BY KATHY CHANG
Staff Writer
NEW BRUNSWICK – Someone was on William and Melanie McGuire’s home desktop computer searching the words “undetectable poisons” and “how to purchase a gun without a permit” and that person, the defense contends, was not Melanie McGuire.
Jesse Lindmar, the director in the computer forensic division at Miles Computer Forensics in Moorestown, testified that he extracted everything from the hard drive of the McGuire’s home computer.
“The Internet history is stored in the form of a database,” said Lindmar. “There were 485,000 rows of information. I took what [Jennifer Seymour, a computer forensics expert who was working at the New Jersey State digital technology unit at the time] did and extracted a few more entries. I concentrated on six particular days.”
On April 11, 2004, at 7:32 p.m., Lindmar said it appears someone logged on to an an e-mail account under the name William T. McGuire at njlincs.net and at 7:34 p.m. someone typed in the words “undetectable poisons” into a Google search engine.
On April 18, 2004, at 5:44 p.m., someone typed in the words “how to commit suicide” into a Google search engine. At 6:49 p.m., someone typed in the word “chloroform,” which can be used as a sedative, into an MSN search engine. At 7:02 p.m., someone logged on to an e-mail account for William T. McGuire at njlincs.net. At 7:06 p.m., someone searched the year 1982 on the Web site www.classmates.com.
On April 26, 2004, Melanie McGuire purchased a Taurus Model 85 .38-caliber handgun and a box of bullets from John’s Gun and Tackle Room gun shop in Easton, Pa. In one of the wiretaps captured by the state police in 2005, McGuire told her friend James Finn that she purchased the gun for her husband.
George Lowery, an IT specialist with the health department in Blackwood, N.J., testified that William McGuire discussed purchasing a fire arm on April 6, 2004, while the two were working on a project for the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
During direct examination, Lindmar said it was possible to check one’s e-mail from a remote location.
William McGuire’s first wife, Marci Paulk, who met McGuire in 1981, testified that she and McGuire graduated from Vernon High School in 1982 and that she had received a message from McGuire on the Web site classmates.com in 2004, but did not answer his message.
“His message said, ‘I’m sorry about what I did to you,’” said Paulk.
Middlesex County Superior Court Judge Frederick DeVesa limited Paulk’s testimony and would not allow her to tell the 12-woman and four-man jury that William McGuire had left her in 1994 and tampered with her bank accounts because DeVesa said the time frame of the two events was irrelevant.
In one of the wiretaps that the state police recorded in 2005, Melanie McGuire tells her friend James Finn that she knows how her husband left his first wife and she was afraid he was doing the same thing to her when she said he left early on the morning of April 29, 2004.
Jay Salpeter, a private investigator, investigated E-ZPass records that show that in some trips William McGuire took in 2003 down to Atlantic City, he did not use his E-ZPass.
Assistant Attorney General Patricia Prezioso asked Salpeter if he was aware that on three of the six dates that showed that McGuire did not use his E-ZPass, Michael Cappararo, who is Melanie McGuire’s stepfather, was also in Atlantic City.
Salpeter said he was not aware and did not look at the Cappararo’s E-ZPass records.
Prezioso also asked Salpeter if it was possible the reason why McGuire did not use his E-ZPass was because he went down to Atlantic City in someone else’s car.
“Yes,” replied Salpeter.
Melanie McGuire, 34, a former fertility clinic nurse, is on trial for killing her husband in their Woodbridge Center Plaza apartment and later dismembering his body between April 28, 2004, and May 5, 2004. McGuire, who resides in Brick Township, remains free on $2.1 million bail.