Later that week, Michelle discussed with her how the accident happened. She told Bolick, “Jason had insisted on getting coffee before they actually got on the road to come back to Raleigh.” Michelle said, “Jason thought he saw the interior light of the car on so he turned towards it, and she said that right before that had happened she had taken off her seatbelt to reach her makeup bag that was on the floorboard. So the wreck happened right after she took her seatbelt off.” Bolick made no effort to hide her suspicion that Jason had swerved off the road because Michelle had taken off her seatbelt.
A short time later, the witness told jurors, Michelle informed her she was pregnant again and how she planned to share the news with Jason—by dressing Cassidy in a T-shirt saying, “I’m a big sister.” The next day, Bolick discussed with her friend how Jason took the news. Michelle, she stated, “specifically said that she did not get the reaction out of Jason that she had hoped to get.”
Finally, Holt asked Bolick to describe her interaction with Jason at Michelle’s pre-funeral visitation. She told the jury everyone had to pass him on the way out of the funeral home. When it was her turn, Bolick said to her friend’s husband, “‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ and his response was very odd. He said, ‘Cassidy’s been a real trooper.’”
Jennifer Powers provided even more damning testimony about Jason. She and Michelle had attended high school together in Sayville, Long Island. They became close friends and remained in regular contact as adults, even though they lived some 500 miles apart. They emailed and spoke by phone frequently and visited each other in New York or Raleigh as often as they could—including at each other’s wedding.
The most stunning revelation during Powers’ testimony was about a phone call she received the day Michelle learned she was pregnant with Cassidy. Michelle was crying hysterically, she told the jury. “She said to me, ‘You have to promise to keep this a secret for the rest of your life. I have to tell you something. I’m pregnant and Jason wants me to abort the baby or he said he will resent me and the baby for the rest of our lives.’”
Considering Jason’s testimony at the first trial that Michelle’s pregnancy with Cassidy was a “good surprise”—that he was happy about—Powers’ testimony about her friend’s desperate phone call was quite startling.
She recalled speaking with Michelle a couple of days after that phone call, explaining to jurors her friend was “still working on the situation. There didn’t seem to be any progress.” But she then heard from her a week or two later “and her news was, ‘I’m engaged. We’re getting married.’ And there was no further discussion.”
Holt also raised the topic of smoking. Powers told the jury Michelle was a social smoker during high school and college. But after meeting Jason, she testified, her friend had to quit smoking because he hated it so.
Toward the end of Powers’ testimony, Holt introduced an October 4, 2006, email exchange between Jason and Michelle about the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Michelle had forwarded the email to Powers, seeking her advice and guidance.
In the email, Jason stated that Linda: has got to start realizing that seeing us as often as she does creates an imbalance in our relationship and I’ve told you that from the start.
He continued: I could NOT even count on one hand the WEEKS that your mom has spent with us in less than three years of marriage! I am sorry, but that is EXTREME. I would love for you to have found a guy out there that would be thrilled to be in that same boat as I in regards to time spent with [your] mother in law....GOOD FREAKING LUCK! It is not easy, and I don’t appreciate being deemed the “jerk” who has to make a stand simply [because] you either don’t have the balls to stand up, or it just doesn’t bother you and you simply don’t hold your husband’s opinion very high.
In that same email, Jason expressed his adamant opposition to Linda spending the Thanksgiving holiday with his family in Brevard.
If you want your mom to come to Brevard for the whole weekend, that’s fine. Bring her on. I’m just telling you that our marriage has seen better days and I don’t see it trending up.
He even suggested that his wife stay behind in Raleigh and not come with him and Cassidy to Brevard:
YOU can stay here with your Mom and have your own Thanksgiving.
The notion of his mother-in-law spending the entire holiday in Brevard, he made clear, was too EXTREME!
In her forwarding email to Powers, Michelle stated:
So this is the issue—you can pretty much figure it out from Jason’s rant below …We obviously had a huge fight about it this morning. As you can see, Jace thinks mom visits too much (I think she’s a big help!!) So I either have to make some excuse to tell my mom no she can’t come or have Jace think that his opinion doesn’t matter.
Toward the end of her email, Michelle asked her friend:
What is the big deal about having 1 more person—my mom!! … But he is making a big stink.
Clearly frustrated, she wrote:
AHHHH!!!! I just don’t know what the ‘right’ thing to do is??? Please help. And PLEASE don’t share this with anyone, I think Mom’s feelings would be really hurt. … Welcome to my world of fighting with Jason. He loves to go below the belt.
Though Powers wasn’t on the witness stand very long, her testimony packed a powerful punch. So too did the testimony of the State’s next witness, Kimball Sargent. She provided counseling to Michelle through Progress Energy’s employee assistance program.
She testified Michelle had set up an appointment for October 19, but for some reason, came to her office a day early. Seeing that Sargent was tied up, Michelle realized she had written down the appointment date incorrectly. Sargent testified Michelle was very upset. “When she walked in and found out I couldn’t see her, she burst into tears and so I actually came out and talked with her.”
