Dead Men Talking Read online

  There is that old saying: ‘one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover’. Although Melanie McGuire used to be a pretty, a magazine-cover-glossy, classy act, it also transpires that this woman has a personality, which manifests itself through her letters, that is seductively enigmatic. When I asked her about her favourite food, she responded in her beautiful penmanship, with: ‘Asian (be it Japanese, Chinese), French (No, you just can’t get decent foie gras in prison). Seafood (hey, I’m from the shore). I fail to cite Italian as that is my ‘ordinary’ food.’

  When I asked Melanie about her favourite colour and hair products, she answered: ‘If I had to choose one, it would be the grey/blue/green of my younger son’s eyes – but, yes, and it is indeed on the list, but I’ll spare you the hair-care products – you’ve suffered quite enough – Oh, I was joking about the color.’

  * * *

  After Melanie’s parents divorced, Linda Slate remarried Michael Cappasaro. Melanie writes: ‘My biological father and I had sporadic contact before he died on 26 February 1987, when I was fourteen.’

  From eleven years onward, Melanie’s lived in Middleton, New Jersey, where she graduated from Middleton High School South in the top 50 per cent of her class. She went to Rutgers College, then Rutgers University, where she was a ‘pretty average student’. She admits that as this was her first time away from home, she was far more interested in immersing herself in ‘collegiate lifestyle academics’. She adds, one senses with a wry smile: ‘Yes, and this incarcerant can write, too.’

  Melanie graduated with a baccalaureate degree in statistics, in 1994, a few months after she had met Bill McGuire, while they both waited tables at a nearby town to earn some spare cash. ‘I was attending the Rutgers School of Pharmacy at the time,’ she writes, ‘ironically housed in the same building as the Stats Dept.’ She had been less than enthusiastic about the major she had chosen, even taking a number of psychological and education courses, so, the 22-year-old woman made a decision to enrol in the Charles E. Gregory School of Nursing, in the Autumn of 1994.

  It is here that Melanie McGuire finally hit her stride, excelling in her classes, she graduated second in her class in 1997. And, it was also here that she befriended James ‘Jim’ Finn, who would soon become a famous American football fullback. They had what she calls ‘a bit of an on and off relationship’, but they kept in touch. Finn became a witness in her subsequent trial.

  While at the nursing school, Melanie responded to an advertisement for ovum donors. By the time she graduated, she had undergone three egg donations, ‘treatment cycles which were anonymous at the St Barnabas Medical Center’. She says that: ‘In talking to the staff and head nurse there, they knew that my licensure exam wasn’t far off, and they offered me a position as an “ovum donor nurse coordinator”.’

  Bill and Melanie were still very much an item, and he encouraged her to accept the job offer. They became engaged in 1998, after she had completed two more ovum donations – this time solely for research purposes. The couple married on Sunday, 6 June 1999. She was 27, he was 34, and a week before the wedding she learned that she was pregnant with their first child.

  Melanie was thrilled:

  I’d suffered a very early miscarriage about six months before that, I was thrilled, but nervous. Later that year, the physician I worked with left St Barnabas to form Reproduction Medicine Associates (RMA), and I left with them. I would eventually come to meet and work with Dr Bradley T Miller there, and he still runs a successful practice in Morristown today.

  Brad would soon become Melanie’s lover.

  Reflecting back on her formative years, I asked Melanie if she thought that the break-up of her parents’ marriage, while she was just five, may have had any negative impact on her. She replied:

  I wouldn’t necessarily say that my parents divorce troubled me – I barely have a recollection of it, and I consider myself infinitely fortunate that my mother subsequently remarried to a wonderful man, who I truly consider to be my ‘real’ father. However, I can and do acknowledge some pervasive abandonment issues – it would be disingenuous of me to say I wasn’t affected by my natural father’s absence (and occasional re-entry) into my life. I am reluctant to reflect on that and assign blame – I am an educated woman, and if it has power over me, it’s because I allow it to.

