Murder on Birchleaf Drive

by Steven B Epstein

  Klinkosum asked the witness whether she had met with Sergeant Spivey during the summer of 2011. With a wry smile, she responded, “No, he met with me,” which evoked uproarious laughter throughout the courtroom once again. The detective, she explained, had parked his vehicle in a driveway and took pictures to try to match the position of the car Hinsley was describing.

  Some five minutes into his questioning, Jason’s lawyer abruptly announced he had no further questions.

  “You’re through with me? Hinsley asked incredulously. “You brought me all the way up here for that?” That retort caused even Jason to chuckle.

  In response to Holt’s questions, the Youngs’ good-humored neighbor explained the car she saw that morning was right on the very edge of the driveway, like it was at a starting line in a race. The Assistant DA asked if she could tell whether anyone was in the car.

  “There was no one in the car,” Hinsley replied, “because I was scared it was going to run over me and I looked at that.”

  Holt ended her cross-examination by showing the defense witness a photo to orient her to Birchleaf Drive. To everyone’s amazement, Hinsley told the prosecutor that the SUV she saw that morning “wasn’t on Birchleaf,” but rather, was on Enchanted Oaks Drive—a nearby street. Finding that answer much to her liking, the Assistant DA announced she had no further questions.

  In contrast to Hinsley, Cindy Beaver was more certain about what she saw the morning of November 3 and where she saw it. She testified to seeing someone in a vehicle at the edge of the Youngs’ driveway. Two people, in fact. That made her the only eyewitness in the entire case—and even more important than Gracie Calhoun.

  Beaver, a 29-year employee with the Postal Service, was the defense team’s foil to Gracie Calhoun, whose brain injury, memory problems, and questionable identification raised huge obstacles for the prosecutors. And whereas Calhoun testified in barely decipherable, monotone answers, Beaver’s testimony was full-throated and filled with emotion and animated gesticulations. Hoping her testimony would prove crucial in the end, the defense team had her testify in much greater depth than in the first trial.

  Beaver lived about ten houses down from 5108 Birchleaf Drive. For at least a dozen or so years, she had passed by that house every day on her way to work. On November 3, 2006, she told jurors, she was driving down Birchleaf Drive at about twenty miles per hour—with the Youngs’ house on her left—between 5:20 and 5:25 a.m.

  “That particular night, as I approached that address,” she testified, “there was a car in the driveway at that address and the pillar lights were on at the end of that driveway, and the lights of the car—the car was coming out of the driveway facing forward—it wasn’t like somebody was backing into the street. It was as if they were going to pull out face forward.”

  Beaver stated that as she rounded a curve, “my bright lights hit the car and there was two people in the car, a driver and a passenger. The passenger, I assumed, was a woman. I don’t know. When my bright lights hit the passenger that person quickly jerked their head away. It was, you know, very obvious, and my first concern was, ‘Oh, gosh, I’ve just blinded this person.’”

  Though she wasn’t able to see the passenger’s face, she assumed it was a woman judging by the hairstyle, which she described as “thicker, you know, about like mine.” The passenger seemed to be talking to the driver, she said.

  She was “embarrassed about what had happened,” the defense witness told jurors, “so I purposely looked over to the end of the driveway where they are. I didn’t know whether I should apologize or wave or say something, ‘good morning,’ or, you know, whatever, or what I might be met with either, but I looked and there the driver was a white male, and I remember very vividly he had his hands on the steering wheel,” using her own hands to demonstrate a “10-2” position.

  The postal worker also recounted passing by a boxy-type, working van to her right, parked on

  Blue Sage Drive. She recalled a man in the driver’s seat with some newspapers spread out across the steering wheel. She assumed he was a newspaper carrier. That same afternoon, between 3:15 and 3:20 p.m., she was heading home on Birchleaf Drive, Beaver told the jury, with the Youngs’ home now on her right. She noticed several cars lining the street and people in suits walking around. She also saw “a woman there holding a small child with blond hair”—presumably Meredith and Cassidy—“and they were crying,” she testified.

