Cummings asked Childs to describe her observations of the couple’s relationship. She responded, “Right from the very first time I met him, they didn’t appear to be very similar … Michelle, she was a very fun person, but also was, you know, responsible and behaved like an adult … Jason appeared to me to be the kind of person where just the world was like a playground to him and fun came before responsibilities.”
In July 2005, Childs testified, she prepared wills, a health care power of attorney, and a living will for Jason and Michelle. That fall, Michelle contacted her to let her know she and Jason were considering purchasing life insurance. Her husband, Michelle said, wanted to get a $1 million policy for each of them “and that seemed to be excessive to her, that she didn’t think they needed that much, and kind of just asked my opinion on that.”
The prosecutor asked her if she knew what Michelle ended up doing about life insurance. “I do,” Childs responded, “because oddly she brought it up about three to five times over that year preceding her death. She brought it up just saying she was concerned it was too much … that a million dollars just, you know, ‘Why does he need to have a million dollars? It’s just so much.’”
Cummings also asked the witness about Michelle’s miscarriage. She testified she sent her friend flowers because she was so distraught. When they were talking about a week later, Childs continued, Michelle said she “was just so sad and she said that what was making it worse was Jason’s just very nonchalant attitude about it. And she indicated to me that he told her she needed to ‘just get over it.’”
When she arrived for Ryan’s and Shelly’s wedding, Childs told the jury, she heard that Jason and Michelle had been fighting—like “World War III.” She sat with Michelle, just the two of them, a distance from everyone else. She was concerned about her friend. As they talked, Michelle told her she wanted Childs “to be there for the birth of her new child. She just didn’t trust Jason to be there with her,” the witness explained.
Cummings asked her if she had learned Michelle was planning to reduce her work schedule once Rylan was born. Childs was aware that was Michelle’s plan, but was concerned about it. Asked to explain her concerns, she testified, “It was very apparent to me that her marriage was not good and that it was not working out and from what I could see was heading in the direction of perhaps separation or divorce, potentially.” She felt it would be harder for Michelle to leave the marriage if she weren’t financially independent.
During his cross-examination, Collins clarified with Childs she had learned following Michelle’s death—from the police—that Michelle had acquired not just $1 million in life insurance, but $2 million in basic insurance and an additional $2 million in accidental life insurance. The defense lawyer suggested she had told detectives that was “nice.”
Childs strongly disagreed, telling the jury she was in “complete and utter shock” when she heard that.
Collins next suggested Childs had told detectives the amount of insurance Jason was insisting on didn’t raise any red flags for her. The amount of insurance, she clarified, “did not cause me any red flags when Michelle was alive, no.”
Finally, Jason’s attorney asked the witness if she had any personal knowledge of violence between Jason and Michelle. Childs replied she was aware of only one incident that might fit into that category—in which Michelle had acted violently toward Jason.
During his redirect examination, Cummings followed up on Collins’ question about the amount of life insurance not raising any red flags. “When you say that it did not raise any red flags to you at the time she was alive, what do you mean by that?” he asked.
“I do remember that she brought it up several times throughout the year preceding her death,” she responded. “And while we would have, you know, in-depth conversations about all kinds of things, it did raise a red flag to me after her death that she brought up specifically her life insurance multiple times throughout that year.”
Cummings then asked the prosecution witness about an observation her husband had made at Ryan’s and Shelly’s wedding. Jason was “extremely intoxicated” at the wedding, Childs recalled. While observing his behavior, her husband said to her, “Something is wrong with that guy. He is just not well.”
Asked to clarify what her husband was referring to, Childs told the jury that while she was talking to Michelle off to the side, her husband observed Jason doing what he referred to as his “dick tricks.”
“At the time of this wedding when Jason is, as your husband described, doing his ‘dick tricks’ around people, he has a two-and-a-half year-old daughter, is that correct?” Cummings asked incredulously.
“Correct,” she responded.
