Evidence presented against ex-boyfriend in murder trial for missing Holly Springs woman
Evidence that included grocery receipts, videos and DNA samples was presented Tuesday against Brian Sluss, who is accused of killing his ex-girlfriend in 2019.
Sluss, 46, is charged with the murder of Monica Moynan, who was 23 when she was last seen in Holly Springs in April 2019. Moynan, who shared two children with Sluss, was reported missing in mid-July of 2019, and her body has never been found.
Opening statements in Sluss’ trial began April 12 in Wake County. Sluss is expected to take the stand in his defense on Wednesday after the prosecution wraps its case.
After Sluss’ May 2020 arrest — more than a year after Moynan went missing — then-Holly Springs Police Chief John Herring told The News & Observer that investigators had developed a “solid case” that indicated that Moynan was no longer alive.
At the start of the trial, Moynan’s mother, Melanie Tucker, spoke about her fear of her daughter dating Sluss, reported ABC11, The News & Observer’s newsgathering partner. Sluss was abusive toward Moynan, Tucker said, and she filed a protective order against him before her disappearance. He was roughly 20 years older than her when they were together.
But the defense has argued that Moynan was an “absent” mother who “walked out on him and his girls,” said Tommy Manning, Sluss’ lawyer. The defense argues that Sluss was a good father and that Moynan was not killed, but instead, she had abandoned her family.
During the investigation, Sluss was a “person of interest,” later being named as a suspect in her disappearance and death, a Holly Springs police spokesman told The News & Observer in early 2020.
The prosecution previously argued that Sluss sought to profit from Moynan’s belongings and used her credit card after the killing, ABC 11 reported. Evidence presented before Tuesday suggests Sluss was selling household items from Moynan’s home on Facebook Marketplace.
Jarlyn Sluss, Brian Sluss’ ex-wife, was charged May 12, 2020, in connection with Moynan’s death. She was charged with accessory after the fact to first-degree murder and obstruction of justice.
Evidence in grocery receipts presented
The prosecution brought several witnesses to the stand Tuesday afternoon.
Lt. Jessica McMillan of the Holly Springs Police Department’s investigative division, who worked the case, was questioned by the prosecution’s attorneys about a collection of receipts for groceries bought with Moynan’s financial cards.
The indictment against Brian Sluss alleged that Moynan was murdered “on or about April 7,” The N&O previously reported.
McMillan confirmed to the prosecution that in the first months of 2019 leading up to the approximate date of Moynan’s death, Moynan’s grocery store purchases were consistent, as well as her methods of payment. She made numerous trips to a Lowe’s Foods in Holly Springs and another in Garner to buy diapers, baby food, organic foods and cat food from January to March 28 in 2019 and typically used a Lowe’s rewards card.
Starting April 7 and onward, McMillan said a noticeable change was observed in grocery receipts at that store in the types of foods that were purchased and in the methods of payment, which no longer used the rewards card and used Jarlyn Sluss’s card and Moynan’s EBT card.
Those consistent purchases included things like soda, Oreo cookies and Twinkies — foods that Moynan was never shown to buy in the months leading up to April.
The prosecution argued that Moynan’s alleged murder is supported by this evidence, which showed that groceries that involved food and items for caring for infants and pets were never purchased again after April 7 at those stores with those payments.
Videos show Sluss hitting child
The prosecution also asked McMillan to review nanny cam videos from July 2019 that were obtained in the investigation.
Several videos presented in the courtroom show Brian Sluss at Moynan’s apartment with their two daughters and his son. Sluss had stayed there, even though the apartment’s management had a trespass order preventing him from setting foot on the property, WRAL reported.
The videos show Sluss telling the children to let them know if a woman and man came to the door. The people Sluss described were with the apartment’s management, McMillan said.
In one video, he appears to instruct the children to meet a person at the door who came to buy something Sluss was selling on Facebook, supporting the prosecution’s claims that Sluss was selling Moynan’s belongings online.
In the video shown in court, he is seen holding a phone in his hand while another phone is seen in the living room. The prosecution said that phone belonged to Moynan.
In one of the videos from that day, Sluss scolds his then 4-year-old daughter and slaps her.
Those sitting in the courtroom, including members of the jury, gasped when another video recorded late past 1 a.m. was shown. In the video, Sluss scolds his older daughter, tells her “I’m going to beat your a--” and punches her several times.
Some people in the audience sobbed afterwards.
The following witness was Mackenzie Dehaan, a forensic scientist with the North Carolina State Crime Lab. Dehaan presented her findings from comparing a DNA sample taken from blood found in the investigation with DNA samples from Moynan’s daughter and her mother.
The kinship analysis supported that the blood collected from a crime scene in the investigation, which was proven to belong to Moynan, matched the samples of her daughter and mother.
Search warrants released in late 2019 say police found blood between cracks in kitchen tiles with “signs of cleanup” but did not specify whose house the blood was in, The N&O reported previously.
Background on the case
Sluss was indicted May 5, 2020, by a Wake County grand jury and charged with murder in Moynan’s death. On May 6, 2020, he was extradited from his parents’ home in Bluefield, Va., to Wake County.
In October 2019, Moynan’s case went from the search for a missing person to a “death investigation with suspicious circumstances,” Holly Springs Police said then.
Herring told The N&O in 2020 that even though Moynan’s body hadn’t been found, investigators had “a significant amount of physical evidence.”
“When you don’t have a body, there is a lot of evidence that needs to be collected to confirm that the person isn’t still alive,” Herring told The N&O in 2020 a few weeks before he retired. “It takes time to gather the evidence.”
Melanie Tucker, Moynan’s mother, told police in July 2019 that her daughter was missing after an apartment manager expressed concerns that she had not seen her in some time.
The N&O reported that Sluss gave four conflicting statements of Moynan’s whereabouts when questioned, including that she had become addicted to drugs and was in “home rehab” and that she also had run away.
He told police that he texted Moynan’s family and friends from her phone, pretending to be her. He also continued to post on her social media accounts, according to search warrant applications.
On Aug. 12, the search warrant application said Sluss told police a different story than what he previously reported. He said she was not addicted to drugs but was depressed.
Search warrant applications state that Brian Sluss and Jarlyn Sluss were in contact with each other by phone after Moynan was believed to have been killed.
This story was originally published April 26, 2022 at 8:30 PM.
