Murder trial's prosecutors try to establish Young's hotel timelime

RALEIGH -- Prosecutors in the Jason Young murder trial continued Friday establishing a timeline for the defendant the day before and the day his wife's bludgeoned body was found in their home.

Young, 37, is accused of murdering his wife Michelle Young, when she was 29 and nearly five months pregnant.

He pleaded not guilty to the charge. His defense team contends his wife's homicide is unsolved.

Prosecutors, though, argue that Jason Young led people to believe he was out of town on a business trip Nov. 3, 2006. But they contend he left a Hampton Inn in Hillsville, Va., shortly after midnight, made the three-hour drive back to Raleigh. They say once inside his home in the Enchanted Oaks neighborhood just south of Raleigh, he attempted to strangle his wife, while their 2-year-old daughter Cassidy was in the house, and then bludgeoned her to death after she put up a struggle.

A convenience store clerk from King, a small town in the western part of the state, about 40 miles from the Hampton Inn that Young checked into on Nov. 2, testified today that she sold gas to the defendant the morning of his wife's death.

Gracie Bailey Dahms, a clerk at Four Brothers Food Store, a convenience store with gas pumps on the route from Raleigh to Hillsville, Va., pointed out Young in a Wake County Superior courtroom today and told jurors she remembered her encounter with him at about 5:30 a.m. on Nov. 3, 2006, because he cussed her out.

Dahms said that when she worked the third shift alone, she often set the pumps so customers paying with cash had to come inside before filling their tanks. Her practice was to tell customers who weren't regulars that they could either pay in cash at the register or leave a credit card or photo ID with her before she would start the pump. That way, she said, she could prevent a "gas and go," a theft she would have to pay for personally.

Dahms said the man threw down $20, pumped only $15 in gas and did not come back for his change.

On Thursday, prosecutors called a series of witnesses to further establish a timeline of his whereabouts on Nov. 2, the day before his wife was found bludgeoned to death in the master bedroom of her home. Cassidy, her 2-year-old daughter wriggled out from under the covers of her parents' bed early in the afternoon Nov. 3, when her aunt Meredith Fisher made the gruesome find.

The child had tracked bloody footprints in the bedroom and down the hall. But her feet only had slight traces of blood near the cuticles of her toenails, her aunt said, when she emerged from the bed that afternoon.

Young was at home with his wife and daughter early the evening before his wife's homicide. Shelly Schaad, a longtime friend and sorority sister of Michelle Young, had seen him when she took dinner over at about 6 p.m.

He gave his wife a quick hug goodbye that night, Schaad said.

Then prosecutors presented a series of receipts and witnesses to put him in a different places later that night.

Young bought gas at a Han-Dee Hugo's in Raleigh about 7:30 p.m. Three-and a-half hours later, he checked into a Hampton Inn in Hillsville, Va., about 160 miles northwest of Raleigh, just over the state line.

Prosecutors contend that he checked into the Hampton Inn, then left shortly before midnight to begin a trip back to Raleigh.

A Hampton Inn security camera captured an image of Young leaving the lobby shortly before midnight.

Workers at the hotel alerted investigators to several oddities that night. A worker found a red rock propping open the door of a fire escape stairwell. The security camera in that stairwell was pointed toward the ceiling and disabled.

The manager of the hotel recalled a similar incident happening at least once before then when guests had been sneaking people into the inn for a party.

A key-card reader from the hotel showed no Nov. 3 entries to the fourth-floor room that Young booked except by housekeepers.

According to the reader, a machine which could retrieve data about entrances but not exits to Hampton Inn rooms, a guest key was used to open the door of room 421, the room booked under Young's name, at 10:56 p.m. Nov. 2.

No other activity was noted until after he had checked out of the hotel.

The defense team contends that DNA evidence and adult-size footprints that cannot be matched to Jason Young were found inside his house by crime-scene investigators. They contend, too, that no blood was found in Young's Ford Explorer and no fibers from the Hampton Inn were found in his Wake County home.

The trial is expected to last several weeks.