Posted on 04/21/2005 12:32:09 PM PDT by Woodstock
A grand jury has indicted an Elkton man on a murder charge, six weeks after police found his emaciated wife dead in a bedroom amidst squalid conditions.
John Joseph Dougherty, 53, faces a second-degree murder charge in the indictment, handed up last week after the grand jury heard new evidence against him.
Dougherty already faced manslaughter and abuse charges in an indictment handed up March 17. The new indictment, unsealed yesterday, included those charges and added the murder charge.
Dougherty is accused of causing his wife's death by keeping her locked in a bedroom for six years without access to basic food, water and hygiene. Police found his wife, Mary Elizabeth Kilrain, dead on a mattress Feb. 25, surrounded by moldy food and her own excrement. She weighed just 81 pounds.
Dougherty is free on $350,000 bail.
Cecil County State's Attorney Christopher J. Eastridge presented new evidence to the grand jury after the medical examiner's office completed an autopsy on Kilrain earlier this month.
The exact nature of the evidence Eastridge presented is not known, but the medical examiner ruled Kilrain's death a homicide, according to sources familiar with the autopsy results, and Eastridge said recently he planned to review the autopsy to determine if new charges were warranted.
The autopsy, normally available to the public, is not being released because it is part of an ongoing investigation, the medical examiner's office said. The state's attorney declined to comment further on the case last week.
Dougherty kept his wife locked in the bedroom after she suffered a brain aneurysm in 1999 and began berating their three daughters, according to court papers. Kilrain, 46, was only fed and bathed sporadically, according to police, and sometimes banged on the walls of her bedroom with a cane.
Dougherty called police to the home when his youngest daughter found her mother dead after trying to give her a drink of water, according to court papers, and later admitted to investigators that he neglected her basic needs.
Dougherty also had a live-in girlfriend when his wife died. Kathleen Marie Zeman, 32, who lived at the home with her two sons for at least a month before Kilrain's death, faces an abuse charge in the case. She doesn't face any new charges.
The pair dated for years before Kilrain's death, according to court papers.
Zeman is free on $125,000 bond. Zeman's attorney filed papers asking a judge to lower Zeman's bail, which was set while she still faced a more serious manslaughter charge. That charge was dropped when Zeman was indicted.
A hearing on the bail request hasn't been scheduled yet.
Dougherty is scheduled to be arraigned May 23 in circuit court. Zeman is set to appear May 5.
Dougherty's children, ages 10, 13 and 16, and Zeman's children, ages 9 and 14, are in foster care under the supervision of the county social services department.
He should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The children should not have been given back to the man who murdered their mother. That's illogical.
The way I read that line, it wasn't the husband that was beratting the children, but the mother.
It was the mother. Pardon my intrusion in your post to another.
I guess we can ignore that he had a girlfriend on the side
< /sarcasm>
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