Did Melanie McGuire dismember her husband?
Most popular Dateline pages |
Sign up for the newsletter |
|
It’s bad enough working a homicide and it’s worse still when the body’s been dismembered and found bit by bit.
Virginia Beach Detective Ray Pickel: Whoever would go to the extreme of dismembering a body definitely does not want to be caught.
Virginia Beach Detective Ray Pickel was the first to investigate the murder of Bill McGuire.
A gunshot victim in three suitcases sounds like a gangland killing, at least to the layman. And Bill McGuire did like to gamble—maybe he reneged on a debt with the wrong person.
But the detective says the evidence never took him down that road. Case in point: the surgical cuts on the body. They indicated someone with medical training—not a thug off the streets. And crime scene technicians found something else: a hospital blanket inside one of those cases. Pickel did a little checking and quickly discovered Bill McGuire’s wife was a nurse.
Pickel: She works at a doctor’s office and those types of blankets were being supplied to her doctor’s office? Yeah, there’s a lot of suspicion there.
Roughly a week after the remains were identified, the detective was in a New Jersey lawyer’s office asking the widow McGuire a few questions.
Had she owned matching luggage now missing? No, she replied. But she did tell the detective her husband’s missing car might be in Atlantic City. And that’s just where Pickel later found the victim’s blue 2002 Nissan Maxima.
Pickel: The vehicle was fingerprinted. Photographs. They vacuum cleaned the floorboards. We also looked inside the glove box and found a clear vial of clear liquid next to a syringe.
Pickel also searched the McGuire apartment since it was the last place bill had been seen alive. It was spotless. No sign of a struggle there. In fact, the place was empty. Melanie had already moved out. When the detective asked to see his clothes, she told him she had already given them away to a friend.
Pickel eventually found those, still in the bags Melanie had packed. Black plastic trash bags, just like those found with Bill McGuire’s remains.
Pickel: To find those black trash bags... I didn’t realize how huge it was going to be to have that evidence.
Oh, and that luggage? A day after Melanie’s interview she told the detective she’d suddenly remembered something: that she had, in fact, owned matching Kenneth Cole luggage...
Pickel: I showed her a picture of one of the pieces of luggage that was recovered from the Chesapeake bay. And she identified that as being the family luggage.
It was a changing story and hard-to-believe coincidences. Still, nothing tying Melanie McGuire firmly to the murder of her husband. Pickel left the state certain of only one thing: Bill McGuire’s body may have been dumped in Virginia, but he had been killed in New Jersey.
David Dalrymple, NJ state police: At the end of the day it’s a horrible, gruesome murder.
David Dalrymple is a detective with the New Jersey State Police. In late 2004, the 4-month-old murder of Bill McGuire was New Jersey’s to solve. Dalrymple wanted to take a fresh look at the case. He searched gun registries, cold-called gun shops and looking for anyone in Bill McGuire’s circle who might have been armed.
Sara James, Dateline correspondent: And you got a hit.
Dalrymple: Yes.
James: Who?
Dalrymple: Melanie McGuire.
James: She had purchased a weapon?
Dalrymple: On April 26th of 2004, she had purchased a .38 special handgun at a small gun shop in Easton, Pennsylvania.
As in, two days before her husband’s disappearance.
James: That adds up to?
Dalrymple: The fact that she’s a suspect in the murder of William McGuire.
And then, Detective Dalrymple and his team tracked down this man. James Finn an old friend of Melanie’s and a gun enthusiast. Weeks before her husband’s death, she’d emailed Finn—there’d been “a lot of weird stuff” going on at home. She wrote and she was worried about Bill’s “paranoia” and wanted protection. Any ideas? Finn told her she could buy a gun in Pennsylvania in only one day.
Now, the police wanted to know, where was that gun? They persuaded Finn to call his friend...
(recorded phone call) James Finn: Throw me a bone. Where’s the gun? ...
Melanie McGuire: The gun was in a lock box when he first left ... I put into the storage unit...Of course I went later and I looked, and it’s not in there...
A missing gun that couldn’t be tested to see if it were the murder weapon. How convenient for Mrs. McGuire. But even if she had the means why would she kill her husband? Police needed to find someone else with whom Melanie might have shared her darkest secrets. That’s when they discovered Dr. Bradley Miller, Melanie’s boss at RMA—the fertility clinic.
Dalyrmple: Bradley Miller was engaged in a several year, three-year, love affair, extra marital affair with Melanie McGuire.
And when they talked to the doctor they learned lots more. He told police Melanie had admitted a crazy story. How, after that fight with Bill. After getting that protection order against him, she’d driven two hours to Atlantic City. Once there she somehow found Bill’s Nissan and, out of spite, moved it to an out-of-the-way motel—the Flamingo. A security camera, she said, might even have caught her doing it. Exhausted, she left her car there and took a cab home. The next day she said she then took a cab all the way back to Atlantic City to retrieve her car.
James: For you how credible was this story?
Dalrymple: It was incredible.
James: Just no way.
Dalrymple: I...I...it, to me, was incredible.
Police even checked cab companies in Melanie’s area. None had any receipts for rides to Atlantic City, a fare that would have cost hundreds of dollars.
Oh, and one more thing: Melanie had told her lover, Dr. Miller, she’d been shopping for furniture in Delaware, not far from the Chesapeake bay—one day before that first suitcase surfaced. Dalrymple says they convinced the good doctor to confront his lover. Another phone call to Melanie was being secretly recorded. Here Miller tells Melanie the cops are hounding him...
(recorded phone call) Bradley Miller: The trip to Delaware...They want to know what you were going there for and what furniture stores you were looking for there and seem to believe you went with your father...
Melanie: There was nobody else in that f*****g car with me...So I, I think that they’re, when it comes to like the mythical second person, I think they’re talking s**t.
Bradley Miller: I think they’re either gonna come down on me or come down on your father. That it was, you know, the one that helped you do the murder.
The evidence police had, circumstantial though it was, looked damning all the same: a missing gun, trash bags, strange trips, bullets, a blanket. What exactly did it all add up to—and would it all end with an arrest?
- Discuss Story On Newsvine
-
Rate Story:
View popularLowHigh - Instant Message
MORE FROM DATELINE |
 Dateline Section Front |
| Add Dateline headlines to your news reader: |