Her next available appointment wasn’t until October 27, so they set up an appointment for that day.
Cummings asked the counselor to describe what happened when they finally met on October 27—one week before the murder.
Michelle started crying from the moment she sat down, Sargent responded, and cried for the entire one-hour session. Her new client told her she was there “to get her life and herself straightened out. She was pregnant with a baby that was due in March and she had a very conflicted relationship with her husband.” She told Sargent she needed to figure out what to do so she could “fix herself and make things better.”
Michelle said she was “stressed out with her marriage” and she had a big fight with her husband that morning. She explained she really wanted to be in marital counseling but that Jason “was resistant because he felt like the problems were her … She was very anxious over the fact that she was pregnant and their marriage was in some real trouble.” Michelle told Sargent how Jason would get drunk at football games—sometimes staying out in the parking lot drinking rather than even going into the stadium.
They also discussed Jason’s complaints about their sex life. Michelle explained they used to have sex about twice a week “and now it was down to about once a week and he didn’t feel like it was enough.” That very morning, Michelle told her, “they’d had a big fight because he wanted to have sex and she didn’t, and she said there was a lot of storming out.”
During their session, Michelle revealed she had been sexually assaulted when she was in college “and one of the issues that she was having with Jason at the time was that when she had sex with him she felt like he was forcing himself on her.” His approach to sex evoked in her the same feelings she experienced, Michelle explained, when she was assaulted. She had sex with other boyfriends before Jason, Michelle told the counselor, none of whom made her feel that way.
In addition, their communication had been so bad, Sargent testified, “it had gotten to the point they could not talk at all.” They were only able to communicate through emails.
Cummings then showed Sargent her notes from her October 27 session with Michelle, which she
read aloud for the jury’s benefit. Significantly, toward the end of her notes, she had written that another therapist had indicated that Jason “had anger issues. Says if she—you try to joke on him he will get revenge. He gets angry and she can’t tell him something that hurt her feelings. He leaves the bedroom and gets angry.”
Sargent told the jury her assessment was her new client “was being verbally abused.” Michelle planned to make another appointment to take place within one to two weeks, she testified. But she never heard from her again.
Despite the gravity of Sargent’s testimony, Klinkosum asked her just seven questions, the last of which was whether Michelle had reported “anything about any type of physical violence in the marriage.”
Michelle “never reported any physical abuse,” Sargent acknowledged.
• • • • •
Once again, the prosecution team put on several days of testimony regarding the crime scene, Jason’s Explorer and luggage, and forensic evidence. Though most of that evidence was essentially identical to the first trial, Sergeant Al Sternberg shared an interesting new detail: within Jason’s luggage, there was a pack of four to five condoms.
That scintillating tidbit provided a good transition for jurors to hear about the other women in Jason’s life. In rapid succession, the State called Genevieve Cargol, Carol Anne Sowerby, and Michelle Money to the stand.
One question Cargol was never asked directly at the first trial was how Jason’s personality would change when he drank. Holt asked her to share her answer with this new jury.
Cargol explained, “His behavior would change so drastically and he typically got real angry with me usually over just nothing and he would do things like leave me alone in the dark after a football game with no way to get home. And there was even a time—he did that multiple times. There was even a time where I was left alone at a bar downtown … and I didn’t have a way home.”
Cargol described the fight in their Texas hotel room in more vivid detail than she had at the first trial, testifying that “something inside of him snapped like I’ve never seen before and he physically came after me to get the ring off of me … He grabbed me by the arms and threw me down onto the bed but with such force that it just stunned me, and he grabbed my arms so tightly that it ended up leaving bruises in the shapes of his fingers. Later he was pinning my arms behind my back with such force I felt like my shoulders were going to pop out of the sockets.”
She told the jury that Jason jumped on her with all of his weight, straddled her, and held her down with his arms and his knees until he was finally able to yank the engagement ring off of her finger.
“And I wanted to state this,” the witness continued. “The fight was so scary not just because of the violent part of it, but I had never seen him like that before. His eyes were completely empty and deserted and glazed over. And it was like he wasn’t even seeing me and I wasn’t seeing him. It was—I felt like he was a different person.” When she later showed Jason the bruises on her arms and rib cage, she said, “It wasn’t registering to him and it just blew my mind that he didn’t care. No remorse whatsoever.”
Unlike in the first trial, Holt made sure to have Cargol share with this jury details of Jason’s other violent outbursts. His former fiancée testified the first incident occurred in the parking lot of an outdoor amphitheater following a Barenaked Ladies concert. She was sitting in the driver’s seat of her car with Jason in the passenger seat. They were chatting while waiting to get in line to leave the parking lot.
Cargol made a point of telling the jury what a great time they had been having up until then. But that changed, she said, almost in an instant. While she and Jason were talking, she casually mentioned she had a mutual, male friend walk her back to her apartment a week or so before the concert. Jason “became so enraged that he punched out my windshield,” she testified. “He took his bare fist and punched right through my windshield and shattered it.”
