Sergeant Spivey took the witness stand—for the third time—to describe a phone call he had with Beaver in February 2008, after she had left him a message to call her. On that occasion, he testified, the postal worker told him she was having trouble sleeping at night because she was unsure of the exact date on which she observed the SUV in the Youngs’ driveway—she was certain it was on a Friday, but beyond that, wasn’t sure which Friday.
The detective also told the jury that, after she met with an SBI agent, Beaver told him she wanted to withdraw every statement she had previously made.
Just before wrapping up their rebuttal case, the prosecutors called to the witness stand a Nationwide Insurance manager, Robin Jones, whose unit fielded a homeowner’s insurance claim apparently filed by Jason’s sister Kim.
Jones told the jury that, on November 20, 2006, a call center adjuster had received a call indicating there had been a murder in the Youngs’ home that resulted in blood in the master bedroom and the need to replace carpet, do some painting, and perform some other repairs.
Cummings asked him if there had also been a claim made for the theft of property—“jewelry or rings or anything like that”—which had been covered under the same insurance policy. No claim had been made for the theft of jewelry, cash, or any other property, Jones testified.
The testimony wrapped up that Leap Day afternoon. Jurors had heard from 65 witnesses. Over the course of more than three weeks, they had been provided a tremendous amount of information. It was now up to the lawyers to help them make sense of it all.
23
Grand Finale
On March 1, 2012, jurors sat at the edges of their seats, eagerly awaiting the arguments in which the prosecutors and defense lawyers would stitch together the evidence into more coherent narratives. The courtroom’s gallery was filled to capacity, with family members, friends, and spectators anxious to hear the lawyers’ closing remarks.
Mike Klinkosum was first to speak. Much as he did in his closing in the first trial, he focused relentlessly on the physical evidence, asking the jury to consider ten circumstances “that show you that Jason Young did not kill Michelle Young.” He started with the fight in the bedroom, the attempted strangulation, and scratch marks on Michelle’s neck, evidence that “she was trying to pry those hands away.”
If Jason had been her attacker, he insisted, there would have been scratches somewhere on his hands.
He spent considerable time discussing Michelle’s blood—how much of it was found in the house, and how none of it had been detected in Jason’s Explorer, the Hampton Inn, or any of her husband’s belongings.
While discussing Cassidy’s shockingly clean appearance, Klink interjected an entirely new defense theory. The only way she could have been cleaned up so meticulously, he suggested—without any evidence of blood in any sinks or bathtubs—is if she had been removed from the house altogether and cleaned up somewhere else.
Yet Jason didn’t have enough time, his lawyer argued, to commit the murder, remove Cassidy from the house, clean her up, and then get as far as Wytheville, Virginia by 7:40 a.m. that morning. He pointed out that even Sergeant Spivey, in one of his search warrants, had asserted his belief the toddler had been removed from the house.
If the State’s theory were to be believed, Klinkosum continued, his client killed Michelle “in the bloodiest way possible and is under enough time pressure to do that but still has enough time to clean himself up, find his daughter in the blood, put her in the bathroom, leave her in there long enough for her to smear blood all over the walls and all over the floor, and then somehow get her cleaned up and put her back in his bed near his dead wife.”
“If he took her away, he took her away to get the blood off of her, and he cleans her up, why,” Klink asked, “would he take her back to the master bedroom and put her in there? That makes no sense.”
He next discussed the lack of fiber transfer between the Hampton Inn and the crime scene as well as the DNA evidence. Unlike in the first trial, however, Klinkosum was unable to argue about the cigarette butts that contained DNA from two unknown males, or the hair on the picture frame whose DNA didn’t match Jason’s or Michelle’s. Judge Stephens hadn’t allowed the defense attorneys to present that evidence in this trial because they couldn’t properly establish where the cigarette butts, or that hair, came from.