  Because she didn’t ordinarily watch or listen to the news and seldom read the newspaper, Beaver explained, several days passed by before she heard about the violence inside the Youngs’ home. She eventually learned law enforcement was asking anyone who might have seen something between midnight and 5:00 a.m. on November 3 to contact the Sheriff’s Office. She didn’t reach out initially, she testified, because she passed by the house in question after the 5:00 a.m. cutoff.

  “The very next telecast,” the postal worker told jurors, “we were at work and it said they had extended it from midnight to six a.m. and I went, ‘Yikes!’” She told her supervisor, a former police officer, what was going on. He called the Sheriff’s Office for her and two investigators came to the post office to meet with her.

  “To the best of your recollection,” Klinkosum asked, “what you saw in the early morning hours around 5:20, 5:30, was it the same day that when you came back you saw all the cars out front of 5108 Birchleaf?”

  “Yes,” Beaver replied with confidence.

  “It was the same day you saw the woman holding the child with blond hair?” he asked.

  “And the same day,” she answered, “the paper guy was …”

  “Okay, okay. All right,” Jason’s lawyer interrupted.

  “A lot of activity in one day that normally I don’t see,” she continued, finishing her thought.

  Cummings handled Beaver’s cross-examination. To obtain a conviction against Jason, he knew it was imperative to diminish her credibility—or to at least make the jury question whether she was talking about the same day as Michelle’s murder. He asked her to confirm she had called law enforcement at some point “and indicated that you wanted to withdraw your statement, didn’t you?”

  Beaver responded she had an unpleasant interaction with someone from the SBI, as the result of which, “I was getting weary with it all. But it was not a retraction. I just said, ‘I’m getting tired of dealing with this.’”

  Cummings recounted her testimony from the first trial, when Beaver stated that her account of what happened that morning would be corroborated by the newspaper carrier who was in the van on

  Blue Sage Road. He asked her if she knew the delivery person for the News & Observer did, in fact, testify in the first trial and didn’t corroborate her observations. She responded, “That would mean the person in the van with those papers weren’t carrying News & Observers, I assume.” The Assistant DA also pointed out Beaver told Sergeant Spivey, in February 2008 she was worried and having trouble sleeping. She said, “Yes, of course. This was heavy on you.”

  Cummings then told the defense witness Sergeant Spivey’s notes indicated she wasn’t sure of the date she made her observations—that though she knew it was on a Friday, she couldn’t recall which Friday.

  Her hesitation was caused by the SBI agent, Beaver testified, “who started putting all these scenarios in front of me, and after that, when they left the office, that’s when I called and said, ‘Look, guys, I’m, you know, I’ve got other things on my plate right now.’”

  The Youngs’s neighbor ended her testimony by telling the jury she had “studied it over, and, you know, I drive by that driveway every day of my life, just about, and there is no doubt … And it’s been five and six years and it’s definitely something you’re desperately trying to forget. Again, I don’t know what else to say.”

  • • • • •

  Jason’s friend Brian Ambrose took the stand next. His direct examination mirrored that of the first trial. During cross-examination, however, Holt unearthe
d a few new details he hadn’t been asked about at the first trial.

  The first was about Jason’s interactions with Michelle Money the day of the N.C. State-Boston College game in September 2006. Ambrose and his wife stayed at 5108 Birchleaf Drive that weekend along with several members of the McBroads. He testified there had been “a lot of drinking” when they tailgated that afternoon and after getting back to the Youngs’ home, there was “a lot of flirtation” between Jason and Money.

  Holt also had Ambrose confirm he had told detectives Jason was a “manipulator.” He explained Jason “has that personality where he can convince, you know, convince people to do things that might not necessarily be what they want to do.”

  As an example, he stated Jason “can be late to something, you can plan everything around him, he can be late to it but, you know, he’ll somehow or another convince you that there’s a reason he’s late and it’s not a problem.”

