Murder On The Cape

A Woman Is Killed And Almost Everyone Could Be A Suspect

(CBS)  “This person, wanted the company of a woman, after partying and drinking all night,” O’Keefe argues. “So, O’Keefe continues, at around 1:30 a.m., McCowan drove to Christa’s house in Truro, where he killed her,” the DA argued.

The district attorney believes McCowen was alone and didn’t have a prior relationship with Christa. “Other than his familiarity with who she was, where she lived and the fact she lived alone,” he tells Spencer.

That is where McCowan’s attorney, Bob George, insists prosecutors have it all wrong. “Now when they found the DNA, for 39 months you will hear they were looking to speak to Christa’s last lover,” George said in court.

George wants to convince the jury there is reasonable doubt about everything in this case. For starters, he claims, his client and Christa may have been involved.

“Chris McCowan could have reasonably had a consensual sexual relationship with Christa Worthington and anybody who doesn’t believe it is someone who just can’t accept it,” George told jurors.

And that’s the defense’s explanation for the damning DNA evidence: that Christa Worthington voluntarily had sex with McCowan, probably that Thursday, his day for picking up the trash, and that later, someone else came along and killed her.

But George says, getting the jury to believe that could be a problem, because his client is being tried in lily white Cape Cod. “If you had the same body of evidence and Johnny Whitebread was home for the holidays from college and was from an affluent family on the Cape and he was not black, the same body of evidence, he wouldn’t have been charged,” George argues.

But miles away, in New York, Christa Worthington’s former boyfriend Steve Radlauer says race has nothing at all to do with his doubts. “Let’s hear about the consensual relationship. How long had that been going on? I saw Christa two weeks before she was murdered roughly. It wasn’t going on then, cause we would have heard about it. That would have been her top story, top of the Christa news would have been ‘I’m having an affair with my local trashman,’” he says.

Back in court, the defense also must deal with its other big problem - that statement. So police intimidated him, George argues, in a six-hour interrogation, much as they’d done with other suspects, like Tim Arnold.

Another one time suspect, Keith Amato, described a similar experience. “Trooper Mawn slammed his hand down on the table and said, ‘This is a murder investigation. And if we so chose we will turn your life inside out,’” Amato testified.

“They did exactly the same thing to them that they did to McCowen, except they were smart enough and they had the wherewithal and the background to know when to say stop, cut it out, I’m not doing this anymore, I want a lawyer,” George says.

George’s witness, forensic psychologist Eric Brown, claims that with an IQ of about 76, Christopher McCowen simply couldn’t understand the police’s questions.

But the prosecution says that’s rubbish. McCowen seemed smart enough, when Brown gave him an intelligence test, linking “relativity” with Einstein, labeling Ghandi as the “spiritual leader of India.”

And he was clever enough, the state argues, to concoct a story blaming someone else, his friend Jeremy Frazier, who appeared uncomfortable the moment he took the stand.

On the stand, Frazier insisted he didn’t drive to Christa’s house with McCowen and that he had nothing to do with her death.

But Bob George wants the jury to believe Frazier could have. Frazier told jurors he did have a few beers at the party.

Certainly Frazier and McCowen were together that night. The videotaped rap contest shows Frazier listening to music with McCowen nearby. But Frazier supplied an alibi. He later was seen at another party, then slept at a friends house. And his DNA doesn't show up anywhere at the crime scene.

“He was a convenient patsy for the defendant to blame,” D.A. O’Keefe argues, saying Frazier had nothing to do with the murder.

Bob George also argues that police bungled the whole investigation. There were fibers, hairs and DNA that never made it to a lab, and a crime scene contaminated by careless EMTs.

Christopher McCowen never testifies, betting that his attorney has created enough doubt to set him free.

“I just think it’s a case about reasonable doubt. The case has too many holes in it,” George says. During closing arguments, he said, “It's based on an assumption - a false assumption - that a Vassar-educated, 46-year old world-traveling wealthy heiress could not possibly have had consensual sex with a black, uneducated, troubled, garbage-man."