After 20 years, an arrest in Megan McDonald's murder: Inside the hunt for a killer
MIDDLETOWN, New York — Her megawatt grin has beamed from reward posters and billboards along New York State Route 17 for years.
Megan McDonald.
For 20 years, she has been the focus of rumor, theory and speculation in Orange County and beyond.
Who killed Megan McDonald?
State Police bristled when her 2003 bludgeoning death was called a cold case. They had filing-cabinet drawers brimming with interviews and evidence. They had interviewed and re-interviewed witnesses and people of interest. There was nothing cold about this case, they insisted.
But years became two decades, and by the time the media was summoned to a press conference at the Troop F barracks on Crystal Run Road in Middletown on Thursday, April 20, Megan McDonald had been dead 7,343 days, almost as long as the 7,622 days she had been alive.
State Police put out the word in late morning: An arrest. After 20 years. A name.
Edward V. Holley, a former boyfriend.
Motive, rage, murder
Holley was the man who sold McDonald marijuana and said he smoked it with her daily, according to the felony complaint State Police Investigator Michael Corletta drafted, the document charging him with her second-degree murder.
Edward V. Holley did intend to cause the death of another person, Megan McDonald, and he did in fact cause the death of such person.
It took 20 years, but the State Police amassed 17 pages of witnesses and connections they say connects Holley to McDonald, a timeline of conversations and circumstances leading to her lifeless, beaten body being discovered off Bowser Road in the town of Wallkill on March 15, 2003.
It pieces together the final days of McDonald's life.
The 20-year-old was living in a new apartment, had a new boyfriend and a job as a waitress. She was earning money and had extra income in the form of her detective-father's pension. But also in the picture was Edward Holley, her marijuana supplier and former boyfriend. She'd lent him money. He hadn't repaid it. She'd broken it off days before she was killed.
There was motive, Corletta wrote. There was rage. There was murder.
A cellphone, rage, DNA
Major Paul M. DeQuarto, the Troop F commander, commended the initial investigators for painstakingly collecting evidence at the crime scene and archiving it. Crime-fighting technology evolved, he said, making it possible to analyze the evidence with more accuracy and sensitivity.
"State Police investigators early on had a vision and a foresight to secure, gather and test certain items of evidence in this investigation with the utilization of modern technology," DeQuarto said. "That foresight has paid off tremendously."
Among the technological breaks in the case was heightened DNA analysis of McDonald's cellphone, found in her car on March 17, 2003.
In June 2021, State Police Investigator Brad Natalizio — who worked for six years on the case — got the Cybergenetics TrueAllele computer analysis of DNA that identified Holley's and McDonald's DNA on the phone.
The police narrative used that information to paint a picture of what happened in McDonald's car.
"It is likely that Holley went through the victim's cellphone and observed the victim's outgoing call to (the victim's ex-boyfriend), causing Holley to go into a rage."
A deviation from the normal, a defiant suspect
As much as the case turned on evidence and emerging technology, there were unusual elements leading to Thursday's announcement.
For one thing, police already had Holley in custody. He was in the Orange County jail on a drug charge. To arrest him, State Police had to get a court order to release Holley to them. He was brought to the Troop F barracks and troopers wheeled him out in a wheelchair in front of the media to be transported to city of Middletown court for his arraignment.
Holley, 42, bearded and wearing an orange jail jumpsuit, denied a role in McDonald's death.
"They're parading me out here like some freaking monkey out here, but it's all good," he said. Asked what he had to say, he offered, "I'm definitely not guilty."
Minutes later, dozens of officers, officials and the McDonald family gathered around a podium flanked by two oversized photographs: the girl with the megawatt smile and the man in the orange jail jumpsuit.
A missing district attorney
Absent from the tableau was Orange County District Attorney David Hoovler. Usually, the district attorney would be front and center at such a press conference, talking about the case their office would be making in court, crediting the police for their role in bringing the suspect in.
