A Killing on the Cape Episode 5: The Verdict | ABC News Podcast (Transcript)

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A Killing on the Cape Episode 5: The Verdict | ABC News Podcast (Transcript)

Length: 47 mins

Mark Remillard: Previously on A Killing on the Cape.

Michael O’Keefe: Last night, at approximately 7:15 PM detectives from the Massachusetts state police, detective unit assigned to my office, arrested Christopher A. McCowen, age 33, for the 2002 murder of Christa A. Worthington.

Beth Karas: He wasn’t fleeing, he wasn’t hiding, he’s volunteering his DNA, he didn’t act like somebody who was guilty of this.

Dan Abrams: The first two times that McCowen was questioned by the authorities, basically denied knowing her, but then they hand him the DNA report and everything changes.

MA: After you showed him that report, slid it across the table to him, what did he do next?

Christopher Mason: Mr. McCowen then stated, “It could have been me.”

MA: “It could have been me”?

CM: “It could have been me.”

MR: From ABC Radio and 20/20, I’m Mark Remillard, and this is A Killing on the Cape.

When police announced the arrest of Christopher McCowen for the murder of Christa Worthington, they worked to assure the community that their investigation, however long and controversial at times, had gotten the right man.

John Thomas: It’s a relief for the community. Now they can rest at night. It was probably another relief that it wasn’t a stranger that just came in and randomly picked a house.

MR: That’s Truro’s former police chief, John Thomas, and this is District Attorney, Michael O’Keefe.

MO: The investigation continues now as we move into the prosecution phase of the case.

MR: But while there had been a number of steps in the investigation that would draw criticism, the arrest of a poorly educated Black man for the murder of a wealthy White woman would rank among the top. Compounding that, a surprise charge added to the Commonwealth list of allegations against Chris.

Peter Manso: Between the time of the murder and the autopsy of Christa’s body and the arrest of Chris McCowen three years later, there was not a word about rape. Not one word about rape.

MR: Author Peter Manso wrote the book Reasonable Doubt, The Fashion Writer of Cape Cod and The Trial of Chris McCowen and worked as a consultant on this story. He covered Chris McCowen’s trial and has been a supporter of the defense and believes Chris didn’t get a fair trial.

PM: This case became a case not only of murder but rape only when and after they had arrested a Black man.

BG: A murder and rape, aggravated rape, which was a new charge.

MR: Bob George was Chris McCowen’s attorney during his trial. In all, Chris was facing first-degree murder, aggravated rape, and aggravated burglary.

BG: Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t surprised by the armed house invasion and I wasn’t surprised by the murder indictments. What I was surprised by was the rape indictment.

MR: It’d be more than a year after his arrest that Chris’s trial would begin in the small, one-room Superior Court in Barnstable County. Fittingly, a silver cod fish hangs from the ceiling of the courtroom; some call it the cod of God.

MA: Let the records show that defendant Chris A. McCowen is in the courtroom charged with the crime of murder in the first degree. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?

Chris McCowen: Not guilty.

MR: I’ve been in this courtroom before. It’s a beautiful space, but it’s not a very large courtroom, especially for a case that would gather so much media attention. In fact, the witness stand is quite literally that, there’s no chair. Just off to the judge’s left, is an area where witnesses stand during testimony.

Sunny Hostin: This case was so unusual for this community. This is not a big city. This is a small town in Massachusetts that hadn’t had a first-degree murder case in 30 years.

MR: ABC’s Senior Legal Correspondent, Sunny Hostin, and ABC’s Senior Legal Analyst, Dan Abrams.

DA: For Cape Cod, this was the trial of the century. There had never been anything like this in recent memory.

BK: My name is Beth Karas, I’m a legal analyst and consultant. I was a correspondent for Court TV when Christopher McCowen’s trial took place and I covered the entire trial.
This case had been around for a long time, all right? She is found dead on January 6, 2002. I arrive at the courthouse in October of 2006. This was a long time coming and people were ready and it was a big deal.

PM: There is a big parking lot between the Superior Courthouse and the District Court.

MR: Author and consultant, Peter Manso.

PM: Parking lot is choc-a-block full, satellite TV trucks, reporters all over the place with cell phones, computers.

MR: Jury selection would begin on October 16, 2006, and for Chris’s attorney Bob George, it was a delicate process. In a case like this with so many layers, from socio-economic divides to issues of race, from its media attention to preconceived opinions on McCowen’s guilt, George says he had to do his best to find a jury that could fairly judge Chris McCowen.

BG: Different lawyers look for different types of juries. The type of jury I needed and the type of jury that I wanted to get was a working-class jury.

MR: But getting that, he says, isn’t always easy.

BG: And, of course, you always want people who’ve been accused of crime on a jury, so they understand the way the system works and should work and shouldn’t work, and the trouble with picking this jury was that, as much as people wanted to believe that Cape Cod is this gorgeous resort-like community where everybody has money and walks around with umbrellas, it really is a community where people are working just as hard to try to pay the bills as anywhere else, especially the off-season crowd. And when you are picking a jury on Cape Cod, self-employed people, people with any kind of criminal record, people who have to work to pay their bills are not picked for jury duty because they’re sole supporters or they’re single mothers or they’re single parents, so you’ll lose all of those jurors, and here I am defending Chris McCowen, an African-American male from Key West, and I’m looking for people of color on a jury or people who are working-class jurors and I’m losing most of them because most of them cannot serve.

MR: Bob George would pay particular attention to whether potential jurors had any racial prejudice, but also if they had any thoughts on whether someone could falsely confess to a crime, especially since the trial would focus so much on the reliability of Chris’s interview with police on the night of his arrest, but more on that in a bit. For the prosecution, meanwhile, Assistant District Attorney Robert Welsh III would present the Commonwealth case.

Robert Lyon: This case has to do with a horrendous crime as defined by our laws.

PM: The Welsh dynasty. Who are the Welsh’s? We are now in the fourth generation of Welsh family judges on Cape Cod, fourth. We’re talking about going back to the early 1900s I guess.

MR: Author and consultant, Peter Manso.

PM: Welsh is an Assistant District Attorney and it’s a huge opportunity for Rob Welsh. From the day he got out of Georgetown Law School, I think that’s where he went, which is impressive, was set on becoming the fourth Judge Welsh on Cape Cod.

MR: Jury selection would last two days, selecting 12 jurors and 4 alternates. Peter Manso on the make up of the jury.

PM: There were two Black faces in the jury, a man and a woman. One of them was, in fact, probably a mixture Azorean and Wampanoag Indian, and the other was a middle-aged woman who had, in fact, recently moved with her husband and three kids, I subsequently found out, to Cape Cod wanting to give, as she explained it to me, her kids a better shot in life.

MR: With the jury set, Cape Cod’s trial of the century began. The prosecution’s case hammered home three main points. First, assistant DA Welsh went over the brutality of the crime scene.

Robert Welsh: The defendant was completely indifferent to her suffering, and that’s based on the statement that you’ll hear that he made.

MR: Welsh showed jurors photos of Christa’s body on the floor as well as photos of the blood stains in the house.

RL: The photos were very graphic.

MR: Robert Lyon was an alternate juror during Chris McCowen’s trial.

RW: They added a certain gravity to the case that you didn’t necessarily… The idea of it is one thing in your brain and I think those photos helped us to get the reality of the crime scene, to get the reality of a murder was committed.

MR: Welsh also called Tim Arnold to the stand. Remember, he was Christa’s ex-boyfriend and the one who discovered her body.

Tim Arnold: It was blood around her head, her right leg was up, her knee was up in the air.

MA: Were the legs together or spread apart?

TA: Somewhat spread apart.

MR: Next, the prosecution spent days going over the forensic evidence, calling both Robert Martin and Kenneth Martin, the two Crime Scene Techs who collected evidence at the scene, the state police lieutenant who photographed 50 Depot Road as well as Dr. Henry Nields. Nields would discuss Christa’s autopsy, recalling for the jury the various injuries she had on her body as well as driving home the details of Christa’s stab wound. But what’s interesting about this, is that it wasn’t Dr. Nields who performed the autopsy. He was subbing in for Dr. James Weiner, who couldn’t testify because of illness. Nields was forced to simply read from Weiner’s notes. So with the brutal crime scene in the minds of jurors, the forensic evidence laid out showing a match for Chris McCowen’s DNA on Christa’s body, Assistant DA Welsh moved to link the evidence with a 27-page report of Trooper Mason’s interview with Chris.

CM: My name is Christopher Mason.

MA: What is your occupation, sir?

CM: I’m employed as a trooper with Massachusetts State Police.

MA: And did you have the occasion to interview a Christopher McCowen?

CM: Yes, I did.

MR: On the stand for more than a day, Trooper Chris Mason went over the 6-hour interview he had with Chris McCowen which we talked about in the last episode. Detailing his 27-page report, Mason went over Chris’s statement, in which he first says he didn’t know Christa, then admits that he did have sex with her, then says he was at Christa’s house on that Friday night with his friend Jeremy Frazier whom, he says, was going through Christa’s things, which led to an argument and ended with both of them beating Christa.

