MURDER ON BIRCHLEAF DRIVE-Steven B. Epstein

a baby boy on the way. Soon after the twenty nine year old pregnant mother's brutally beaten body was discovered on their bedroom floor, a very different picture emerged of a marriage crumbling at its foundation, of a meddlesome New York mother in law whose running critique left Jason frustrated and angry, of a thirty two year old man who

behaved like a frat boy, rebelling against adult responsibilities. Murder on Birch Leaf Drive documents the gripping tale of a family's marathon quest for justice, confounding crime scene evidence, persistence of law enforcement officers, and riveting courtroom combat. The book they were featuring this evening is Murder on Birch Leaf Drive, The True story of the Michelle Young murder case, with

my special guest, attorney and author Stephen b Epstein. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Steven b Epstein, thank you for having me. Thank you very much for this. I want to ask how you came to be the author of Murder on Birch Leaf Drive. What was it about this story? Tell us the circumstances in which you happen to be and want to write Murder on Birch Leaf Drive.

I was of course interested. I knew the judge that was involved in the case, I knew some of the lawyers involved in the case. But I think what really drew me to this story was that I shared some common pathways with the victim. Michelle Young. She grew up in Long Island and used a computer in her high school to find her way to North Carolina to go to college. She wound up going to North Carolina State University in Raleigh. I pretty much did the same thing.

I grew up in Long Island, and I used a computer in my high school to find my way to North Carolina. I wound up going to the University of North Carolina. But I moved to a place that was foreign, as did she. The culture in the South is quite different in the culture in New York. And I married a Southerner and had to learn all of the things that were different about the South and the culture in

the South. And she did as well. Jason Young grew up in Brevard, North Carolina, in the mountains, and there were a lot of culture clashes between Michelle and Jason and between their two families that were prominent in the problems in their relationship that ultimately, if you believe that Jason is the one who killed her, ultimately led to

him committing this despicable act. So there was a lot about this story that I was attracted to, just as basically a reader of newspapers and as someone who watched little bits of news here and there about this trial.

And no one else had written this book. I think that was the thing that eventually pushed me to write it, is that I believe that this was a story that really needed to be told, and that others around not only Raleigh and around North Carolina, but around the country would find to be a very fascinating true crime story. And that's why I decided to write the book. And

certainly that was a great decision. You take the reader November third, two thousand and six, and a phone ringing, awaking Meredith Fisher, and the call is from or the message is brother in law Jason Young and this is her sister's husband. Michelle tell us what that phone ringing means? Does he leave a message? Does she talk to Jason Young personally tell us about that phone call November thirty two.

So the book begins with the phone in Meredith Fisher's Mere Fisher's cell phone ringing in her bedroom, waking her from a dead sleep at twelve fourteen pm on November third, two thousand and six. Because she's asleep, she doesn't answer. Eventually, she sets the phone down and listens to the voicemail,

which is from her brother in law, Jason Young. And what Jason Young says in that voicemail is that he he had left some papers on the printer in his home on Birch Leaf Drive in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the time he departed for a business trip by car to Virginia, and those papers that he said he left on the printer were of auctions that were taking place on eBay for coach purses, And what he says is that he had intended to take those with him on

his business trip because he was trying to figure out the perfect gift for Michelle for their third wedding anniversary. Now, mind you, this call was on November third, two thousand and six. Their third wedding anniversary was on October tenth,

two thousand and six. A few weeks before. Nevertheless, he says he really wants Meredith to run the twenty minutes over to his home, pull those off of the printer, and get them before his wife sees them, because he didn't want them to spoil her surprise and that he was thinking of getting her a coach purse were their anniversary, And that's what eventually leads to Meredith heading to fifty one oh eight Birch Leaf Drive, the home that was shared by Jason Young, Michelle Young, and their two year

old daughter, Cassidy.

