The Girl Who Survived(18)

The police thought the murders of Sam Senior and Zelda McIntyre may have been premeditated.

Jonas may have slaughtered them as they slept first, before hunting down Donner—at least that was the prosecution’s theory. Why else wouldn’t they have awakened, even in their drugged state, during what had to have been utter, hellishly loud and savage chaos?

Later, after autopsies and lab work, it had been discovered that massive amounts of Valium were in both of their bloodstreams.

That was one of many parts of the story that didn’t ring true to Thomas. What parent ingests massive doses of a serious sleeping aid on Christmas Eve?

The reigning theory was that Sam Junior had tried to stop the slaughter and had been brutally killed in the attack. Marlie, too, was a victim, some of her blood found at the scene. The fact that Donner Robinson’s wounds were massive and that his jugular was severed convinced the police that he was the intended victim, the source of Jonas’s rage. Sam Junior hadn’t had as many wounds, but his femoral artery had been nicked and he’d bled out, possibly had just gotten in the way and Jonas, already out of his head, killed his brother in the frenzy of the attack. Yes, Jonas suffered wounds himself, but they had not been life-threatening. The DA had painted a clear picture that the defense couldn’t dispute completely or muddy sufficiently.

Though Jonas had sworn that Marlie saw him with the weapon as she passed by his door that day, she ended up going missing and has never been located, her blood identified through DNA matched with what had been extracted from hair on the brush she’d left behind. Even though Jonas’s own wounds were real, they could have been self-inflicted according to the prosecution’s expert witness.

“I can’t believe he was convicted,” Johnson said, closing the file. “All twelve jurors?”

“His juvenile records came into play. Unsealed.”

“How?”

“Severity of the crime. The fact that the records were never expunged. Certain information was kept confidential, but the offenses leaked to the press. He had two prior incidents of violence on his record. Then, of course, there was the fight with Donner after he turned eighteen. Jonas pulled a knife.”

“Jonas assaulted his brother?”

“Mainly threatened, but somehow in the struggle, Donner ended up with a slit on his forearm, not deep, but required stitches and was bad enough for Zelda to call 9-1-1.” Thomas glanced up at her. “Less than a week before the massacre.”

“Holy crap.” She let out a sigh and shook her head just as noise from the outer hallway, voices and laughter, rippled through the open doorway.

“Yup. The real tipping point in the trial was Jonas’s girlfriend at the time.”

“Lacey Higgins. I saw.” She tapped the file with a long finger.

“Right.” He downed the remainder of his now-cold coffee, then crushed the paper cup in his fist and tossed it into the trash can he kept near his file cabinet. He remembered Lacey taking the stand. Dressed in white. Pale and doe-eyed, seeming positively virginal. All part of the theater that was the courtroom. On the stand, Lacey kept her eyes downcast for the most part, but admitted to sleeping with Jonas’s stepbrother, Donner.

When Jonas had found out, she’d said, he’d confronted her at her parents’ house in Portland.

“Did he threaten you?” the DA, a tall woman with sleek blond hair and sharp features, had asked.

“Yes,” had been the meek reply.

“What did he say?”

Lacey had bit her lip and then whispered, “That he would kill me.”

“He would kill you?”

“And anyone I . . . I was with.” Lacy swallowed hard. Fingered the collar of her white dress.

“What exactly were his words?”

“Uh . . . that . . . that if he ever caught me, um . . . you know . . .” She’d visibly swallowed and bit her lower lip.

“If he ever caught you doing what?”

Lacey took a deep breath. “If he caught me with someone else, like, you know, sleeping around, that he, um, he would kill me.”

“Those where his exact words?”

Lacey had looked up at that moment, her slim shoulders stiffening, her dark eyes suddenly cold, as she’d stared across the courtroom to the spot where Jonas McIntyre, dressed in a suit and tie, sat motionless next to Merritt Margrove. She cleared her throat, then spoke. Clearly. Crisply. “He said, ‘If I ever find out you were fucking someone else, I’ll take an axe to him first and you next. That way you can watch him die before you go to hell.’ ”

An audible gasp had come from one of the jurors, a woman with a tight white perm who’d been wearing a pink pantsuit. The other jurors had been somber and tight-lipped, a thin man glaring from behind horn-rimmed glasses, a fortysomething woman turning ashen.

Lacey’s quote, coupled with Kara’s testimony and Jonas’s own past acts of violence, had sealed his fate and become a part of every newspaper report, book, television true crime movie, blog, and podcast since. Even though Jonas’s own wounds were real and shown in graphic display to the jury, the DA’s expert witnesses claimed those cuts could have been self-inflicted, and they paled in comparison to the sickening crime scene and the sliced bodies of the victims. Blood had stained the carpets, run on floorboards, glistened on the tile near the fireplace, splattered against the wood that had been stacked in the firebox, and even smeared some of the branches of the toppled Christmas tree. The dead bodies had been strewn in two rooms, the leftover carnage of a brutal, barbaric attack. His own family members butchered. Jonas’s violent temper, sparking several times in the courtroom, didn’t help, and his prior convictions were the nails in his proverbial coffin.