CM: He stated that, “Jeremy lost it and I just followed suit. It was pandemonium.”

MR: Finally, the statement ends with Chris saying it was Jeremy who stabbed Christa. Juror Robert Lyon.

RW: Robert Welsh, the prosecutor, was very straightforward in presenting the case and he did an excellent job in giving us the facts as best he could. The defense attorney was really a character I thought.

MR: Chris’s defense, meanwhile, would attempt to not only poke holes in the prosecution’s case but also present an entirely new timeline of events to show Chris’s innocence. Chris’s former attorney, Bob George.

It wasn’t an easy trial, but I mean I thought that I had planned to attack the validity and reliability of the statement.

MR: First, despite the fact that Chris declined to have the interview recorded, Bob George criticized the fact that the pivotal 6-hour interview was reduced to just a 27-page summary.

BG: The statement is not worth the paper it’s written on.

PM: This interview of the man arrested for a crime that the whole nation knew about, this is in New York Times, People Magazine, USA Today, you name it, was not taped.

MR: Author and consultant, Peter Manso.

PM: Now, as an experienced reporter who always uses a tape recorder, six hours of talk does not translate to 28 pages; it translates more to 300 to 400 pages.

MR: And compounding the fact that there was no recording of the interview, were concerns raised by the defense that Chris’s low intelligence meant he was saying what he thought the police wanted to hear. To back this up, George called Dr. Eric Brown, a forensic psychologist who’s testified in more than 200 trials.

Eric Brown: Having an IQ of 78 and being subjected to that kind of stressful, prolonged interview makes him also very susceptible to manipulation.

PM: He was putty in their hands as are most people when they’re in this kind of a situation. You’re terrified, you can’t think straight and you’re not in a state where you’re very discriminating. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that, when they asked him to sign this waiver, by complying, McCowen may well have thought, “This is going to get me points with these guys. They’re not going to be so hard on me. They might believe me if I sign what they want me to sign.”

MR: Bob George also challenged whether the interview should have taken place at the time that it did, arguing that, on top of his inability to understand the gravity of the situation, Chris wasn’t even sober at the time.

BG: He was completely wasted when he was taken into that police station.

SH: Christopher McCowen says that he didn’t say a lot of the things that the investigators say he said, and he says he doesn’t even really remember the interrogation because he was under the influence of Percocet, cocaine, and marijuana.

MR: ABC’s senior legal correspondent, Sunny Hostin. A report from police following Chris’s arrest says four burnt joints are found in Chris’s house, and another report says Chris told police he had taken two Percocet, an opioid pain reliever for knee pain, on the afternoon of his arrest. All of this, the argument that Chris wasn’t smart enough to understand what was happening, that he wasn’t sober at the time of his interview, and that the interview wasn’t recorded so it could be scrutinized later, Bob George hoped would plant seeds of doubt in the minds of jurors about Chris’s interview.

BG: I thought that the investigation had been shaky. I thought that McCowen’s mental and emotional condition lent itself to false confession.

MR: Attacking Chris’s statement was key for his defense since, during his interview, Chris had placed himself at 50 Depot Road around the time that the prosecution says Christa was killed, but it would also take holes in the forensic evidence for jurors to doubt the Commonwealth’s case. Bob George attempted to do this in a few ways. First, he challenged the state’s timeline.

BG: Because I also thought that their time of death in the case was completely off the mark. If the time of death in the cases is off the mark, then McCowen doesn’t need an alibi because he would be somewhere else at the time the crime was allegedly occurring simply by the way the evidence was going to come in.

MR: The prosecution said Christa had been killed roughly 24 to 36 hours before she was found at 4:30 pm on Sunday, January 6, so sometime in the early morning hours of Saturday. They had coupled that with Chris’s statement to police in which the report says he arrived at Christa’s house approximately 39 hours before her body was discovered, putting Chris at 50 Depot Road very near the estimated time of Christa’s death, but Bob George would raise questions about just how accurate that timeline is. He had pressed on Dr. Henry Nields, the doctor who subbed in to review the autopsy report, about exactly when rigor mortis set in and what that says about Christa’s time of death arguing that, because she hadn’t been in full rigor at the time she was discovered, Christa couldn’t have died any earlier than 8 am on Saturday. Much of this forensic back and forth over the phases of rigor mortis, lividity, effects of temperature etc. was very complicated and open to interpretation. Beth Karas, an attorney and former Court TV correspondent.