But Hoovler said in a statement later that while his office had worked closely with Troop F investigators to build the case against Holley, the arrest had come as a surprise, that his office had been told an arrest would not take place without his office being notified. As it turned out, Hoovler's office only learned of the arrest after the fact.
Typically, a case is presented to a grand jury, which hands up an indictment, a suspect is arrested and arraigned. Instead, Holley was taken from jail, delivered to the custody of State Police, arrested, and then taken to the City of Middletown Court to be arraigned. The grand jury will next consider the case.
It's more than a matter of custom, Hoovler said in the statement. An arrest starts the clock ticking for the grand jury, which has six days to vote an indictment or the defendant must be released. Cold cases like McDonald's, he said, can often be complicated and take extra time to present to the grand jury.
At the press conference, asked about the missing Hoovler, Capt. Joe Kolek, Troop F investigations commander, said tersely: "We communicate with all district attorneys that we work with. And this case was no exception."
An argument over money
In the felony complaint, Corletta wrote that McDonald and Holley had had a physical relationship that broke off in the days before her murder in a dispute about money.
McDonald had loaned Holley money to buy a car and wasn't paying her back. He told friends it was $300. She told friends it was $3,000. Megan was working for her money, as a waitress at the American Cafe in the Galleria, the kind of server whose personality made customers happy they were seated in her section.
But the money she had loaned Holley was different money. It was from her dad's police pension. Dennis McDonald had died in early 2002, a retired NYPD homicide detective whose pension benefit gave Megan an extra $1,250 a month.
She and Holley had argued and went days without speaking, the complaint suggests, and she had ended their relationship on March 11.
But there was another relationship they had: Holley supplied McDonald with marijuana.
On the night she was killed, still angry with Holley, she had tried unsuccessfully to buy marijuana from several other people. She had twice driven to a friend's home on Greenway Terrace and was invited to a party inside, but she knew Holley was there and wanted to avoid him.
As the night wore on, though, she picked up another friend, who sat in the passenger seat of Megan's Mercury Sable as she drove. Before long, the complaint's narrative suggests, her desire for marijuana was stronger than her anger at Holley. She reached out.
'Loudest car in town'
The car that McDonald's loan had financed was a purple 1990 Honda Civic hatchback. Its previous owner had outfitted it with a sound system that made it the "loudest car in town."
That was the car that circled the Kensington Manor apartment complex twice on the night she vanished. A witness, drawn to the window by the deafening music after midnight, recalled seeing it following McDonald's Mercury.
The police narrative then suggests that McDonald drove with the friend in the front seat and Holley in the back seat to a remote field off Bowser Road in the town of Wallkill where Holley bludgeoned McDonald from behind with a blunt object.
The damage inflicted to McDonald's head and face was "overkill," the narrative says, an "expressive homicide," an extreme physical attack whose fundamental characteristic is "an intimate personal relationship between the victim and offender."
The beginning of the end
Elizabeth McDonald sat silently at the press conference in the warm spring air. She clutched her cane, her sons, son-in-law and surviving daughter, Karen, close by.
She had buried her husband and, 13 months later, her daughter. A detective's wife knows her share of worry, as does a mother of four.
Elizabeth McDonald didn't speak at the press conference. Karen McDonald Whalen and her husband, James, would do the talking.
"We are here for our sweet Megan," Karen said through tears. "Today, the police have given us the gift of the beginning of the end. For 20 years, we have looked forward to a time where we can celebrate Megan's life and honor her memory without wondering who ended her life and where that monster is. We now have those answers. The monster has a face and a name, and he is in jail where he belongs.
"We look forward to the day when all of this is behind us. We want to end with a message that has always been our goal to finally be able to tell the story of the beautiful life she lived and not simply how she died. Thanks to the police, we have the beginning of the end."
The detective's widow sat silently. She had waited for this day, waited 20 years for justice for her girl with the megawatt grin. She'd done countless interviews, begged for witnesses to come forward, spoken about the possibility of a reward.
On Thursday, patience was its own reward.
Reach Peter D. Kramer at pkramer@gannett.com.