Star Witness
“Miss McDonough, who killed Lizzi Marriott?” asked Hinckley.
“Seth Mazzaglia.”
“How did Seth Mazzaglia kill Miss Elizabeth Marriott? Please tell these jurors.”
“He strangled her with a rope.”
“How do you know what Seth Mazzaglia did to Elizabeth Marriott?”
Kat did not hesitate. “I was there.”
—
“I’m at the outer door :D”
The text came from Lizzi at 8:51 P.M. According to Kat’s testimony, Seth had just gotten out of the shower. He reminded his girlfriend that Darkheart and Skarlet were their sexual personas of the evening, and that it was her job to get something going. Strip poker was on the menu, he told her, and she should wear something alluring. Kat was already wearing a plain top, so Seth had her take off her bra.
Kat headed to the ground floor. When she opened the back door, she found Lizzi in her black Avenue Q sweatshirt sending a text to her girlfriend.
Seth welcomed Lizzi as she came into the apartment. The room was relatively neat, save for the mixture of painting supplies he’d collected for the work at his mother’s house. Seth had turned on a floor lamp with a red lightbulb in it, so the room was dim.
Seth asked what Kat and Lizzi felt like doing that night. He suggested that they could either spend some time creating Dungeons & Dragons characters or watch a movie they’d rented.
“Or,” Kat offered in a joking tone, “we could play strip poker.”
Lizzi laughed, Kat claimed, and said, “That would be fun.”
Kat admitted she didn’t know how to play poker, so Seth explained the rules. The player with the best hand got to keep his or her clothes on; the two losers had to throw an item of clothing in the pot. Kat went into the bathroom to put back on the bra she had just taken off, as she wasn’t wearing very much to start with.
According to Kat, the three of them sat on the floor in front of the futon, the movie playing in the background. The cards were dealt to all. Bad cards were discarded, and the trio picked up two or three new ones to replace them. They flipped their hands and everyone laughed at Kat and Seth for losing the first round. Kat took off her glasses and placed them on the floor in the center of the circle.
More hands were dealt, won, and lost in rapid succession. Kat tried to delay the inevitable by surrendering bracelets and her mismatched socks. Another low card fell, and Kat had to throw her top into the pot. Seth stood up to remove his pants, and the girls squealed at his supposed embarrassment. Lizzi lost fewer hands than either of them.
Kat said that Lizzi bragged, “I’m a lucky person. If there’s another me in another dimension, that me has all the bad luck.” She said that Lizzi’s mood remained light and playful the entire time.
Kat was bare breasted before Lizzi finally lost her shirt, revealing her brassiere. Kat admitted to feeling conflicted. She was losing her clothes quickly, and she knew Seth wanted her to “make something happen.” Her friend Lizzi was having fun, but she seemed oblivious to any sexual tension they were trying to create.
At 9:54 P.M., Kat’s cell phone buzzed. It was a text message from Darla, her friend who was supposed to come over later in the evening to learn some fetish rope play:
“I’m at my grandpa’s tonight.”
Kat knew Darla’s grandparents had been sick and that her family had been taking turns providing care. To be certain that this meant Darla and her boyfriend wouldn’t be coming over later, Kat texted back, “So no hang out?”
She waited for a response but didn’t get one, so finally said, “Seth, our friends don’t need us to pick them up at the airport.”
It was the signal they’d arranged that there would be no bondage demonstration with Darla and Eli later that night. Seth’s face pinched, Kat testified, but he quickly returned his attention to the game at hand. “That means you can stay later if you want, Lizzi.”
—
Peter Hinckley moved steadily through the questioning, not rushing anything. His pacing matched Kat’s responses, which were measured and flat. Few people watching in court or on television had ever met her, had ever seen her theatrical effervescence. Her whole affect on the stand formed the jury’s (and the public’s) opinion of what kind of person she was.
It was hard to get a read on her.
—
Continuing her direct examination, Kat recalled that both she and Seth were soon completely naked. Lizzi still had on a pair of blue thong panties. With nothing left for two of the players to offer, Seth suggested a change in the game.
“How about something happens to the next person who loses?”
Kat had the next low hand and turned to Seth to ask for the consequences.
“Kat, why don’t you kiss Lizzi?”
Lizzi looked back and forth between them. “I’m not comfortable with that,” she said.