BK: It can’t be hard to fix the time of death because there are so many elements that will go into it — the weather conditions, the temperature — so no one can really say for sure. I mean sometimes there can be certain changes in the body, which means it within 24 hours. Here, Bob George says she wasn’t killed Friday night the way McCowen describes, but it’s really hard to determine.

PM: The complexities that were thrown out for the jurors to consider were huge.

MR: Author and consultant, Peter Manso. But challenging the timeline was important in casting doubt over whether Chris was at or around 50 Depot Road near the time of the murder. And to further his scrutiny of the timeline, Bob George presented a whole new scenario at trial, and one that he believes was largely ignored during the investigation.

Gerard Smith: The house is up there on top of the knoll. I’m Gerard Smith. Back then, every day I walked three miles.

MR: This is Gerard Smith. He’s a Truro resident, and back in 2002, he says he would regularly walk around the neighborhood where Christa lived. He says on Saturday, January 5, 2002, one day before Christa’s body was discovered, he was walking down Depot Road when something caught his attention.

GS: When I got here, I walked across here and I could hear a car going at very fast rate of speed because of the sand that it kicked up under the car. And I turned to see who was driving that car at such a fast rate and the car came out, took a right turn and didn’t stop, period. As it turned out, it was Christa Worthington driveway and that was it. This was Saturday around 12 o’clock.

MR: At trial, Gerard Smith said it was more like 1 o’clock, but either way, one day before Christa’s body is found, Smith says he was about 15 feet from a dark-colored car that bolted out of Christa’s driveway and sped off.

GS: I think that the vehicle was large and it was dark and what I didn’t pay attention to was I kept looking at the person, that’s it.

MR: And that person, he says, didn’t look like Chris McCowen.

MA: Could you describe the person?

GS: He was Caucasian, he was little dark, but he was not Black. I turned around to see who was driving the car and a gentleman, dark-complected, oval face was driving the car, and he had brown hair.

MR: At the time, of course, Smith had no idea that up the driveway at 50 Depot Road was Christa Worthington’s body and her two-year-old daughter left unattended. About a week and a half later, Smith talked to then Truro police chief John Thomas about what he saw. He ended up speaking with Trooper Mason three days later on January 19, 2002. The information in the report is largely consistent with what Smith testified to in court, though Mason had written it was now closer to 2 pm when Smith said he saw the vehicle.

Smith says police would return to show him pictures of cars, but he insists that they should have been showing him pictures of drivers not vehicles.

GS: And they kept saying, “What did the car look like?” And I kept saying, “I didn’t look at the car, I looked at the person driving it.” So they didn’t pay attention, they had the wrong way and that was it. I guess they didn’t believe me or something of that nature, that’s how it goes.

MR: Chris McCowen’s former attorney, Bob George.

BG: The police, the investigators in this case, obviously disregarded Gerard Smith’s testimony because he wasn’t telling them something they wanted to hear, because it’s impossible to turn away from evidence like that when you have someone coming from the crime scene at a high rate of speed. By the way, when you say a dead body is lying up in the house and a person like Gerard Smith is the person who makes the observations, Gerard Smith is not some homeless junkie lying in the street who is imagining things because he’s out of his mind. This is someone who testified clearly at trial as to what he had seen and the description of the person coming out of that driveway did not match the description of Christopher McCowen nor the ethnic background or the race of Christopher McCowen.

MR: There are more than a few possibilities as to what Gerard Smith could have seen. Maybe it was the murderer fleeing the scene as the defense would like to suggest. Maybe it was someone who had good reason to be at Christa’s but stumbled across the crime scene and took off. Either way, if Smith is to be believed, as he says, the scenario is troubling.

GS: The thing that bothered me was, obviously later, the individual had seen the carnage and left this baby with her mother in this blood and everything. That’s the thing that bothered me more than anything else.

MR: Tied in with his challenge of the state’s timeline, Bob George hoped to separate the forensic evidence from Chris’s statement and introduced a whole new sequence of events for Chris in the days before Christa’s body was found. Bob George once again focused in on the autopsy report, narrowing in on the fact that despite all the injuries Christa suffered, it did not specify that there had been a sexual assault. This is him questioning Dr. Henry Nields about the autopsy.

BG: So there’s no evidence of any violent sexual contact with the victim in this case in the form of injury, is there?

Henry Nields: There’s no report of injury, that’s correct.

Brad Garrett: In the medical examiner’s report, he doesn’t mention that she was raped. There is nothing to suggest, on her body, that she was violently sexually assaulted.

MR: Former FBI profiler and ABC News Consultant, Brad Garrett.

BG: The police and prosecutors make a presumption that if you find somebody that’s nude… There’s three things, nude from the waist down, has been murdered, and there’s signs of DNA in or around her, that a sexual assault occurred and, with this type of murder, that it is not consensual, and so that’s how they get to rape.

