Murder on Birchleaf Drive

by Steven B Epstein

  Why was any of that important? Holt asked. She explained the State wasn’t asking the jury to convict Jason because he engaged in extramarital sex or because he was a jerk to his wife. Rather, she contended, when the defendant finally made a statement—from the witness stand—”1,693 days after Michelle’s murder,” and said he loved his wife, the evidence of his blatant infidelity “should make you question his honesty.”

  In view of the sorry state of his relationship with Michelle, the prosecutor asked jurors whether it made any sense that he was shopping for a belated anniversary present before leaving the house on November 2. Or that he left with the MapQuest directions, but not the eBay printouts he had printed off the very same printer.

  “The defendant, who had sent a card for the anniversary and not purchased a gift now, almost a month later, has decided before he leaves for a business trip that he’s going to shop for an anniversary gift. Does that make sense?” Holt asked incredulously. “Or in light of what you now know, is that part of the plan, the plan to leave those papers so that he could later have an excuse to have Meredith go over to the house?”

  She next discussed the photo of Jason at the Cracker Barrel, reminding jurors Tom Riha had testified the shoes Jason was seen wearing were consistent with the appearance of Hush Puppies Orbitals. And it just so happened that Jason owned a size 12 pair of those very shoes, only 195 of which existed in the entire world.

  The Assistant DA also focused on Jason’s testimony about his activities at the Hampton Inn, asking jurors if it made sense to them that he would leave his computer and all of his belongings in his hotel room with the door propped open. Or that he needed to get the USA Today from the front desk to look at sports scores, even though his room had a TV and wireless internet access—which he was actually using to access sports websites.

  Equally incredible, she suggested, was the defendant’s testimony he went to the parking lot to smoke a cigar. Not only did the evidence reveal Jason hated to be around anyone who was smoking, his friend Josh Dalton had never seen him smoke a cigar, despite all of their activities together over several years. On top of all that, it was thirty degrees outside that night with the wind blowing twenty miles an hour.

  “Your reason and common sense should call ‘foul,’” she asserted.

  Holt reminded jurors about the three voicemails Jason left, designed to get Meredith into the house to retrieve the eBay printouts—two to her and one to his mother. “You know from those three phone calls he wants Meredith to hurry up and get over there. Is it because the surprise is important?” she asked in disbelief. “Is it because there really, really is going to be a purchase of a purse and he doesn’t want Michelle to find out about that? Or is it because he knows that somebody needs to get over there and get Cassidy?”

  Reminding the jury of Brian Ambrose’s testimony that Jason was a “manipulator,” Holt began wrapping up, telling jurors, “Don’t let yourselves be manipulated in this case. When you go back to deliberate, consider all the circumstances in this case. Consider how it is that the defendant could have been so lucky to be trapped in a situation and that his wife just happened to be murdered, that the things that happened at this hotel would happen on that very night, that Gracie Calhoun would see him and recognize him, that the wedding rings would be the only thing missing.”

  The situation, the prosecutor explained, “was not tolerable for the defendant. He wanted out, and while he may have loved Cassidy, Jason Young loved himself more. He’s a salesman by trade. Do not buy that statement that you heard … Tell Jason Young by your verdict that you know that these circumstances are important, that you see through the story that he tried to concoct four years later. Tell Jason Young that your reason and common sense dictate a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder of Michelle Young.”

  Howard Cummings stood up to address the jury. Though he wasn’t directly involved in the first trial, he had served as the lead prosecutor in the case since the day Michelle had been murdered. Particularly after the first trial ended in a hung jury, the first Assistant DA felt an immense sense of responsibility to deliver justice for Linda and Meredith, for the dozens of law enforcement officers who had devoted so much time and energy to the case, and, most importantly, for Michelle Young.

  He began his closing by articulating a theme he would return to repeatedly: “It is not a stranger that did this,” he said. “This is not a stranger crime. This is an act of domestic violence that had been coming on for a while.”

