A Killing on the Cape Episode 2: The Shellfish Constable | ABC News Podcast (Transcript)

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A Killing on the Cape Episode 2: The Shellfish Constable | ABC News Podcast (Transcript)

Length: 39 mins

Mark Remillard: Last week on A killing on the Cape.

911: 911, this line is recorded. What’s the problem?

Tim Arnold: It’s Christa Worthington; I don’t know what happened to her. I think she fell down or something. I’m sure she’s dead. Her two-year-old daughter was nursing on her body.

911: Okay, I’ll send them right over.

George Malloy: The crew that had pulled up the driveway had just come out and they were somewhat distraught and I asked them what they had and they told me they had a deceased female. So I went in and just looked and Christa was naked from the waist down, lying on her back.

Jan Worthington: I put my hand on her left carotid artery, she had no pulse. I knew she was dead. I didn’t know what had happened, but I thought that she had been murdered.

MR: Police in Cape Cod, trying to solve the most high profile case in decades. Christa Worthington, a fashion writer and single mother stabbed to death in her own home.

Male: There are many different investigative methodologies and we’re gonna employ every single one of them until this case is resolved.

MR: From ABC Radio and 2020, I’m Mark Remillard, and this is A Killing on the Cape.

The investigation into Christa’s murder would see a long list of potential suspects, a number of dead ends and a community growing frustrated that the killer hadn’t been caught. State police investigators took over the investigation on the night Christa’s body was found, January 6th, 2002, and immediately they believed this was not a random murder, but someone who knew Christa or knew how to find her. After all, it was winter time, and so the tourists are gone from the Cape and the population in places like Provincetown and Truro dropped to just a few thousand people.

Christa was killed in her home, which is hidden down a long driveway. In the summer, with the trees and flowers in bloom, you can’t even see the place from the street. Depot Road is also not a place that random people typically drive down. Christa’s home is about a mile off Cape Cod’s main highway and remember, the town of Truro really doesn’t have much to it. There are two post offices, a town hall, a grocery store, a few restaurants and small businesses, but there are no strip malls or food chains. People are much more likely to be passing through as they head in and out of the touristy Provincetown.

So taking that into consideration, I went to 50 Depot Road with Brad Garrett, a former FBI profiler and consultant to ABC news and asked him, what would investigators look for?

MR: What about this type of crime that occurred in an area like this, this is something unseen before, almost.

Brad Garett: Well, statistically, if you’re in a place like this, the crime rate is exceedingly low because you have so few people. However, because of the isolation factor of how many people live here, including Christa and this long driveway up to her house, how did somebody know to come here? The question then is who could fit that particular profile?

MR: And to figure that out, police had to look at everyone in Christa’s life. And to know those in Christa’s life, we have to know Christa.

Maria Flook: She was glamorous in a certain way, even though everybody says Christa would hate that word, that she wasn’t glamorous, but she had that glam factor being somebody who worked in New York and Paris and was part of the fashion industry.

MR: Maria Flook, the author of Invisible Eden, which dives into Christa’s career as a fashion writer before her death.

MF: Secrets, sex, and money, that was all in this story, but the story I was interested in was the real story, who was Christa Worthington?

Christa Worthington had been a student of mine in a writing class at the Fine Arts Work Center in 1996, and she was an independent, idiosyncratic, eccentric, professional person. Her friends, Christa’s friends, called her vivacious, sparkling, they said she had a world-weariness, but it brought her great sophistication.

Peter Manso: She grew up in Hingham, Mass., which is south of Boston, a kind of tony suburb. Her father was a Harvard educated lawyer.

MR: Peter Manso, author of Reasonable Doubt and a consultant on this story.

PM: Christa was the only child. She then went to Vassar, she went to a local high school, went to Vassar, where she was among the more interesting students. And back then, this was just after Vassar became co-ed. Traditionally, Vassar was an all-women’s school, and then it became a co-ed school.

Victoria Balfour: My name is Victoria Balfour, I was a Vassar classmate of Christa Worthington. We were classmates from 1973 to 1977.

MR: Victoria says she was in an English thesis class with Christa. And while they weren’t close friends, she got to know Christa since they were both English majors.