Seth gestured to his naked girlfriend. “Come on,” he invited Lizzi. “Just make out a little bit with her.”
Lizzi said, “No. I’m in a committed relationship.”
Seth nodded and said it was cool, but Kat read his body language and said she knew he was upset.
He stood up, put on a robe, and went to get the women glasses of apple cider. Kat and Lizzi sat on the floor, their backs to the futon, and watched the movie while still in their states of undress.
Seth texted Kat from the kitchenette. “We painting tonight?”
On its face it was a reference to the painting they’d been doing at his mother’s house, but Kat understood it to be a coded message: Are we having sex with Lizzi tonight?
She texted back. “Your decision I guess. If you have a plan.” Afraid of Seth’s reaction if things didn’t go as he hoped, Kat was on edge. She added to the text the word, “Nervous.” That was at 10:29 P.M.
Seth got on the futon behind them. Kat knew the move he was about to make.
“Lizzi, is it okay if Kat and I have sex now?”
It was the line he’d used several times before, and each subsequent time he’d used it, the sexual encounter had gotten hotter. The last two girls he’d used it on eventually joined them in bed. Lizzi was already topless. This had all the hallmarks of an epic night. Maybe this time he could be the one getting all of the attention.
Unlike all the previous times he’d used this line on people, Lizzi didn’t acquiesce. Instead, she scowled. She didn’t want them to do that in front of her, she said.
Seth protested, saying, “My girlfriend is here and I want to fuck her.”
Then he asked Lizzi to join them, his voice rising, saying there were things that Kat could do to her that he couldn’t.
Lizzi repeated firmly that she was in a committed relationship. She wasn’t interested.
Seth appeared to let it slide, but again, Kat testified, she could tell he was angry. He was always the Master and was unaccustomed to people saying no to him.
Kat stared at the television, now hyperaware of her nakedness. She crossed her arms, casually trying to cover her breasts. She wondered what Seth was thinking. She could hear him moving around on the futon but didn’t want to look back at him.
It was then Seth struck, looping one of the white cotton ropes they’d used for sex play around Lizzi’s throat, crossing it behind her neck and pulling as hard as he could. Kat testified that Seth was wearing a pair of black leather gloves he’d worn the previous winter.
On the stand, Kat described how, as the cord wrapped around her throat, Lizzi let out a short shriek that was quickly cut off by the rope. Seth pressed his knee into Lizzi’s back as he pulled tighter and tighter. Her whole body froze. Her legs stretched out straight, then began to turn inward. Her arms curled up to her chest.
Instead of helping the struggling woman beside her, Kat claimed she merely turned away from the attack and watched the images on TV. Kat testified that she’d been unsure what to do. So her response had been to do nothing at all.
Eventually, she got up from the floor and walked to the window overlooking the river. It was the place in the apartment she said she’d go to when she felt lonely or depressed. She pulled the curtain closed. She looked behind her to see if it was over. It wasn’t. Seth was still pulling tightly on the rope as Lizzi convulsed. He nodded toward the other window, and Kat pulled the curtain on that one too.
Kat testified that the strangling seemed to go on for hours, although it probably lasted about ten minutes.
After Seth stopped pulling on the rope, she testified, Lizzi remained slumped in the seated position against the futon. He laid her on her back on the floor and asked Kat to check for a pulse. Both of them had completed the EMT-B course and knew how to administer first aid. She tried the ankle, then the wrist. No pulse. He told Kat to try Lizzi’s neck. Still nothing.
Seth’s father, Joe, lived in the same building and was likely in his apartment at the time. Instead, Seth decided to reach out to someone else for help.
“Call Roberta,” he instructed Kat. She didn’t have Roberta’s number, so she used Seth’s cell phone. It was 10:47 P.M., eighteen minutes after Seth had sent the “painting” text from the kitchen. When Roberta didn’t answer, Seth demanded Kat call again. Roberta still didn’t pick up until the third time she called. Five minutes later, Roberta texted they were on their way. Kat said that, at that point, she walked into the bathroom, the only place in the apartment where she couldn’t see the living room floor. She considered leaving the apartment, but felt she had no one else, no place to go. She was in love with Seth. There was nothing else in her life. It was him or it was nothing.
When she returned to the living room, Kat testified about the monstrous thing she saw. She said she saw Seth on top of Lizzi Marriott, raping her dead body, and as he thrust, he barked insults and profanity.