  Melanie says that she is currently steeped in an environment where she is ‘almost incessantly bombarded with people who seem to relinquish responsibility for their lives and blame any deficits in themselves on their upbringing, or lack of it, as it were’. She suggests an example of this typical inmate thinking: ‘“I robbed an old lady at gunpoint and beat her within an inch of her life because my mother was mean to me,” and that sort of thing.’

  Using verbal skills that any psychotherapist would be proud of, Melanie McGuire is also clear on another point:

  I don’t mean to intimate that one’s earliest experiences (or the perception of them) don’t impact our psychological development – but if I have issues related to my rearing, they are just that – my issues. As adults, we bear the charge of choosing how we allow these things to impact or dictate our own choices. Did I have a ‘bad’ marriage? Yes. Was my husband abusive, be it emotionally, and/or physically? Yes. But I am responsible for staying and for bending to his will on issues that I should have remained firm on. So, while I think things like a ‘battered woman’s syndrome’ do, indeed, exist and are appropriate affirmative defenses in some cases, I do place some degree of accountability on the ‘victim’, albeit limited. In my criminal case, I never waged an affirmative defense – my defense was always that of actual innocence.

  Melanie McGuire admits that she allowed many of her choices to be fashioned, or impacted, by ‘the tenor of the relationship’, but she adds:

  I won’t sit here [in prison] and cry that my biological father’s absence explains it all away. It may be useful in coming to understand some of my choices and my rationale for not walking away from my husband sooner. My husband’s abuse does not absolve me of my poor choices, but it lends a somewhat mitigating context for the situation and the perfect storm of circumstantial evidence that has put me here.

  Melanie finishes this issue with her usual dry humour:

  I’m not certain if I’m being clear, or if this is going to read like a flight of ideas from Plath, [Sylvia Plath, the American novelist and poet] or something. Somewhere, several hundred miles away, I sense my appellate attorney developing an unsightly facial tic, so I’ll stop for now.

  I also put it to her that she must be proud of her academic achievements, and Melanie McGuire responded in her typically humble fashion:

  Chris, dear Chris, my academic achievements are anything but interesting. But I’ll run through them if you like. When I was in the second grade, someone thought it would be helpful to test my IQ. As a result, I was placed into what was called a ‘Gifted & Talented’ programme (how politically incorrect). I was in this programme throughout grammar/middle/high school, where I excelled even in a fairly competitive school system. I was a member of a both the Spanish Honor Society (I like the word, honor) and the national Honor Society, and a drama club. I was selected as an Edward J. Bloustein Distinguished Scholar [intended to recognise the highest achieving graduating high school students in or from New Jersey and to reward them with awards that are granted regardless of need]. Then I went to Rutgers University, and got a 1.0 GPA my first semester to the acute distress of my parents. I discovered unchecked freedom – and parties. I think I pulled a 3.0 or better each semester after that: Statistics major, Psyche minor, Religion mini, but my initial fall from academic grace doomed me to mediocrity. I decided in my senior year that I wanted to pursue nursing, but didn’t have the credentials to switch majors at that point, so I completed my BA first at my parents’ insistence.

  Although Melanie and footballer Finn had a short relationship, she says she is not the football type – being more of the ‘conspiracy theory/science fiction type’.

>   Melanie McGuire admits that by anyone’s standards her marriage was far from happy. ‘Jim had a few problems – drink, gambling, and women on occasions,’ but she is quick to point out that she is ‘not entitled to any righteous indignation about this last, as I, too, was unfaithful’.

  So, Melanie Lyn McGuire has her feet firmly placed on Mother Earth. A highly intelligent and self-effacing woman, she certainly likes her books, too. Her favourite authors are Stephen King, Janet Evanovich (selected works), P.G. Wodehouse, Martin Amis, Haruki Murakami, Hugh Laurie, and Matt Beaumont, whom she describes as ‘hilarious’. She intends to read Duma Key by Stephen King, The War against Cliché by Martin Amis, and The Gnostic Faustus by Ramona Fraden. ‘That’s quite a queue I know,’ she admits.

  Melanie McGuire finished by saying: ‘Alas, time for group therapy, so I’ll close for now (and before, somewhere in DC, my appellate attorney has a grand mal seizure). Let the healing begin (yes, that’s sarcasm you smell). This should all be duplicative anyway, as I’ve channelled to your mailman all I wanted to say (the poor bastard).’

