Man cries after Stuart jury convicts him of killing 3 women

September 30, 2006

STUART -- It took a Martin County jury about two hours on Thursday to find Eugene Wayman McWatters Jr. guilty of the "Salerno Strangler" murders.

The jury found McWatters guilty of three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of sexual battery in the 2004 deaths of Jacqueline Bradley, 43, Christal Wiggins, 29, and Carrie Caughey, 18.

Dressed in navy slacks and a pale yellow checkered shirt with shackles around his ankles, McWatters, 28, cried when the verdict was read. His family, including his mother, and his pregnant sister, whose baby's due date is today, sat behind him.

After hearing closing arguments Wednesday, the jurors deliberated for about five hours before going home for the evening about 6 p.m. The 12-person jury consisting of 10 men and two women began deliberating again at 8:40 a.m. today and reached a verdict at 11 a.m.

The prosecutors and defense rested their cases Monday afternoon -- the defense without calling a single witness.

Throughout six days of testimony, prosecutors painted McWatters as a calculating killer who lured Bradley, Wiggins and Caughey to their deaths.

Bradley was murdered on or about March 28, 2004. Witnesses from the Golden Gate homeless camp where she lived said McWatters promised her a shower and that they watched the two walk away together toward a Port Salerno home owned by Jessica Aleman, McWatters' sister. Bradley's strangled body was found March 31 in a canal about 100 feet from the house.

Wiggins and Caughey were murdered within hours of each other on May 31. Witnesses at a house party McWatters and Wiggins attended said they last saw the two together.

Later in the evening, McWatters returned to the house without Wiggins, sweating, "hyped up," and requesting cocaine, according to a witness deposition.

Although Wiggins was murdered second, her body was the last to be discovered. It was found on June 7. A Martin County Sheriff's Office detective searching for clues to the Caughey murder came across her body in a wooded area near a retention pond about three miles from where Bradley's body was found.

Caughey was last seen alive walking down Lincoln Street in Port Salerno with McWatters trailing behind on a bicycle, calling her name. A witness said he had dropped her off behind a Lil' Saints convenience store after they unsuccessfully tried to buy crack cocaine. On June 3, a family found her body in the woods across the pond from the Wiggins crime scene.

All three women were found unclothed from the waist down with their shirts jammed up into their armpit area, bras pushed over their breasts. The disarray of the victims' clothes and the fact that they were strangled led a forensic pathologist to conclude they were sexually assaulted and then murdered.

Before he confessed, detectives tried to connect McWatters to the crimes through a foot-deep hole next to Caughey's body. Because of the position of her body, detectives believed the killer had murdered her, picked her up, tripped in the hole and then dropped her. Leaving the body as it fell, the murderer then used tree branches to cover it up.

During the June 23 confession, McWatters relayed varying stories about how he fractured his ankle around the time of the murders.

He first told detectives he injured his leg in an all-terrain vehicle accident, but when asked for the names of the people he was with, McWatters recanted and said a car had run over his foot during a drug deal.

"... If you told us the truth about smoking rock, why would you lie to us about how your leg got broken?" Detective Brian Bergen asked in a recorded conversation with McWatters.

"I don't know," McWatters said. "'Cause (expletive), story kinda got confused in my head. 'Cause trying to make up a story to tell everybody else and then (expletive) tellin' you," McWatters said. "In between the two stories and (expletive), like I told ya man, I'm confused."

McWatters eventually admitted to killing the three women in the recordings. He said he was in the process of having sex with each of them when he "lost it."

Because of the bodies' extensive state of decomposition, no concrete forensic evidence was collected from any of the crime scenes. Wiggins' mother whimpered softly when Bakkedahl projected pictures of her body on a screen during his closing arguments Wednesday.

The jury will next hear attorney arguments in the penalty phase of the trial and then recommend a sentence. Martin County Circuit Judge Larry Schack must ultimately decide whether McWatters will receive the death penalty.

The defense plans to have Aleman, Dr. Michael C. Riordan and a former teacher of McWatters' testify on his behalf during the penalty phase, defense attorney Bob Udell said today.

The defense also will play audio from a recorded jailhouse telephone conversation between McWatters and his mother, Jacqueline Wayman.

McWatters erupts, denies killing in rage over prostitution

September 30, 2006

STUART — The suggestion that he raped and strangled three women because he was angry at his ex-girlfriend and mother for prostituting themselves brought derisive laughter and a curse from Eugene McWatters during closing arguments in his triple-murder trial Wednesday.

"That's bull(expletive)!" McWatters blurted from the defense table where he has sat during his three-week trial in Martin Circuit Court.

The outburst came after prosecutor Tom Bakkedahl quoted from a statement McWatters gave to detectives in which he said he didn't believe in paying for sex and that he had been hurt badly by women who sold themselves for drugs or money.

"It's disgusting that they could do that to themselves," he said in a June 2004 statement after his arrest on an unrelated sexual battery charge that was later dropped.

Jurors began deliberations Wednesday and will resume this morning in the case in which McWatters, 28, is charged with three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of sexual battery in the deaths of three women in Golden Gate and Port Salerno.

Carrie Caughey, 18, Christal Wiggins, 29, and Jackie Bradley, 43, were killed in 2004.