“Say no to me? I’ll show you . . . you fucking bitch . . . fuck you.”
Seth grunted as he ejaculated inside of Lizzi Marriott’s body.
—
During her long narratives testifying for the prosecution, Kat’s voice was timid but steady. But when Hinckley reminded her, his star witness, that she had done nothing to aid Lizzi as Seth strangled her, Kat’s voice began to tremble.
The assistant attorney general and his witness tried to plow ahead. It was better the jury heard it from Kat—not from the defense—that she failed to act, failed to save Lizzi’s life. As she talked about the murder and answered questions about why she hadn’t intervened, Kat doubled over and cried uncontrollably, prompting Hinckley to call for a recess and the removal of the jury from the courtroom.
—
When her testimony resumed, Kat said Seth stumbled toward the bathroom to clean himself off. He told Kat to grab the rope, now hanging loosely around Lizzi’s neck, and pull it tight again. Maybe he wasn’t positive the girl was dead. Maybe he just wanted Kat to take some active role. Maybe he needed her to put her own hands on the murder weapon. Kat was crying. She couldn’t refuse one of Seth’s orders.
Up close, Kat could finally see Lizzi’s face, swollen and discolored. She protested, Kat testified, but said Seth demanded she also throttle the corpse of her friend—the young woman who’d been giggling about her good luck at cards not thirty minutes before. She claimed to have held the rope for about ten more minutes but hadn’t pulled hard.
When Seth emerged from the bathroom, Kat said he told her to find a plastic grocery bag. Kat found two in the kitchen and tried to hand them to Seth, but said he wouldn’t touch them. He told her to put them over Lizzi’s head and to tie them shut at the bottom, Kat testified, so that Roberta wouldn’t see the dead girl’s face.
Roberta Gerkin had testified two days before Kat had, telling the jury how she and Paul Hickok had responded to Kat’s desperate call and found a lifeless woman with two plastic bags on her head lying on the apartment floor. Roberta said Lizzi’s face was purple and there were marks around her neck, but in her opinion the marks were made by the bags and not a rope. Other than this detail, Kat’s retelling of the visit substantially matched Roberta’s. Kat told the jury that Paul advocated that they report Lizzi’s death, but she felt Roberta would have tried harder to convince Seth to cover it up if Paul had not been with her. The couple left the Lair without providing any assistance to them (other than their temporary silence).
If they were going to “take care of this” themselves, they had to start covering their tracks. Kat said she picked up her cell phone and sent a text message to Lizzi’s number. They needed to make it look like Lizzi had never been to the apartment.
“Hey dahling i expected you at 10? i passed out and lost track of time. you still coming?” It was another step in Kat and Seth’s efforts to cover up Lizzi’s murder.
At this point, Kat said, Seth came over to console her. He curled his arms around Kat and told her that all of this had happened because of Doomsday.
“‘We’re in this together now,’” she quoted him. “We have to figure out how to get rid of her body.”
They both pulled out the blue latex gloves Seth had used to clean the apartment, and Seth also put on the black leather gloves he’d worn to strangle Lizzi.
Kat testified that they then gathered all of Lizzi’s clothes and put them in plastic shopping bags, setting her car keys aside. Then, she said, Seth took the painting tarp and wrapped Lizzi’s body inside of it. Kat—remembering how her brother had traced her movements via her cell phone at New Year’s—shut off Lizzi’s phone. She and Seth also both switched off their cellphones, afraid they might ping a tower.
The rolled-up tarp still looked suspicious, so Kat told the jury that it was her idea to use her suitcase from summer camp, the big one with the extendable handle. They folded Lizzi’s body up, but couldn’t close the case completely, so Seth held the sides together as best he could while Kat wrapped it with duct tape.
Kat used Lizzi’s key fob to locate her Mazda in the back parking lot. Relieved to see it was an automatic—she didn’t know how to drive a stick—she pulled the car up to the back door and opened the Mazda’s tailgate, then helped Seth put the plastic bags and the bulging suitcase into the back of the SUV.
Kat took the wheel with Seth sitting in the passenger seat, and they left Sawyer Mill.
Seth didn’t want to take the highway, where the E-ZPass toll system and cameras might track them. Kat was worried because the car was low on gas. They pulled into the parking lot of the Wentworth-Douglass Hospital to consider their next move, and Kat testified that it was her suggestion to take Lizzi’s body to Peirce Island. She knew the current was fast, and her mother had told her never to go there at night because “that’s where the bad people went.”
