Trial to start for felon in three slayings
It’s been almost five years since the horrific discovery of two small decomposing bodies, stuffed into luggage, in the canal that divides Delray Beach and Boca Raton.
Autopsies showed 10-year-old Jermaine McNeil died from a hit on the head, while his younger sister, Ju’Tyra Allen, 6, died from a lack of oxygen — her face was wrapped in tape.
The siblings’ mother, Felicia Brown, 25, also was dead; her body was found at a West Palm Beach trash-processing facility in August 2010.
These are the gruesome details a Palm Beach County jury will hear soon when Clem Beauchamp, 38, goes on trial. He’s charged with three counts of first-degree murder, and prosecutors are seeking a death sentence.
Circuit Judge Charles Burton scheduled jury selection to start Jan. 11; the trial could take five weeks. If Beauchamp is convicted, it would then be the jury’s job to make a recommendation of death or life in prison; the punishment is up to the judge.
On Dec. 15, Beauchamp’s attorneys notified the court they then intend to argue his life should be spared, partly because he was extremely mentally disturbed at the time of the killings. The defense will call upon two mental health experts to testify Beauchamp has substantial brain damage, wrote lawyers Ronald Chapman and Michael Maher.
But Assistant State Attorney Terri Skiles told Burton she plans to argue Beauchamp deserves death for a variety of reasons, including the ages of the young victims, and that the crimes were “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel” and committed in a “cold, calculated, and premeditated manner.”
Beauchamp is a convicted felon, currently serving a 10-year federal prison term he received in 2011 for possessing an illegal handgun silencer. In December 2014, he also pleaded guilty to two unrelated drug crimes from April 2010 and received a three-year prison sentence.
Federal prosecutors have alleged Beauchamp may have been motivated to kill Brown, his on-and-off girlfriend, because she was a key witness against him in the gun case.
The firearms charge against Beauchamp arose when Brown’s car was repossessed from his Delray Beach home in 2009. A tow-yard employee found a black bag containing a .22-caliber revolver and a homemade silencer, and 12 rounds of ammunition.
Brown later told a towyard employee the bag was her boyfriend’s, according to prosecutors.
According to a Palm Beach County grand jury indictment, Beauchamp killed Brown by “unspecified means.”
The body of Brown went unidentified until her children’s bodies were found in early March 2011. Brown had their names tattooed on her leg, leading to her identification.
The kids had been living with Beauchamp for about six months after Brown vanished the previous summer, according to court files. Brown was gone with “no warning and no goodbyes” because Beauchamp had killed her, prosecutor Skiles wrote in September.
“He couldn’t report their mother missing as he was the reason for her ‘disappearance’ and he attempted to hide her ‘missing status’ by telling other family members that Felicia couldn’t come around him, her children, or other family members because she had the police looking for her and he had put her in hiding (all of which was untrue),” Skiles wrote.
At one point during an interrogation, police detectives showed Beauchamp photographs of the dead children.
“I wouldn’t do nothin’ like that,” Beauchamp said, before he asked for a lawyer. “I wouldn’t help nobody do nothing like that.”
Beauchamp insisted he had loved the boy and girl as if they were his own kids, records show. He said he taught Ju’Tyra how to swim and ride a bike, and played football with Jermaine.
“Ju’Tyra calls me ’Dad,’” he said. “Jermaine ... He’s like a son.”
Beauchamp repeatedly said he walked the children to their school bus stop on Feb. 22, 2011, and that they were going to be picked up after school by Brown’s fiancé. He did not see them after that morning, he told detectives.
At the time, Beauchamp was living with his girlfriend, Michelle Dent, their three children and Brown’s two children, in a threebedroom house. He was stressed about being out of work, collecting a monthly $400 welfare check that was supposed to go to Brown, the court records show.
Beauchamp and Dent fought over Brown’s children; Dent allegedly wanted them out of the house because of the financial burden.
A breakthrough in the investigation came when Beauchamp’s son, who was 15 when the children disappeared, told police he had helped his father throw two pieces of dark, heavy luggage in the canal, according to evidence released by prosecutors in 2012.”