  * * *

  The depravity of this murder simply shocks the conscience of this court. One who callously destroys a family to accomplish her own selfish ends must face the most severe consequences that the law can provide.

  Superior Court Judge Frederick De Vesa – sentencing Melanie McGuire.

  On Thursday, 19 July 2007, Superior Court Judge Frederick De Vesa rejected Melanie McGuire’s claims of innocence and sentenced her to life in prison. She was visibly shattered as she listened to the judge. Her lawyers had asked for the minimum sentence of 30 years for the murder count. She had been convicted on Tuesday, 23 April 2007, of four counts, including first-degree murder. She also received 10 years for desecrating human remains, to be served concurrently, and an additional five years on one count of perjury for lying to a family court judge regarding the whereabouts of her husband, Jim. In an agreement among the lawyers, Judge De Vesa merged one count of unlawful possession of a weapon with the murder count.

  Melanie McGuire will be eligible for parole after serving 85 per cent of her sentence, or when she is 100 years old, and that is after the judge gave great weight to ‘the cruel and heinous nature of the crime’, in determining the sentence after hearing pre-sentencing witness impact statements from William McGuire’s family.

  Clutching a tissue, Laura Ligosh told the judge that her memory of her ‘Uncle Jim’ was marred by the image of his bloated limbs after they were pulled from the Chesapeake Bay. ‘She [McGuire] has stolen our smiles, our laughter, our joy,’ she said through sobs. ‘She has also taken from us something deeper from us all – our innocence, our faith in humanity.’

  The motive for the murder was claimed to be that Melanie McGuire killed her husband so that she could start a new life with her boss without a messy divorce, and during the seven-week trial the prosecutors relied on evidence of the affair and testimony from a forensic expert who said the garbage bags containing the victim’s remains were consistent with bags from the couple’s home.

  While McGuire’s attorney, Joseph Tacopina, maintained her innocence, stressing: ‘She didn’t do this,’ the prosecutor, Assistant State Attorney Patricia Prezioso said that McGuire’s ‘meticulous nature was what almost enabled her to get away with murder’, and urged the judge to hand her the maximum sentence.

  ‘This is a defendant who puts on a face and shows the people before her whatever it is she wants to show,’ Prezioso said. ‘I don’t know who the real Melanie McGuire is.’

  * * *

  Way back in 2004, John and Susan Rice had been hearing about the bizarre story of suitcases containing a dismembered body turning up in Chesapeake Bay, Virginia, but by then there were engrossed in another bizarre tale – this one involved their favourite couple, the McGuires. The Rices had just heard about the beautiful new home their friends had bought in New Jersey, and a few days later Melanie phoned the Rices to say that she and Bill had had a terrible argument about their dream home just hours after signing on the dotted line. Melanie said that John had got physical with her and stormed out of their apartment.

  It didn’t add up. Bill loved the boys, and having just signed up for the house, John Rice, who knew Bill from their US Navy days together, was suspicious. But Melanie insisted that he had left her and he had hit her. She had even got a restraining order in case Bill decided to come crawling home, she told the Rices.

  She told the family court judge: ‘He [Bill] told me I was stupid, and slapped me, uh.’ The judge asked: ‘Where did he slap you, ma’am?’, to which Melanie replied: ‘In the face.’

  While the Rices were stunned, others were not, and they lived closer to the McGuires, in New Jersey. Selene Travis’ had known Melanie almost all of her life: ‘I don’t think Jim was a good husband,’ she said. ‘I don’t think he was a good father, either. For years I feel that Bill was stressed by all his responsibilities and he was quick to anger.’ And, the light-hearted repartee between husband and wife, the banter the Rices had so enjoyed? Selene said it had become ‘a one-way tongue lashing. She was no longer fighting back, no more arguing back and forth.’ Selene thought that Melanie was better off without Bill.

  But, where was Bill?

  Selena and another friend called Alison McCaulsey said that Melanie later confided in them about Bill’s other problem – gambling. Maybe he had fled to glitzy Atlantic City…gone on a bender…met up with the wrong people?

