18

District Attorney John Morganelli was elected Northampton County’s highest-ranking law enforcement official in 1991 with about 60 percent of the vote in the primary and general elections, defeating a three-term incumbent for the position. In mid-August 2000, he was on his way to becoming the longest-serving DA in Northampton County history. Since his election, he’d won two subsequent four-year terms, running unopposed both times because no candidate was strong enough to challenge him. During his years in office, he’d built a reputation for fairness, impeccable courtroom preparation and political drive. He approached his position as DA with a well-formed professional philosophy.

“I believe that it’s my job to protect the public from violent criminals,” he said. “I believe strongly in punishment. And I think that people who commit violent crimes should be locked up and warehoused for long periods of time. I also feel that the district attorney’s office can be a very strong bully pulpit for influencing criminal legislation that helps protect the public. I’ve been a pretty outspoken DA on a lot of different issues.”

Morganelli was also a family man, married and raising three teenage children. Outside of work and home life, his interests included golfing, running and politics. If things had gone differently in the spring, he would have been preparing to run in the fall for attorney general, the highest law enforcement office in the state. However, he’d been edged out in the spring Democratic primary by Jim Eisenhower, a former federal prosecutor and distant relative of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Now Morganelli was watching from the sidelines as Eisenhower prepared to challenge Tom Corbett for the state of Pennsylvania’s top law office. It was going to be a noteworthy race. Eisenhower was a strong candidate, and his famed surname alone lent interest to his candidacy. However, Morganelli knew that in the end, it was unlikely Eisenhower, or any Democratic candidate, would prevail. The state attorney general’s office had been an exclusively Republican stronghold for two decades.

But even without an election campaign to run, Morganelli had his hands full with the business of criminal justice in Northampton. In addition to the day-to-day cases handled by his office, the murder caseload was mounting. The slaying of Devon Guzman was one of three murders in three weeks in Northampton County that summer, and in addition, Morganelli was preparing to prosecute Douglas Crist for the December 22, 1999, murder of his girlfriend’s mother, Debra LaForm. That case was on the docket for October 2000.

But on Sunday, August 13, 2000, Morganelli had a more immediate matter for which to prepare. Blood and DNA test results had come in from the state police lab. Tomorrow morning at ten o’clock sharp, he’d be hosting a press conference regarding a couple of arrests that, to many in Northampton county, felt like they’d been an awful long time coming.

Rick Guzman had stayed overnight at his sister’s house in Allentown the night of Saturday, August 12. He and Holly had gone there to watch movies that evening and wound up spending the night. An unexpected early-morning phone call woke him up. It was someone with the Easton police.

“We’re gonna go in and bust these two bastards,” he remembered being told.

He was in Allentown, a good fifteen miles from Easton.

“Can you wait?” he asked, wanting to be as close as possible when the long-awaited arrests went down.

They couldn’t. “They set up their ducks, and before they busted them, they called me,” Rick said. But they didn’t want to delay any more than they had to.

Until that phone call, Rick said, police had divulged nothing to the family about their investigation. It had been hard to bear having two months going by without hearing any official word about who might’ve killed his daughter. In hindsight, Rick said the police investigators were very astute in how they handled the investigation. While Devon’s family members were emotionally involved and unable to think clearly, the police remained detached and uninvolved from the emotional aspects, and focused on doing what they had to do to solve the case, even if it meant remaining maddeningly tight-lipped.

Rick remembered asking periodically during the investigation, “Can you at least tell me where you’re at?” Each time he was rebuffed with the excuse that they couldn’t discuss an ongoing investigation. “So they keep you in the dark,” he said. Looking back, he saw it was the professional way to handle it.

 

 

The knock came at 7:30 A.M. on Sunday, August 13, at the West St. Joseph Street home in South Side, Easton. It was almost two months to the day since Devon Guzman had been murdered—two long, arduous months for police investigators operating under both public pressure and deep personal commitments to bring about justice for Devon. It had taken that long to gather and analyze enough forensic evidence and to interview enough witnesses, neighbors and friends to go forward with the arrests. They had been long months of painful, patient waiting for Devon’s family. They had been two grueling emotional months for Brandon and Michelle as well. During that time Brandon had consulted with an attorney to discuss divorcing his wife. And Michelle was involved in legal issues of her own stemming from a charge of drunken driving.

When the door opened, police were standing on the concrete walk with warrants for the couple’s arrest. Brandon was cuffed at the doorstep. Michelle was taken into custody on the second floor. Husband and wife were whisked away in the cool of the early morning, to be later arraigned by District Justice Matos-Gonzales on charges of criminal homicide and criminal conspiracy to commit homicide.

In the days to come, they would be spending their time in the overcrowded quarters of the fortresslike Northampton County Prison, where they would be held without bail. They’d have plenty of time in the months to come to contemplate how and why their lives and the lives of those they touched had taken this tragic turn.