping the jury would wonder why the lead detective was observing Meredith—without her knowledge—if he didn’t consider her to be a suspect.
As Sergeant Spivey returned to his seat behind the prosecution counsel table, Judge Stephens asked whether the State had further evidence to present.
In response, Becky Holt uttered the three words the jury had been waiting to hear for two weeks: “The State rests.”
15
Defense
Pat Young and Jason’s sisters, Kim and Heather, endured the first two weeks of the trial as best they could. They bit their lips as Becky Holt portrayed Jason as a monster who bludgeoned his wife to death. They watched helplessly as witness after witness described Jason as a deeply flawed human being. They knew their turn would eventually come. And it finally had.
Bryan Collins called Pat as Jason’s first witness. She testified she was a schoolteacher for over thirty years, though stayed at home to raise Kim, Jason, and Heather. She told the jury how her first husband, Robert Young, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease and died within just a few months, when Jason was only five. Gerald McIntyre, whom Pat would later marry, would become the father figure in Jason’s life, she said.
When asked to describe Jason’s personality, his mom responded, “He was always quite an imp” and teased his sisters incessantly. She would tell the girls, “That’s showing how much he loves you … because if he didn’t love you, he wouldn’t fool with teasing and aggravating you.” Pat told the jury Jason’s sisters would get so angry with him, “they’d be ready to skin him alive and he would, of course, run off laughing.”
Collins asked the former schoolteacher to describe her first impressions of Michelle. “I liked her very, very much. She was a beautiful young woman,” Pat replied. “She loves to cook and I love to cook so she sat in the kitchen while we were cooking and talked.” When Michelle came up to Brevard, Pat would always fix her favorite foods for her. “She especially liked my banana pudding, so I would always try to have banana pudding for her,” Pat added.
Michelle was interested in learning how to grow vegetables in the backyard of the Birchleaf Drive home, she testified. She gave Michelle advice on planting lettuce, radishes, and onions. Pat also brought her boxes of hostas, she told jurors, which they planted together in the backyard.
When Michelle visited Brevard, she and Pat would walk together, pushing Cassidy in the stroller. The pair would also take Cassidy to a nearby lake to feed the ducks, she recalled fondly.
Collins asked Pat share with the jury her feelings about her daughter-in-law. “I loved Michelle,” she replied warmly. “I loved her very much. She was a wonderful mother. She was kind. She was always doing thoughtful things.”
The Public Defender asked Jason’s mother
to share her observations of her son’s relationship with Michelle.
“Well, I always thought that Jason loved her very much,” she testified. “They would kid and go on with each other. Yes, they would argue some, but I haven’t seen too many young people in life who don’t argue some.” They would become aggravated with each other for a little while, she acknowledged, “and then it would be all over and they were fine again.” In Pat’s opinion, they were both “strong willed” and “very stubborn and so each wanted their own way.”
Pat made clear she didn’t approve of Jason and Michelle moving in together before they were married, but that obviously didn’t stop them. And then she learned Michelle had become pregnant. Collins asked her to describe Jason’s reaction to that news.
“Oh, he was excited,” she responded. “He was very excited to be a father. I mean, he had always loved children and animals and things like that. So he was very excited to be having the child.”
Collins asked whether she believed Jason felt pressured into getting married.
She didn’t think so, Pat said. “I think he wanted to marry her … I said, ‘Do you love her?’ and he said ‘Yes,’ and he seemed to be very excited about it. I don’t believe she would have pressured him into marrying her. I think he wanted to get married.”
Jason’s attorney then showed the defense witness a series of photos from the couple’s wedding, including one of them with their ring bearer—Mr. Garrison—and another of “Mr. G” giving Michelle a kiss on the neck. Pat chuckled at the sight. One by one, she held the photos up for the jury and described—with a bright smile and calm, ingratiating demeanor—different events from their wedding day.
They next discussed Cassidy’s birth. Pat was actually in Raleigh when her granddaughter was born, but was out shopping with Kim for some baby clothes when Jason called. “And he let me hear her cry and then he was just so excited about holding her. And he was telling me how, what a little bundle she was all wrapped up, you know, in his arms and I think he called her his ‘little glow worm,’” Jason’s mom recounted. “She was just such a beautiful, sweet, good baby and she made him so happy.” Jason “loved taking care of her,” Pat told the jury, “helping bathe her, doing all the things. He was great with her.”
Murder on Birchleaf Drive Page 17