  The prosecutor also questioned Ambrose about his knowledge of his friend’s relationship with Carol Anne Sowerby. She asked whether he had told law enforcement, though Jason and Sowerby were never officially dating, they “hooked up” from time to time.

  “I don’t know if I ever knew that they truly hooked up,” he replied, “but I think it was kind of just a foregone conclusion with all of us that they had.”

  Demetrius Barrett was next to take the stand. His testimony was also very similar to the first trial. One new detail he added, though, was about Jason’s behavior at the funeral. Barrett testified his friend “was in a state I’ve never seen him before.” He told jurors he asked Josh Dalton if he had ever seen Jason like that. Dalton responded, “No, he’s taking it pretty tough. He’s on a lot of drugs.” To Barrett, he “just seemed out of sorts.”

  During his cross-examination, Cummings asked the defense witness about the tailgates in which he and Jason participated.

  Barrett told jurors the tailgates were “pretty massive,” often involving as many as 100 people. “Actually, before Michelle came into the picture,” he explained, “our tailgates were more or less, ‘All right, who’s getting the keg?’ basically. There was no food or anything or anything kind of. It was just like, ‘All right, let’s basically get hammered.’ So Michelle came into the picture and she brought order, and she—actually, I think I told you this—she made us adults.”

  Cummings also established with Barrett that Jason gambled enough to have a bookie, or at least someone Barrett assumed was a bookie. He also described Jason as a “horndog—he was quite flirty. I’m trying to be delicate. Yeah, he was.”

  The prosecutor pushed Jason’s friend to elaborate on his definition of “horndog.”

  “Well, he had a lot of hookups in college,” Barrett explained.

  • • • • •

  Unlike in the first trial, the defense team called two of its own investigators to the witness stand to testify in the second—Steve Hale and Marty Ludas. Hale, a private investigator, was appointed by the court to assist Collins and Klinkosum with Jason’s defense. Hale had worked as a PI since retiring from the Wake County Sheriff’s Office in 2003. He had been seated at or near the defense counsel table throughout both trials.

  Hale informed the jury he had gone to the Hillsville, Virginia Hampton Inn in May 2011 and rented Room 421, the same room assigned to Jason the evening before the murder. He did several experiments to determine whether the room door could be closed without actually locking. He discovered it could.

  The defense investigator testified if the door were closed from a distance of less than six inches, it wouldn’t always lock—and could easily be pushed open without a keycard. The defense team then showed the jury a video of Hale’s experiment.

  Hale also conducted a similar experiment with the emergency exit door. Just as Jason testified he did, the defense investigator found a stick in some shrubbery near the door and used it to prop it open. He showed the jury photos documenting his findings.

  During her cross-examination, Holt intimated Jason had cooked up his story about propping open both doors only after he had received discovery information the State provided his lawyers. But her questions backfired.

  Hale testified it was actually in one of his first interviews with Jason after his December 2009 arrest when Jason told him his hotel room door wasn’t locked—long before his lawyers were provided with any discovery.

  Holt did score some points, however, when she asked Hale about the stick he used to prop open the emergency exit door. In response to her questions, he acknowledged the stick would hold the door open only if he placed it right where the latch was, midway up the edge of the door.

  On redirect examination, the defense investigator told the jury he had no problem holding the exit door open with one hand and grabbing a stick from the shrubbery with his other—just as Jason testified he did.

  Marty Ludas had spent nearly his entire forty-year career as a fingerprint expert, with stints at the FBI, SBI, and CCBI. He had provided expert testimony some 450 times as a prosecution witness. Only twice before, he said, had he testified for the defense.

  Ludas’s testimony was highly technical and jargon-filled, stuffed with information that can baffle weary juries. His primary point was that the CCBI had obtained palm prints from Jason’s closet door that matched neither Jason nor Michelle, although the jury may well have missed that point amid the fog of his complicated descriptions.