MR: So in challenging that a sexual assault had occurred, Bob George proposed a whole new scenario to the jury, that Chris had never been at Christa’s house overnight Friday into Saturday as the report of his interview says, but instead, that Chris had gotten his days mixed up and he was at Christa’s house on Thursday and that’s when he had sex with her. In Chris’s statement to police, he mentions having a conversation with Christa about her Christmas tree. Remember, it was a couple weeks after Christmas and Christa hadn’t gotten rid of her tree yet. Here’s trooper Mason at Chris’s trial.

CM: Mr. McCowen explained to me that he had a discussion with Christa Worthington that evening in that house about getting rid of the Christmas tree.

MA: That Friday night, is that correct?

CM: That’s correct.

MR: So Trooper Mason’s report says that Chris McCowen had had a conversation with Christa about her Christmas tree on the night that Chris says he and Jeremy went up to Christa’s house, and that that’s when he had sex with her and claims Jeremy later killed Christa. But Bob George would argue Chris got his days wrong.

BG: Chris McCowen’s version of his relationship with Christa Worthington was that of a one-time event with a customer on his route that previous Thursday. That’s what he described to me.

MR: If you think back to the last episode, Chris’s regular trash pickup would take him by Christa’s house on Thursdays, so Bob George says that it was on that day in which Christa had invited him in to look at her Christmas tree and that’s when they had consensual sex.

SH: He says he was on his route on a Thursday, Christa called him into her home because she wanted him to remove her Christmas tree. He says that one thing leads to another and they do have this encounter, but that it’s consensual.

MR: Was there anything to back this up, though? Bob George pointed to two things at trial. One, a call he says was placed by Chris from inside Christa’s house that day, and two, the forensic evidence. Remember Don Horton? We talked about him last time. He was the owner of Cape Cod Disposal who hired Chris and gave him a place to live. He says he got a call from Chris one day while Chris was on his route.

Don Horton: Chris McCowen and calls me from Christa’s home in Truro one day asking me about her Christmas tree.

MR: Horton says he can’t be sure of the day, but that it was on one of Chris’s regular pick-up days, which was on Thursdays.

DH: He called me and he asked, he says, “She has a Christmas tree. What should I do? Should I take it?” and Chris was in the wrong truck, because I had little rubbish trucks and I told him, I said, “We will get it on Monday when we go into Provincetown to do the recycling. We’ll just stop there on the way back if she wants us to and pick it up then.”

BG: He called in on Thursday to take Christa Worthington’s Christmas tree, he was at the house and he had sex with her then. And didn’t rape her because there’s no evidence of rape.

MR: But it’s not just Chris’s claim that he was there on Thursday and Bob George saying Don Horton backs that up. He says the forensic evidence also supports it. Chris’s fingerprints were never found at the crime scene; and while investigators found hairs, they never found any that were consistent with an African-American. So the only forensic evidence tying Chris to the scene was the DNA found on Christa’s body, but Bob George says the sperm sample police collected was so degraded that it could have been there for days before Christa’s death.

BG: There were no fingerprints, there were no footprints, there was nothing in the house that indicated Chris McCowen was there other than the seminal fluid. The testimony in this case indicated that the state of the seminal fluid that was found on Christa Worthington’s body was in such a condition that it could have been there for days before because it had degenerated to a point where there were no tails, and I don’t want to talk heads and tails, but there were no tails on the evidence, which indicated it could have been there for days, which of course, destroyed the time of the crime and the version of events that Commonwealth was trying to sell to the jury.

MR: All this served as an attempt by the defense to create a bigger valley between when Chris had sex with Christa and when she died.

After hounding Chris’s statement, the forensic evidence, and the state’s timeline of events, Bob George would make an effort to create reasonable doubt by presenting alternative theories as to who may have committed the murder, and he would point to the man that Chris blamed for the murder in his statement to police, Jeremy Frazier, who would end up testifying on behalf of the prosecution.

Amalia Barreda: Jeremy Frazier’s testimony was like an early Christmas present for the defense.

MR: Amalia Barreda was a reporter for WCVB in Boston and covered Chris’s trial.

AB: In all of the trials I have covered, and there have made many over in my 30+ years of being a reporter, I don’t remember a prosecution witness ever sending up red flags like Jeremy Frazier did.