  Cummings tried to explain away some of the forensic evidence on which Klinkosum had so heavily relied. There was no blood anywhere downstairs, he noted, so why would there have been any in Jason’s Explorer? The Youngs had recently had a house “full of people” for the N.C. State-Boston College game, many of whom stayed several nights. Law enforcement officers hadn’t been able to obtain prints of everyone who had been there. Naturally, the prosecutor explained, there were unidentified prints and DNA in the house.

  The only unexplained fingerprint evidence that would have been significant, he argued, would have been a fingerprint made in blood. “That would tell you that that person was there that had that fingerprint after the bleeding started, but that doesn’t exist anywhere in the house.”

  Bewildered, Cummings asked why the defense, all of a sudden, seemed to be rejecting Jason’s own testimony that Michelle had donated his Hush Puppies—and was now suggesting someone else had worn those shoes the night of the murder.

  The Assistant DA held up still images taken from security cameras at the Hampton Inn. The first showed Jason at the front desk at about midnight. He suggested Jason wanted to be seen to establish his alibi.

  The object in his hand, as he walked toward the exit, had to be the road atlas found in his Explorer, not a newspaper, Cummings argued, as he was holding that same item when he approached the front desk. He then held up the road atlas that had been entered into evidence and pointed to Meredith’s telephone number, insisting Jason had written it down “because he had to call Meredith to go over there to take care of Cassidy.”

  He asked the jury where the shirt was that Jason was seen wearing at the Hampton Inn’s front desk and where his Hush Puppies shoes were. When he arrived at Meredith’s home the night of the murder, Cummings reminded jurors, Jason wasn’t wearing either and neither was in his car or in his luggage.

  “You know, sometimes people don’t tell the truth. Sometimes people tell lies. Sometimes people live a lie,” the prosecutor snarled with scorn and derision.

  That statement led him inexorably to the topic of Jason’s infidelity. “Why would a married man whose wife is pregnant have condoms in his luggage?” he asked. “Not just one. Why would he do that unless he was doing something that is dishonest. Adultery is dishonest. That’s what he’s doing. And I’m not asking you to pass judgment on him because of the adultery. I’m asking you to pass judgment on him because of his honesty in his life or his dishonesty in his life.”

  Cummings next turned to Klinkosum’s contention that Jason’s closet had been “pillaged.” The Assistant DA argued the disarray could have resulted from the defendant’s time crunch. Another possibility was that Jason had deliberately staged the scene to make it look like a robbery. Michelle’s missing wedding and engagement rings—for which no insurance claim was ever filed—might also have been part of the staging, he suggested.

  The prosecutor asserted that the manner in which Michelle had been killed didn’t fit with the notion of a stranger having been her assailant: “A stranger comes into your house, and all he is going to do is strangle you, and that doesn’t work—how many times is he going to hit you afterwards?”

  Holding up a gruesome photo of Michelle’s bloody and disfigured face, he asked: “Is it going to be like this? Is this what a stranger does?” There was only one word to describe the beating inflicted on Michelle, he continued, “Overkill,” which would not have resulted from a confrontation with a stranger.

  Cummings also p
ointed to Jason’s reaction when his stepfather told him Michelle was dead. “No reaction or disbelief … He does not say, ‘I need to call and find out about this.’ It’s because he knows what happened.”

  The Assistant DA puzzled over the oddity of Jason’s statement to his mother, during their long drive to Meredith’s home, that he would surely lose the house. Cummings noted Jason stood to receive $4 million in life insurance proceeds. “The only way he’s going to lose the house is if because, as he killed his wife, he will not be able to claim the life insurance. He will never get it. That’s why. That’s the only way he can lose that house.”

  Neither Klinkosum nor Collins had addressed the testimony of Cassidy’s daycare teachers. Not only did Cummings remind jurors of their testimony, he used the actual dolls Cassidy held that day to recreate the beating she had one doll inflict on the other.

  He told jurors, “You can consider what they reported to determine whether or not that is evidence that Cassidy actually observed what happened.”