  Klinkosum also briefly called Sergeant Spivey back to the stand. He had the detective confirm that, in April 2007, the Sheriff’s Office had received a call stating a mallet, or large hammer, had been found in the front yard at 5108 Birchleaf Drive by a neighbor who had been mowing the lawn. Investigators sent the hammer off for testing to determine if any blood could be detected. But none was. Nor were any fingerprints.

  Jason’s lawyer also had Sergeant Spivey authenticate the voicemail Jason had left for Michelle on the home answering machine on November 3. But the quality of the recording was so poor, one juror raised his hand to report, “Your Honor, we couldn’t understand a word of that.”

  Finally, Klinkosum handed the detective a stack of credit card statements for a Visa Signature card that was actually in Michelle’s name. The statements dated back to February 2004. Klink had Sergeant Spivey confirm that a purchase had been made on that credit card in early 2004 at Cigars by Antonio in Tampa, Florida. Again, the defense team wanted to make sure jurors knew there was evidence supporting Jason’s testimony he had smoked a cigar in the Hampton Inn parking lot.

  Cummings picked right up on that point in his cross-examination, noting the credit card records spanned over four years, and that only one single transaction appeared to have anything to do with cigars.

  The Assistant DA also elicited a curious exchange Sergeant Spivey had with Pat Young in February 2008, while they were riding together to meet Jason to search his SUV for the Hush Puppies Orbitals. During that drive, Pat shared with him a discussion she had with Jason shortly after an SBI agent had been permitted to take a swab from Cassidy’s cheek.

  Jason told his mom, the detective testified, “We would probably find his DNA on the dropper because he had given Cassidy the adult Tylenol, but he had diluted it with water.”

  Klinkosum returned to this subject during his redirect examination. By this point in the trial, it had become clear the prosecution team had abandoned the theory Jason had drugged his daughter with Tylenol and/or Pancof PD, likely because the fingerprint on the medicine cup atop the Tylenol bottle didn’t match Jason’s.

  Klink wanted the jury to know this idea had been Sergeant Spivey’s theory all along.

  In response to his questions, the detective confirmed he did, initially, believe Jason had drugged Cassidy. He also confirmed they were never able to identify whose fingerprint was on that medicine cup.

  • • • • •

  On Wednesday, February 29—without even taking a pause to discuss whether to call Jason to the stand again—the defense rested its cas
e. The State then called three rebuttal witnesses to cast doubt on Cindy Beaver’s testimony—Travis Branch, Jimmy Arrington, and Sergeant Spivey.

  Branch was the regular News & Observer delivery person for the Enchanted Oaks subdivision. He delivered the Raleigh paper to nearly 300 subscribers in his white minivan. Branch told the jury he delivered papers on Birchleaf Drive the morning of the murder and noticed nothing out of the ordinary—in contrast to Beaver. Yet his timing didn’t match her testimony, as he testified he would have made his deliveries on that street between 4:00 and 4:30 a.m., long before Beaver spotted the newspaper delivery van she described.

  Arrington was Beaver’s supervisor at the Postal Service, who had retired in 2008 after 23 years. He had previously worked eight years as an officer for the Raleigh Police Department and five years in alcohol law enforcement. He had supervised Beaver for more than ten years before retiring. Arrington told the jury he called the Wake County Sheriff’s Office on her behalf because she was reluctant to get involved. Later on, investigators spoke with him as well. At that time, he apparently described Beaver as being “nosy.” Holt asked him what he meant by that.

  “Cindy, knowing her for the period of years I worked with her,” her former boss replied, “had a tendency to get involved with other employees’ affairs, and it was a constant thing going on with people. You were putting out fires every day. He said/she said type thing, scenario, and she would get involved with somebody’s affair when she really shouldn’t have ever got involved in it. And then the personnel clash would come about and I’d have to get involved to try to smooth things over. And it was a constant battle every day almost.”