Cape Fear

Dennis Murphy Correspondent • Profile

You can't see the weathered gray cottage from the road, but look up from the salt marsh and there it is, perched on the bluff. It’s nothing fancy. That’s the way Yankees like it.

For years an old Cape Cod family had made it a simple summer retreat.

For the last member of this family to live there, Christa Worthington, the shingled home offered a place to catch her breath and take stock after the fast track years of New York and Paris, of the hollowness.

In the solitude of winter in the sand dunes, the sea air was what her soul craved. The latest chapter in Christa's life had been all about the Cape. Making sophisticated simple again.

Jay Mulvaney [family friend]: She was always a writer. She'd always wanted to be a writer.

She'd always wanted to be a mother, but also thought she wouldn't be able to. Then along came Ava. Things hadn't looked so upbeat for Christa in a good while.

Melik Kaylan [friend]:  And then some great unexpected claw comes out and tears everything apart.

When it seems nothing can go wrong, cynics might tell you to expect the worst.

The worst did happen, on a cold January after midnight, kicking its way through the screened kitchen door.

The mother and baby were alone and exposed. The gray cottage was no longer the nurturing shelter but a secluded killing ground.

Maria Flook [writer]: Everybody responded to this murder and the horror of it.

Christa Worthington, 46, was found in her home, naked from the waist down, dead of a savage knife wound to the chest.

A neighbor and former boyfriend found her after she'd been dead for as long as a day and a half.

Maria Flook: (reading) "He looked in and saw her laying on the floor, with her baby huddled beside her, and he said the baby looked up and he went and picked her up and discovered that Christa wasn't responsive."

There hadn't been a murder there in 30-years and then this.

The accomplished fashion writer and Vassar grad was killed in such a brutish manner. She was in her own home, with her baby trying to nurse for hours from her dead mother.

The question was both “Why?” and “Who?”

Mulvaney: You leave your doors open. You leave your keys in your car when you go shopping. You do all this sort of stuff. There's a level of trust in these small communities.

It's a trust that can quickly turn into suspicion against neighbors when the natural order is upset.  Soon, Christa's old lovers were pulled into the riptide of the murder investigation.

Dennis Murphy [Dateline correspondent]: You became the suspect early on...
Tony Jackett: They helped make me be the suspect.

Before it was through, a proud old community would be accused of losing its moral compass.

Bob George [attorney]: Race hovers and class bias hovers over the whole thing … In this particular case, the two are the one.

Christa Worthington was a child of New England privilege when she went to Vassar in the late '70s.

Riding the zeitgeist of the era's Have-It-All Feminism, Christa took on New York City after graduation and shared an apartment there with a former classmate, Jay Mulvaney.

Jay Mulvaney: Just talking about what we wanted to do and how -- how just really you know, just exciting it was to sort of be there.

Christa was a facile writer and quickly found work writing for various magazines, fashion stuff mostly.

In the '80s the gods of the catwalk were Lauren LaCroix and Versace. Keeping a bemused and savvy eye on the scene was Christa Worthington.

Kaylan:  She was very good at it.  She had a tremendous facility for writing ... a wide open quality to her writing.

Another old friend from those days, Melik Kaylan, recalls Christa's gift for turning the lighter-than-air fluff of the fashion world into absorbing and readable copy.

Her chops for the job won her an enviable ringside seat as the collections were strutted out every season, first in New York, then in Europe.

Kaylan:  She was sort of a glitzy phenomenon.  She was the head of the Women's Wear Daily bureau in Paris, and knew all the designers and knew how to live well over there.

But her friends say that have-it-all Christa lacked one important knack: the ability to pick out the right guy to have a relationship with.

While colleagues and friends from her college days were getting married and having babies, her magnetic north was set on Mr. Wrong time and time again.

Soon, even her strong suit -– her career -- was looking frayed at the edges and very last year.

She was trapped by her success.

By the early '90s, Christa was antsy and ready to fly her gilded coop. Maybe she would try writing a novel, she thought. She wanted a change of scenery, to swap the city for the place she'd been a child in during summers.

She came to rest in the outer cape of Massachusetts in a town called Truro, on a swath of land between the Atlantic Ocean and Cape Cod Bay.

It is still full of wild and beautiful dunes and scrub pine and oak. Squint away a few houses and it looks very much as it must have to the Pilgrims when they rowed ashore here and stole corn from the Indians.

Maria Flook: We even have an area of Truro called Corn Hill.

Maria Flook is a resident of Truro and a writer, like Christa.

She knows what that thing is about the solitude of the Cape off-season that has appealed to artists for over a hundred years.

Flook: People who have a life of the mind like to come there and spend the quiet months in Truro.

She also had family here. Grandmother Worthington had built a home in Truro years ago.  This was home.

Dennis Murphy: This is a name that goes back?
Flook: The Worthington family's been in the Truro area for about 100 years.

In fact, some believe the Worthingtons helped saved this area during the Great Depression.

Christa's grandfather put the locals to work in his fish processing plant while grandmother Worthington turned the idea of the fishermen's reliable old nets into something both marketable and tres chic.

But Maria, the writer, said Christa in no way flaunted or traded on her famous family name.

Flook: I think she wanted her privacy. She wanted peace and solitude and she wanted to make new connections.

And one of those new connections was someone she could see everyday from the porch of her grandmother's old tumble-down bungalow by the docks.

He was a one-time fisherman, a good looking guy with a mop of wiry hair: Tony Jackett.

Tony Jackett: And through the summer she would come over and you now, we got to be friendly.
Dennis Murphy: Little bit of flirtation going on?
Jackett: Yeah.

This became that and pretty soon they were consenting adults with a semi-regular routine of afternoon delights, as Tony remembers their affair.

But Tony wasn't just a consenting adult -- he was also a married father of six.

Tony says Christa knew all about his wife and never made claims on him other than in the bedroom. She told him it would be about laughs and sex. She was in her forties and told him doctors had said a baby for her was out of the question.

The fisherman bought the arrangement, as they say, hook, line and sinker.  Before he could see it coming, he was living a life out of a cheap romance novel.

The wave was big, unexpected and threatened to sweep him right away.

The first shock came when Christa broke some stunning news.

Dennis Murphy: Do you think she manipulated you into becoming a father?
Tony Jackett: [silence]

MORE FROM CRIME STORIES

Crime stories Section Front

Mystery at Lost Dog Road Slideshow: Photos in the Bob Duke case When The Smoke Clears Slideshow: The Christie Fleming murder Through The Pouring Rain In Plain Sight: Jaycee Dugard Bad Chemistry Bad Chemistry: Photos in the case The Mystery in the Master Bedroom Slideshow: Photos in the bathtub murder case Crime stories Section Front   Add Crime stories headlines to your news reader: