Dancing on Her Grave (13 page)

Jason Griffith’s Trial by Fire

Friday, May 16, 2014, was a difficult day in court for Jason Griffith. He shed no tears, but the prosecution’s cross-examination of Griffith’s testimony lasted almost all day, exposing to the jury that the killer on trial had not been telling the whole story.

The prosecutor, district attorney Marc DiGiacomo, was unrelenting. He started off by asking, rhetorically: “You have no reason to fabricate to your friends, to your other girls? Statements about Debbie being crazy and not actually being truthful about the fact that you’re a coward as it relates to her, that you’re a liar as it relates to her, and all of those other things you said to her?” The defense raised an objection and the judge sustained it.

Marc DiGiacomo continued: “Let me rephrase. You are a liar, correct?” asked the prosecutor.

Griffith replied in the affirmative. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“And when you want something you are more than willing to lie about it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re more than willing to say ‘on my sons,’ this is true?” DiGiacomo already knew Griffith had two sons.

“If necessary, yes, I have done that.”

“Does this oath mean anything to you, sir?”

Griffith didn’t reply, as his attorney objected and the judge sustained it.

Jason Griffith had told the jury about the threatening note he’d found on his car, handwritten by Debbie. This note was a piece of evidence presented by his attorneys to portray him as a victim, not a murderer.

“
I will kill you before I let another bitch have you. I will find you wherever you hide. Love always, your Destiny
,” the note read.

Griffith apparently hadn’t counted on the prosecutor’s rebuttal. DiGiacomo was able to use text messages found synced from the defendant’s iPhone to his computer that showed Griffith knew in spring 2010 that the letter had actually been written by his roommate, Louis Colombo, and that it had been meant as a joke.

The text message from Louis said, “Are you still mad
at me? Like I said I didn’t mean to make you upset. I thought we’d be able to laugh about it. I didn’t think for a second that you’d think it was really her. The letter was so outrageous and in my handwriting. I’m really sorry it caused you grief.”

Griffith had replied to Louis with another text: “It wasn’t a funny joke at all. She had just said something like that on the phone.”

On the stand, Griffith seemed shaken by prosecutor DiGiacomo’s discovery, but he composed himself. “I took that note very seriously,” he stated on the stand. “I believed that she wrote it. As I said in the text message, she just said something like that on the phone. I had no reason to fabricate that at the time. She had just said something like that on the phone.” Griffith then turned to the jury.

“You are a coward, correct?” DiGiacomo said, now getting angry.

Griffith’s attorneys objected. “Sustained!” said Judge Delaney.

During an intense day of questioning, the prosecutors got Griffith to admit he’d still contacted Debbie for sex, even during the time she was supposedly harassing him. A portrait was beginning to emerge of Griffith as a sex addict.

“This woman, I’ve got to imagine, has been torturing
you since February or March 2010, who has finally left you alone for the better part of two weeks. You think it’s a good idea to Facebook her?” asked the prosecutor.

“It’s her birthday,” responded Griffith sheepishly.

DiGiacomo could barely hide a smirk. “Would you agree with me you were having sex with so many women you had to tell a lot of lies to keep it up?”

“No,” Griffith replied.

Prosecutors disagreed, producing text message records dating back several years that they said showed Griffith had lied to a lot of women, including a dancer named Agnes.

Griffith said that Agnes was his girlfriend when Debbie died, and that hours after Debbie’s death, he’d gone to a hotel to see Agnes.

“Did you tell Agnes [that] Debbie left town and that was why she was no longer in your life?” DiGiacomo asked.

“Never in that much detail,” Griffith replied. At this point, Griffith was lying. He had not yet told Agnes Roux that he had murdered Debbie.

Everyone who knew him said that Griffith had seemed okay, even happy in the days and weeks after Debbie’s disappearance. Prosecutors questioned him as to why witnesses would say that. Griffith claimed he’d just been keeping up appearances.

Switching tactics, prosecutor DiGiacomo asked Griffith
why he’d asked his roommate, Louis Colombo, to dismember Debbie’s body and store it.

“Why would you ask your best friend to dismember a body if he had nothing to do with the killing?” DiGiacomo asked.

“Nobody wanted to be a part of anything like that,” Griffith replied.

During the interviews with the police department, Griffith had also provided some contradictory information.

“As you sit here today, you can’t remember if trying to lie your way out of this to the police happened before or after you dismembered the body?” the prosecution pressed.

“I said, in relation to the days, so many things were happening, so many different trips to the store, and this and that, that I don’t remember what day was what in relation to the interview,” Griffith said.

The jury went home for the weekend, and Judge Kathleen Delaney instructed them not to discuss the case with anybody. The cross-examination would continue on Monday.

Celeste was overjoyed at the prosecutor’s cross-examination of Jason Griffith. She had been unusually silent on Facebook, perhaps understandably so, when Griffith had first taken the stand and answered his defense attorneys’ questions. It was not lost on the older sister that Griffith was fighting for his life, and might get away with a verdict of manslaughter, but now she crowed:

“District Attorney started cross-examining today, and all I can say is BOOM! Got him stuttering and nervous as they are calling out lies left and right nonstop. Thanking God for the awesome job the DA is doing on representing my Lil Sister Debbie Flores-Narvaez. Their strategy is untouchable!”

On Monday, May 19, 2014, it was a new, defiant, annoyed, and visibly tired Jason Griffith who appeared for his fourth day of questioning at the courthouse. He even rolled his eyes as the prosecutor kept on asking him the same questions in a different way.