Klink focused instead on the unknown DNA found on the jewelry box, arguing that the master bedroom, “almost like an inner sanctum of a home,” wouldn’t contain DNA from friends or other visitors. “That’s where you and your spouse or people in your immediate family are allowed to go,” he argued, “and there was DNA on the jewelry box in this master bedroom that doesn’t match either of the adults that lived in this house. There is something not right with this crime scene, ladies and gentlemen.”
He then pivoted to the fingerprints found in the master bedroom. “It’s the inner sanctum of a home and you have fingerprints that cannot be identified to anyone. The fingerprints that CCBI compared—they found unidentified prints on Michelle Young, around Michelle Young’s closet and inside Jason Young’s closet on the shoe box, on the shoe-shine box—and these prints,” Klinkosum continued, “were compared to over 160 different people. Family members, close friends of the Youngs, acquaintances of the Youngs.” But not a single one matched.
He also focused on the unidentified prints found on the eBay printouts Jason sent Meredith to retrieve. He suggested the prosecutors would contend the prints belonged to law enforcement officers. “If you have law enforcement officers’ prints on file,” Klink asked, “why don’t you just compare them and then eliminate them?” The failure to take that logical step couldn’t be so casually excused.
“That’s not right,” he argued. That’s not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s not uncovering every stone, and, ladies and gentlemen, in a case where a man’s very liberty is on the line, where he could go to prison for the rest of his life, that’s very little to ask.”
Klinkosum then pointed to the fingerprints and palm prints on Jason’s closet door frame—from which Jason had been excluded. “You have palm prints within three or four feet of Michelle Young’s body and yet that question mark hangs out there in the air about who they belong to. It doesn’t make sense, ladies and gentlemen.”
Circumstance six, he stated, involved Jason’s telephone calls the night before the murder. According to Michelle Money and Demetrius Barrett, it was “same old Jason,” he reminded jurors, rather than “the mind of a man that is trying to plot out a murder and get away with it.”
The Hampton Inn was circumstance seven. The phone records established that Jason was in his room speaking with Barrett until 11:11 p.m. The western stairwell camera went black at 11:20 p.m. “How did he, in the span of nine minutes in a hotel he’d never been in,” Klinkosum asked, “go throughout that entire bottom floor, figure out exactly which camera to unplug and then do it in the span of nine minutes without even being seen downstairs? There’s cameras all over the first floor and yet there’s not one picture of him walking anywhere down there until midnight.”
The defense lawyer then transitioned to the shoeprint evidence, circumstance eight, suggesting it left two possibilities other than those posited by the prosecutors. The first was that two different people were involved in the murder, one of whom was wearing a pair of Hush Puppies just like Jason’s. The second possibility—a radical departure from Jason’s testimony Michelle must have donated his Hush Puppies—was that the Hush Puppies shoeprints may have been made by Jason’s shoes, but with other feet wearing them.
Klink reminded jurors that Jason’s and Michelle’s closets had been “pillaged and rummaged through,” with clothes strewn everywhere and shoe boxes torn open. Unlike the dark and distinct prints left by the Franklin athletic shoes, the prints from the Hush Puppies were so faint they had to be enhanced with chemicals in order to discern any details. What that meant, Jason’s lawyer contended, was Michelle’s assa
ilant had been wearing the athletic shoes—pressing them hard against the floor while beating her repeatedly.
Realizing he had blood all over his shoes, Klinkosum theorized, the assailant may have thought, “‘I can’t track blood out of here; it might lead back to me,’ and so what do they do?” He suggested the killer rummaged through Jason’s closet, found the Hush Puppies, and put them on so additional prints weren’t made as he exited the house.
The closets were circumstance nine. If Jason had been Michelle’s assailant, Klink asked, why would he have rummaged through both closets to find whatever he was looking for? “Why would Jason Young’s closet have been pillaged like that unless it was someone who was not Jason and was not—didn’t know where things were in Michelle’s closet either?”
The tenth and final circumstance, the defense lawyer stated, was the “investigation itself” and how investigators “focused like a laser on Jason Young.”
