Richard Spivey
Appearances
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
And she goes, I thought he was going to pass out, but he just fell down to the ground, just immediately kind of drops to the ground. The stepfather goes and grabs him a chair, a lawn chair, so he can sit in it out in the driveway while he gathers himself. And he's like, oh, you know, my son, my son, all this kind of stuff. Now, what stood out to me...
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
having delivered death notifications and stuff, is when you tell people that somebody's dead, there's a moment where it doesn't register and people are like in kind of disbelief. They're also like, what do you mean they're dead? What happened? None of that from him. Just immediately accepted that she's dead and drops to the ground. And I mean, most people would be like, are you sure?
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
From everybody we talked to, I mean, she was somebody that kind of had a plan. She was going to get like a business degree. She was going to, I think more or less specializing in accounting. She wanted to find a professional husband, somebody that was, you know, kind of had the same goals of achieving and building a nice life and wanted to have children, et cetera.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
Was she in an accident? How did this happen? A million questions.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
They talked to him on the phone as he's headed from Brevard back to Raleigh. Investigators spoke with him on the phone, said that they needed to talk to him just to get, you know, find out information about her. By the time he got back to Raleigh, he had already spoken with a friend of his. It was an attorney who basically said, don't talk to them. Don't say anything to them.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
Get yourself an attorney in Raleigh before you talk to them.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
I mean, so she had it kind of laid out what she wanted.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
Well, the only thing we found as far as the blood, all the blood was hers. Once the closet doors opened, there was a little fingerprint smear in the blood, but it could not be identified.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
The only DNA that really stood out that was his from any of the evidence collected, there was a condom found behind a couch in the living room. And the seminal fluid that was in that was his. The exterior DNA ended up being another female friend of his who lives in Montana that had come to visit them for a few days.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
When we brought in the State Bureau of Investigation, one of their latent evidence people was looking at a lot of the bloodstains and looking at, like I said, there was blood on the bed sheets and pillows had fallen off and the bed and there's bloodstains on them. She actually was able to identify a footwear impression on one of the pillowcases.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
She reached out to somebody that she knew at the FBI in Quantico. They ran it through their database and actually were able to identify the shoe. And it was a hush puppy orbital shoe, like a casual shoe.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
July 4th, 2005, they'd gone in there and bought a bunch of shoes. That was one of the only receipts they found were any shoes.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
When we reached out to Hush Puppy to confirm that that was the tread for that, Hush Puppy told us, oh, that's a sole that you use on the Belleville or a Sealy shoe. And they're like, those are the only shoes that have that? And he goes, oh yeah, those are the only brands that we manufacture that have that sole. And we were like, oh, okay.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
And we were kind of said, well, it's too bad because we had a record of him buying a hush puppy orbital. And we thought that that might be what it was. And the guy kind of paused for me and he goes, well, let me check something. He goes, oh, we did manufacture the exact same shoe. for DSW Shoe Warehouse. They just sold it as an orbital.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
One of the first things that was done in the investigation is we're having to trace his steps. And that was done actually two ways. One is through the use of the financial records. So we knew where he stopped to eat. We knew where he spent the night, etc.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
Just to eliminate any other locations, all along that travel area, we stopped and got all the videotapes at all the convenience stores and gas stations.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
He stopped at a Cracker Barrel in Greensboro, North Carolina. We had, of course, the financial records of that. We have him on videotape, and we have what he is wearing on the videotape, the surveillance tape at the Cracker Barrel. Then the next time that he appears on tape is when he is in Hillsville, Virginia, and he's checking into Hampton Inn in Hillsville.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
I said, somebody needs to sit down with this tape from the hotel and go frame by frame by frame. One of the investigators who was working with us on the case at that time, John Stubbs, he sat down and over like a week or so went frame by frame by frame through the whole tape.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
She was planning on cutting back on the number of hours that she worked. It was going to be a pay cut. She also was planning on converting money. the third floor slash semi-finished attic space. She was going to convert that into a room where her mother could live. And her mom was going to move down here from New York and move in with them and help take care of the children.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
At some point during the night, after he checked in on one of the stairwells, somebody had pushed the camera so it points straight up at the ceiling instead of at the staircase. One of the employees there realized this, went over there, readjusted the camera, put it back in the right place. And a short time later, just the cable to that camera got unplugged.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
This employee later on discovered that someone had put a rock down there to keep the door from closing all the way. So it had been slightly propped open so that the latch wouldn't fully latch.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
We actually have him on the other stairwell coming down the stairwell. Ends up walking to the front desk. There's more photographs of him there. And then... He leaves going toward the exit door that was propped open. And that actually is the last time we see him on video.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
And they had investigators go and speak with people at these different stores as well who were working night shifts. They stopped at a convenience store in King, North Carolina, just south of the Virginia border, and went in there and spoke with the clerk that was working the night shift. I think they showed her a picture of Jason and said, have you ever seen this guy before?
