Jury deliberating in case without a body
In a murder trial without a dead body, a Palm Beach County jury on Friday began deliberating whether a woman was killed by her neighbor 14 years ago.
Prosecutors argued Mark Barrow is responsible for the disappearance of 36-year-old Rae Meichelle Tener, based on an alleged confession and DNA evidence from blood stains discovered in his work van.
“There is no question about it,” Assistant State Attorney Aleathea McRoberts told the jury. “Rae Meichelle is never coming home and this man made sure of it.”
The panel of eight women and four men deliberated for one hour before Circuit Judge Jeffrey Colbath sent them home for the weekend. The panel will return at 9 a.m. Monday.
It’s the second time Barrow, 57, has been tried on a first-degree murder charge. He was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in 2007, but an appeals court later tossed his conviction and ordered a new trial.
Despite testimony this week and statements through the years from his former live-in girlfriend that Barrow confessed, he has always publicly denied knowing what happened to Tener after Aug. 24, 2004.
Barrow declined to testify in his own defense, but the jury Friday listened to a voluntary statement he made to a detective who was investigating the alleged confession.
“I know I’m in trouble but there’s nothing I can do,” the air conditioning repair man told the investigator. “I don’t know where she is … my conscience is clear.”
Barrow said he didn’t like Tener, and he called her a “slut,” but he insisted, “I didn’t kill nobody.”
Defense attorney Peter Grable argued it remains a missing persons case, and Tener could have encountered some other trouble.
“There is no body,” he said. “There’s no murder weapon.”
Grable blasted the testimony from Barrow’s former girlfriend Peggy LaSalle as lacking credibility, especially because she continued to live with Barrow after the supposed confession.
“Can you believe anything she said?” Grable asked, noting that LaSalle has given conflicting statements over the years. “What corroboration is there?”
In one example, LaSalle previously said Barrow admitted to dumping Tener’s body in a west county canal to become food for alligators. On Thursday, she called it a “crocodile pit.”
But prosecutors McRoberts and Reid Scott say even without a body there’s no question Tener is dead and Barrow — the last person to be seen with Tener — is to blame.
Tener lived with her 13-year-old son, Zachary. In tearful testimony Wednesday, the now-27-year-old Ohio man told the jury that he had attended Barrow’s party, but passed out back at his trailer and never saw his mother again.
To counter the defense claim that she was perhaps still alive somewhere, the prosecutors called as witnesses Tener’s parents, her son, and her sister, to say they have not heard from her all these years. She never picked up a paycheck from her job as a maid nor did she ever touch her bank account again.
mjfreeman@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6642