MR: And the defense would welcome those so-called red flags. Jeremy testified that he was at the Juice Bar with Chris and his friend Sean Mulvey. Remember, they were there for a rap contest on the Friday before Christa’s body was found. And just like in his interview with police, he said that he left the Juice Bar and went to an after-party where a fight broke out. Everyone got kicked out of the party and that’s when he and Sean went back to Sean’s father’s house and were there the rest of the night. Jeremy says he didn’t know what happened to Chris, but under cross-examination from Bob George, Jeremy would make a startling admission about his memory from that night.

BG: And did the police ask you where you had been that day?

Jeremy Frazier: Yes.

BG: And did you remember?

JF: No.

BG: In fact, you didn’t even remember where you had been after the Juice Bar the first time they talked to you, right?

JF: Yeah, until they fed me pieces of information, where I was that night.

BG: So they were feeding you pieces of information? You just said “fed you pieces of information,” right?

JF: Yeah.

BG: And when you say feeding you pieces of information, who was feeding you pieces of information?

JF: State Police.

MR: Jeremy Frazier said under oath that the police helped refresh his memory about where he was that night.

DA: Jeremy Frazier is a prosecution witness who is now saying that the state police were feeding him information. That’s not what you want in your witness if you were the prosecutors.

MR: ABC’s Chief Legal Analyst, Dan Abrams.
Jeremy was asked point-blank if he was involved in the murder.

BG: And I ask you now for the record, did you kill Christa Worthington?

JF: No, I didn’t.

MR: He also denied ever being at Christa’s house that night and the prosecution says Chris was alone. The friend Jeremy says he was with, Sean Mulvey, would also testify, backing up that Jeremy was with him all night.

Sean Mulvey: Jeremy was probably the most intoxicated out of everybody, so I told him to come with me.

BG: During the course of that evening, did Jeremy remain at your house?

SM: The whole night? Yes, he did.

MR: But Bob George would question Mulvey; if he was so sure that Jeremy was with him, why didn’t he originally back up Jeremy’s alibi when police first talked to him?

BG: There was an initial meeting with the police where you told them you basically didn’t remember anything. Is that correct?

SM: Yeah, that was the first time advice from my father.

BG: So was that a lie?

SM: In the first statement? Yes.

MR: We wanted to talk with Sean and see if he remembered anything about that night. We found out that he lives in Florida and sent a crew there, but he told us that he didn’t want to talk. Our producer, Karen Shiffman, and I also went by Sean’s father’s house on Cape Cod, the one where Sean says he and Jeremy were that night.

So no luck? All right.

Karen Shiffman: So the note is there and you can see that there’s something in the mailbox.

MR: No one was home so we left a note, but we never heard anything.

So while the defense tried to raze down about the state’s case, the questions remain. Could jurors just throw out Chris’s statement? Could they just ignore that Chris had said he was at Christa’s with Jeremy and participated in beating Christa but didn’t kill her? Could they look past the DNA? Could they believe that he had consensual sex with her? Just as there’s a dichotomy on Cape Cod, the idyllic summer seaside getaway contrasted by the cold, harsh winters where the affluent vacation destination equaled by blue-collar year-rounders, there are two sides to this case, and even to Chris McCowen. To some, Chris is a jovial laid-back prankster who’s tough exterior doesn’t match the man inside, but to others, he’s a violent man who raped and killed a single mother and left her toddler alone with the body. The jury was instructed to only weigh the evidence outlined in the case, but some, like author Peter Manso and defense attorney Bob George, saw the case as a broader challenge about assumptions and prejudice.

BG: So as soon as they see a Black garbage man, it’s rape. Not just rape, aggravated rape, because this woman would never have had sex with a garbage man unless it’s rape.

PM: I think this entire case is riven with racial prejudice. I’m saying beginning with the simple fact that for three years this was a murder case not a rape case, and it became a rape case only when they busted a Black man, a Black suspect. Then, it became a rape case.

MR: ABC Senior Legal correspondent, Sunny Hostin.

SH: This defense was somewhat novel in this town, because you have to believe that this White, privileged, attractive fashion writer from a background of affluence would actually be interested in a good-looking, yet simplistic, African-American garbage collector. In order for the defense to be successful, they had to convince the jury that this was consensual.

MR: The prosecution maintains to this day that the evidence against Chris and Chris alone was “overwhelming” and that it didn’t matter that Chris was Black. Prosecutor Robert Welsh during his closing argument.

RW: Mr. George just tried to play the race card during this trial and said that the police couldn’t accept the idea of consensual sex between a Black garbage man and Christa Worthington. I suggest this defendant would be facing the same evidence and the same trial with the same jury if he were White.

MR: Sixteen days after the start of the trial, the jury was given the case.

AB: When the jury went in for deliberations, we all waited, and we really didn’t have a sense of how long this was going take, but it took longer than I thought it would take.

