The prosecution team also had the luxury of interviewing jurors from the first trial to learn what led two-thirds of them to vote in favor of acquittal. Those interviews allowed them to retool their case and to focus on new themes and new witnesses who could support them.
Cummings and Holt decided they needed a more detailed, methodical presentation of evidence, and to call additional witnesses to help establish Jason had the evil mind and depraved heart possessed by the monster who had so savagely beaten Michelle.
With a longer witness list and a greater focus on detail, the second trial would ultimately last nearly twice as long as the first. The prosecutors believed jurors would appreciate the depth and breadth of their presentation and would be more likely to return a guilty verdict.
Meanwhile, Bryan Collins and Mike Klinkosum understood all too well establishing reasonable doubt this time around would be significantly more difficult. They no longer had the tactical advantage of holding their cards close to the vest—as they did when they surprised prosecutors by calling Jason to testify in his own defense.
The risk of calling him to the stand in this trial would almost assuredly be too great. In all likelihood, therefore, Jason wouldn’t be able to look these jurors in their eyes and emphatically deny his involvement in the murder.
If there were one advantage for the defense, it was that—unlike during the first trial—Jason was now a free man. He wouldn’t be locked into his jail cell following each court session. This time, the defense team could strategize with him during lunch, in the evenings, and over the many weekends the trial was likely to last. That was as liberating for Collins and Klinkosum as it was for Jason himself.
• • • • •
On Monday, February 6, Holt rose from her seat at the prosecution table to reprise her opening statement. Yet this version was notably different. Not only was it more than double the length as in the first trial—nearly an hour—it included several new themes and far greater detail.
She began by focusing on Jason’s and Michelle’s marriage, rather than his so-called “plan” to kill her. As she described it, it was a “marriage in trouble.” Jason “felt pressured into the marriage,” she told jurors, due to Michelle’s pregnancy. He was “stuck in the college life,” and would go to parties, tailgates, and football games and get drunk. While Jason wanted to live the college life, Holt said, his wife wanted to focus on family life. But he wasn’t ready for that or for the responsibilities that came with it.
The prosecutor described the “friction” between the pair. “They argued often. They argued in public. So much so that some of their friends would say they really didn’t want to be around them as a couple much.”
There was also friction between Jason and his mother-in-law, Holt noted, who wasn’t afraid to tell him how he was shirking his responsibilities. And friction regarding Linda’s plans over the holidays and her plans to move into their home after the baby was born.
This time around, the Assistant DA was more explicit about Jason’s involvement with other women. She told the jury that in September 2006, Jason “reached out to an old girlfriend, someone he hadn’t seen in years, describing her as the love, his one and only, the love of his life.” In that email, she stated, the defendant indicated the biggest mistake he had made was proposing to Cargol before they were ready.
Holt next discussed Jason’s relationship with Michelle Money, which started as “flirtations” and developed into an “affair.” She told the jury about his October 2006 trip to Orlando to be with Money and how he told at least one friend he believed he loved her.
Following his trip to Orlando, and then a business trip to Denver, Jason returned home, Holt recounted, and had a belated anniversary dinner with Michelle. Their argument that evening was “like World War III,” she said, continuing right through Ryan’s and Shelly’s wedding in Winston-Salem.
The week following the wedding, she noted, Michelle went to New York on business. Meanwhile, Carol Anne Sowerby, who had been Jason’s friend when he was a camp counselor, came to stay at the couple’s home. In a disgusted tone, Holt told the jury Jason and Sowerby “engaged in sexual relations in the Young residence with Cassidy Young present upstairs.” Later that week, she said, while Sowerby was having dinner with Jason and Michelle, the defendant swallowed their guest’s wedding ring, causing her to delay her trip back to Montana until he could pass them.
Hinting at new evidence prosecutors would introduce, Holt told jurors that in that same time period, Michelle visited with a counselor because she was distraught about the state of her marriage, and cried during their session. She tied that visit together with the four-hour counseling session Meredith mediated for her sister and brother-in-law later that same day. The jury also heard about the argument Jason had with his wife on November 1, and Michelle’s claim her husband had thrown a TV remote at her.
Finally, the Assistant DA turned to the events of November 3, telling the jury about the voicemail Jason had left for Meredith about the eBay printouts, and how Meredith went to their home to retrieve them. “What she discovered when she got to the Birchleaf house was horrific. She found her sister in her bedroom having been beat to death. She found her niece hiding under the covers in the master bedroom … She found little footprints by Michelle Young as she lay facedown on the floor of her bedroom, little footprints in blood. She found them around Michelle’s head. She saw them as she was coming up the stairs in Cassidy’s bathroom. She found baby dolls, a baby doll by Michelle’s head, another baby doll in the bed, a blanket, and she heard Cassidy say, ‘Mommy got boo-boos.’”
Holt told jurors the Medical Examiner found evidence of strangulation, and that Michelle’s face and head had been struck with an object at least thirty times. “The blood in that bedroom, in the area where Michelle Young was found, goes almost to the ceiling,” she explained. “It was a brutal, personal beating.” Investigators, she said, also discovered the diamond engagement and wedding rings Michelle always wore had been removed from her finger.