didn't make any sense. She noticed that the gate that kept the backyard closed was open, which was odd because the Youngs had a black lab dog named mister Garrison, who was often allowed to roam free in the backyard and seeing that gate open was very unusual. So those are the first two things she noticed. She got to the front door, and she heard mister Garrison inside whimpering, which seemed a little bit unusual. Unfortunately, she couldn't she

didn't have a key. She thought she had a key, but then she realized that she had let a friend borrow the key while she and Jason and Mary and Michelle were in New York on a vacation a little while earlier, so she didn't have a key to get in. She eventually realized that the garage door was broken and she was able to slip underneath the crack of the garage door by pushing it up just enough to get

her body inside. And she noticed that Michelle's Lexus SUV was inside of the garage, which also was very odd because she should have been at work at Progress Energy where she was a financial specialist in the accounting department. So all those things were unusual before she even opened the door to enter the home.

got upstairs, and then it all became very clear. But she walks into the home through the unlocked door leading from the garage into the kitchen, and she notices that Michelle's purse is lying on the floor against a leg of a small desk, which suggests to her that Michelle must be in the house, and she starts crying out Michelle, Michelle, and there's no response, and then she proceeds up the front stairway and gets to the top of the staircase, and out of her peripheral vision on her right, she

sees Cassidy's bathroom, and she noticed she notices that there are footprints on City's bathroom floor, and then she looks at the landing just at the top of the staircase and notices that there are similar footprints on the carpeting on the landing, and those footprints, she realizes that are actually in the color red, are just large enough to be a toddler's set of footprints, and so they were

clearly Cassidy's footprints. But even then she's thinking the Cassidy must have gotten into Michelle's red hair dye, and she's thinking Michelle must be pissed, so she doesn't clewe in at that point that those footprints were made in blood.

She then turns to the left to face the master bedroom and she takes a few steps to the entranceway of the master bedroom, and then she sees, in addition to red streaks on the walls and red spots on the walls and on the bed, she sees in between the bed, on the far side of the bed and some closet doors, she sees her sister's lifeless body lying

on the floor soaked in blood. And that's when she realized that her sister has been attacked, and she immediately goes to the phone to call nine to one one.

hip like a koala bear. While Meredth proceeds to begin the conversation with a nine to one to one dispatcher.

directed to do those things. And when she touches her sister's body, it's cold, and she reports that she's eventually instructed to try and turn her sister's body over so that she stays up so that she can try to perform CPR, and she basically tells the dispatcher her body is so twisted and it's so heavy, she can't do that.

And then she also says her body is ice cold, it's stiff, suggesting that ray mortis has set in, And at that point the dispatcher basically gives her permission to cease any further life saving efforts because it's very clear that Michelle is dead and has been dead for some

time now. You talk about the circumstances the Michelle investigators immediately find out that she is four and a half months pregnant with this baby boy that they've already named Rylan, and also that we talked about, You talked about the third anniversary and where Jason was at this particular time when this nine one one call was made. Tell us what investigators find at the crime scene in terms of

forced or non worst entry. Tell us what are the some of the things that they deduce from that crime scene.

behind the door of Cassidy's bathroom. There was a baby doll that was set out next to Michelle's head in the master bedroom that Cassidy had clearly placed there, and there were some of Cassidy's footprints there right around Michelle's head. So they found all of those things. But downstairs, the only blood that was visible was on the door knob of that same kitchen door that Mariith had entered from. On the reverse side, the kitchen side, there were a

couple of small drops of blood there. All that blood was eventually determined to be blood from Michelle. No one else's blood was found at the crime scene. The blood spatter went as high as the ceiling in the bedroom. It was very clear that there was a beating that was inflicted upon Michelle. When you looked at her face, you saw that her teeth had been knocked out, her lips were cut badly, her jawbone was actually protruding through

her skin. On her face. It was very clear that her head had been beaten either with a blunt object or with a strongly with a fist many many times she was dressed. There was no indication of any type of a sexual assault. The only thing missing from the bedroom there were two drawers in a jewelry box out of a total of three that were not there. They were missing. And then Michelle's wetting and engagement rings that supposedly she always had worn were also missing from the

ring finger of her left hand. Those were the only things that appeared to be missing from the house. There did not appear to be a robbery of any kind at all.