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
And she goes, yes, I have. They said, well, when did you see him? She goes, he came in here. He was in a white SUV.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
And she goes, he came in this store and he started cussing at me because the pumps weren't turned on. Night, you got to come in and pay first before we turn the pumps on so we don't have a drive off. And he came in here and cussed me. And I don't ever forget anybody that's ever cussed at me.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
That was big, because he wasn't in Virginia anymore. He was back in North Carolina.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
We got the search warrant for what he had searched on the internet, what he looked at on the internet. There were topics that came up, such as anatomy of a knockout, head trauma knockout, divorce, and right posterior, posterior occipital region. And that's the region at the back of the head.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
I was pretty certain that if he didn't do it, he's at least involved in it somehow. I don't know if he had assistance or not, but he's responsible for her murder.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
He's the main guy we're looking for. We have our suspect right here.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
There was what appeared to be blood on the outside of the vehicle. It looked like a little spot of blood. They were able to seize the vehicle. completely inventory everything that was in the vehicle, and it later turned out that it was actually not blood. But at least we had the PC to seize the vehicle and completely process it.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
It was obvious that whoever did this with the amount of blood, that blood is going to be on their clothes, feet or shoes or pants. I mean, you know, they're going to be covered in blood as well. They seized the vehicle when he got back to Raleigh. They did a complete inventory of everything in there.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
The clothes that he was wearing at the Cracker Barrel and in the video at the Hampton Inn, those clothes were never found.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
When he got up on his phones and started doing some of the phone work, it became very clear that he was talking to one of Michelle's best friends a lot more than Michelle was. She had a really, really good friend who lived at the time in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and he was talking to her and texting her numerous times daily.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
Found out where there were places where I think it was someplace in Florida. They just happened to be there at the same time when he was supposed to be on a business trip somewhere else.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
Once we found out about it, they started talking to his friends about it. They were like, well, yeah, he told me that he thinks he's in love with her. Not just a one night fling thing. I mean, this was a rather developed relationship that they had going on.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
One of the things that stood out there was that he had a, I think it was a $2 million life insurance policy on her. And it was a policy that was double indemnity. So with something like this, there would have been $4 million available.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
Here's a young lady with a child. She's pregnant with another child. And you know, she deserves justice. I mean, there need to be answers provided here. And the person responsible needs to be brought to justice.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
A friend of Michelle's, who was an attorney, I think she had kind of set this whole thing up. And the whole time what she was doing, she said she was telling Michelle and telling him, this is really excessive. You don't need this much money at your age, etc. With half this, you're going to have enough money to pay off the house and all these things if something was to happen to her.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
Like I said, they were big, big defenders of his. They did not believe he was involved in any way, shape, or form. And then as they started laying out some of the facts, et cetera, they were devastated.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
He wanted her to go over to the house and pick up some printouts that he had left on the printer concerning a handbag that was for sale. I think it was a coach handbag that was for sale on eBay.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
If I can be completely honest, we so often talk about the public having the CSI effect. And I think law enforcement officers and investigators at times are kind of guilty of the same thing. We're thinking that, you know, oh, we're going to get a report back any day that's going to be the slam dunk and he did it and that's it. And, you know, it's not always the case.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
Sometimes it's just a lot more involved in that. Even when you have good crime scene evidence, you need more than that a lot of times to go along with it.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
But they had a very tight wire they had to walk because he had custody of the daughter. I think one time it was even suggested that if they wanted to keep seeing her, that they needed to make a public statement in support of him.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
There was an indictment handed down and we had people already on the way from our SWAT team who were headed up that way. But he ended up getting in a car and going somewhere and just to be safe, they went ahead and arrested him in the vehicle and then transferred him over to our custody in Black Mountain and brought him down.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
He sat in jail maybe almost a year, I think, before we actually went to trial. It was actually quite a while. So we were still monitoring phone calls and things like that that were coming from the jail. And he just never talked about the case.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
And he did not want Michelle to discover these, so he called her sister and asked her if she could go over there and pick them up.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
They did put on a defense and actually they put Jason on the stand. He, of course, talked about how much he loved his wife and got emotional on the stand and everything else. But I mean, that was the first time we'd ever heard him tell anything about his story or anything whatsoever.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
I went into the trial expecting a conviction, but prepared for a not guilty, you know, like you do for all trials because anything can happen. This caught me totally off guard because, I mean, we've been working this case for so long. In some respects, I was like, finally, there's going to be a conclusion one way or the other. We're going to be done with this.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
I think the fact that we had been working on this case for so long and knew it so well, I almost wondered if there wasn't maybe a perception of like, everybody already knows all of this. We're just restating what everybody knows.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
She was at the daycare that day, and they were playing with a little dollhouse that has several dolls in it or whatever. She took one of the dolls and put the doll on a little toy bed. And then took another larger doll and started like beating the doll that was on the bed and then put it on the floor of the little doll house.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
And the lady just thought, is she acting out something she saw or is it just a coincidence? But it really stood out to her because of the situation with her mom and the belief that, you know, her having been in the house when it happened.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