“And he is at [his wife’s] best friend’s wedding doing ‘dick tricks?’”
“Correct,” Childs replied, with evident disdain.
Though Linda, Cargol, Sowerby, and Money certainly painted a negative picture of Jason, as they had at the first trial, the State’s new witnesses—particularly Powers, Sargent, and Childs—inflicted significant damage on the defense. They gave this new jury much more to think about as it considered whether Jason had the evil mind and depraved heart necessary to have committed such a heinous, brutal crime.
21
Kitchen Sink
Howard Cummings and Becky Holt had several more surprises in store for the defense team. On February 20, they called to the stand Brooke Bass and Ashley Palmatier, Cassidy’s former daycare teachers at the Country Sunshine Children’s Center in Raleigh. They testified Cassidy returned to daycare the Monday after Michelle’s murder.
Both told the jury Cassidy was withdrawn and keeping to herself, rather than interacting with the other children as she normally did.
That Thursday—the last day Cassidy attended the Raleigh daycare before being moved to Brevard—both Bass and Palmatier noticed something very unusual outside on the back porch of their classroom. Cassidy had taken two dolls out of a bucket. She held one of them, whom she referred to as “Mommy,” in one of her hands.
The mommy doll had long brown hair and a pony tail. In her other hand, the toddler held another female doll with short, gray hair and a purple jumpsuit. Cassidy also held a toy chair in that hand.
Over Mike Klinkosum’s objection, Palmatier testified she noticed Cassidy had the gray-haired doll strike the mommy doll repeatedly with the chair. Palmatier tapped Bass on the shoulder and pointed toward Cassidy. As they both looked on, Cassidy placed the mommy doll facedown on the bed on the second floor of the nearby doll house.
Cummings then handed Palmatier the two dolls and asked her to demonstrate the toddler’s actions. As she showed the jury, the witness stated that just before Cassidy placed the mommy doll facedown on the bed, she said, “Mommy’s getting a spanking for biting.” After placing the mommy doll down, Palmatier testified, Cassidy told her, “Mommy’s got boo-boos all over. Mommy has red stuff all over.”
The Assistant DA also asked Bass about an interaction she observed one of her coworkers having with Jason when he came to pick up Cassidy prior to Michelle’s death. The coworker asked Jason if he was excited to be having a baby boy, Bass said. Jason replied bluntly, “that was the only way that he could get Michelle to have sex with him.”
• • • • •
Tom Riha, the product specialist from Hush Puppies, had testified at the first trial, mainly to tie up some loose ends in Agent Morrow’s shoe-impression analysis. During his direct examination in the second trial, Holt asked him some additional questions.
She first asked how many size 12, brown Hush Puppies Orbital shoes had ever been manufactured. Riha responded the company made less than 200 in that size and color combination.
Holt then had him examine the shoes Jason was wearing in a still photo made from the security camera video footage at the Greensboro Cracker Barrel. She asked him if there was sufficient detail in the photo for him to positively identify the shoes.
“Specifically, I mean, I could i
dentify some characteristics of the shoe,” Riha responded. He testified the shoes appeared to be dark, slip-on shoes.
The prosecutor followed up, asking, “Is there anything that you observed in that photo that’s inconsistent with the Hush Puppy Orbitals?”
“No,” Riha replied. “I would say this would be consistent from a visual of this photo to be similar to the Orbital product.”
“But simply, it’s not enough detail for you to say specifically that is the Hush Puppy Orbital based on the photo?”
“No,” he agreed.
“But there’s nothing inconsistent?” Holt asked again.
“No,” Riha responded.
Curiously, during his cross-examination, Collins neglected to ask Riha how many other shoes sold in the United States might also appear similar to the shoes Jason had on in the Cracker Barrel photo. Nor did Jason’s lawyer ask whether the Kenneth Cole slip-on shoes found in Jason’s Explorer were similar to the Orbitals.
• • • • •
That same day, the State called Sergeant Spivey to the witness stand. After discussing several aspects of the investigation with him, Cummings asked Judge Stephens for permission to play for the jury the entire video of Jason’s testimony from the first trial.
Through a large TV monitor centered in front of the jury box, the jury was able to see and hear every word Jason told the first jury—all four hours of his direct and cross-examination. Once again, jurors were riveted as they watched and listened, hearing Jason’s voice for the very first time.
When the video had finished playing, Sergeant Spivey resumed his seat on the witness stand. With Cummings, the most seasoned Assistant DA in the office at counsel table, prosecutors would now attempt to discredit Jason and demonstrate his testimony was nothing more than a tangled web of lies.
One of the questions Holt had asked the defendant during her cross-examination was what had upset Michelle the evening of the couple’s belated anniversary dinner.
Jason had responded he “was on the phone with a coworker, my previous employer, and when I picked her up I was still on the phone with my previous employer, and so I was finishing that conversation … all the way to Bella Monica, to the restaurant.”
That is what started the argument with Michelle, he had testified in June.
With the luxury of seven months to scrutinize Jason’s phone records, however, investigators discovered something quite different. Sergeant Spivey told the jury Jason did indeed begin a telephone call that day at 5:17 p.m.—about the time he would have picked up Michelle from Progress Energy—and remained on the phone for nearly 25 minutes.
But the person at the other end was not a coworker—it was Michelle Money. Worse still, Jason continued to text and speak with Money incessantly throughout that evening, until 1:08 a.m. the next morning, the detective testified.
After handing Sergeant Spivey the official transcript of Jason’s trial testimony, Cummings had him read aloud the series of questions and answers about the two times Jason said he had left his hotel room—the first to retrieve a laptop charger and the second to get a newspaper from the front desk and to go outside to smoke a cigar.
Using still images from the hotel’s surveillance video, Sergeant Spivey showed the jury that at the time Jason approached the front desk near midnight, he was holding a water bottle in one hand and another item in his other hand. Another still image, taken fourteen seconds later as Jason was walking down the hallway toward the exit door, showed him holding the same two items, the detective told the jury. If that were true, Jason’s claim that he got a newspaper from the front desk couldn’t be.
Cummings pivoted to Jason’s testimony about smoking a cigar in the parking lot. Sergeant Spivey told the jury that other than a suit jacket, no outerwear of any type was found among the items Jason took with him on his business trip.
The prosecutor showed him weather data for that evening from Hillsville, Virginia, which revealed a temperature just before midnight of about thirty degrees, with the wind blowing at 21 miles per hour and gusting to thirty. Though the detective didn’t say those conditions made smoking a cigar impossible, they made it appear highly improbable.
The Assistant DA next asked Sergeant Spivey to read aloud Jason’s testimony about eating breakfast in the Hampton Inn’s breakfast area the morning of November 3. The prosecution witness told the jury he reviewed all the hotel’s video footage of the breakfast area starting at 6:30 a.m. that morning.
Cummings asked him if the defendant appeared anywhere in that footage. Though Sergeant Spivey responded that Jason couldn’t be seen in the video footage, he qualified his answer by acknowledging there wasn’t enough detail in the footage “to really make out who people are.”
Cummings then shifted his questioning to the photo of Cassidy’s third birthday party in which Jason was wearing a shirt with a thin white stripe across the chest. His defense counsel had left the subtle impression during the first trial that their client was wearing the same shirt in the birthday photo as he had been seen wearing at the front desk of the hotel shortly before midnight. The seven months between trials had given the detective the chance to put the two images side-by-side to compare the shirts.
Judge Stephens let Sergeant Spivey step down in front of the jury box to show jurors the side-by-side comparison. The detective pointed out the similarities in the shirts—their color and the stripe across the chest—as well as the key difference: their necklines. The shirt in the birthday party photo had a crew neckline. The shirt Jason was wearing at the hotel’s front desk was a zip-up V-neck. They were clearly different shirts.
