“Holy crap.” She let out a sigh and shook her head just as noise from the outer hallway, voices and laughter, rippled through the open doorway.
“Yup. The real tipping point in the trial was Jonas’s girlfriend at the time.”
“Lacey Higgins. I saw.” She tapped the file with a long finger.
“Right.” He downed the remainder of his now-cold coffee, then crushed the paper cup in his fist and tossed it into the trash can he kept near his file cabinet. He remembered Lacey taking the stand. Dressed in white. Pale and doe-eyed, seeming positively virginal. All part of the theater that was the courtroom. On the stand, Lacey kept her eyes downcast for the most part, but admitted to sleeping with Jonas’s stepbrother, Donner.
When Jonas had found out, she’d said, he’d confronted her at her parents’ house in Portland.
“Did he threaten you?” the DA, a tall woman with sleek blond hair and sharp features, had asked.
“Yes,” had been the meek reply.
“What did he say?”
Lacey had bit her lip and then whispered, “That he would kill me.”
“He would kill you?”
“And anyone I . . . I was with.” Lacy swallowed hard. Fingered the collar of her white dress.
“What exactly were his words?”
“Uh . . . that . . . that if he ever caught me, um . . . you know . . .” She’d visibly swallowed and bit her lower lip.
“If he ever caught you doing what?”
Lacey took a deep breath. “If he caught me with someone else, like, you know, sleeping around, that he, um, he would kill me.”
“Those where his exact words?”
Lacey had looked up at that moment, her slim shoulders stiffening, her dark eyes suddenly cold, as she’d stared across the courtroom to the spot where Jonas McIntyre, dressed in a suit and tie, sat motionless next to Merritt Margrove. She cleared her throat, then spoke. Clearly. Crisply. “He said, ‘If I ever find out you were fucking someone else, I’ll take an axe to him first and you next. That way you can watch him die before you go to hell.’ ”
An audible gasp had come from one of the jurors, a woman with a tight white perm who’d been wearing a pink pantsuit. The other jurors had been somber and tight-lipped, a thin man glaring from behind horn-rimmed glasses, a fortysomething woman turning ashen.
Lacey’s quote, coupled with Kara’s testimony and Jonas’s own past acts of violence, had sealed his fate and become a part of every newspaper report, book, television true crime movie, blog, and podcast since. Even though Jonas’s own wounds were real and shown in graphic display to the jury, the DA’s expert witnesses claimed those cuts could have been self-inflicted, and they paled in comparison to the sickening crime scene and the sliced bodies of the victims. Blood had stained the carpets, run on floorboards, glistened on the tile near the fireplace, splattered against the wood that had been stacked in the firebox, and even smeared some of the branches of the toppled Christmas tree. The dead bodies had been strewn in two rooms, the leftover carnage of a brutal, barbaric attack. His own family members butchered. Jonas’s violent temper, sparking several times in the courtroom, didn’t help, and his prior convictions were the nails in his proverbial coffin.
“So the DA really thought Jonas managed to stab himself with a sword?” Clearly she was skeptical. “His wounds—”
“Were superficial. Hands, forearms, one leg. A weapons specialist showed the court how it could have happened, how he could have been injured in the struggle.”
She flipped through the file again and scoured a page. “In his original statement, Jonas said the intruder pushed him and he hit his head, was knocked out for a while.” She looked over the edge of the worn file. “But no one believed him?”
“No one who mattered. Not the jury. None of the cops. Not even his family with the one exception of his younger sister.”
“Who testified against him?” With another sigh, she closed the file.
“No one knows for certain what really went down that night, and Jonas didn’t help himself by not testifying. His wounds looked like they came from the same weapon, and all the victims’ blood was found on the blade, even Jonas’s.” Thomas rubbed a hand around the back of his neck, remembering. “His attorney, Merritt Margrove, advised Jonas to take the Fifth.”
“He thought Jonas would incriminate himself?”
“Probably. McIntyre was shell-shocked. No surprise there. Barely spoke to anyone pretrial after his initial statement. My bet is that the lawyer thought the jury wouldn’t convict because of his age and his wounds.”