—
After spending her first day on the stand describing her intimate, abusive relationship with Seth—complete with graphic descriptions of their BDSM sex life—and telling her recollections of October 9, Kat returned the next day to explain what happened next. She appeared in court wearing the same prison uniform, the same plain glasses, her hair pulled back in a bun.
—
They arrived at the island after midnight, Kat told the court, and parked as close as they could to the overlook in the unpaved lot by the dog park—but they still had a long way to go. There was just enough moonlight for them to see what they were doing. Together, they wrangled the suitcase from the car. Seth extended the handle and pulled. It wobbled as he dragged it over the dirt parking lot, then stopped when the wheels hit some grass. Seth heaved, but the wheels wouldn’t spin in the turf. They tugged together, but the cumbersome bag would only lurch and then stop mere inches away.
“This isn’t working.”
Seth suggested they take Lizzi’s body out of the suitcase and drag her on the tarp. They unwrapped the duct tape, and let Lizzi’s body tumble out of the carrier. Kat described how Seth laid Lizzi out on the cloth and grabbed a corner, hoping her body would slide over ground; but it soon became clear that he would just end up yanking the tarp from beneath her uncooperative body.
Eventually, Seth picked the body up and flung it over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. His feet were moving slower and his breath was coming faster.
When they got to a dirt path, Seth told Kat to reopen the suitcase. They again folded Lizzi’s limbs inward and he resumed dragging the bag, dragging it past their once “magic tree,” dragging it toward the water. Without any duct tape holding it shut, Kat said, Lizzi’s body fell out again and again.
Kat testified that, when they were nearly to the overlook, Seth let go of the suitcase handle and put his hands on his hips, gasping for air.
“‘I can’t do it anymore. You have to pull it,’” she said he told her, so Kat tugged the suitcase the last few feet from the trail to the end of the semicircular railing on the overlook.
The light from the naval shipyard on the other side of the river was just enough to illuminate the shapes around their destination. Behind them they’d left a tortuous, irregular set of drag marks in the dirt. Delaying the inevitable, they sat down on the granite benches, the same place they’d once come to hold hands and dream of their future.
Kat testified that Seth stood up first. Sweating and wheezing, he picked up Lizzi’s body, lifted it to the top of the waist-high railing, and heaved it over the side.
Instead of the splash they expected to hear, there was a thump.
The overlook had not been built at the very edge of the cliff. It was set back about three feet, with just enough turf on the other side of the railing to walk on. Seth and Kat peered over the rail only to see Lizzi’s body resting on the lip above the twenty-five-foot drop into the Piscataqua.
“‘Go and push her the rest of the way over,’” Kat said that Seth demanded. “‘You’re smaller than I am.’”
Kat swung a leg over the railing and got on her knees. She shoved as hard as she could, but she had neither the strength nor the leverage to move Lizzi’s body.
“Come help me,” she asked Seth, but he said he was too tired to climb over the rail.
Kat pointed out that there was no need to climb. “‘Go to your left. You can walk around the fence,’” she recounted on the stand.
Seth walked around to where Kat knelt, and together they rolled Lizzi’s body over the precipice.
There was still no splash.
They looked over the cliff and in the moonlight saw Lizzi’s lifeless form on the rocks below.
—
In the courtroom, Seth watched his ex-girlfriend explain her actions on the night of October 9. The defendant wore little or no reaction on his face. The only indication that something was churning inside his head could be seen under the table. With the ball of his foot firmly planted on the floor, Seth bounced his right leg up and down. He seemed to never stop.
Kat testified that the river lapped hard against where Lizzi lay, but it wasn’t nearly strong enough to pull her partially submerged body away from the shore.
When they’d visited the island during the day, the water on the Piscataqua had been coming in from the ocean and was eight feet higher than it was this night, as the river was flowing outward. They’d never seen the cascade of rocks hidden just beneath the surface of the high waterline. At first, they contemplated leaving Lizzi there and letting the next high tide take her away, but then Seth said they had to make sure she went into the water, Kat testified, because his DNA was inside her.