his reaction to finding out about that. Police are interested in questioning him talking to him.

offices to do just that. He had just started this company called chart One, and he had a meeting at a regional hospital in clint Wood, Virginia the morning of the third. So he had decided he was going to leave home on the second to break his trip into two legs, and he was going to stay at a Hampton End hotel in Hillsville, Virginia, which is kind of in the western mountains of Virginia, before heading almost to the Kentuck Key bordered to Clintwood the next morning for

his sales meeting. So that's what he did. He went and had this sales meeting. He was apparently about thirty minutes late to the meeting. It didn't go well. They didn't buy the software, and then he drove south through Asheville, North Carolina, another hour to his home in Brevard, North Carolina, which is where he grew up, and he was going to spend the night there with his mother and his stepfather. He pulls up to the curb and he gets out

of his car, which was a Ford Explorer. He slings his suit jacket over his shoulder and he starts walking up to the front door, and he notices that his mother, Pat and his stepfather Gerald are standing on the front lawn and they have very worried, anxious looks on their faces. And he walks up to them and he says, what's wrong?

face plant into the ground. They brought him into the house where he was sobbing uncontrollably, and eventually later that day they make the decision to head back to Raleigh, which is some five hours away east, five hours east all across North Carolina, and they drive and along the way, Pat is in the back seat with her son, Jason, and she's receiving calls here and there, and one of them is from law enforcement indicating that they want to

speak with Jason. And when Jason arrives at his sister in law's house, Meredith's house, law enforcement seizes his Ford Explorer, and he receives several more requests to meet with law enforcement. Jason says he's not going to do that, that he's already had contact with a lawyers one, that he's going to meet with a lawyer first, and he's not going to have any communications with law enforcement until he's done that. And so that's how that started.

But what I can tell you is that Michelle already started, I'm sorry, Meredith already started suspecting something about Jason that very night that he came to the house, because they went to the back porch and Meredith was encouraging him to try to speak with the police, and he was refusing, and at one point he hugged her on the back deck, just lamenting what had happened, and he, in her view, was basically fake crying that there was something that didn't

seem genuine about the way that he was crying. That made her suspicious on that very night, so she was suspicious right away that Jason might have been involved in Michelle's murder.

and they won. They were co champions. I think of of all of Long Island as a cheer team. She actually when she went to m C State, she was on the cheering squad at m c State as well. She made straight a's throughout high school. She made basically straight a's throughout college. She was an incredibly gifted student. She made friends extremely easily, and she was a very pretty woman and had a smile, as people would say,

that would light up a room. Her demeanor was such that people wanted to be around her, and people enjoyed her. She formed friends that lasted a lifetime, several of them who feature prominently in the book. And she wound up meeting Jason when she was celebrating I think it was her twenty second or twenty third birthday at a local rally bar with of course, a cluster of friends, and just so happened that Jason Young, who had graduated from

Ency State a couple of years before Michelle. Jason Young, was in the bar that night himself with a cluster of his own friends. And Jason was kind of a goofy, silly guy. He could be very charismatic, but he could also be very wild, and that night, true to form, he was being a little bit wild, and he knocked over her wineglass and they struck up a conversation, which is the very first time they had ever met one another.

And there was somewhat of a spark, and that spark eventually led to a romance.

was very meticulous about work. She had great jobs. She started out after getting her master's degree at De Luyte and Touche, and then she wound up working eventually for Progress Energy, a fortune five hundred company that's now part of Duke Energy, in their accounting tax department. Everything about her was planned, meticulous, and top notch. Jason, on the other hand, as people were wont to say, flew by

the seat of his pants. Didn't plan anything out. Basically, he wanted to encounter life on a minute by minute second by second basis, and he wanted to pull pranks. He wanted to make people laugh, He wanted to entertain people, and he would do basically anything to entertain his friends,

to have fun. He would get drunk frequently at parties, at tailgates, at football games, and sometimes when he got drunk, he did some things that were pretty shocking, Like he did something that I refer to in the book because everybody else talked about them as his dictrines where he would actually pull down his pants and use his genitalia to perform in front of other people, male and female.

