Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
First witness on stand in missing-body case
The young man told the jury Wednesday it’s been almost 14 years since he last saw his mother, on a night when he passed out from drinking beer at neighbor Mark Barrow’s home.
“Worst night of my life,” Zachary Tener testified, tears welling in his eyes as the first witness in Barrow’s murder trial.
Prosecutors say Barrow killed Rae Meichelle Tener, and dumped her body in a canal, never to be found. But they say they can still prove the murder case without the body, thanks mainly to Barrow’s confession to his then live-in girlfriend.
But the jury won’t be told it’s the second trial for Barrow, 57, who was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in 2007, and later had his conviction thrown out by an appeals court.
In testimony interrupted by crying, putting his head down for a few moments, and running his hands through his short hair, Zachary Tener, 27, said his mother had sometimes left him alone for one or two days.
But after Aug. 24, 2004, her car was still in the driveway of their suburban West Palm Beach home and she was not coming back.
Tener testified that he found his mom’s cigarettes and lighter on the ground by Barrow’s trailer the morning after the party. He said he was 13 and afraid because he “didn’t know what to do.”
“Have you ever seen your mother again?” asked Assistant State Attorney Reid Scott.
“Not one time,” answered Tener, who now lives with his paternal grandmother about 60 miles from Cincinnati, Ohio.
When the prosecutor asked if he recognized Barrow in the courtroom, Tener wiped a tissue over his bloodshot eyes and looked around, glaring over at the defendant. Finally, he broke his silence and answered, “I don’t know.”
Earlier Wednesday, Barrow’s attorney insisted Tener’s mother could have gotten into some trouble that had nothing to do with his client.
The problem, attorney Peter Grable told the Palm Beach County jury, is that “nobody knows what happened” and prosecutors can’t prove Barrow had anything to do with the 36-year-old woman’s disappearance.
“It’s still a missing persons case today,” he said. “There’s no body.”
The lawyer then suggested Rae Meichelle Tener may have been the victim of foul play because she kept up a lifestyle of drinking, drug use, and affairs with different men.
“Who knows where she went?” Grable said. “Maybe she got in the wrong car … and something bad happened.”
But prosecutor Aleathea McRoberts told the jurors it’s clear Barrow is responsible because he long ago confessed to his then-lover, Peggy LaSalle, that he killed Tener, providing “pretty chilling” details about the crime.
LaSalle is expected to testify today she was in a drug rehab facility on the night that Tener was last seen alone with Barrow at the trailer park. But LaSalle later told authorities that Barrow admitted to her that he murdered Tener, according to the prosecutor.
The violence started when Barrow became enraged after Tener threatened to call police on him, because he had violently pushed the woman out of his trailer home during a confrontation, McRoberts said.
Barrow later told detectives that he didn’t like Tener because she provided anti-anxiety pills to LaSalle, but denied having anything to do with her disappearance.
But McRoberts said Barrow, fearing he would be taken to jail, “made the deliberate decision to brutally murder and dispose of Meichelle Tener like she was trash.”
He bashed Tener’s head in with a rock, crushed bones in her body to squeeze her 4-foot-11, almost 100-pound frame into a garbage bag, placed a zip-tie around her neck to make sure she was dead, and then dumped the body into a western canal, McRoberts said, pointing to the alleged confession.
Detectives searched for Tener’s remains but discovered that the canals were flushed into the ocean to prevent flooding from hurricanes Frances and Jeanne.