Jury shown evidence from the day of Megan McDonald's murder; defense attorney calls it 'parade'
Prosecutors in the Edward Holley murder trial spent extensive time during the first week laying out the circumstances around the discovery of Megan McDonald's body.
Holley, a former boyfriend of McDonald, is accused of murdering her in March 2003. He has pleaded not guilty to a charge of second-degree murder.
The jury was shown numerous photos of McDonald's white Mercury Sable, which was found at Kensington Manor in the Scotchtown area of the town of Wallkill — 470 feet from where Holley lived at the time — on March 14, 2003.
Retired New York State Police investigators Timothy Zeszutek and Joseph Barrett walked prosecutors through those photos, which showed numerous blood stains on the inside and outside of the car, including on the driver's seatbelt, which was hanging out the closed door.
Barrett said no usable latent fingerprints were found on the car. A cigar butt was found in the ashtray with a mixture of DNA from McDonald and Paul Simpson, who was previously in a relationship with her.
David Voelker, a resident of Kensington Manor who saw the Sable parked there while walking his dog on the morning of March 14, called its presence suspicious.
Prosecutors and investigators believe McDonald was killed sometime in the early morning hours of March 14, although her body was not discovered in a field off Bowser Road in Wallkill until March 15.
Barrett said he was assigned to go to that location around 3 p.m. on March 15. Around 10 p.m., he went to McDonald's residence, in a basement apartment of a ranch house on Karen Drive, to see if it might be a crime scene. It was not.
One of the last things McDonald was known to have done was make a deposit at the HSBC on Route 211 in Middletown. Jurors were shown surveillance camera images from just after 3:30 p.m. on March 13.
Representatives from Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and Frontier Communications testified to the authenticity of phone records that the Orange County District Attorney's office had subpoenaed at the time of McDonald's murder. Those records are no longer in those company's computer systems, as such records are usually purged after a year or two.
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The relationship of those phone records to the case was not explained at the time of their testimony.
In opening statements, Laura Murphy, one of two special prosecutors, recounted how McDonald was found with multiple fractures to the back of her head, bleeding from the brain, a fractured jaw, multiple bruises on her body, a chipped tooth and broken fingernails.
She said Holley has told false stories to police of his whereabouts during the time McDonald disappeared and was being murdered. She told the jury the prosecution's case will convince them to find Holley guilty of murder.
Lead defense attorney Paul Weber, however, told jurors not to "fall for the parade" of witnesses the prosecution will call, and urged them to judge evidence based on quality, not quantity.
Weber said state police did not become focused on Holley until 2017, while rejecting other suspects. He claimed state police to this day are still trying to get evidence against Holley.
The trial is scheduled to continue in Orange County Court for several weeks.
Mike Randall covers breaking news for the Times Herald-Record and the Poughkeepsie Journal. Reach him at mrandall@th-record.com.
This article originally appeared on Times Herald-Record: Testimony underway in murder trial for 2003 death of Megan McDonald
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