And this was who Michelle, this meticulous planner who got straight a's throughout high school and college, This is who she married.

And then there's the version of a friend, a lifelong friend of Michelle's, who describes Michelle calling her one night in that same time period in sobbing in tears, and what she reported Michelle told her is that Michelle had told Jason that she was pregnant, and Jason basically told her in no uncertain terms that if she didn't abort the baby, that he would she would regret that decision for the rest of her life, and that he would never be able to forgive her for not aborting the baby.

And that was very poignant testimony in the second trial, that is not the way at all Jason portrayed that decision making process and what he thought of when he learned that she was pregnant. He described it as you know, it was a dock to him, and he was not sure he was ready, but he was perfectly happy to have Cassidy as his child, and very quickly came around to the decision to propose to Michelle as the result of knowing she was going to have a baby.

he couldn't have that. He wanted to make sure there was plenty beer at the wedding, and apart from that, he was more than willing to seed all wedding planning responsibilities to Michelle and her family. And the same was

pretty much true for the baby. Other than the fact that if the baby was going to be a boy, and this turned out to be true for Rylan, who Michelle was pregnant with at the time of her death, well the baby couldn't wear any clothes that were blue, or at least not that shade of blue that conflicted

with mc State. NC State wolf pack is red and light blue is the color of the Carolina tar heels, and so Jason was an avid wolf Pack fan and hated the tar heels and wanted to make sure that any clothing that was purchased for his children didn't suggest that he was a tar heel fan.

In the next summer, they had moved into their home on Birch Leaf Drive, and she spent large portions of that summer there, as she did the following summer in

two thousand and six. Linda was a New York raised, New York bred woman in her at that point in time in her fifties, and she had very decided views about things and about her daughter, and she very quickly came to consider Jason as not good enough for her daughter, that he was very immature, irresponsible, didn't pull his weight in their marriage, and especially after Cassidy was born, didn't

pull his weight with child responsibilities. Instead, he would go off and do things like join basketball and softball leagues, and even though he worked from home, he was never at home when Linda was there, and she grew very dissatisfied with the way he was pulling his weight and

treating her daughter. Jason, of course, found her to be very intrusive, moving in on their new home in the summer of two thousand and five almost the day that Jason and Michelle moved in, and he couldn't stand her and didn't want to have anything to do with her, and that created enormous turmoil and conflict as we head

into two thousand and six. And then, of course, Michelle gets pregnant in two thousand and six, and Michelle tells Jason that he's planning to convert the third floor attic into a bedrooms and bathroom, essentially a mother in law suite for Linda to move in, and Linda at that point has retired from teaching altogether. So the thought is that Linda's going to move in and be that Rylan's nanny after he's born and in early two thousand and seven, and that Jason's going to have to see her pretty

much every day. And Jason said, no way, that is not going to happen. And they were also having fights about whose houses they were going to stay at over the holidays in two thousand and six and the extent to which Linda would be part of that, and Jason was pushing as hard as he could to limit Linda's time with them over the holidays, and of course Michelle, who loved her mother Dealey, was pushing for the opposite. So there was enormous conflict over things like that.

another generation, and he was very excited about that. Jason is also very he was very manly, liked being a man and having a boy or a son to do sports related things with, I think really appealed to him. So he was really looking forward to having by all accounts, to having Rylan as his son.

was important to Jason. Michelle, being the meticulous planner that she was, wanted to make sure that everything was in order, everything that was in place, including should they meet unfortunate circumstances, And the wills actually led to a discussion about life insurance and somebody that was a sorority sister of Michelle's helped them both with respect to wills and powers of attorney and living wills, and also bouncing around ideas about

life insurance. And Michelle, because she was a CPA, was able to get some fairly inexpensive life insurance through the North Carolina Chapter of the CPA Association and was able to procure a two million dollar life insurance policy for herself and for Jason, which had a double indemnity provision, meaning it would pay four million dollars in the event

of a death that was that was accidental. And so there was a four million dollar policy essentially in place on Michelle's life at the time she was murdered.