VB: Christa was someone you would know because she was so short but interesting looking and pretty. You just knew who she was, she was one of those people.

MR: Christa would eventually become a fashion writer, but Victoria says you might not have guessed it if you knew Christa back when she was at Vassar.

VB: She wasn’t into fashion at the time. She was into more hippie peasant look, no makeup, she would wear peasant blouses and kind of long denim skirts to the the ground and bandanas, those blue paisley bandanas that you see motorcycle guys wear now, but that was big in the 70s. She was just more kind of waifish hippie, and I remember her… My strongest memory of her, just trudging across campus, this little person, but hugging books probably way more than she did, but like they were her lost children.

MR: And that is one thing that is always consistent with every description of Christa I’ve ever heard. She loved books.

VB: But she was brilliant in class. I mean I know she graduated with honors. Our thesis was British literature and Irish literature like James Joyce, Yates, and it was very esoteric if you ask me; and our professor was kind of an anglophile, and I think Christa was too, but she could come out with things that were, like, where would she get that? She was very bright in kind of an academic way, very thoughtful and insightful, and we would all look at her like, “Wow.” And I’m not just saying that because… She really was very smart.

MR: After college, Christa moved to Manhattan where she began her writing career. The world of fashion writing in a city like New York seemed a natural fit for Christa, according to Peter Manso.

PM: And Christa was always this, best I know, was attracted, drawn to not the high life, but the bohemian, the intellectual, which she found in Manhattan, obviously. She worked for the New York Times, she worked for ELLE magazine, she worked for W, Women’s Wear Daily. As a matter fact, she spent a year and a half, closer to two years maybe, in Paris. And during this period, the then editor of Women’s Wear Daily in Paris either died or quit, and she ran Women’s Wear Daily. She became the temporary editor of the magazine in Paris.

MR: Christa would leave Paris and return to New York continuing a life mixed in with the glitz and glamour that came with high fashion. Even in the 1990s, which saw the rise of heroin chic subculture influence and a turn away from the flashy 1980s.

Novelty and news.

Christa Worthington: What the look that everyone is looking for this year?

This business has become glamorous than ever. It’s the prestige, and in New York, the Americans they like that, they’re impressed by the Italian designers, also the French designers, anything international.

Male: The fashion story this year is more above the waist, around the neckline, open necklines.

CW: They like a variety of options; and this season, they’re given much.

Eli Gottlieb: My name is Eli Gottlieb, I’m a writer and novelist, and I met Christa when we were editors together at ELLE magazine in probably 1990. The French were still running the magazine, and because the French were running the magazine, it was kind of an ongoing party disguised as a publication and there was a lot of extracurricular fun. Christa seemed to know a tremendous amount of celebrities. It wasn’t anything that she was too ostentatious about, but it was clear that she was really wired in and she always used to have the latest gossip.

MR: But while New York fashion writing in the 1990s meant a fast=paced life, Eli says Christa never took writing for granted.

EG: She sweated over her writing. She did not take it lightly. She took it extremely seriously and she turned out very elegant prose. It wasn’t always on weighty subjects, it wasn’t about world peace or global disarmament, it was usually about the latest desert boot or culotte trend, but it was well done. She was a good writer.

MF: Christa published three books with Chic Simple.

MR: Author Maria Flook.

MF: One of them was this little book called Scarves, and I’d love to read you a couple little passages from this book, which I totally enjoy.

“The headscarf: The headscarf reveals as it conceals. Since the 50th century, when the Catholic Church decreed that the Virgin Mary conceived through her ear, wrapping the head has been a show of feminine chastity with built-in provocations. The louder the go away message, the more audible the come hither.”

Isn’t that great?

MR: Christa’s friend Eli says as time went on, though, Christa’s writing appeared to be less fulfilling for her.

EG: After she left ELLE magazine, she experimented for a while, she was the antiques or collectibles columnist for the New York Times, and I think, she’d been doing this for 20 odd years, and she was beginning to lose a little bit of interest and beginning to look for deeper fulfillment in life.

MR: For all her brilliance and success, Eli says Christa’s personal life was filled with one tumultuous relationship after another.