To underscore that point, he reminded jurors how differently two of the most critical witnesses—Gracie Calhoun and Cindy Beaver—had been treated. Calhoun, he argued, “was just welcomed with open arms by law enforcement and the prosecution.” They “didn’t do one thing to test her memory.”
“But yet Cindy Beaver, okay, Cindy Beaver, who saw a car in that driveway at around 5:30 in the morning, ‘Oh, she’s not credible.’ … A twenty-plus year employee, federal employee, who’s driven that route every morning for the last twenty years has something stand out to her and all of a sudden she’s not credible.”
As he began wrapping up, Klinkosum implored the jury to find that the physical evidence “points to someone else and that they were trying to get you mad at him for the way he treated Michelle, for having an affair on her, for everything he’s done that’s wrong.”
He granted the jury permission to be mad at Jason. “Hate him if you want to. I don’t blame you. But what you feel about him in terms of him as a person, that anger that you feel, put it in context, ladies and gentlemen. Put that in context, because when you look at the physical evidence in this case, it does not match up. It does not match up to Jason having killed his wife and unborn son.”
Bryan Collins stood up to present Jason’s final argument. He repeated several of the themes he relied on in the first trial—including the analogy of a highlight reel of Michael Jordan’s worst moments on the basketball court. He showed the jury the same PowerPoint presentation to illustrate Jason’s testimony about his travels had to be accurate—and the State’s theory couldn’t be.
A new theme he presented was about the prevalence of electronic information in the modern world—from cell phones, computers, surveillance cameras, electronic keycards, credit card swipes, and so forth—all of which had been admitted into evidence.
Jason was leaving “electronic traces of himself everywhere he is,” Collins told jurors. “And the thing about that is that every single one of those electronic traces that he left of himself are exactly where he says he was and exactly when he says he was there and he’s doing for the most part what he says he’s doing in those electronic traces.” But not a single electronic trace of Jason existed between midnight and 7:40 a.m. the morning of the murder.
“And do you know why that is?” Collins asked. “When you’re in your hotel room asleep, you’re not generating electronic evidence. You’re not driving. You’re not talking on your cell phone. You’re not using your computer. You’re asleep.”
The Public Defender suggested the wrongful death case was irrelevant, noting Jason simply decided “not to participate. He wasn’t going to play that game.” As a result, “Cassidy gets all of Jason’s money and Cassidy gets all of Michelle’s life insurance, and that’s the way it should be. That’s the way Jason wanted it. It makes you wonder a little bit what Linda’s lawyers did to earn a million dollars in that case,” Collins mused, “and it makes you wonder a little bit what she did to earn $150,000 in that case, but that would be pure speculation and that doesn’t help you decide this case.”
He next pivoted to the custody case, telling jurors, “Jason didn’t give Cassidy away. Jason is still Cassidy’s father” and could reclaim custody of her at any time he proved that to be in her best interests.
He asked them to consider the timing of the custody case: “At that time Jason was still a suspect. He hadn’t been charged with anything. The media was hounding him. He didn’t have a job because of that. He didn’t have a house. He was being sued for $15 million. He was sitting around wondering when or if law enforcement officers were going to come and take him to jail.”
Jason had consulted a really good family-law attorney, Collins reminded the jury, “and what do you think she told him his chances were of winning a child custody case? Think about that.” At the hour-long hearing that had been scheduled, “Do you really think a judge is going to let him have custody of his child?” he asked rhetorically. “So he agreed that Meredith could have her, that she could take custody of her and take care of her … He did the best thing he could do for Cassidy at that time. But the point of that is none of that helps you decide this case.”
Turning to Roger Smith, Jr.’s advice to Jason not to cooperate with the investigation, Collins suggested that was actually “good advice to give to an innocent man.” That’s because “if you tell the police a story that doesn’t fit their theory, they are relentless in going after you … You saw how that worked with Cindy Beaver. This poor innocent woman, who’s just driving through her neighborhood, trying to be a good citizen and tell the police what she saw. They grilled that poor woman.”