The prosecutor next told the jury about “some awfully strange events” at the Hampton Inn, forecasting evidence about Jason’s change of clothes, the use of his room keycard, the rock that propped open the exit door, and the tampering with the security camera. She also told jurors they would be hearing from a convenience store employee in King, North Carolina who would testify the defendant was pumping gas outside her store at 5:30 a.m. on November 3.
“What you will learn about the events of November 2 and November 3 throughout this trial,” Holt said, “will have lots of pieces, a lot of pieces to the puzzle.”
She described Jason’s journey back to Raleigh on November 3 and how he learned from his friends the police wanted to talk to him. From that day forward, she told the jury, he refused to talk with investigators, his family, or his friends about what happened. “In the days, weeks, months, years that followed, a man whose wife has been brutally murdered in his home does not call to say, ‘What does your investigation reveal? What is going on?’”
In the meantime, the Assistant DA recounted, rather than having to answer questions about where he was and what he was doing that day, he turned over physical custody of his daughter to Meredith.
At that point, Holt dropped the biggest bombshell of her opening statement—signaling a major shift in strategy from the first trial: “You will learn that there was a civil suit, a wrongful death suit filed in which the allegations were that the defendant murdered Michelle Young. And you will learn that instead of responding to that lawsuit, instead of responding to those allegations, the defendant defaulted. He didn’t answer because that would have required him to submit to a deposition, to answer questions. So instead of doing that, he gave up his daughter. He allowed publicly [the] allegations to be admitted.”
Belatedly, Klinkosum jumped to his feet to object. Judge Stephens sustained the objection. But Holt continued to tell the jury about the wrongful death case, prompting Klink to object again.
This time, the judge asked the lawyers to approach the bench, where they hashed out the objection.
After the sidebar, the prosecutor stated—for the third time, “Instead of responding to those allegations, he allowed a civil judgment to be entered against him.” The first jury hadn’t heard anything about that judgment. This jury, however, would hear about it in great detail.
Holt ended her opening statement by pointing to Jason’s testimony at the first trial, telling jurors he had first answered questions “1,693 days after his wife’s murder.” And all he said at the time, she stated, was that he propped open the hotel’s exit door and went outside to smoke a cigar. “1,693 days later. That is what he tells. How in any way would that have been incriminating?” she asked incredulously.
Then, in a solemn tone, she concluded, “The evidence in this case will convince you, each and every one of you, that Jason Young is responsible for the murder of Michelle Young, that he is guilty of murder in the first degree.”
Once again, Klinkosum delivered the defense opening. It was short and crisp, just as it had been in the first trial. As he did then, he focused largely on the forensic evidence. “It’s no coincidence,” he said, “that, in the State’s opening statement, they didn’t mention anything about any physical evidence linking Jason Young to the murder of his wife.”
He alerted the jury to the two different sets of bloody shoeprints found in the bedroom and “fingerprints that remain unidentified.” And that LabCorp had found DNA on the jewelry box that didn’t match anyone.
He used maps of Virginia and North Carolina to demonstrate the long distances Jason needed to traverse to have committed the crime, leaving precious little time to clean himself up.
Yet, Klinkosum continued, he had supposedly “killed his wife in the most brutal and in one of the most bloody ways possible and somehow got back, got out of the house, without getting any blood downstairs, and not one drop of blood in his truck, in his Ford Explorer, not one drop of blood back in his hotel room.”
Once again, Jason’s lawyer conceded his client wasn’t a good husband. “He was far from it. He wasn’t ready to get married. He was not ready to have a child.” He engaged in “juvenile behavior” and acted like an “obnoxious jerk.” Klink even told jurors about the incident in which Jason got drunk at Ryan’s and Shelly’s home, urinated on their rug, and then sat down on the sofa completely naked. He also agreed Jason and Michelle fought often, including at Ryan’s and Shelly’s wedding. “But you’ll also hear that, after it was over, he hugged her at the reception, kissed her, and told people, ‘I love my wife. She’s crazy, but I love her.’”
Though Holt didn’t mention it, Klinkosum told the jury about Jason’s violent outburst toward Genevieve Cargol: “You’re going to hear about how they had a physical altercation at a wedding reception where he pulled an engagement ring off her finger.” But even though he behaved like “an obnoxious, juvenile jerk,” he continued, “we don’t convict people of murder just because they sometimes act like jerks.”
Like Holt, the defense attorney discussed the Hampton Inn security camera, but told jurors this wasn’t the first time a camera at the hotel had been tampered with. Also, fingerprints found on the camera didn’t match Jason’s, nor did the DNA collected from a water pipe above the camera. He also wondered aloud why his client would have gone to such great lengths to disable that security camera only to walk directly in front of two other cameras and a hotel employee at the front desk just before midnight.
All Jason did that evening, Klinkosum contended, was go outside the hotel, smoke a cigar, and come back to his room to go to bed. And by 7:40 a.m. the next morning, he was calling his mother from near Wytheville, Virginia. That timeline was inconsistent with the prosecution’s theory, he suggested. “The puzzle the prosecution talked to you about—Jason does not fit into it.”
