Did Melanie McGuire dismember her husband?
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It was unusually cold that first week of March as Melanie McGuire stood trial in a Middlesex County courthouse for an unusually callous murder — shooting and dismembering her husband.
People who had known the McGuires long before the newspaper headlines and the TV trucks arrived, asked themselves whether the demure nurse they knew could really be responsible for a crime that some thought looked more like a gangland hit.
Jennifer Calise: It is like watching your next door neighbor. It is just so surreal. I don’t believe the person I knew is capable of that.
Linda Smit: There is no way. Not the Melanie I know. Absolutely not.
Jennifer Calise and Linda Smit are Melanie’s former patients from the fertility clinic. Calise says as she was trying to get pregnant in early 2005, she made her nurse Melanie promise her something:
Jennifer Calise: I said you have to promise me that you are not gonna’ leave this clinic and until I’m done. And she said, they’ll drag me out of here when I’m 85.
Linda Smit says Melanie’s dedication and commitment to bringing life into this world, make her the last person capable of murder.
Smit: Someone who’s in the position of giving life and helping people to achieve life. There’s no way that you can take someone like that and say that they could take life so carelessly.
Melanie’s old friend Allison Licalsi goes a step further. She says the very idea Melanie could even dismember her husband defies common sense.
Allison Licalsi: His whole torso essentially in one of those suitcases. Had to be 150 pounds or more. She’s going to throw that in the car, drive down to the Chesapeake and just sort of chuck it over a bridge?
But if her friends weren’t buying the bridge scenario, her former friends were. By now, Jon and Susan Rice were convinced Melanie had murdered their friend. And they could only remember that time when Melanie had fought the waves to save Jon Rice.
Susan Rice: I would hear that “there’s no way this petite little person could do something to a person like Bill’s size” and be able to carry the suitcases and dump them in the Chesapeake bay. I’m like absolutely she could.
Finally, after six weeks of testimony, it was almost time for the jury to determine Melanie McGuire’s fate. Those attending the trial could only watch and wait.
In closing arguments, the defense stressed that Melanie lacked any motive to commit such a gruesome murder.
Tacopina: Did they have a good a marriage? Absolutely not. And you get divorced when that happens. I mean, you don’t commit murder.
While the prosecutor described Melanie as a calculated killer.
The jury began trawling through the evidence. The forensic testimony, the trash bags, the computer searches. So much to consider. Four days later, a decision.
The foreman read the verdict on eight counts...
Judge: How do you find on the count of the indictment charging Melanie McGuire with the murder of William McGuire?
None mattering more than this...
Foreman: Guilty.
Her face wincing, hands clutching her attorney, Melanie McGuire listened to the other counts against her: desecration of human remains, perjury, unlawful possession of a firearm...
Foreman: Guilty.
Tacopina: Melanie, started pulling on my arm and grabbing my lapel and was saying to me, “I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it” and “My babies. My babies.” That’s all she kept repeating, “my babies,” meaning her two kids.
On the remaining four counts: not guilty. Little consolation there. On the murder count alone, she faces 30 years to life—no parole. Her parents sat behind her, their bodies slumped one into the other... grief upon grief.
Jon Rice, Bill McGuire's friend: I really thought I’d be happy… it wasn’t. There’s no win in this.
Even Bill’s friends felt a pang of something as they watched her. But it was tempered by their outrage at what she had done.
Susan Rice: She could have filed for divorce. But I think that’s the choice she’s gonna have to ponder now.
Melanie’s lawyers say she is already preparing her appeal. But for now, and the foreseeable future, she is in jail. Her two young sons without a mother or a father.
Rice: He loved those boys. That was, you know, his biggest crowning achievement.
And who knows, maybe someday he would have brought them here. The Chesapeake... bluer than blue... so peaceful. Friends say Bill McGuire loved Virginia, ever since his days as a young man in the navy.
They even say he wanted to return to live in this state. Instead, he drifted back, lost, broken on these waters, his shattered body in need of a place to rest. The Chesapeake, ever grand, gave that to him — if only for a moment.
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