Dead Men Talking (10 page)

So, ever the pushy bullshitter, JR finishes off another letter, with:

So, John Robinson, you have become unstuck. The padded tapestry hangers, what the hell is all that about, you old rascal? Perhaps we will never know. As John Steinbeck wrote: ‘There are some of us who live in rooms of experience that we can never enter or understand,’ and I suggest that the room inside John E Robinson’s head is one of them!

H
ow do you do that? A beautiful young mother of two adorable kids shoots her husband, chops him into three large pieces, stuffs the remains into suitcases, then slings them into the Chesapeake Bay. And these are the actions of a highly educated and attractive lady.

‘Motive’ is always the buzz word in domestic crimes such as this. Double-indemnity insurance pay-out, jealousy, greed salted with a bucket-full of avarice, even. But try as I could, one will never find the motive in Mel McGuire.

The jury had her ‘bang-to-rights’. She was ‘the Scarlet Woman’ and ‘the Ice Queen’ all rolled into one, who ‘iced’ her husband, after shooting him. But where did she commit the crime…where did she power-saw his body up? Not a speck of flesh, not a drop of blood was ever found, and no one has ever figured out how this petite little nurse managed to haul her grim baggage to a high bridge across a busy highway and heave the load into the swirling waters beneath.

This is what fascinated me, and I set out to try and find out, ‘How did she do that?’ I am still as puzzled as I was from the outset, and I leave it to the reader to figure out.

As a brown-eyed, brown-haired nurse, she was known for her kind and generous nature. As a wife and mother she seemed to have a perfect life. In fact she and her husband had just realised their perfect dream – buying their own home. But behind that perfect picture were secrets and soon they would surface, revealing a murder, chilling in its calculation and its cruelty:

• 1 count of murder – life 
  
• 1 count of disturbing/desecrating human remains – ten years 
  
• 1 count of perjury: false statement – five years 
  
• 1 count possession of firearm for unlawful purposes – life 
  

Millions of years ago a melting ice age carved itself into the memory of Virginia. Early Americans called the area Chesapeake, or ‘Great Water’. Even today the vast area is still a haven for wild life, and where, on occasions, the broken come to rest.

It all started in the spring of 2004, the season in the Chesapeakes for trophy fishing for bluefish, perch and striped bass. Chris Hankle and Don Conner thought they might get lucky with a catch or two in the bay that early May, then they spotted a black fabric suitcase, bobbing in the water near the bridge tunnel of a road bridge.

‘It was right there, so I’m thinking immediately that it probably had blown off somebody’s luggage rack of a car coming down the road,’ said Conner, ‘or, something like that.’

The men and the very excited 12-year-old son of Conner’s pulled the suitcase onto the boat, thinking it was a real life treasure chest, and quickly opened it to find crumpled black, plastic garbage bags and a pair of decomposing legs severed at the knees. The lad recoiled in horror. His father comforted him and the police were called.

A week later, another gruesome find turned up in the bay. Virginia Beach crime scene supervisor Beth Dutton was already processing the first suitcase when police hauled in the second case. It contained a 5lb weight, black trash bags and more human remains – this time a man’s head and torso.

Gunshot wounds told the cause of death, but when and where the man had been killed was still a mystery. ‘He had some hair slippage, some decomposition – much greater than the legs,’ reported Beth Dutton.

The third and final suitcase surfaced on 16 May, this time holding the man’s hips and thighs, but who was the man? Virginia Beach PD launched an intensive investigation to identify the victim.

Events led to the corpse being 34-year-old William T. McGuire, a computer programmer at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark. The killer, his younger wife, a fertility nurse and a real-life femme fatale.

Melanie McGuire’s own fate was settled in 2007 after more than thirteen hours of deliberation by the nine-woman, three-man jury. They had listened wide-eyed to 76 witnesses and had patiently reviewed over 1,200 exhibits during the course of the seven-week trial. When the verdict was announced, by Superior Court Judge Frederick De Vesa, Melanie burst into tears – she would stay in prison for the rest of her life.

Followers of this, one of the most notorious trials in New Jersey’s history, referred to the 5ft 3in, 121lb woman as an ‘Ice Queen’, because she was so cold and emotionless through the entire proceedings. Perhaps if she had expressed her feelings to the jury, even though she refused to testify, they may have been more likely to acquit.

During deliberation the jury asked to view footage from a parking lot surveillance camera that formed part of the evidence. The jury also requested to view emails that were sent between Melanie McGuire and her friend from nursing school, James Finn. There were also wire-tapped conversations between these two submitted into evidence. It was sordid stuff, indeed!

Perhaps the saddest part of this tragic story is, that by murdering her husband the couple’s two sons are left without any parents to raise them.

With a younger brother, Christopher, Melanie was born a Libra, Sunday, 8 October 1972, at Ridgewood, New Jersey, to Robert and Linda Slate. Her parents divorced when she was just five years old. Today, she is serving a natural life sentence at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, Hunterdon County, Clinton, New Jersey (the Garden State) for murdering her husband William ‘Bill’ McGuire.

Bill McGuire was last seen alive on Thursday, 29 April 2004, the day the couple had closed the sale on a $500,000 up market house in Ashbury, Warren County, New Jersey.

Shortly after Bill disappeared, over a period of days three black suitcases bobbed up in Chesapeake Bay. They contained his dismembered remains which were wrapped in black plastic garbage bags.

In a case, built entirely on circumstantial evidence, prosecutors theorised that Melanie McGuire served her husband a celebratory glass of wine spiked with a sedative then shot him to death. Investigators found the murder weapon, and in a phone conversation with a friend she claimed that she had purchased the gun just two days before her husband disappeared.

Police claimed that Melanie cut Bill up into four pieces in the shower using a saw, though investigators were unable – using all the forensic techniques available to modern law enforcement – to link the man’s death to his home, or his wife to his remains.

Lawyers for Melanie McGuire would later aggressively contest these allegations, arguing that their client had no motive to kill her husband, whom they claimed was, like Melanie, also involved in an extramarital relationship.

Melanie told police that the last she saw of her husband was on the morning of 29 April after an argument over their new home. She said he drove off in his car and was never seen again. Indeed, at her subsequent trial, it was suggested that his death may have been related to gambling debts; a letter, from an unknown but alleged mobster from a major organised crime family in New Jersey, surfaced. The writer claimed that Bill McGuire owed a $90,000 debt to a Mafia family and this is why he was fed to the fishes, in true Cosa Nostra style.

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Beauty is only skin deep, and Melanie McGuire is undeniably pretty when the camera catches her right: with her lustrous dark hair, pixie-like profile, almost vulnerable features, she is certainly not unattractive. However, in her prison mug-shot she appears all washed out. When one views her all made-up she is confident and self-assured, a real femme fatale; when otherwise, a self-serving and manipulative woman playing upon the heartbreak that has been ‘forced’ upon her.

When I put it to her that she must have lots of people writing to her, and that she was a femme fatale, she responded: ‘Lots of guys write me, but, femme fatale, REALLY?’

That singular statement from Melanie McGuire says everything about the woman who has been convicted of murdering her husband, who was claimed by the defence to be a hard-drinking, womanising, gambling, wife-beating man who threatened to take his wife’s doting children away from her – or so she claims.

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:

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:

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: