Not an Innocent Man, but Not a Killer Either

Not an innocent man, but not a killer either

07/04/11 · 7:13 pm :: posted by Jack Coleman ShareThis

Manso's new book finally explains the Worthington murder
Part One of a Two Part review of "Resasonable Doubt"

By Jack Coleman, Special to CapeCodTODAY.com

Author Peter Mason is impracticable in seeking the untold story of our tarnished District Attorney.

It took nearly 10 years, but someone has finally explained the murder of Christa Worthington in a way that makes any sense.

That it should be Peter Manso in his new book, "Reasonable Doubt: The Fashion Writer, Cape Cod, and the Trial of Chris McCowen," comes as no surprise.

Manso's involvement in the case began on the night in January 2002 when he received a phone call from one of Worthington's relatives, stricken with grief after the body of her cousin was found by a former boyfriend.

More than three years would pass before police would arrest a suspect in the case -- Worthington's trash hauler, Christopher McCowen -- who also happened to be a man of color, thereby racheting up interest in the case exponentially.

The trial that followed in the autumn of 2006 riveted local residents and generated media attention unseen on the Cape and islands since an inquest into the death of Mary Jo Kopechne in 1969, in equally murky circumstances.

In both cases, an end to legal proceedings didn't put to rest any number of persistent questions. And with the release this week of Manso's book, many people will be asking those questions again, at least those taking the trouble to actually read what Manso has written. And once people delve into this book, a compelling summer read, they won't be able to put it down.

Many people won't take the trouble, however, because they can't get past Manso's personality. "Abrasive" seems to be the adjective most commonly attached to him. As someone who's had my share of verbal tussles with the man, it's a description not always undeserving. But I doubt there is another person anywhere more knowledgeable about this case.

No one knows more about this case than the "other murderer"

It did not go at all as expected and veered into the surreal, Manso tells readers in his introduction --

I began this project with the assumption that the Christa Worthington murder would be the basis for my "trial book" (every journalist wants to do a trial book), that it would take only eighteen months to complete, and that my involvement as the author would be no different from my involvement in the half-dozen other books I've written, even though I'd known Christa Worthington, my neighbor in the town of Truro on the tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, for more than a dozen years.

Like many assumptions, these proved false, largely because of what I found while digging into the crime, its investigation by the Massachusetts State Police, and the trial I'd planned to cover in the style of the late Dominick Dunne, notebook in hand, memorializing courtroom events in a so-called objective manner. Instead, I would up lending assistance to the defense team and soon found myself in a great deal of trouble -- specifically (not to say surreally), hauled into court, where I was indicted on a series of felonies after voicing my belief, both in print and as a guest commentator on Court TV, that the Cape and Islands district attorney in charge of the case (and also the case against me) was an ambitious, racially insensitive politico who'd cut corners in the courtroom and during the three and a half years he supervised the police investigation.

The case against McCowen appeared strong at first. As Worthington's trash hauler, he'd had weekly access to her property. McCowen, 34 at the time of his arrest and hobbled by a borderline IQ, consistently denied to police that he had any physical contact with Worthington and claimed he'd never been inside her house.

Once a DNA match was established and McCowen was arrested, his story changed repeatedly during an interrogation lasting nearly seven hours. In its final version, McCowen admitted he'd had sex with Worthington, but it was consensual, and that he was at her house the night she was murdered, but a friend actually killed her.

McCowen's seemingly desperate claims were hardly bolstered by the revelation prior to trial of a half-dozen restraining orders against him from as many women, though at least some of these, the exact number open to question, filed in attempts to receive financial assistance from the state. McCowen had also served time in prison for burglary, though his criminal record did not include incidents of violent crime.

McCowen's claim that Frazier killed Worthington did not seem all that unlikely.

Once McCowen's trial began in October 2006, the problems with the prosecution's case soon became apparent. Other than McCowen's interrogation by police and the DNA evident proving physical contact with Worthington -- but not rape -- the case was circumstantial.

The murder weapon was never found, not a single fingerprint, hair or fiber of McCowen's clothing was found at the scene of the murder, and no witness had seen the crime, at least none willing to come forward.

During the trial, McCowen's claim that Frazier killed Worthington did not seem all that unlikely once the particulars of the night in question were revealed in court. McCowen and Frazier, along with a third friend, were bar-hopping on the night of Friday, January 4, 2002, two days before Worthington's body was found.

That the three young men got as far as Eastham, where Frazier got into a fight at a party, was also established in court. Manso reveals in his book what jurors and observers at the trial were not privy to -- that in July 2003, Frazier pulled out a knife and threatened two English summer residents at the Wellfleet pier.
Frazier was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, a felony, Manso points out. The charges were later dropped after neither of the summer residents appeared in court to testify. But why had they not? Manso writes --

Records from the victim/witness assistance unit of the DA's office show that Keir Kennedy-Mitchell and Blake Fisher were never contacted by the court or the O'Keefe office. Never. Not about the trial date or even that Frazier had been arrested and indicted. The omission was colossal.

"To date [Keir] has never received any correspondence from the U.S. courts or indeed any U.S. lawyers about this matter," Kennedy-Mitchell's family retainer wrote to me in a May 2009 e-mail. Kennedy-Mitchell had "received no request formal or informal to attend as a witness in any hearing. ... He will be very happy to respond to any official request from the courts."

A troubling lapse on the part of the DA's office, to say the least.

The book which will keep DA O'Keefe awake for many nights to come. Buy itn on Barnes & Noble here or on Amazon here.

That Frazier had allegedly planned to rob "a rich woman's house" in Truro with "lots of money, rare coins and jewelry" was revealed by a witness at the trial, further bolstering McCowen's claim.

Then there was the matter of blue and white clothing fibers found in Worthington's pubic hair. A video taken of McCowen, Frazier and Shawn Mulvey at a bar in Orleans showed Frazier wearing a blue and white sweater.

Another troubling aspect of the trial came from the testimony of a Worthington neighbor walking past her property in the early afternoon of Saturday, January 5, 2002, just over 24 hours before her body was found. The man testified that he saw a large dark vehicle barrel out of Worthington's driveway and that he caught a glimpse of its driver -- a white male in his late '30s or early '40s.

Add to this the medical examiner's conclusion that Worthington died 24 to 36 hours before her body was found -- in other words, right within the timeframe of an apparently panicked driver who could not be McCowen leaving her property -- and another hugely problematic element was introduced at trial.

During the trial, which I covered as a stringer for the New York Post and wrote about at this blog, I wondered if the blue and white fibers and unknown motorist might be enough to establish reasonable doubt among jurors.

In the end, McCowen's claims were more dubious than jurors were willing to accept and he was convicted of first-degree murder, rape and burglary. The jury was unable to render a verdict until one of its members was dismissed during deliberations after it was revealed in court that she had referred to media coverage of the trial, in violation of Judge Gary Nickerson's instructions to the jury, during a phone conversation with her boyfriend in jail.

McCowen's defense was handled by a skilled lawyer, Robert George, who'd been involved in high-profile cases before and approached this one in his characteristically brash manner. Like an outmatched boxer lasting far longer into a fight than expected, George punched so many holes in the case that many observers expected a hung jury to result.

But the disparity in resources between George and the district attorney's office was huge and his closing argument came across as scattershot. Manso writes here --

The defense lawyer's syntax had become garbled at times during his forty-five-minute address. And he's pointed his finger in too many directions instead of telling a single coherent story, which probably should have been the same story his client told over and over again during his interrogation: Jeremy Frazier killed Christa Worthington.

Speaking with Manso by phone last week, I asked him about his conclusion about George's closing argument -- if this is what he thought George "should have" told jurors, isn't Manso saying he believes McCowen is at least partially complicit in Worthington's murder?

"Nowhere in this book do I say McCowen is an innocent," Manso responded. "But I have my doubts that he would have been charged had he been white."But if police were motivated by racism in their pursuit of McCowen, you'd think it wouldn't have taken more than three years to charge him with Worthington's murder.

After all, police first made personal contact with McCowen as a potential suspect in March 2002, two months after Worthington's death, with McCowen agreeing to provide a DNA sample in April 2002.

I came away from this book skeptical that a just verdict was rendered.

Three more years would pass before the state crime lab matched McCowen's DNA with that found in and on Worthington's body -- three years in which Republican district attorney Michael O'Keefe oversaw police investigation of the case, and with another Republican, Mitt Romney, controlling state offices such as the crime lab from the Corner Office. If this was a racially-motivated investigation, it moved at a glacial pace.

Also undercutting claims that McCowen was railroaded was the Supreme Judicial Court -- the same court to make Massachusetts the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, not incidentally -- unanimously upholding the verdict in December 2010.

Still, I came away from this book skeptical that a just verdict was rendered, and that alleged racism among jurors, the subject of a seldom-seen post-verdict hearing, affected their deliberations.

In fairness to Frazier, the evidence that he murdered Worthington is decidedly flimsy -- it hinges on the claim of a man facing life in prison, McCowen, and physical evidence of it is non-existent.

Even so, Manso makes a strong argument that it's hardly unlikely, of Frazier as the predator that awful night in Truro, not McCowen, a man never lacking for female companionship.

Jack Coleman has been a reporter for several local newspapers including The Cape Cod Times. He covered the Christa Worthington murder trial for CapeCodTODAY.com and the New York Post. He is presently a regular contributor to Newsbusters.org.

07/05/11 @ 8:21 am

grasshopper [Member] writes:

This looks like it could be the perfect forum for a moonbat debate.