MR: Amalia Barreda covered the trial as a reporter for Boston’s WCVB.

AB: We were running across the street to get coffee and water and lunch and whatever all the time, we were trying to make arrangements so that the verdict wouldn’t come down while we were gone.

MR: It would take eight days of deliberation and one juror being removed for phone calls she made to her boyfriend talking about the case before a verdict would come in.

AB: After many days, the verdict comes in. It’s a stampede up here to the courtroom.

RW: We, the jury, ask to return the following verdict, guilty of first degree, guilty of murder in the first degree and extreme atrocity or cruelty and also felony murder.

MR: Guilty on all three counts, murder, rape, and aggravated burglary.

BG: I went into closing argument believing I had, at the very least, a case of reasonable doubt. After the verdict was delivered, McCowen, of course, was devastated, and he started to cry.

SH: I remember this case for one reason and one reason alone. I watched the verdict come in.

MR: Sunny Hostin, a former federal prosecutor and ABC’s Senior Legal Correspondent.

SH: And having been a prosecutor and seen so many defendants be found guilty, I always look at the defendant for a reaction. This reaction was completely unusual. When the verdict came in and Christopher McCowen was found guilty of murder, of rape, he shook his head vehemently and cried.

MR: Chris would never testify during his trial, but at his sentencing, the court would hear from him for the first and only time.

CM: I feel sorry for Miss Worthington’s family, her daughter, and her. All this time, I’ve been innocent.

MR: It’s hard to hear, but Chris says he feels sorry for the Worthington family, Christa’s daughter, and Christa, but says, “All this time, I’ve been innocent.” Meanwhile, a statement was also read on behalf of Amira Chase, Christa’s friend and the one who got custody of Ava after her death.

Female: I know I will, throughout Ava’s life, witness over and over again that Christa was robbed of the privilege and delight of raising her daughter, but today, I know that Ava will be an even stronger person, firm in the knowledge of all of those who supported her mother, Christa.

MA: According to consideration of your offense as set forth and said indictment, hereby sentence you to being imprisoned at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Cedar Junction for and during the term of your natural life, without the possibility of parole.

MR: Chris would receive three life sentences, one for the murder, one for the rape, and one for the burglary.

BG: But in Massachusetts, unlike other states, conviction on first-degree murder is life without parole. You die in prison.

MR: But the story doesn’t end there. It was just a day after Chris’s guilty verdict that Bob George would receive a call from one of the jurors voicing concerns about the deliberation process, and in the coming days, two more would also come forward with similar complaints.

BG: Three particular jurors that contacted me that they believed that there was racial bias in the jury deliberations, and I immediately filed. I met with those three jurors and I immediately filed a motion to set aside a verdict as a result of racial bias in the jury room.

MR: The three jurors signed affidavits, which included allegations that racist comments were made during deliberations and that some jurors had already made up their minds on Chris’s guilt before deliberations began. One of the jurors that signed an affidavit was the sole Black female on the panel. Author and consultant Peter Manso interviewed her for his 2011 book Reasonable Doubt, the Fashion Writer of Cape Cod and the Trial of Chris McCowen.

Manso’s tapes of the interview have never been heard publicly before and we’ve altered the voice of the juror to protect her privacy.

Female: I would say the first day, as soon as we get in there, the first thing I say, just to see how everybody’s thinking, my words to them, “So, guys,” I say, “Let’s see where we stand here.” I say, “Who all think this man is guilty?” and so I get some hands raised, like probably five or six. And then I say, “Who thinks he’s not guilty?” Like probably two.

PM: Two hands went up?

Female: Two, maybe three and a couple of people didn’t raise their hand at all. So after we did that, I said, “First of all, the reason why I think he’s not guilty is because, first of all, the charge. The judge tells us, until we start to deliberate, when we walk into this room, this man is presumed innocent until proven guilty.” I said, “We haven’t even begun to deliberate and you people already think this man is guilty.”

PM: How many people thought he was guilty from the get-go?

Female: I’m not accurate. I want to say at least five or six.

MR: The juror did not want us to use her name. She told us that, after the trial, she moved as far away from the Cape as possible and, in her interview with Manso for his book, she described comments that she felt were racially biased during deliberations.

Female: Maybe day two or day three of deliberations, I’m not sure.

PM: Morning or afternoon?

Female: Morning.

PM: What happened?

Female: We were putting up issues, writing down pros and cons about what we think happened.

PM: On these easels?