Wearing a royal blue shirt and a black suit, Griffith sat through hours of questioning, maintaining he’d been afraid of Debbie.

“Certainly by the time you had your arms around her, you had the upper hand, considering your size?” asked the prosecutor.

“The only thing I did was restrain her,” Griffith insisted. “No banging, tossing, nothing like that, sir.”

“You’re telling the jury you held on to her long enough for her to die and you didn’t realize you were in the process of asphyxiating her?”

“She’s not gagging, not scratching. We fell backwards. I was talking to her,” he said.

“Are you willing to acknowledge you did nothing to save the life of Debbie Flores?”

“I was in shock, sir.”

“Are you willing to acknowledge not helping her?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Griffith replied.

“Thank you,” DiGiacomo said, satisfied with Griffith’s cold answer. The chief prosecutor had concluded his cross-examination.

The defense’s final witness was Griffith’s ex-girlfriend, Agnes Roux, a gorgeous woman in her midthirties with high cheekbones and auburn hair. Agnes was a dancer in another Cirque du Soleil extravaganza, and she testified that Debora Flores-Narvaez had been a violent woman who’d shown up everywhere the couple met to harass them. Agnes told the jurors how she’d witnessed Debbie push, slap, and spit on Jason Griffith. She recalled a time when Debbie showed up to the Mirage Hotel and Casino, waiting for her and Griffith in the parking lot.

“I’ve seen her spit on his face, and I’ve seen her slap him,” Agnes said. “She was harassing us, and she was getting crazier and crazier.”

Agnes testified that she had broken up with Griffith when she’d learned he was having an affair with Debbie, and that he was also sleeping with two other separate female fellow dancers from the Cirque du Soleil show
LOVE
. Before their breakup, Agnes had believed that she and Griffith had an exclusive and monogamous relationship. Now she would learn the truth.

Agnes also believed Griffith when he told her that Debbie was constantly stalking and harassing him. She was under the impression that his relationship with Debora had ended in May 2010. However, he continued to have sex with Debbie. Agnes Roux would slowly find out that Jason Griffith had lied to her, too.

Agnes described again how Debbie had pushed, slapped, and spit on Jason Griffith in the October 2010 incident while she yelled at him to tell Agnes the truth about their relationship. At one point, Debbie had begun to kick Griffith’s car door and Griffith grabbed her by the shoulders to move her. Agnes said Debbie fell to the ground; Griffith didn’t push her down. “Her fall seemed disproportionate” to how he’d grabbed her, Agnes recalled. Debbie then sat on the ground, crying, before Agnes helped her get up, she said.

Griffith was arrested and charged with coercion in the incident, but the case was later dropped. (Jason Griffith had appeared in court to testify as to the charges on December 22, 2010, but Debbie, of course, had not—since at that time, Debora had already been dead for more than a week.)

The jury also heard a recording of Agnes Roux calling 911 on Griffith’s behalf after an incident where Debora was in her car, chasing Griffith to his home.

Agnes testified that in early December 2010, not long before Debbie’s death, she and Jason Griffith had
considered reconnecting, but said that she told Griffith she wouldn’t get back together with him if he was still with Debbie and the two continued to have a sexual relationship.

“It was quite obvious she couldn’t be in the picture if I was back,” Agnes said.

So, according to prosecutor Michelle Fleck, Griffith took care of appearances.

Fleck later summed it up: “Debbie and Jason break up in June [2010]. Then Jason meets Agnes. Debbie slashes his car tires in June, and he films her admitting she did that. Finally, she walks away from him and wants nothing more to do with him, but on July 5th he texts her ‘Happy Birthday.’ And then they start a flirtation on the phone again. He asks her what she wants on her birthday. She talked about tennis shoes, and then he goes over to her place to give her money for the shoes and they have sex. And then, from July until October there are no incidents at all.”

Once Jason meets Agnes, he apparently needs to find a cover for her with Debbie, according to prosecutor Michelle Fleck. “So on October 3 he calls 911 while Agnes is in the car with him.” Fleck retraced the steps he took. “He says, ‘What can I do about my [ex] girlfriend? She’s harassing me.’ The dispatcher asks him, ‘When did this happen?’ ‘In June,’ he says. And the dispatcher asks him, ‘Why are you calling me now?’ So, from June till
the fall there are no problems. But then he calls 911 with Agnes in the car, to manipulate Agnes.”

Testimony from some of Debbie’s close friends has shown that their volatile relationship sparked into heated confrontation after Debbie Flores-Narvaez twice became pregnant and sought more attention from Griffith. He has said he became scared of her violent tendencies.

On cross-examination, prosecutor Michelle Fleck asked Agnes about the so-called threatening letter from Debbie that Griffith alleged to have found on his car, the letter that supposedly threatened Griffith with death if Debbie found him with another woman.

Fleck asked whether Agnes was aware that Griffith had learned four years ago that the note had actually been written by his roommate, Louis Colombo.

Agnes said she hadn’t known that.

Fleck then asked Agnes to recall whether, after she had dumped him for cheating on her, Griffith had become suicidal.

Agnes remembered telling police she did not necessarily believe he was suicidal. “‘I just believe he’s a great actor,’” she said she told police, now with an ironic look on her face.

Although Griffith had previously testified that Agnes Roux was “the love of his life,” now she did not even go visit him in jail.