The next area of Jason’s testimony the Assistant DA and Sergeant Spivey tried to rebut was that he couldn’t afford to fight for custody of Cassidy. One by one, Cummings had the detective walk through the various sources of funds Jason could have tapped into to fight for custody. There was a home equity line from which he had advanced $12,000 to pay money to his sister Heather and his mother; an IRA that held $20,000; and a 401(k) account that held nearly $24,000—roughly $60,000 in all.
They also attacked Jason’s testimony he had “lost everything. I’ve lost—I’ve lost family, friends, jobs. I’ve lost everything.” Cummings asked Sergeant Spivey, “Are there any words left out of that like ‘I’ve lost my wife too?’”
“Yes, sir, there are,” the detective answered.
“I mean, nothing he said on that video or said last summer is left out of that transcript; is that correct?” Cummings asked.
“That’s correct. This is a true transcript.”
The Assistant DA also asked Sergeant Spivey about Jason’s last phone call with his wife the evening of November 2—which Jason testified not being able to recall in detail because it was such an ordinary good-night call.
That call was just before 11:00 p.m., the detective testified, and lasted just shy of five minutes. He told the jury that after that call, the records revealed Jason had five conversations with Money before midnight. Perhaps that was why, Cummings hoped jurors would conclude, the defendant couldn’t recall any details of the last conversation he ever had with his wife.
Klinkosum’s cross-examination barely touched on his client’s testimony at the first trial. He did, however, push back on Jason’s purported ability to afford a custody battle over Cassidy. As compared to the $60,000 Jason allegedly had available to him, the defense lawyer asked Sergeant Spivey if he knew how much it would have cost for Jason to have hired attorneys to contest custody. The detective confessed he didn’t.
Klink also asked him whether he knew how much Jason had to pay to retain Roger Smith, Jr.
Once again, Sergeant Spivey acknowledged he didn’t know. He agreed with the defense lawyer the appointment of Bryan Collins—the Public Defender—signified Jason had been declared indigent by the court.
Hearing this line of cross-examination, Cummings decided, during his redirect examination, to release one arrow he had deliberately left in his quiver.
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p; “Mr. Klinkosum asked you about the defendant’s finances and about whether you knew how much it would cost to hire a lawyer for various things?” he asked.
“Correct,” Sergeant Spivey replied.
“Do you know how much this defendant is out on today?”
“Yes, sir. I do.”
“How much?”
“900,000,” the detective replied.
Content with that answer, Cummings announced, “That’s all the questions I have.”
• • • • •
Part of the prosecution’s shift in strategy in the second trial was to focus more intently on Jason’s status as the primary beneficiary under Michelle’s life insurance policy. If his deteriorating marriage and affair with Michelle Money didn’t supply sufficient evidence of motive, Cummings and Holt believed his hope of becoming an instant millionaire would.
To help make these points, the State called two witnesses who hadn’t testified at the first trial. Jennifer Ray worked for Progress Energy in the department that handled employee benefits. Mark Thomas worked for AON, the international insurance brokerage firm that assisted the American Institute of CPAs in procuring insurance for its members, including Michelle.
Ray helped process life insurance claims for deceased Progress Energy employees. She testified that following Michelle’s death, she sent a notification to Jason as the beneficiary under Michelle’s life insurance policy from Prudential, instructing him how to submit a claim.
Cummings showed her the claim form Jason completed and asked what had happened after the claim was submitted. She responded she received a letter from Prudential indicating the company was unable to pay the claim “because they cannot pay to a beneficiary if they are considered a potential suspect.” Ray added she continued to receive updates from Prudential—who was not willing to pay the claim because it couldn’t rule out Jason’s involvement in his wife’s death. She told the jury the life insurance proceeds were ultimately paid to Linda Fisher, as Cassidy’s guardian, instead of Jason.
Murder on Birchleaf Drive Page 28