Had his client submitted to an interview and gotten “the most minor, insignificant detail wrong,” the Public Defender argued, “then trained, experienced law enforcement officers or trained, experienced prosecutors are going to seize on that and they’re going to claim that you’re lying and then they’re going to use that claim that you’re lying to argue that you’re lying about everything and that you can’t be believed about anything.”
Jason’s lawyer then grabbed the Hampton Inn check-out receipt from his counsel table and held it up before the jury to stress its significance. That receipt would have been placed under Jason’s hotel room door between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m., he reminded jurors. “He had this,” Collins asserted, clutching the receipt. That means he was in that hotel room after this was slid under the door, so we know he was in the hotel room.”
And if Jason’s hotel room door had been propped open all night as the prosecution team suggested, he argued, Keith Hicks would have noticed it either when he slid the receipt under the door or when he hung the USA Today on the door handle.
“Keith Hicks, the man who can see a little rock in the door. Keith Hicks, who’s worried about security because he’s the only person there at night. Keith Hicks would have seen that, and if he didn’t see it when he went to hang the paper on the door, it would have opened and he would have noticed it then. That door wasn’t propped open all night long. Jason was there asleep,” he insisted.
As he neared the end of his argument, Collins focused on a vacuum cleaner investigators had found plugged into an outlet in the second-floor home office. Pointing to a photo, he showed the jury a footprint made in dirt on the very bottom step of the staircase leading upstairs from the kitchen; the same photo didn’t reveal dirt on any other step.
“How is that possible?” he asked. “Well, was somebody using that vacuum cleaner to vacuum those steps? We’ll never know because they didn’t seize the vacuum cleaner. Might we want to know whose fingerprints were on that vacuum cleaner? If there were unidentified fingerprints on that vacuum cleaner, wouldn’t that really tell you something? How can there just be dirt on that step, and none of those, and yet we’ve got a vacuum cleaner out in the middle of a crime scene and nobody bothers to look?”
At that moment, Collins began choking up with emotion. “And they want to put this man in prison for the rest of his life,” he said, voice quavering, “and they didn’t even bother to look
.”
As he began wrapping up, the Public Defender reminded jurors about Beaver’s observations the morning of the murder. “Her testimony cripples the State’s case and they know that,” he argued, unable to contain his frustration. “The law enforcement officers knew that from the very beginning. The State knows that, the prosecutors know that, and what they have done to her is wrong. Just like what they’re doing to Jason Young is wrong.”
Collins concluded with familiar words from the first trial: “We’re not ever going to know what happened in that house that night. We just can’t. It’s too late. The case is not solved. The evidence is not clear. It’s not beyond a reasonable doubt. Please do your duty and find Jason Young not guilty.”
Following a lunch break, Becky Holt picked up right where Collins left off, telling jurors, “This case is solved. Jason Young brutally murdered Michelle Young in the early morning hours of November the 3rd of 2006, in the bedroom that they shared at 5108 Birchleaf Drive. He is guilty of first-degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Michelle, Holt said, found herself “married to a man who wouldn’t grow up, didn’t want the same things that she wanted, who didn’t want to be married to her, who abused her verbally, enough that she went to seek help.” And she told her therapist that, though Jason was complaining about the lack of sex in the marriage, she felt like he was forcing himself on her.
Meanwhile, the Assistant DA continued, “Jason had had it with Linda Fisher. Her visits were too long, her visits were too often, and he absolutely was not going to have her move in the house with him.”
The defendant had confided in his friend Josh Dalton that he didn’t think he could divorce Michelle “because she will move to New York and she’ll take Cassidy,” Holt reminded jurors. He also told Dalton he thought he might be in love with Money and talked about getting her pregnant. At nearly the same time, the prosecutor added, he had sexual intercourse with Carol Anne Sowerby in his home and had written to Genevieve Cargol that she was the “love of his life.”
Murder on Birchleaf Drive Page 31