If McWatters is convicted of any of the murder charges, a second phase of the trial will determine if the 12-member jury recommends life or death.

Bakkedahl, who has a reputation for compelling closing arguments, told jurors they can find first-degree murder in two ways.

If they find the women were raped, it is considered first-degree felony murder. If the killings were planned, even for the briefest of periods, they would qualify as first-degree premeditated murder.

"The cause of death proves premeditation," Bakkedahl said, noting testimony from experts that it takes at least four minutes to kill a person with strangulation, and that's if they don't struggle.

To illustrate his point, he stood in front of the defense table, extended his hands as if choking an invisible throat and held the position for a minute he timed by the courtroom clock.

"One minute," he said after 60 seconds of intense silence in the crowded courtroom. "One minute. You want me to stand there for three more minutes? Is that premeditation?"

As to the sexual battery charge, defense attorney Rusty Akins argued there was no evidence of force and it was possible the women, two of whom were known to trade sex for drugs or money, had consensual sex and were killed later.

But Bakkedahl pointed to McWatters' statement that he was having face-to-face sex with the women when they died and argued if there was consent, it disappeared when he put his hands around their throats.

Akins argued McWatters gave a false confession based on information he gleaned from his many contacts with detectives and witnesses over the two-month investigation of what became known as the Salerno Strangler case.

And he questioned the reliability of the memories of the prosecution witnesses, many of whom admitted they were drinking or using drugs during the times they said they saw McWatters with the victims.

"These witnesses didn't come in and tell you they were baking cookies," Akins said.

Less than three hours into deliberations, the jury asked to listen to the confession statement with the aid of prepared transcripts that were used in the trial to help decipher the poor audio quality, but the law doesn't allow use of transcripts during deliberations.

Instead, court officials will try to find a better sound system for jurors to use in replaying the recordings.

The jury foreman also disclosed that the panel had begun filling out the verdict form, although it had not reached a verdict. The form was ordered sealed until deliberations resume this morning.

Akins said he had never heard of a jury filling in a verdict piecemeal in more than 20 years of practicing law.

Part of the final argument from the defense came from co-counsel Bob Udell, who repeated his suggestion from the start of the trial that McWatters may have confessed because he wanted to seem important, to be a somebody.

Bakkedahl turned the comment around to end his argument.

"He just wanted to be somebody. He's somebody now," Bakkedahl said. "He's a murderer, and he's a rapist."

Attorneys offer conflicting views in 'Salerno Strangler' case

September 19, 2006

STUART — To prosecutors, he was a calculating murderer, a hyped-up drug addict, a cunning predator of wayward women.

To the defense, he was an abandoned child, a high school drop-out, an informer with aspirations of helping to catch a serial killer — and ended up getting wrongly arrested for the crimes himself.

Those were the contrasting images painted Monday morning during opening statements in the trial of alleged "Salerno Strangler" Eugene Wayman McWatters Jr., accused of killing three women in the summer of 2004.

Until a bomb threat put a halt to court proceedings, the triple murder trial was off to a steady clip after a week of jury selection.

By 10 a.m., when the threat was announced, the prosecution and defense had addressed the jury and the defense was about to cross- examine the prosecution's first witness, Thomas Field, a friend of one of victim Jacqueline Clark Bradley who told jurors Bradley was with McWatters the last time he saw her alive.

In her statements to the jury, prosecutor Erin Kirkwood described McWatters as a social deviant who knew how to dispose of DNA from watching the CourtTV program "Forensic Files," and who destroyed physical evidence at each of the three crime scenes.

"We're not going to have a CSI moment in this trial," she said, referring to the popular crime investigation TV show.

Any DNA on Bradley's body was lost when it was submerged in a Port Salerno drainage canal in March 2004, and the bodies of both Carrie Ann Caughey and Christal Dawn Wiggins were highly decomposed when they were found near a Port Salerno lake on June 3 and June 7, 2004.

He lured each woman with a promise, Kirkwood said: crack cocaine for Caughey and Wiggins; a shower for the homeless Bradley. Instead of keeping his end of the bargain, Kirkwood said, McWatters, now 28, raped and strangled the three women, pushed their bras above their breasts and attempted to hide the bodies.

Yet the crux of the prosecution's evidence and its potential downfall, defense attorney Bob Udell told the jurors, is McWatters' confession.

After he was arrested on an unrelated sexual battery charge on June 23, 2004, McWatters, now 28, told detectives he had sex with each of the three murder victims, "lost it" and was responsible for their deaths.

But Udell said his client admitted to the crimes only after detectives placed McWatters in an evidence room jam-packed with "Salerno Strangler" evidence. That gave McWatters — under the influence of marijuana and alcohol — an opportunity to learn things only the killer would otherwise know, Udell said.

Kirkwood acknowledged detectives deliberately placed McWatters in the room, but said it was to force him to "stew" about the crimes and their victims. Confronting his actions, she said, induced McWatters to confess out of guilt.

Udell, who wondered aloud why none of detectives' many conversations with McWatters were recorded until after he actually confessed, said his client was eager to speak about the crimes because, after a lifetime marred by violence, drug use and run-ins with the law, he wanted to be helpful.

"Eugene was one of those people who wanted to be somebody because he was told he was worthless," Udell said.