'Killer nurse packed husband's remains in cases'
A nurse accused of killing her husband and discarding his dismembered body in Chesapeake Bay carefully planned his death, but she became unhinged after carrying it out, a New Jersey court was told.
In her closing argument, Assistant Attorney General Patricia Prezioso portrayed Melanie McGuire as an organised, capable woman.
McGuire, 34, is accused of drugging her husband William, shooting him, then putting his body parts into three matching Kenneth Cole suitcases in April 2004.
“The murderer was meticulous, was careful, was very well organised, and you know what? That fits the description of this defendant,” Prezioso said.
If convicted, McGuire faces 50 years to life in prison. The jury is expected to begin deliberations today.
Prezioso said McGuire wanted to begin a new life with Dr Bradley Miller, her boss at a Morristown fertility clinic with whom she had been having an affair.
“She knew her husband well. She knew a divorce from him would not be easy,” Prezioso said. “She wanted him dead.”
Prezioso highlighted the internet searches made from a computer in the McGuires’ Woodbridge apartment on topics including “instant undetectable poisons” and “How To Commit a Murder”.
McGuire purchased a gun and bullets just two days before her husband, a 39-year-old computer programmer, was last seen alive – the same type of bullets found in her husband’s body, Prezioso said.
The prosecutor told jurors that Melanie McGuire forged a prescription for a powerful sedative – chloral hydrate – using the name of a patient from her fertility clinic on April 28 2004, the same day her husband disappeared.
The McGuires closed on a £250,000 house in Warren County on that day, Prezioso said. William McGuire called his friends and probably had a drink with his wife to celebrate, she said.
“It’s very likely that his had an extra kick to it,” Prezioso said, referring to the chloral hydrate. “He had no idea that he would never see his children again.”
But afterwards, Prezioso said, Melanie McGuire seemed to fall apart and tell convoluted stories to explain her actions in the days around her husband’s disappearance.
McGuire asked Miller to write her several prescriptions for Xanax, according to Prezioso, because she was stressed.
And in the days after her husband’s disappearance, McGuire said she went to Delaware to go furniture shopping. Prezioso said it was an “absolutely incredible” attempt to explain her actions when she was actually on her way to dispose of the body.
McGuire’s lawyer has argued that the petite nurse was physically incapable of killing her husband. During his closing argument on Monday, Joseph Tacopina said it also would be impossible to have carried out such a bloody crime in the couple’s apartment without neighbours hearing something or without leaving behind physical evidence.
Prezioso told jurors that McGuire most likely had an accomplice, but no one has been named or charged.