We deliver the seasonal must haves. You need. These boxes sello fasts, so sign up for yours today. My wife Lisa was very excited when she received her very first box. She was initially very surprised and then very impressed with the high end products the box contained. Most of the items in each box are customizable, and Lisa received and ordered bobble Bar, Farah earcrawlers, and a Kate Spade lunch tote. Her favorite product of all was the Amika Strand Perfect

ceramic styler. Remember the fat fit. Fab Fit Fund membership also goes beyond the box itself. Members can gain access to members only flash sales called add on sale. Browse around the website fabfitfund dot com to explore and become more familiar with the brand. Fabfit Fund is a seasonal subscription box with full sized beauty, fitness, fashion and lifestyle products. It retails for forty nine to ninety nine, but always

has a value over two hundred dollars. Use coupon code Murder for ten dollars off your first box at www dot fabfitfund dot com. That's use coupon code Murder for ten dollars off your first box at www Dot fabfitfund

dot com. Now, Stephen, we were just talking about what the investigators were learning about the dynamics of the relationship between Jason and Michelle and all the precipitating factors that might have led to his possible murder of his of his unborn child, and his wife, and leaving Cassidy to again, as we mentioned, walk through the blood of her mother.

When investigators look at the forensic evidence when they get to search warrants for vehicles and homes, tell us about the investigator's quest to get forensic evidence tying Jason Young to this murder.

They did find two sets of shoeprints that were made in blood which were promising leads that were made on a pillow case. They had those sent off for analysis and testing. The State Bureau of Investigation. Obviously, there was a medical examiner who very quickly determined that Michelle had indeed died as the result of blunt force trauma to the head. She had been beaten some thirty times, mostly in the head. There were lots of lacerations in her skull. As I said, she was so hard that her jawbone

protruded through her through the skin on her face. So they were able to determine that she was beaten pretty viciously. They also were able to determine through the medical examiner that she defended herself. There were lots of marks on her arms and hands, suggesting that she had deflected some of those blows, and that was significant to investigators because they were able to determine that there was a struggle,

there was a fight. So they had Jason come in, as they're allowed to do under the law, and they got his blood, they got his saliva, and they also photographed every nook and cranny and square inch of his body. And the very shocking thing to them at that point was there wasn't a scratch mark on him, and that seemed very counterintuitive if he was the killer, because Michelle

had clearly defended herself. The other thing that they found that was surprising if Jason, in fact was the one who had killed her, was that there was not a

sign of blood in his vehicle. And remember, he was at a hotel in Hampton at Hampton in hotel in Virginia, and he had to come back some two and a half hours if he was the one to have done this crime, and he had to be in his vehicle a whole lot of the time, and if he had done all of these things, and it was a very compressed timeline, if he was going to make that meeting the next day, and they actually were able to trace his cell phone pinging a cell tower in withvill Virginia,

at seven point forty the morning of the third, so they knew, you know, at best, he had some hour or so to have committed this crime, gotten back in his car, driven up there, and still made the meeting the next day. There surely had to be some kind of sign of blood or something in his car, and there wasn't. There was no sign of blood in his hotel room either. They searched that. What they did find at the hotel, though, was one of the things that

led them in the direction of Jason Young. This key card was used only a single time, when he checked into the hotel and went to his room the very first time, at about ten fifty four on November second. There are cameras showing that he left his hotel room. He was pictured at the front desk of the hotel, actually wearing a different shirt than he had been wearing at the time he checked in, and they show him. Another camera shows him walking down the hallway right about

at midnight again wearing that different shirt. That was at midnight on November second, just before the clock turned to November third, and that's the last time his whereabouts at the hotel could be documented. So we know he would have left about midnight and he's back in with a Virginia at seven forty the next morning. So what did they find there? They found these things. First, there was a rock propping open an emergency exit door exactly in

