A North Little Rock man who fatally burned his girlfriend was sentenced to life in prison Wednesday after a Pulaski County jury rejected his claim that he had meant only to hurt the 38-year-old woman, not kill her.
Jessie Renee "Nana" McFadden suffered burns over 90 percent of her body, including her throat, and died from a combination of those injuries and suffocating on inhaled smoke -- hours after police found her in the driveway of her home, still conscious and able to speak, burned almost beyond human recognition.
Prosecutors said she was attacked after trying to break up with the defendant, 47-year-old Matthew Wayne Nichols, and she intended to change the door locks at the Water Street home he shared with her. Nichols said he was mad at McFadden for taunting him about being with another man, so he tried to disfigure her.
The eight men and four women convicted Nichols of capital murder Wednesday after about an hour of deliberations. Jurors could have chosen lesser charges of first-degree murder, second-degree murder or manslaughter.
The verdict required Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen to impose a life sentence since the death penalty had been waived at the request of the woman's family. Nichols accepted his fate without obvious reaction.
The father of five had tearfully apologized to the woman's family during his testimony Tuesday in what prosecutors called "alligator tears."
The judge concluded the three-day trial Wednesday by offering his condolences to McFadden's family and acknowledging the brutal nature of her murder.
"The death of anyone is always a tragedy," Griffen said. "The court hopes the trial did not compound your grief although the court recognizes it was a difficult proceeding for everyone."
Jurors were shown autopsy photographs, called "gruesome" by the judge in a pretrial hearing, that showed that the woman suffered burns that removed strips of her skin and charred, blistered and melted most of her flesh. Medical intervention required doctors to slice into her skin to ease swelling associated with her burns.
In that hearing, Griffen rebuffed a motion by the defense to keep jurors from seeing eight autopsy photographs. The lawyers argued that the photographs were so graphic that they would kindle so much sympathy in jurors as to prevent Nichols from receiving a fair trial.
But the judge, saying the photographs were so graphic they could prompt an accidental emotional outburst from spectators, restricted how the photographs would be shown in court so they would not be easily seen by the audience.
A neighbor, Angela Yielding, described seeing Nichols pouring gas on a "figure" that she didn't immediately recognize as human. That person made "an awful noise," Yielding testified, describing the sound as a "squelch or a scream" as the flames rose.
Yielding grew so distraught during her testimony that she became overcome with emotion and started struggling to breathe until she was calmed by the judge before continuing her testimony.
"[McFadden] was barely recognizable as a person," said the first police officer to arrive, Jeffrey Elenbass, describing how he found her naked and gasping at the foot of her driveway. "There wasn't anything I could do. She could barely muster out the words, 'I can't breathe.'"
In closing arguments Tuesday, chief deputy prosecutor John Johnson and co-counsel Jeanna Sherrill called Nichols a "liar" who told a self-serving story that was contradicted by the testimony of every other witness.
Johnson asked jurors to remember how Nichols didn't cry, despite the brutality of the photographs.
"Not a single time did he cry until he got on the stand and started crying for himself," the prosecutor told jurors. "He said she hurt him [emotionally] 'right down to his shoes.' But what did he do to her? He said he wants you to believe he just set her on fire just to hurt her real bad."
Johnson said jurors shouldn't believe Nichols' assertion that the woman, while burning, was able to get into the shower and put out the flames. Showing them a photograph of the melted and soot-stained fixture, Johnson said the bathtub would not be dry if Nichols was telling the truth.
"The reason it looks like this is, it's another point of ignition," he said. "The only hope she has is, the water that's coming out of the shower, and he's followed her into the shower" and set her on fire again.
Nichols' lawyers asked jurors to convict him of lesser charges, saying that what the man had done was at most a deliberate act that he knew could kill her, second-degree murder, or an act so reckless as to be manslaughter. Attorneys Brett Qualls and Lott Rolfe IV said they knew jurors would convict him.
"He bared his heart to you. He bared his soul to you, and he bared his mind to you," Qualls said, reminding jurors that Nichols had divulged his convictions for drug dealing, theft and battery by taking the stand. "He told you the truth. You might not like Matthew Nichols. You certainly don't like what he did. But he's not on trial for being likeable. I'm going to ask that you decide this on the solid rock of evidence and the law."
Metro on 08/28/2014