AUBURN — A witness testified Tuesday that William True said he killed Romeo Parent, who had implicated True a week earlier in a burglary.
Eric Leighton, 19, of Auburn also said in Androscoggin County Superior Court that Sebastian Moody had confessed to him to killing Parent, 20, of Lewiston.
In addition, Leighton told a jury that Moody described later that day how Michael McNaughton had killed Parent and that McNaughton, who was in the same room, hadn’t denied it.
On the fifth day of testimony in the murder trial of McNaughton, 26, of Lewiston, three witnesses were called by prosecutors who are seeking to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that McNaughton killed Parent on April 9, 2013.
Defense attorney Verne Paradie Jr. has highlighted the changing stories that witnesses told police as well as inconsistencies between statements made to detectives last year and those made to attorneys in the courtroom in an effort to weaken testimony against McNaughton. True is an alternative suspect to whom the defense hopes to deflect the jury’s attention.
Prosecutors believe that McNaughton and True walked into a wooded area in Greene, where McNaughton stabbed Parent in the back of the neck with a screwdriver and strangled him to death with a makeshift garrote fashioned from a bicycle cable and wooden pegs. True assaulted Parent by punching and kicking him, witnesses at trial have said.
True was indicted by an Androscoggin County grand jury a week ago on a murder charge. Up until that time, he had been scheduled to go to trial with McNaughton on the lesser charge of hindering apprehension or prosecution. With the indictment imminent, True was removed from McNaughton’s trial.
Taking the witness stand Tuesday afternoon, Leighton told prosecutors that he saw Parent on the night of April 9, 2013, at dusk. Parent said he’d recently become homeless. Leighton tossed him his keys and offered his apartment at 9 James St. near the CVS store where Parent was last seen alive climbing into a car with True, McNaughton and Nathan Morton, 25, of Greene, who owned and drove the 2007 Volkswagen Passat.
Morton has pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to commit murder in exchange for his testimony and a 20-year sentence, of which 10 years is suspended. A murder charge was dropped.
Leighton said he had allowed several homeless teens to stay at his apartment and had expected Parent to take him up on his offer.
But at noon the next day, True had climbed through Leighton’s apartment window from a fire escape, pulled him aside in the kitchen and asked him for a duffel bag, settling instead for two trash bags.
Leighton said he’d been a close friend of True, with whom he had had a brotherly relationship, but the two had begun to grow apart.
Leighton said he asked True if he had seen Parent because he hadn’t stayed there the night before as expected.
“He got real emotional,” Leighton said. “He told me he had killed Romeo.”
Leighton said he didn’t take True’s confession seriously until True told him he would kill him too if he told anybody what he’d just admitted.
“At that point, I didn’t doubt it for one second,” Leighton said.
After True left, Leighton said he “blurted out” what True had told him. He then went “immediately” to a neighbor’s apartment and called 911, he said.
Two local police officers arrived and took sample trash bags from his kitchen for evidence, Leighton said. He went with police to the station where he told detectives “everything that happened in the last 24 hours.”
He said he initially lied about one of his friends (that he named using an alias) who had stayed in his apartment and was wanted on a warrant, but he later explained his deceit. He also talked to a Maine State Police detective about the case.
Leighton’s girlfriend at that time, Diana Jack, 19, testified Tuesday morning that Parent had been a “really good friend of mine.”
She said she had been walking with Parent shortly before he climbed into Morton’s car at CVS on the night of April 9, 2013, with Morton at the wheel and McNaughton in the passenger’s seat, wearing a bandanna over the lower part of his face as she had seen him do before.
True, who was at Leighton’s apartment at that time, told Jack as she came in that he had to go with Morton, McNaughton and Parent. He grabbed a face mask and jacket and left, she said.
When she saw True the next day in the kitchen with Leighton, True’s eyes were bloodshot and he looked “really tired,” Jack said.
After True left and Jack learned what True had said about Parent, she told Leighton he had to call the police.
When True tried to get back into Leighton’s apartment again from the fire escape, he called police and True was arrested.
Leighton testified that he had run into Sebastian Moody at a teen drop-in center in Lewiston and the two went outside for a cigarette. Leighton told Moody what True had told him about killing Parent. Moody told Leighton how “they” had used a cord to strangle Parent. Moody told Leighton that he had killed Parent, then changed his story to say that a “hit man” had killed Parent, Leighton said under cross-examination.
Moody took Leighton to a Lewiston apartment on Bartlett Street where McNaughton had been visiting. Leighton said McNaughton questioned why Moody had brought Leighton to the apartment. Leighton said he emptied his pockets to show McNaughton he wasn’t a threat. When the business card of a Maine State Police detective appeared from one of Leighton’s pockets, McNaughton quizzed him about what he had told police and what he had learned from police about the investigation into Parent’s disappearance. McNaughton asked whether his name had come up during the interview. Leighton said he only knew McNaughton by the nickname “No one,” and hadn’t known his actual name.
Moody described Parent’s murder and McNaughton circled a chair in which Leighton sat. When he was behind the chair, McNaughton touched Leighton’s shoulders and the back of his neck, he said.
Leighton said he was concerned about his safety. He later met with police detectives to share with them what had transpired at the Bartlett Street apartment.
He was later “jumped” on a bridge by Moody, who punched him repeatedly and said he had “f—– up” and to “watch out.”
A third witness, Jessica Gaudet, testified Tuesday that she had been living in Lewiston the weekend before Parent was killed. She had gotten drunk at a bar and fallen down stairs, waking up later in her apartment. McNaughton spent the weekend and the two had sex, she said.
She had told him that the father of her daughter had threatened her. McNaughton told her that he had military training and could stab her former boyfriend in the back of the neck to paralyze him, she said.
McNaughton showed her the screwdriver he carried with him in his pocket. Gaudet identified in court the screwdriver other witnesses said belonged to McNaughton and that he had nicknamed “Pokie.”
Later, True’s girlfriend, Felicia Cadman, had come to Gaudet’s apartment, led her to a bathroom and told her that McNaughton had killed Parent. Cadman had just been in a car with Morton, True and McNaughton, she said.
McNaughton had stabbed Parent in the back of the neck and strangled him several times because “he was a rat.”
She was told Parent’s dead body was in Greene.
Gaudet didn’t believe Cadman and told her to stop joking, she said. A drug addict hooked on opiates, Gaudet said she wanted to get high because she “didn’t know how to deal with what was going on,” she said.
She stole her roommate’s electronics and pawned them for drug money, she said.
Gaudet said Morton had called later to say he would be arriving to pick up True to go back to the crime scene and move Parent’s body. True started crying, saying that he didn’t want to go and was scared, Gaudet said.
When Morton arrived, True was on her living room floor, refusing to leave. But Morton persuaded him to go, Gaudet said.
She said she was “scared I would get in trouble for knowing what I knew.”
Morton had told her he had driven Parent and McNaughton to Greene where he was going to beat up Parent, then he had stabbed and strangled him.
“I was starting to realize it was true,” Gaudet said.
cwilliams@sunjournal.com
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