During the ride back to Raleigh on November 3, Klink said, Jason heard from his friends, “The police think you did this. This is serious. They are after you and you need to talk to a lawyer before you talk to them.”
“The police kept focusing on him like a laser,” he told jurors, “even though there was evidence of someone else’s DNA in the house, unidentified fingerprints, different feet.”
It was important, Klinkosum suggested, that it took more than three years for authorities to charge Jason with the murder, noting, “in that intervening time period, there was nothing, no physical evidence that was developed that linked Jason to this murder. Nothing.” He agreed with Holt that the murder scene was very bloody. “And what they also want you to believe, ladies and gentlemen, is that Jason Young did this with his daughter, Cassidy, in the house and then somehow had her walk around in the blood, get blood on her and clean her up and put her back to bed and left her there.”
As for his client’s decision to give up custody of Cassidy, Klink explained his original lawyers had told him, “‘You don’t say anything about this unless you go to trial on this.’ It was a hard decision for him to make, but he did it because he was told that once it was over he could come back and get custody of his daughter back. But they want you to believe that this man, that was a good dad, that loved his daughter, let his little girl walk around in her mother’s blood.”
Noting that Cassidy was found by Meredith to be “shockingly clean,” Jason’s lawyer contended that “the time that it took to do this and clean her up and clean up this house and clean himself up if he did it—which he didn’t—the time it would have taken to do that and again get back on the road to Hillsville, Virginia, and then make a call to his mother at 7:40 a.m., you will see that it does not add up. And the reason, ladies and gentlemen, is because Jason Young did not commit this murder.”
“The physical evidence in this case points to other people,” Klinkosum argued, as he began wrapping up. “The amount of time it would have taken points to someone else doing this. Jason Young did not kill his wife and his unborn child, and this case, ladies and gentlemen, you will see, has not been solved.”
Thus, he told jurors, “The only verdict in this case that is proper to find is that Jason Young is not guilty.”
• • • • •
It became evident with the State’s first witness—Meredith Fisher—this trial would last considerably longer than the first. She was on the witness stand for portions of three days. Holt’s questioning covered significantly more territory, and explored details in far greater depth, than in the first trial. There were also more demonstrative exhibits to help focus the jury’s attention, including large, blowup floor plans of 5108 Birchleaf Drive.
Unlike in the first trial, Holt had Meredith describe in detail how Jason and Michelle plunged into the French Broad River during their trip to Brevard over Memorial Day weekend in 2006.
Meredith testified her sister had informed her that while she and Jason were on the road to Starbucks, he thought the back hatch of his Mitsubishi Endeavor SUV had come open, which made him turn toward the rear of the vehicle. When he looked back through the windshield, he was drifting off the road. He apparently overcorrected, resulting in them descending down the embankment. According to Michelle, Meredith testified, water started filling the vehicle to the point she began to panic. But they were both ultimately able to escape and make their way up the side of the mountain as the SUV sank into the river.
The Assistant DA asked Meredith whether her sister was wearing her seatbelt at the time Jason veered off the road. She responded Michelle had told her she had unbuckled her seatbelt to grab some lotion in the backseat the moment before Jason veered off the road. She also testified that for Father’s Day that June, Michelle had purchased a tool for Jason that could be used to crack a window open if something similar ever happened again.
Holt had her first witness go into much greater detail about Jason’s refusal to speak with the police. “I asked him countless times,” Meredith testified, “if he had spoken to the police … When he indicated ‘no,’ I continually asked him w
hy he wouldn’t do that.”
“And what was his response to you?” the prosecutor asked.
“His attorney told him not to.”
“Did you try, attempt to have conversations with the defendant about information he might have, where he had been that night when Michelle was murdered? Did you attempt to yourself elicit information from him?” Holt asked.
“Yes,” Meredith answered.
“And what was his response to you?”
“He would not say one word unless his attorney was there and his attorney told him not to speak. So he wasn’t going to speak to anyone. Not me. Not anyone.”
Meredith recounted in detail the difficulties she and Linda had in arranging visitation with Cassidy, including the incident that precipitated Jason and his mother cutting off visitation altogether. She testified one of Pat’s friends was at her Brevard home having a “heated conversation about us supporting Jason publicly and contacting the newspaper, the media, and saying that we support him publicly, and if we weren’t willing to do that that contact with Cassidy would end.” At the time, Meredith responded she wanted Jason to talk to the police, “but until he did that, until he answered questions, I wasn’t willing to do that.”
“What happened after that visit?” the Assistant DA asked.
“Shortly thereafter, any attempts to talk to Cassidy on the phone, schedule a visit, cards that we sent, gifts that we sent, were returned to sender. Completely cut off. No contact whatsoever.”
Noting the custody order she and Jason signed included restrictions on Meredith’s smoking, Holt had her discuss what she knew about her brother-in-law’s attitudes about smoking—foreshadowing how the prosecution intended to rebut his testimony that he left his room at the Hampton Inn to smoke a cigar.
Murder on Birchleaf Drive Page 25