Female: Yeah, right. So I did me a whole probably presentation of why I think this man is innocent. Because Trooper Mason’s testimony, I felt like I went from believing some of it to not believing ***** he had in his report, because if, in fact, this man is telling them he was at the scene of this **** murder, this crime, they would have **** recorded anyway regardless to what he signed here, because they wanted to make damn sure that this stick in court because this report alone ain’t going to do it. After I presented my facts, so *****, I did not know her, she says, she was heated, because I had all this stuff, that I feel that…

PM: You’re standing by the easel; she’s sitting down on the other side of the table?

Female: Right. After I finished presenting my case, so to say, I wanted to sit down. So she stands up, heated as well, starts screaming at the top of her lungs, “Yes, if this big, Black man beat this lady the way they said, she would have these same marks.” I said, “What the hell does Black got to do with it?” And so everybody, “Oh, *****, don’t start, don’t pull the race card. You’re acting like Bob George.” They telling me, “Don’t do that, blah blah blah.”

PM: They’re accusing you…

Female: Of acting like Bob George.

PM: But more than that, they’re accusing you of playing the race card.

Female: Right.

MR: Other jurors, meanwhile, like Robert Lyon, who’s a middle-aged man, sharply dressed with thick glasses and a bow tie, says race simply didn’t play a role in their decision.

RW: Race did not play a part at all in deciding Christopher McCowen’s guilt or innocence. It had no effect on the verdict.

MR: For Robert, he says the crux of the Commonwealth’s case, Chris’s various accounts and the DNA match, were crucial.

RW: One of Bob George’s defense strategies was to say that he, Christopher McCowen, came in on Thursday, had consensual sex with her, left, someone else came in and committed the crime. This did not line up with Christopher McCowen’s interrogations that he had with the state police. There were a number of interrogations where he gave different versions of what happened. None of them said, “I was there on Thursday and never came back.” All of them said, in some version or another, that he was there when the crime happened. The DNA was very pivotal in the case, there’s just no way around the DNA. The DNA put Christopher McCowen at the crime scene. It put an approximate time he was there at the crime scene and there’s no altering that.

MR: So, to sort out whether racial bias played a role in the jury’s verdict, the judge of the case, the same one who oversaw the trial, did a very rare thing and held a post-trial hearing to look back at how the jury reached their verdict. Each one of the jurors was called in to testify about the deliberation process.

MA: And that’s when we had these extraordinary, I think, it was four or five days of hearings, in which every juror took the witness stand and testified. Judge Nickerson had four or five days of hearings and then sometime in the next couple of months, I think it was in early 2007, that motion was denied. It went up as part of the appeal and it was denied on appeal.

MR: ABC’s Senior Legal Correspondent, Sunny Hostin, and ABC’s Chief Legal Analyst, Dan Abrams.

SH: The racial bias motion was denied. The judge found that the words big and black were just descriptors.

DA: The judge heard, literally, days of evidence about how the jury reached its verdict and, in the end, concluded that the verdict would stand.

MR: Since his conviction, Christopher McCowen has had three motions to get a new trial denied and juror Robert Lyon says time hasn’t changed his opinion.

RW: Christopher McCowen is the man who committed the murder. There is absolutely no evidence that anyone else did it. The trial was 10 years ago and time has not altered, at all, my conviction about his guilt. I still believe as strongly as I did then that he was the man who committed the crime.

MR: But as for the sole Black woman on the panel who spoke with author and consultant Peter Manso?

Female: This experience has changed me forever because for me to come in here, to be so naive to thinking these are some nice people doing the trial, and they weren’t. I started seeing true colors at the deliberation. I’m like, “This is crazy.” I didn’t think racism still existed this way. I just didn’t know people still behaved and felt that way. I truly didn’t.

MR: It’s been 10 years since Chris McCowen’s conviction, and now, with a new attorney, Chris is hoping to get new evidence that could warrant a new trial.

MA: There were a number of items that were not tested, but one of them was fibers. Those were never tested.

MR: And for the first time, Chris McCowen is ready for his side of the story to be heard.

BG: Chris didn’t testify. We’ve never really heard from Chris as to what he said actually happened.

Chris McCowen: Hello?

MR: Hey, Chris. This is Mark, I’m a reporter with ABC.

CM: Why am I sitting in prison for somebody else?

MR: That’s next time.

If you’re enjoying this podcast, please rate it, leave a review and tell your friends. New episodes every Wednesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Tune In, or your favorite podcast app. You can also find our other podcasts on the ABC News app or at abcnewspodcast.com. If you like crime podcasts, check out A Murder on Orchard Street, our friends at Nightline are investigating an unsolved murder and could use your help. I’m ABC’s Mark Remillard.
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