the direction that Jason was walking at midnight. Second, they were able to determine that the camera in that basic location had been disabled unplugged at eleven twenty the previous night, about a half an hour after Jason checked into the hotel, when it was determined that that camera was disabled. They

were able to get it working in. They plugged it in, and then at six thirty on the morning of November three, all of a sudden, the footage from that camera that was pointed toward the door and the hallway, the footage from that camera was of the ceiling. The camera had been pushed up to the ceiling at about six thirty

that morning. Those discoveries and the fact that Jason was wearing different clothing at the front desk and he had checked in with just an hour before, and also that that clothing was never found among Jason's possessions all pointed strongly in the direction that Jason had left the hotel, traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina, killed Michelle, and then came back to Virginia to preserve as alibi.

What did that have to do with Jason. The second pair of shoes, though, was eventually identified to be Hush Puppies orbital shoes size twelve, which was the size Jason wore. And not only did Jason wear size twelve, he had purchased a pair of Hush Puppies Orbital shoe whoes a year before the murder occurred. Actually it was about a year and a half July fourth of two thousand and five, and Jason at trial contended that Michelle must have thrown

those shoes away. But some pictures of Jason that were made from the footage of him both at the Hampton I'm Sorry, both at the Hampton End Yes and also at the Cracker Barrel Will Hit where he had dinner the night of November two were shoes that looked very similar to the Hushpuppy orbital shoes that the product specialist from Hushpuppy said those shoe prints were from. And so

those tied fairly closely to Jason Young. Even though he said that Michelle must have gotten rid of those shoes, they were never found, along with the clothing he was wearing the night of the murder. So again that's something else that pointed at him directly. Although the size ten shoes were very enigmatic, the other thing that was very enigmatic was Cassidy. Cassidy, Remember she was under the covers in the bedroom. She had walked through her mother's blood.

She had played with the blood in her bathroom with her hands, with her feet. Clearly there had to be blood all over that child. And yet when Meredith found her at one point fifteen the afternoon November third, as Mereth described that she was shockingly clean and that no one was ever able to explain, not the prosecutors, not the family members, not the SBI, not the detectives who investigate case. No one was able to explain how that happened.

was a cough medicine for adults. In addition, so the lead detective, Detective Spivey, when he got involved in the case, one of the first things he did is he started looking through pictures and one of the pictures that he focused on was of a hutch in Cassidy's bedroom, and

on that hutch were two different bottles. One was of adult strength tilonol in a liquid and one was the Pan Cough PD And he also noticed that there was a dropper sitting next to one of those bottles and it had a liquid in it, and he eventually had that liquid sent off her testing and sure enough, it had a mixture of some of these adult strength medicines that included dehydrocodeine, which is something that will cause drowsiness in an adult, let alone in a two and a

half year old child. And Jason, having known about these kinds of drugs from having sold them, clearly would have known what the side effects of those drugs were. And the theory very quickly became that Jason had given Cassidy, perhaps when he entered that home before he killed Michelle, perhaps after he killed her, given her a bunch of this medication in order to get her to go to sleep, and that after he, as he was getting ready to leave the house after committing the murder, cleaned her up,

put her in the bed. She was fast asleep, and she stayed asleep for the many hours between then and when she was discovered at one fifteen the next afternoon by her aunt. And that was the working theory throughout the case, that she had been drugged.

her a picture of Jason's vehicle. And they showed her a picture of Jason, and they asked her, did this vehicle did this man come to this store sometime in the early morning hours of November the third, They were there a few days later, and the aster a few days before. Did this vehicle did this Ford explore, this white Ford explorer? And did this man show up and get gas at your gas station? And she said yes, she said, I remember very distinctly. This man came in

after buzzing on the pump several times. Because it was early morning hours, we wouldn't allow the pumps to be on until somebody came in and showed identification. He came in, he was angry, he cussed at me, and he threw a twenty dollars bill at me, and then he pumped his gas and he left, and she became an important witness for the prosecution to establish that Jason was not asleep at a hotel at four, five, six seven in

the morning. Rather, he was on his way back from having committed this murder, ran out of fuel, needed more fuel, and filled up at that gas station that was some hour away or so, I think it was a way from the hotel in Hillsville, Virginia.