  He mocked Jason’s testimony—that he loved Michelle, even though he wasn’t a proper husband, and he was a good father to Cassidy. “Cheating on her mother in the same household, talking about your sex life to your daycare workers, public humiliation of this child’s mother—is that being a good father to this child?” he asked derisively.

  Shifting to the custody lawsuit, Cummings emphasized that Linda and Meredith hadn’t even asked Jason to grant them custody—merely to have regular visitation with Cassidy. They sued him only after he wouldn’t agree, he reminded jurors.

  “He had every opportunity in the world, both in family-law court and in regular civil court,” the prosecutor argued, “to say to a judge or a jury the same thing that he said on that video, the same thing he said last summer. He could have said that at any time he wanted to, but he never would do that. They would have been happy with just visitation. That’s all they wanted, but he couldn’t do that, and then he got sued and he couldn’t stand to answer the questions either in civil court or in domestic court.”

  Those references to “civil court” were as close as the prosecution team came to mentioning the wrongful death case. Neither Cummings nor Holt reminded the jury Jason had been declared Michelle’s slayer—by Judge Stephens himself—or that he had been found liable for her wrongful death and ordered to pay more than $15 million.

  As he neared the end of his argument, Cummings returned to the topic of domestic violence, which he told jurors “takes shape in many different ways. It is about control. It is as much about verbal abuse and mental abuse as it is physical abuse.”

  He pointed out that a “history of prior acts of physical violence doesn’t always come before the first serious act. Thirty blows. Thirty blows. That’s not from a stranger,” he argued. “That is a mad, mad domestic abuser who is mad about the place he’s found himself in.”

  Standing beside a flip chart near the lectern, he began filling the blank page with all of the circumstances he contended left no doubt that Jason had been Michelle’s killer: strangulation, thirty plus blows to her body, no forced entry, no theft, no harm to Cassidy, Jason’s ownership of size 12 Hush Puppies, strange camera events at the Hampton Inn, in-law problems, $4 million in life insurance, an affair, and the way he testified at the first trial.

  “When all those things come together,” the prosecutor asserted, “and there may be more, but you think about the fact that he’s going to be able to, if it works like it’s supposed to, he’s going to be able to get the life insurance, he’s not going to have to deal with his in-laws anymore, no harm is done to his child. She’s obviously over-killed and there’s no forced entry. All of those things come together to say that this is not a stranger that did this.”

  Cummings acknowledged Jason may have had help, possibly to clean up Cassidy. And that the second set of shoeprints did suggest an accomplice may have been involved. None of that mattered to the jury’s decision, he explained, because Jason had clearly committed this murder.

  The first Assistant DA ended his argument using a puzzle as a metaphor. “Sometimes when you’re with your family on a rainy day,” he mused, “you all get around a breakfast room table and get a big box out that has a puzzle in it. You don’t always get to look at the outside and know what it’s going to be when you get through.”

  Like missing puzzle pieces, he suggested to jurors, there were facts in this case no one would ever be able to explain—the unidentified fingerprints and two sets of shoeprints, as examples. “What I’m going to say to you is that the State has given you enough pieces, enough pieces to that puzzle” to be able to clearly see the picture, even without the missing pieces.

  The jury didn’t need every last piece, Cummings argued, to be “convinced to a moral certainty and beyond a reasonable doubt of what this picture is. And in this case, when you go back there and you begin deliberating—take all the pieces that the State has given you and put them the way that they do fit together. And at the end, the picture will be quite clear that this defendant murdered his wife, Michelle Fisher Young, on November the 3rd of 2006. It will be quite clear, and the State asks you to find him guilty of murder in the first degree.”

  With those final words, Cummings resumed his seat next to Holt, hopeful that jurors now had all they needed to reach a unanimous guilty verdict.

  Though the prosecution team’s arguments covered a wide swath of the evidence presented, there was one glaring omission: Cindy Beaver. Despite the emphasis both Klinkosum and Collins had placed on her testimony—and the way she had been treated by law enforcement personnel—Cummings and Holt apparently decided their best strategy was to ignore her testimony altogether, gambling that jurors would conclude on their own that she was either misguided or mistaken.