EG: Christa’s love life was a mess. There is no other way to describe it. She was perennially in search of a guy and perennially unable to happily settle down with anybody. She would have relationships, but they usually would be of short duration. And as time went on, they seemed to get shorter and shorter and more and more erratic. The people that she was with became stranger and weirder and, every time the phone would ring, she’d have some new story to tell and it just went from weird to weirder.

MR: Eli says Christa began to want a child, even writing some articles and appearing on some television shows to talk about it.

This is from her appearance on the Leeza Show.

CW: Trying to figure out how to be the best parent to your child, given that there is no father.

EG: Christa, at one point, decided to go public with her quest to have a child and she wrote an article in Harper’s Bazar, I think it was, called something like “Do I Dare?” and it was, “Am I selfish to try to have a child in-vitro at age 40?” And the answer that came back from the audience of the television show she did, as I recall, was, “Yes, you are.” She was booed and hissed, and she didn’t really seem to mind, she thought it was all quite funny. I think she was a bit shocked at the time, but I think, in the end, she found it hilarious, their reaction.

MR: With fruitless relationships and a biological clock winding down so to speak, Eli says Christa began looking for a change. So in the summer of 1997, she left New York and moved to Cape Cod, where she had spent summers as a child and where her family has a number of properties.

The first place she moved into was a small, almost shack-like home that was owned by her grandmother. It was right on Pamet Harbor, just down the road from the house at 50 Depot Road where she would eventually move.

EG: In the Cape, Christa seemed to access the Truro version of herself, which really was more let your hair down, walk around in flip-flops and shorts, throw the Hermès and the Givenchy to the back of the closet and just relax. She was a more soulful, to use a freighted word, but she was. She let herself unwind.

MR: Pamet Harbor is picturesque Cape Cod. The inlet is surrounded by beautiful sand dunes and Pamet Marsh is where people go swimming, kayaking, or paddle board. And in the evening, the sunset’s out over Cape Cod bay with vibrant oranges, yellows, and deep purple colors. It’s a very relaxing place, but it can get busy at times.

Christa’s shack was right next to the parking lot for the Harbor, where, every day, pickup trucks arrived with trailers carrying fishing boats that pass out of the Harbor and into the bay. According to Maria Flook, Christa would get upset that people would leave their boats in front of her house, but her complaints about it led to one of the most important relationships in her life.

MF: She used to like to go and talk to the Harbormaster. She often had complaints about people leaving their boats right in front of her door and all kinds of problems, and that was the first time she noticed Tony Jackett. Tony Jackett came in to talk to Warren and he met Christa. She noticed him because he was very handsome. He’s got black curly hair and a beautiful golden complexion and he’s very, very appealing when you first meet him because he’s wide open and he’s friendly. And he noticed her too and, within several weeks’ time, they took a liking to one another.

MR: Tony Jackett was the Shellfish Constable of Provincetown and Truro. It was his job to enforce fishing laws and make sure people have the proper licenses when they fish. Well, apparently not long after they met, Tony had just gotten a pair of rollerblades and in the most 90s way of strutting your stuff I’ve ever heard, he skated around in the parking lot in front of Christa, which caught her attention.

MF: She found him in the parking lot roller-blading back and forth in front of her. This is a 50-year-old guy on rollerblades, roller-blading in front of Christa.
And before you know it, he was going over to her house for tea and then, of course, it became a little deeper.

MR: One small problem, Tony was married and he and his wife, Susan, have six kids together.

MR: Right now, we’re pulling up to the house of Tony Jackett.

[Mark and the Jacketts greeting]

MR: Today, 67-year-old Tony Jackett leaves in Wellfleet. That’s on the Cape just south of Truro. And like a lot of Cape Cod homes, it’s hard to spot from the street, but it’s definitely not as hidden as Christa’s.
Tony still lives with his wife Susan.

Tony Jackett: So that’s the story behind that.

MR: Can you describe it for me? What are we looking at?

TJ: Well, this is my boar head, more than 25 years, Josephine G.

MR: On the wall near the kitchen of his home is a black and white picture of Tony in his boat. He must’ve been in his late 30s at the time. You can see that he’s weathered tan with curly hair, his bleached white teeth stand out as he smiles back towards the camera. The way Tony explains the affair is very one-thing-led-to-another.

TJ: Well, when I first met her, it was somewhere in 1997. And then, as I got to know her a little bit, I think there was a time she asked me to help her do something up at her house, and I think it was to move a door that she had, and that was when I got to be more friendly with her. Seems to me that I went over to her house, I was having a cup of tea, and then, the next thing you know, we were in bed. It was probably easier to go back the second time. But, you know, I didn’t really see her a lot. It was a really just small town, you’re nervous, at least aware, that you could be seen.

MR: Nevertheless, the affair went on.

TJ: Like I said, I felt, at that point in time in my life, I wouldn’t say it was a midlife crisis, I was more like curious about an opportunity to explore and do different things. And I had no plan on leaving home. Certainly, I wasn’t going to leave one family and go start another.

MR: Tony insists that Christa told him she couldn’t have a baby. Christa was, after all, in her early 40s and had been told by doctors she couldn’t have children. But against the odds, and to Tony shock, Christa got pregnant.

TJ: She tells me that, “I think you should sit down. I have something to tell you, and I’m pregnant.” So I’m thinking, “How could I be so dumb?” And I remember that it was like, I said, “Well, okay. So what do you want? I’m not going to leave my family to go start another family.” “No, no. I don’t want you to say anything because my mother is not well. I plan on going home to help take care of my mother. This is very early on and I might lose the child.” So we kind of left at that, And I didn’t know if that was something I could keep from my wife, not for very long, but I did manage to do that for a couple years. I was shocked, because she had me convinced that she couldn’t have children.

MR: After Christa became pregnant, the affair ended, but the secret continued. Around this time, Christa had moved out of the house on Pamet Harbor and into the home at 50 Depot Road.

Ava was born in May of 1999, but it wouldn’t be for nearly two more years until Tony would confess to his wife. At some point before April 2001, about eight months before Christa’s death, tensions between her and Tony began to rise. She’d begun asking Tony to put Ava on his life and medical insurance as well as to provide child support for her. Tony later told police that Christa had been “nagging him for financial support of Ava.” Christa had even gotten a lawyer involved who was threatening to garnish his wages to provide support for Ava and was asking Tony to sign a formal agreement.

MR: Tony says the agreement was set up in a way that he’d still be able to keep it all a secret from his wife, but notes that he felt pressured to agree to it or that Christa might expose their affair. And there is at least some evidence that Christa may have been thinking of exposing their tryst. At one point, Christa wrote a 5-page hand-written letter to Tony’s, wife Susan Jackett, in which she wrote that she’d been having sex with Tony for some time. The letter is dripping with a sardonic tone. She talks about being in bed with Tony from 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM, or maybe it’s a 9, it’s hard to tell. But either way, she wrote about spending all day in bed with him. She wrote about how, when Tony says he was going to check on his boat, he was actually with her. She even wrote a few graphic lines about his anatomy just before capping it off with the words “happy anniversary.” The letter was, apparently, never sent but shows that Christa, for whatever reason, may have been looking to ruin things for Tony. The letter isn’t penitent, it’s rather malicious.

PM: This is part of the files from my book.

MR: In the basement of consultant and author Peter Manso’s home on Cape Cod, are the dozens of boxes filled with research for his book, Reasonable Doubt.

PM: This is Christa’s handwriting.

MR: And in one of those boxes, a copy of Christa’s diary, a window into her thoughts.

PM: As you’ll note, it’s a very good handwriting. I mean she has a good script. It begins, “Comedy is the hardest thing in the world.”

MR: Christa wrote in her diary about her relationship with Tony Jackett, and it shows how swept up in the affair she had become, writing “If there was a sweeter person on earth between the hours of 8:00 and 9:15, I would not believe it. Tony became tender and we were made new spellbound, I love him.”
She even has this line about how ordering pizza in public was a thrill, “That is adultery. When ordering pizza becomes a thing of beauty.”

But it also shows that she had become frustrated with Tony and that, at times, outright angry with him.

PM: “Tony was here and could feel the quality of my complaints. Nothing was possible. All was bleak. I force myself to stop.”

MR: She also writes about her pregnancy and being alone.

PM: “For me, there was no choice. Not that I’m so unhappy about it, but the difficulties are not what I would have chosen. A child without a father, me without a mate.” And she goes on.

MR: At another point, she writes that she’d come to resent Tony, apparently telling him how depressed and how unnatural it was to be pregnant alone. To which, she writes, Tony said he hadn’t completely abandoned her. She replies, “Don’t do me any favors.” Then, she reaches a point when she seems to have had enough, writing, “I’m here alone and he’s living his married life. That’s it. I’m out if he can’t do better than that.”

Despite her frustration, though, Christa wouldn’t be the one to expose the affair, which Peter Manso says was actually no secret to practically anybody in Truro, save for Tony’s wife, Susan.

PM: The child was born, what, in 2000, late ‘99? So she did not know, up to that point, but everyone else in town knew. This was the incredible thing.

MR: In Trooper Christopher Mason’s report, Susan even tells him that she was apparently the last person to find out that Tony had been sleeping with Christa. She’d only find out about it after Tony says he couldn’t live with the secret anymore nor could he live with what he told Trooper Mason, was the power that Christa had over him. And that’s when he decided to come clean.

TJ: When I told her the news, and I was like, you feel like you could almost do anything else, you know? Be on a boat that just sunk in a big storm and hope you can swim to shore than tell her that, but she was in a state of shock and then she started like, “I got to get out of here.” She actually drove into town in tears and told her dad while she’s banging on the door. And he’s coming to the door, I don’t think it was that late, but he went to bed, and she, “Dad, I got this awful news,” and he’s just, “What is it?” And she told, “Tony had an affair and he had a baby,” and he’s like, “Christ, is that all?” So I think that kind of calmed her down a little bit. So I figured she thought of, she’d said, “Okay, I think what I want you to do is you got to go down the hall and you’re gonna stay in that bedroom until I figure out what I’m going to do with you.” And I remember saying, “Okay, all right,” so I get that out of the way. So I never left, I wasn’t kicked out of the house and then we started to talk a little bit about how something like that could happen and then we both agreed to see the therapist.

MR: In Trooper Mason’s report, Tony told him that, after about a month, things started to improve between him and Susan. He says Christa had given him plenty of time to get his family together and that, after adding Ava to his health insurance, Christa had stopped pursuing things with the lawyer.
He also says, with everything out in the open, Christa seemed less concerned about how and what she would eventually tell Ava about who her father is, and making the situation even better was that Tony’s wife, Susan, had decided that Ava should be part of the family, which culminated in Susan embracing Ava, and by extension, Christa, and all of them regularly having dinner together. An unorthodox situation, according to Peter Manso.

PM: Christa agreed to go to the Jackett’s for dinner, Sundays. At this point, Susan embraced Ava, “Ava is one of my children too.” Mother Earth comes to the fore.

MR: While I was at the Jackett household, there was a picture of Ava on the fireplace mantle, prominently displayed right next to a family portrait of their other children. There were other pictures of Ava around the house as well. Susan says it really wasn’t that hard to accept Christa and Ava.

Susan Jackett: It wasn’t difficult. Once I got to know Christa, I liked her and enjoyed her company and I just felt sorry for her dilemma, for Ava’s dilemma, my dilemma, my children’s, and I said, “Tony and I are going stay together. We have to make this work.”

MR: The Jacketts and Christa continued to be involved in each other’s life right up until Christa’s death. The Jacketts say they were getting along with Christa, but the whole situation, as odd as it is from the outside, quickly made them targets for suspicion.

On January 6, 2002, after Tim Arnold had found Christa’s body, Tony and Susan were called to come over to Christa’s uncle house, where the rest of the Worthingtons had gathered.

SJ: I didn’t know that she was dead when they called Tony to go and pick Ava up. He said, “Come on, we’re going to go pick up Ava, and something’s happened to Christa,” that’s how he worded it. So we got in the car to go pick up Ava at Cindy Worthington’s and I said, “Is Christa in the hospital? Did she fall? Is she okay? How long will we have Ava?” He said, “Susan, she’s dead.” I just couldn’t believe it. I was in shock.

TJ: I couldn’t believe it either.

SJ: I was in shock.

TJ: I couldn’t even say it.

SJ: He couldn’t even bring himself to say it.

TJ: A couple weeks early, here we are at a mutual friend’s house.

SJ: At a solstice.

TJ: At a winter solstice party, which, we’ll say December 21, and that weekend of January 6 was when we got the news. But I’m thinking, “I can’t believe that I was still married and that Christa and Susan are sitting together.”

SJ: We were sitting together with Ava, chatting.

TJ: I was shucking oysters, little thinking that, two weeks later, my feeling so lucky turned upside down because now. I don’t think I was aware of me being the suspect additionally.

MR: At Christa’s uncle house, Tony would be interviewed by Trooper Christopher Mason and asked about where he’d been that day. Mason wrote that Tony told him he was at Pamet Harbor in the morning, that he’d driven past Christa’s on his way out and went to Provincetown, where his son had been shell fishing with a friend. He later went to his father-in-law’s, watched some of the Patriots’ game, left to go home to eat dinner, and then he received a call from Christa’s friend, Francie Randolph, telling him the Christa was dead.

MR: Mason also asked Tony about where he was Friday and Saturday as well. Since Christa’s body was already stiff when paramedics arrived, investigators believe she’d been dead for some time. Mason’s report noted that, on Friday, Tony told him he and Susan had gone to see the Royal Tenenbaums at Cape Cod Mall Cinema, in Hyannis, and then, on Saturday, they had gone to see A Beautiful Mind at Wellfleet Cinemas, just south of Truro. Trooper Mason later checked with the theaters and wrote that there were, in fact, show times for when Tony said he and Susan were at the movies.

SJ: I can’t believe they would suspect you, and so we were questioned quite few times.

TJ: I remember I said was saw those two movies, this is when we’d go to movies together. I haven’t been going to the movies since she’s, doesn’t do that anymore, but we saw the Tenenbaums. I love that Gene Hackman, and the other was with Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind.

SJ: Yes.

TJ: So that weekend, and then we had people that we knew, that we saw in the movie theater that they could account for our time. But even though they didn’t, or was reluctant to rule me out, they’d say, “We can’t rule him in, we can’t rule him out,” and it kind of stayed like that and it was going to stay like that until they made an arrest.

MR: It would be three years before that would happen, though, so during that time, Tony and Susan Jackett said the endured sideways looks from some in the community who thought they might have been involved. One of those who became suspicious of them almost immediately was the EMT, George Malloy, who took Christa’s daughter, Ava, away from the scene. Malloy says, while they were all at Christa’s uncle’s house on the night they found Christa’s body, Susan made what Malloy called offensive comments about Ava.

GM: And Jackett’s wife said to me, “Don’t listen to anything this little girl has to say. She’s a **** liar,” and I’m thinking to myself, “What the ****?” And I just found that to be extremely offensive, when you’re talking about a two-year-old, calling a two-year-old a liar because, at this point, you’ve got a dead woman who he’s had an affair with, okay? All right? You’ve got his wife in front of me telling me that the two-year-old is a liar, I suspected him as a suspect, the first suspect, and then her as the second.

MR: This, of course, doesn’t mean Tony or Susan had anything to do with Christa’s death, and they have both always denied any involvement, but as George Malloy says, the situation between the Jacketts and Christa, coupled with Susan’s alleged comments, made him question whether they were involved.

While we were at Tony and Susan’s house, I asked Susan about what George told us.

MR: We just wanted to hear it from you guys. Allegedly, George Malloy had said, or heard you say, Susan, that “Don’t listen to Ava, she’s a bleeping liar.” We just want to hear your response to that.

SJ: Okay. George was sitting on the floor. I felt like I couldn’t even get near her and I was afraid she would reject me being how she was, she’s with who she’s with, so I just stood there and I was kind of chatty and I said, you know, I came to pick up Ava, and, “Would you like to have a bath, Ava?” And I said, “Once in a while, she’d tell me that she didn’t like to take baths and her mother said she actually loves baths, but sometimes she tells fibs.” And when I was just trying to kind of make light conversation and that, just somehow or other, I don’t know how that got twisted around, that I said she was a liar or not to listen to what she said. I was just trying to make conversation, how she’s little and she really loves baths, but she’ll say she doesn’t like them and her mother said she tells fibs sometimes, and I don’t know how that got misconstrued, but that’s so untrue that I said that child was a liar. She was a baby; she didn’t even know to tell lies.

MR: It’s not clear if any of this ever weighed on Trooper Mason or Sergeant William Burke. It’s not clear if they ever even heard about Susan’s alleged comments, but after interviewing nearly every member of the Jackett family as well as dozens of other people close to them and Christa, police knew about the friction between Tony and Christa before he told his wife about the affair.
And then there is that letter, the one that Christa wrote that would have exposed the affair and was apparently never sent. As Peter Manso says, it was written with intention.

PM: I mean this was a letter written by one woman to another meant to hurt, to injure; and the cops took this letter and they said, “Hey, maybe this is why Susan killed Christa. Not because she got the letter, but because this letter encapsulated some of the elements, the emotional elements of what was going on here.”

MR: Police looked to Tony and questioned both him and Susan several times in the months after the murder, even asking both of them to take polygraphs during which they were asked questions such as, “Did you stab Christa? Do you know who stabbed Christa?” and in both tests, the state trooper who administered them wrote, in his opinion, there was no deception found.

So without anything concrete to tie Tony or Susan to the murder, just some apparent hurt feelings and alleged odd reactions, as well as others, backing up that the relationship between the Jacketts and Christa had been good at the time of her death, Trooper Mason and Burke’s focus on them seems to have eased in the months following the murder. Each subsequent interview with Susan and Tony got shorter. For example, in his first interview with Tony, Trooper Mason’s report was 7 pages; by the second, 3 pages; and by the last one, May 2nd, 2002, a little less than four months after Christa’s murder, the interview summary, just 2 pages.

Police suspicion around the Jacketts, though, particularly Tony, they say, would still come to affect them directly. After Christa’s death, they fought to get custody of Ava, but they believed the cloud of suspicion hurt their chances. And like nearly everything that occurred in this case over the next several years, the custody battle included, it will play out in the public eye.

Female: It ended with a handshake between Christa Worthington’s ex-lover and her good friend; the two are now fighting for custody of the child he fathered.

TJ: I kind of felt like I was being thrown to the wolves a little bit. This is, with all the media there and such a scandal, just having the affair and a baby, and now it’s all over the news, so that was a big turnout. All of a sudden, you’ve got media from everywhere and at the courthouse. And I thought, “Oh, my God. This not something that you think is going to happen when you’re trying to figure out what you’re going to do the rest of your life.” So the DA was there, he had gotten up to speak and said, “We can’t rule Mr. Jackett in or out as far as being someone that could have committed this crime,” so I think the judge felt the safe thing to do was to award temporary custody. And a lot of times, the one that gets temporary custody most often ends up with permanent custody.

MR: It was Christa’s good friend, Amira Chase, who would be awarded custody of Ava, and Ava would go to live with her near Boston. Christa had apparently named Amira as the person she wanted Ava to live with if in case something did happen to her. So with police unwilling to officially rule anyone out, Tony and Susan say they faced public pressure for the three years it took investigators to make an arrest and charge someone else with Krista’s murder.”

TJ: I was never ever called or told that I was not a suspect. I did get a letter from the DA and I think it was phrased as “diminished.” The letter that I got from Mr. O’Keefe would have been phrased in a way that my being a person of interest had been significantly diminished with whatever evidence that they had before them.

MR: Next time, police expand their radius looking at others in Christa’s social circle, even her own father.

MF: So it was shocking when people learned, after Christa’s murder, that he was involved with heroin addict rent girl, but Christa knew about this prior to her murder and was quite worried.

MR: And with the dead ends mounting and the public watching, authorities would soon expand their search for the killer to the whole town of Truro.

Female: …Massachusetts drew national attention because police tried to find the killer by asking every man in the small town to submit DNA.

MR: I like to see the murderer would be found, but to invade everybody’s privacy in the town is just a bit ridiculous. You know what I mean? And I feel, as an American citizen, it’s just wrong.

MF: I think he felt the pressure to solve this also because it was such a nationally publicized case. This is not just a little Cape Cod murder. It suddenly involved New York, Los Angeles, the whole country was watching.

Male: The reason this case is so complicated is there were so many different possible suspects. From an investigative standpoint, this case almost becomes like a game of Clue.

MR: That’s next week.

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