Howard Cummings. What does he ask them to do and what does he believe this endeavor legally might be able to and in result, what's the end result of what this person would like to have these attorneys do well?

they needed some help. So the district Assistant District Attorney in charge of the case, Howard Cummings, got a couple of personal injury lawyers involved Paul and Jack Michaels, to see if they wouldn't file wrongful death case against Jason on behalf of Michelle's family, to basically turn up some new evidence, possibly even take Jason's deposition and get him under oath as to what had happened since he wasn't

talking to detectives. And they filed that wrongful death case and Jason didn't respond, he defaulted, allowing judgment to be taken against him, and that judgment was eventually signed by a judge named Donald Stevens, which among its findings included a provision declaring that Jason was the slayer of Michelle under North Carolina slayer Statute and for that reason, barring

him from recovering any life insurance proceeds. Remember there was a four million dollar life insurance policy that was ready to be paid out. It didn't get paid out to Jason because he was determined to be the slayer, and instead that money was directed toward Cassidy as his as the next lineal descendant of Michelle Young. So no evidence was actually gathered because Jason didn't respond. However, that wrongful death judgment against him would loom large in later proceedings.

to head from Raleigh. The five hour trek to Brevard, North Carolina in order to arrest Jason, which they did in early December of two thousand and nine.

that were the same size Jason wore. It would have included things like the propped open door at the Hampton End, the camera being tampered with twice at the Hampton Inn. Would have included interpersonal stories between Jason and Michelle, Jason and Linda, and all of the turmoil that was going on in their marriage and in Jason's life. Those types

of things would have been presented. Grand jury proceedings are secret, so I didn't have access to them in writing the book, But presumably those are the types of things that would have been presented to the grand jury, and then the grand jury would have deliberated and come to a decision that they were going to sign the bill of indictment, which meant that at that point Jason was formally charged with first degree murder.

of the DA's office in Durham County. Michael Peterson is of course the staircase murderer, so to speak, where his wife was found at the bottom of a staircase in Durham, North Carolina, and he was ultimately convicted of killing her, although he was later released from prison, and David Sachs was one of the more junior lawyers involve in that case several years before this trial.

No blood in his hotel room, no blood in the car, despite the fact that it was one of the bloodiest crime scenes, you could imagine all of the things that were unexplained, like Cassidy's shockingly clean appearance, like the size ten shoe prints, and so these things were thrown up

to cast reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors. But the most, probably the high point of the trial from a theatrical standpoint, was when Jason Young took the witness stand, much to the surprise of the prosecutors, and for a couple of hours in his direct examination, mesmerized the jury with his testimony about his love for Michelle, his wife, and the life that they led together, and though it wasn't a perfect marriage, and though he had made mistakes.

In fact, he admitted to having affairs, including a very active affair at the time his wife was killed, that he had nothing whatsoever to do with her murder, and it was convincing testimony. The cross examination was very brief, it only lasted some fifty to fifty five minutes, and it didn't make a lot of progress in establishing that Jason was involved in his wife's murder. The difficult questions that he could have been confronted with, he was not.

I think the prosecutors were actually not expecting him to testify and were not prepared to cross examine him. They did the best they could, but he got the better of the prosecutors rather than the other way around, which is not the way it's supposed to be, and that result resulted in the jury, for the most part, finding a reasonable doubt. Eight of the jurors were at the time the case was mistried because the jury did not

come to an unanimous decision. Eight of the jurors had decided they would have voted in favor of a quitting Jason. Four of the jurors hung strong and prevented that result, and as a result of the Judge Stevens declared a mistrial, and that led to the case being tried a second time about seven months later.

to do a lot of things differently. They focused less on the forensic evidence. They focused more on Jason and Jason's mindset and the relationship and the troubles in his marriage. The affairs that he had were more pronounced in the second trial. That he had had a former girlfriend that became a fiancee who he had actually attacked in a hotel room in Texas during that relationship was played up

somewhat more prominently than the first trial. And then the other thing that was mentioned in the second trial that had no role in the first trial was the wrongful death judgment that Judge Stevens himself, the trial judge in the criminal case, had signed when Jason defaulted. When Paul and Jack Michaels filed that case several years earlier, and that was brought to the jury's attention when the clerk of court won by the name of larn Freeman, who

eventually became the district attorney. She was called to testify about the case file in the wrongful death case and testified that a wrongful death judgment had been entered against Jason, declaring that Jason had been the slayer of Michelle, and that fact was put to the jury as if it was a fact they should have been aware of. And though an objection was made initially by Brian Collins, there was very little objection thereafter to this testimony coming before the second jury.

first trial. Remember, he hadn't spoken a word to anyone, not law enforcement, not his family, not his friends, about his whereabouts and his circumstances in the days leading up to the murder, the day of the murder, before he took the witness stand in the first trial, so they

didn't know what he was going to say. But after the first trial ended in a mistrial, they knew everything he had said, and every fact that was in his testimony was thoroughly fact checked with all the evidence that the Sheriff's office had amassed over all those years, and there were several inconsistencies between what Jason said from the witness stand and the facts they had a mast and Sergeant Spivey went threw them one by one in the second trial before the second jury, after they had played

his videotape testimony from the first trial, and that was a very effective way of establishing that not only was Jason not the charming, charismatic guy that he presented himself as to the first jury, that he was lying about a number of things, including his whereabouts the night of the murder, whether he was at a sleep in his hotel room, what he was wearing, and so forth, and that, ultimately, I think was the reason why the second jury unanimously

found that beyond a reasonable doubt that he had killed his wife right.

the conviction. They throughout the conviction because of the wrongful death evidence coming before the second jury, that the second

jury should never have learned. The Court of Appeal said that Jason Young had been found liable civilly for the wrongful death of his wife and that he had been declared the slayer in that civil case, and that made it look like there was going to be a third trial of Jason Young, so, much to the elation of his family, it looked like he might get a third shot to convince jury that he wasn't guilty, much to the consternation this of the Fisher family, who had been

fighting for justice by that point for some seven and a half years. They thought they were back to square one and that they were going to have to go back to a courtroom and have a third trial of

whether Jason had in fact killed Michelle. Now that's not what ultimately happened, because the State Supreme Court ultimately undid the Court of Appeal's decision and said that Jason's lawyer's failure to object to that evidence coming before the second jury, or at least object as often and in the right places that they should have been objecting, essentially, was enough of a default on their part that the court could not say that Jason had received an unfair trial because

that evidence came in that it was their obligation to object, they had not, and therefore the only question remaining was whether their failure to object had deprived Jason of effective assistance of counsel, and for that purpose and that purpose only, they sent the case back down once again to the Wake County Superior Court, not to have a trial of Jason's guilt or innocence, but to have a hearing on whether he was deprived effective assistance of counsel that he's

owed under the constitution, and that proceeding eventually did occur in June of twenty seventeen before another Superior Court judge named Paul Ridgway.

a new trial. Judge Paul Ridgway's fifty page or so decision was that whatever the failures occurred in the representation of Jason, they didn't change the outcome, that the outcome of his guilty verdict was controlled by many other pieces of evidence, and that the wrongful death evidence, even if it had not come in, would not have changed the outcome.

And therefore he ruled that Jason had not been deprived effective assistance of counsel, he was not entitled to a new trial, and that decision was ultimately affirmed by the Court of Appeals and it has since been reviewed by the North count of Supreme Court in May of twenty nineteen, and that is where this case, in my view, reached its ultimate end, which was actually just a few weeks before my book was published.

Meredith here in North Carolina. She is currently a rising tenth grader. She by all accounts, is doing well and has flourished despite these awful circumstances that have surrounded her entire life. And so those who I have some friends who have children that have gone to school with her, and what I have learned from them is that she's doing amazingly well here in twenty nineteen as a fifteen year old.