  Whether their gamble had paid off would be known soon enough.

  • • • • •

  Jurors returned to begin their deliberations on Friday, March 2. After deliberating for more than five hours, they left for the weekend without reaching a verdict. Having waited more than five years for justice, Linda and Meredith would have to wait another three days. At the very least.

  The following Monday, the jury returned, eager to complete its mission. At about 10:00 a.m., the foreperson had a note delivered to Judge Stephens.

  She asked permission for the jury to review numerous items of evidence, including the still frame of Jason inside the Cracker Barrel, the jeans and USA Today newspaper found in his Explorer, the autopsy report, photos taken of the master bedroom before the crime scene was processed, Cassidy’s pajamas, photos of Cassidy’s hutch, the shoe impressions Agent Morrow made of the Hush Puppies Orbitals, the enlarged roadmap of Virginia and North Carolina, a diagram of the first floor of the Hampton Inn, and a photo showing the back of Jason’s Explorer before it was processed.

  With the assistance of the Clerk, the lawyers assembled the requested items on a table. After jurors returned to their seats, Judge Stephens had the bailiff begin passing several of the items through the jury box. He then allowed jurors to step into the well of the courtroom to examine Jason’s jeans and Cassidy’s pajamas. They then returned to the jury room to continue their deliberations.

  At 3:15 p.m., another note from the foreperson indicated jurors needed a twenty-minute break. And further, they intended to retire for the day at 4:45 p.m. It was becoming increasingly apparent, like the first jury, these jurors were also having a difficult time reaching a verdict. It now seemed inevitable deliberations would spill into a third day. For those waiting on the verdict—members of the Fisher and Young families in particular—anxiety and frustration were escalating with each passing minute.

  The jury returned from its break just after 3:30 p.m. Less than ten minutes later, however, the foreperson knocked on the jury room door and handed the bailiff yet another note. Judge Stephens summoned the lawyers as the bailiff walked the note toward the bench. With mild trepidation, they began to examine the note together, fearful its conten
ts might reveal that this jury was also “immovably hung.”

  But to their collective surprise and intense relief, the note indicated the jury had reached a unanimous verdict. More than two years after Jason’s arrest. Nearly five and a half years since Michelle’s murder. Finality was now just moments away.

  • • • • •

  The packed courtroom was filled with nervous anticipation as the eight women and four men emerged from the jury room and filed into the jury box one final time. Judge Stephens asked the foreperson if the jury had reached a unanimous verdict. She confirmed it had and handed the bailiff the manila envelope containing the verdict form. The entire courtroom fell eerily silent as the bailiff walked the envelope from the jury box to the bench. Time crawled almost to a halt, the suspense almost too much to bear.

  With a poker face, Judge Stephens stared down at the verdict form for what seemed like an eternity.

  He then announced the verdict: “We the jury, by unanimous verdict, find the defendant, Jason Lynn Young, to be guilty of first-degree murder of Michelle Fisher Young.”

  As the judge read the verdict, Jason stared straight ahead, devoid of any expression or emotion. The same could not be said for Linda and Meredith who from their seats just behind the prosecution table, quietly hugged one another, tears streaming down their faces. Finally. Justice. They were overwhelmed with emotion. Howard Cummings leaned over and grabbed Linda’s hand, a broad smile washing over his face.

  After thanking jurors for their service and excusing them from the courtroom, the judge asked if the defendant would be moving to set aside the verdict. After Collins responded that his client would, Judge Stephens began what turned into a five-minute soliloquy.

  In a tone mixed with exasperation and sadness, the judge stated, “The Court’s assessment of the evidence in the case is actually pretty simple. This is a domestic violence homicide case.” He found “fingerprints of the domestic violence” throughout the case, stemming from a relationship that “escalated from disagreements to irreconcilable differences in which the defendant had pretty much declared he was done with the marriage.” It appeared, he lamented, “to be a relationship in which some traumatic event was not only predictable, but almost inevitable.”