The second incident occurred at Jason’s apartment in Charlotte, Cargol told jurors. She had just arrived from Raleigh and was using the bathroom. While there, she noticed a letter sitting out on the sink from Jason’s camp friend, Carol Anne.
Cargol had never met her before but understood from Jason that she was younger than him and that they were “good buddies,” not romantic partners. But when she skimmed through the letter, she was surprised to see Carol Anne “pouring her heart out to him and saying how much she loved him and had always loved him. And she knew that he was serious with me but that she would wait for him if things didn’t work out.”
When she showed the letter to Jason, Cargol testified, she expected him to tell her he had no idea his friend felt that way about him. Instead, he became “absolutely irate with me, and I was very confused because I thought, ‘If somebody is supposed to be upset here, shouldn’t it be me?’ And I couldn’t figure out why he was so angry with me for reading it.” Jason became so angry, Cargol told jurors, he punched a hole right through the drywall of his apartment. She found it “bizarre that he was so angry about this letter.”
Holt ended her direct examination by showing her witness the September 12, 2006, email Jason had sent her, in which he professed his eternal love. Though she didn’t publish it to the jury then, the Assistant DA did so the following day, during testimony about the forensic examination of Jason’s laptop computer.
Klinkosum’s cross-examination was very short, aimed only at confirming Jason had been drinking before the incident in their Texas hotel room and that Cargol had remained in a dating relationship with him for about a year even after she broke off the engagement—despite his violent outbursts.
Carol Anne Sowerby took the witness stand next. As in the first trial, she was an emotional wreck. It took her some twenty seconds to gather herself sufficiently to even state her name. Her testimony was nearly identical to the first trial, including her hanging her head in shame as she admitted to having sex with Jason on the couch while Cassidy was asleep upstairs.
Her direct examination ended rather oddly, though. Cummings suggested to her that she woke up naked the following morning.
Bewildered, Sowerby responded, “That didn’t occur.”
Michelle Money’s testimony was also mostly a carbon copy of her testimony at the first trial. She testified Jason told her, prior to coming to Orlando on October 7, he was going to tell his wife he was going on a business trip to Florida that weekend. Holt asked her, “What happened during the course of that weekend?”
“We just spent a lot of time talking and hanging out at the house. We ended up having an intimate relationship while he was there,” Money responded, once again leaving out the R-rated details.
“So at that point, were you actually engaged in an affair with the defendant?” Holt asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” she replied. In contrast to Sowerby, she didn’t appear embarrassed or ashamed.
“We also talked about us and how we couldn’t do what we did,” Money continued, noting that they “didn’t have a future, and that we needed to go back to being friends.”
But she also admitted she and Jason were trying to meet in Orlando a second time—the weekend of November 4, when her husband would next be out of town—but it didn’t work out because of Jason’s business meeting on November 3 and the football game the following day.
Money testified she and Jason spoke multiple times a day from October 7 until Michelle’s death, including during Jason’s drive to Hillsville, Virginia on November 2, on his way to his business meeting on November 3, and later that afternoon on his way to his mother’s home in Brevard.
She also told jurors about their meeting in Myrtle Beach in June 2007. They sat on the beach together, Money testified, “and talked for a long time. And we talked about—I remember we talked about the media and how they blew a lot of things out and we talked about how there was a lot of lies said about us and hurtful things that weren’t true.”
During cross-examination, she told the jury
that following their tryst in Orlando, she and Jason both agreed their relationship couldn’t go on any further. And that their relationship was more than physical anyway—they had developed a friendship and felt comfortable talking to each other about a wide range of things, in particular their children. Jason talked about Cassidy “all the time,” she testified.
Then, out of nowhere, Klinkosum asked, “Ms. Money, this question has to be asked: Did you have anything to do with Ms. Young’s death?”
“No,” she replied, somewhat surprised by the question.
• • • • •
Toward the end of its case, the State called Fiona (Ginter) Childs to the stand—another witness who hadn’t testified at the first trial. Though she wasn’t a member of the McBroads, Childs was already a member of ADP when Michelle rushed the sorority as a sophomore. She liked Michelle so much, she became her big sister. The following year, Childs moved into the condo Linda had purchased for her elder daughter and lived there for three years, the last two while working as a legal secretary. She later went to law school and became a practicing attorney.
The prosecution witness testified she first met Jason at the Youngs’ engagement party. She made a point to tell the jury though she arrived late, Jason wasn’t even there yet. When he finally arrived, he was sweaty and wearing running clothes, as he had been out jogging around the neighborhood. She found that “a little bit unusual.”
Childs came to the hospital to visit her “little sister” after Cassidy was born, she testified. While there, she had a rather odd interaction with Jason. The new father seemed very intrigued with the C-section, Childs told jurors, and mentioned he was able to see over the curtain during the operation. Jason told her that he was able to see Michelle’s body opened up, including “her organs and stuff and that the doctor just pulled her uterus out ‘like it was a dirty dish and was scrubbing it, and then put it back in.’ And he seemed rather fascinated with that.”
Murder on Birchleaf Drive Page 27