Seth and Kat climbed up to the overlook and walked back to the parking lot, where there was a path to the shore. The beach was rocky, with no sand, just gray river stone and washed-up shells. They doubled back on the lower rocks of the shoreline, hoping to reach Lizzi’s body. Some of the boulders along the way were the size of furniture, covered in lime- and rust-colored seaweed.
They shimmied along the shore until reaching a U-shaped break along the boundary. The crevasse was filled with water, and the only way to get by was to climb across a slab of rock to the other side. Kat said she found a fingerhold and hoisted herself across, then turned and summoned Seth to follow.
But, she testified, he refused. “‘I’m too tired. I can’t make it. You go on and do it,’” Kat quoted him as saying. He told her he’d go back to the overlook and direct her from above.
Kat made it to Lizzi’s body and waited for her boyfriend to reappear. When Seth reached the overlook, Kat pointed out a way he could scale down to where she was, but again, Seth said he couldn’t do it.
Left alone at the bottom of the cliff, Kat tugged on Lizzi’s body, but she could only move it an inch or two. She kept pulling, and as she yanked, Lizzi’s thong underwear balled up and came off her legs. Kat grabbed the panties and put them into her pocket. All Lizzi was left wearing was her necklace. Kat testified she thought it was a kind of crucifix, but it was actually a starfish.
Lizzi was half floating now.
“It’s too bad we don’t have a rock to weigh the body down,” Seth said from above.
Kat began covering the body in seaweed to hide it. She told the court how surreal she thought the whole scene was. A few hours beforehand, she, Lizzi, and Seth had all been laughing together, and now Lizzi was dead, her body refusing to go into the water.
Kat began pulling and pushing again and, gently, Lizzi made her way to the ocean she’d loved. Finally the current won, cradling Lizzi and finally pulling her into the briny deep.
—
As prosecutor Peter Hinckley walked Kat through how she’d pushed Lizzi’s body into the water, Kat began to sob.
Hinckley, who had been walking the line between maintaining his star witness’s credibility while acknowledging her culpability, asked Kat if she was aware that Lizzi’s body would never be recovered.
“Yes,” Kat barely squeaked out the word.
“Tell these jurors: Do you have any remorse for what you did to Lizzi and her family?”
She answered. “There’s so many things that she’s never going to be able to do. So many things in her life that she missed out. I mean I’m only twenty, but I still look back and think that even now there’s so much I’ve yet to do, so much of life left. She never got to get married. She never got to have kids. She never really got to live her life yet.”
Kat was sobbing again.
“It was because of us that she never got to live her life. This isn’t something we can fix. She can never come back.”
The judge called for an early lunch break to give Kat some time to compose herself.
—
Finishing her direct examination, Kat said she and Seth drove away from Peirce Island in Lizzi’s car, the needle on the gas gauge hovering just above E. They stopped at a hotel parking lot and threw the suitcase into a Dumpster. Seth placed Lizzi’s iPhone and TomTom GPS unit under one of the Mazda’s tires and had Kat drive over them. He collected the pieces and threw them from the SUV’s passenger window as they crossed the General Sullivan Bridge over Little Bay. Then they threw the bag containing Lizzi’s clothes, her panties, and the rope Seth used to strangle her into another Dumpster near a volunteer fire department. Those items were never recovered.
Coasting on fumes, they parked the Mazda Tribute in a UNH parking lot near the equestrian center on the far end of campus. Seth, still wearing gloves, wiped the car’s interior and exterior with a towel. Now on foot, they carried the tarp and dropped it in yet another Dumpster they passed on campus. The pair then walked the seven miles from Durham to their apartment in Dover.
They arrived home at six A.M., just before sunrise. Seth told Kat to remove all of her clothing and shoes and put them in a trash bag. He did the same. He carried the bag to the Sawyer Mill Dumpster, confident he had removed all traces of Lizzi from the apartment.
A day later, they would find Lizzi’s Avenue Q sweatshirt in the living room and quickly throw that away as well. They would also go through their phones deleting text messages, including Lizzi’s “I’m at the outer door,” Seth’s “We painting tonight?” and Roberta’s “We are on our way.”
Kat testified that, when they finished their walk from UNH to the apartment, they both took showers and fell into restless sleep. When Seth awoke, he made breakfast and served it to Kat on the futon. After she ate, Seth said he wanted to have sex.
They removed their clothes. Seth instructed Kat to climb on top of him, her favorite position. Kat knew what the gesture meant. It was her reward for a job well done.