  ‘Melanie knew all about Atlantic City,’ said Alison, ‘she always knew that Atlantic City was a monkey on Bill’s back, and she also wasn’t sure to what extent he was involved with gambling, or if he owed heavy debts.’

  On the other hand, the Rices would say this was all nonsense. Bill did not have a gambling problem, and did not hang around with unsavoury characters. But, they did think it possible that their dear missing friend was in Atlantic City. And, of course, most adults only travel to Atlantic City to gamble in the many casinos.

  ‘We actually started calling hotels in Atlantic City, just to check for ourselves whether Bill had checked in,’ Susan Rice said. And, when one week turned into the next, with no sign of Bill, her concern became tangible fear.

  But now Susan started paying attention to that other strange story she had been hearing – the one about the suitcases and the unidentified man inside them. The TV was on, and the reporter said that the police had released a sketch of the dead man, so Susan draped a towel around herself and came out of the bathroom:

  ‘I looked at the picture, and something about the military-style haircut looked familiar, so I compared it to a photo I had of Bill,’ she recalled. ‘I just remember that my heart just sank to my stomach, so I told my husband and then called the Virginia Beach Police on their hotline: 1-888-LOCK-U-UP.’

  When the Rices learned the truth they went into shock and were physically sick. Virginia Beach Detective Ray Picalle was the officer who broke the tragic news, and now that he had the victim’s name he could now try to find out who had hated Bill so much as to saw him into thirds. The sleuth was especially interested in speaking to the victim’s wife, Melanie McGuire – he needed her help most of all. Little did he know how much help she would be, and he soon formed the opinion that she was ‘a lousy actress’.

  The possibility that Bill had been the victim of a gangland killing, perhaps over a large unpaid gambling debt, was soon ruled out. The almost surgical dissection of the body was the work of someone with medical knowledge, and not that of a thug off the streets. And, crime technicians found something else, a hospital blanket inside one of the cases. Picalle did a little checking and soon found out that Bill McGuire’s wife was a nurse. She worked at a doctor’s office and the same type of blanket was used by her boss for his patients.

  Roughly a week later, the detective was interviewing the ‘grieving’ widow in her attorney’s office and asking a few questions.

  Had she owned black matching luggage, now missing?

  �
��No’, she replied, but she did tell the detective that her husband’s missing car might be in Atlantic City, New Jersey. And that’s just where the police found the blue 2002 Nissan Maxima. After crime technicians had thoroughly examined the vehicle, they handed over to Detective Picalle a phial of white liquid, which they had found with a syringe in the glove box. This, and the blanket were very significant finds indeed.

  Picalle also searched the McGuire’s home because it was the last place Bill had been seen alive. It was spotless, no sign of a struggle there. In fact the property was empty for Melanie had already moved out.

  When the detective asked to see the victim’s clothes, she told him she had given them to a friend. Picalle soon found them still in the bags Melanie had packed. They were black plastic bags, just like those containing Bill McGuire’s remains.

  And that luggage? The day after Melanie’s interview she told the detective she had just suddenly remembered something; that she had, in fact, owned a matching set of Kenneth Cole luggage.

  ‘I showed her a picture of one piece of luggage recovered from the Chesapeake Bay,’ said Picalle, ‘and she identified it as a family piece of luggage.’

  A changing story, hard-to-believe coincidences, but still nothing to firmly tie Melanie McGuire to the murder of her husband. So, Picalle left Virginia certain of only one thing: Bill McGuire’s body may have been dumped in Virginia, but had been killed in New Jersey, so it was in the Garden State’s jurisdiction and, therefore, their problem to solve.

  * * *

  At the end of the day it was a horrible, gruesome murder.

  Detective David Dalrymple - New Jersey State Police

  As lead investigator, Detective Dalrymple started by taking a fresh look at the case. He searched gun registration records and cold-called at gunshops, looking for anyone within Bill’s circle of friends who might have been armed, and he got a hit. On 26 April, just a few days before the murder, Melanie had purchased a .38 calibre special handgun at a small gunshop in eastern Pennsylvania.