When it came to the second trial, I think things were a lot more background, a lot more emphasis on certain pieces of evidence. Plus, we also had his statement from the first trial. So we were able to pick apart his testimony that he'd given in the original trial.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
My theory is that I think the married life, the family, it was all really tying him down. He wanted more of a bachelor, fun life, go out, do what he wants to, when he wants to, and not have to answer to anyone. And to some extent, he kind of had that until plans were being made for his wife's mother to move in.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
And this wasn't unusual. I think she had a key to the house. She would babysit for them and stuff like that. So it wasn't unusual. She said she went to the house, expected her sister to be there because she saw her car, started calling out to her and didn't hear anything. And then heard, I think her niece, who was maybe not quite two years old at the time, heard her upstairs.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
And I just think that he saw that any freedom that he kind of did have to go out and work With his extracurricular activities, he saw that that was getting ready to come to an end. And then as a little bonus, he also would be able to finance kind of a fun lifestyle from the insurance.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
It may have been the last question asked of me on the stand in the second trial. Howard Cummings asked me, he says, has Jason Young ever called you to ask you the status of this case? And I'm like, no, sir, he has not. He had no interest or at least no desire to talk to any of us about anything, including his daughter and her well-being concerning the case.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
In the master bedroom, she finds her deceased sister laying between the bed and what is actually the husband's closet.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
Carpet was completely saturated with blood. There was blood spatter around the walls and the door. Blood areas that were soaked into the pillow and part of the mattress. I mean, just a horrific kind of scene right there.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
She noticed soon thereafter that in the bathroom there were bloody footprints of little tiny footprints that were her niece.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
I think the first ones arriving were just kind of shocked at exactly how brutal the beating was and how serious the crime scene was as far as the amount of blood. I mean, that really stood out. I've seen serious facial injuries, usually because of the result of maybe a self-inflicted shotgun blast or a rifle or something like that. I've seen really horrific injuries.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
Traffic accidents where there's a lot of damage to the face. This was by far the worst that I had ever seen that had been like manually conducted on someone, another human being. I mean, it's just hard to believe this might could beat someone that viciously.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
The only thing that we can determine... that was missing were there was a little jewelry box or jewelry chest that had three or four drawers in it that had been built by Jason's stepfather and given to Michelle. I think this is a wedding gift. There were two drawers, I believe that were missing from that jewelry chest.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
And in speaking with her sister, we were like, you know, does she have a lot of jewelry, a lot of expensive jewelry, jewelry, Anything like that? Hardly anything like that. No, that's, you know, she just, that wasn't her thing.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
From my experience, you know, as an investigator and a police officer, I just thought that was kind of a bizarre thing to be missing as well because no electronics were taken. Why take the whole drawer? That just stood out as like somebody was trying to draw attention to that. Oh, look, this is missing. Somebody took this.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
I had investigated and responded to numerous scenes of a break-in where a homeowner was home or walked in on a break-in or what have you, and usually the perpetrator would just run. If they did, if it was some like a close encounter type thing, they might shove the person or maybe hit the person or whatever. But it's just basically to stun them to get away.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
So the whole somebody broke in to steal something just out of these two drawers and then beat her to death like this just didn't make sense.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
There's anger. There's some kind of, you know, something behind it. Some kind of anger, hatred, something.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
She was very serious about things, very dedicated. They said, loving mother, very dedicated to her child, great friend. If she said she was going to be someplace at such and such a time, She was there five minutes early. I mean, she was that kind of person. The kind of person you'd be lucky if you had somebody like that as a neighbor.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
He was very much an alpha male, very much going to do whatever he wanted to do. Make fun of somebody if he's going to get a laugh from the rest of the group, regardless of how much it may have hurt the person that he was talking about. That kind of a person.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
It was just really strange that the two of them somehow ended up connecting, getting married, and had so, so different personalities.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
From what I understood, he had some problems with her cutting back on the hours and not making as much money. He had a real, real, real problem with the plans for her mom to move in with him.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
They were some of his biggest defenders. When he came back to Raleigh, they were like, you know, his wife has just died. Why are you all bothering him and wanting to talk to him? And why are you doing this and that? And like I said, they were big, big defenders of his. They did not believe he was involved in any way, shape or form.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
He works at this time for a company that I believe they sell some sort of medical software. And he's gone to a hospital up there in Clintwood, Virginia. And it's an appointment that he has set up. It's not something that the hospital was requesting. They have already told him that the kind of software, whatever he's selling, is not something that they can use at their hospital.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
But he wants to go up there anyway and just sit down and kind of show it to them, explain it to them, etc.,
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
His appointment was set for 10 o'clock that morning. He was about 35 minutes late. The person he met with described him as being hyper and kind of nervous.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
He drives from Clintwood, Virginia, and instead of going straight back to the home in Raleigh, he drives to his mother's house in Brevard.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
He is in the mountains, so I can understand, you know, your cell service is going to be kind of spotty. In the meantime, his mother-in-law has been trying to call him repeatedly. And it's being allowed to go straight through the voicemail and not being answered. He drives all the way to Brevard. And his mom talks about how he gets out of the car.
Anatomy of Murder
Double Indemnity (Michelle Young)
He's got his jacket slung over his shoulder and he's petting the dog that's come out to greet him. He's walking up to them in the driveway. The mother walks out to him and says, Jason, I've got some bad news. And he's like, what is it? And she says, Michelle's dead. And he immediately falls to the ground.