“I’m glad he’s gone”
Around the 32-minute mark the tone changes. “I’m sorry I did it, but I didn’t know what to do. I panicked.”
Two minutes later she talks about the months in between: “lying to my kids, and it’s hard.” Then, at 34:43: “But the last twenty four years has been a big burden to me too, and I’m just relieved he’s out of my life. I mean, I hate to say that, but I’m glad he’s gone.”
At 37:19 she tells the detectives: “I hate guns. I don’t like guns.” Asked whether she had ever fired one before that morning, she says: “Nope.” She explains that she had ordered a gun and ammunition online, cancelled the gun, and was stuck with the bullets: “I couldn’t cancel the ammunition because ammunition sales are final online.” So she bought a revolver to match them.
Did she ever think she might kill her husband? “No. Actually, I thought maybe I might kill myself before I would kill him,” she says at 39:30. Then: “It came down to that morning it’s me or him. And it was really a last minute decision for me, to be honest with you.”
At 41:19: “Well, the sad part is I knew no one was gonna miss him.”
At 46:45 a detective tells her she will be charged. “That’s fine,” she says. When he mentions a lawyer, she answers: “I’ve already confessed everything anyway.”
Near the end, asked whether she plans to harm herself, she talks about Howie. “Unfortunately, because of me, yeah. I took his father away from him.” She asks for water, and a detective leaves to fetch some. As the interview wraps up, the detectives tell her she can keep a card with her in jail. “Mine’s an easy name, Larry Brown,” one of them says.
Where her account clashes with the evidence
The detectives in this room had known about the case for less than six hours. Over the following weeks, Detective Jason Kline and his colleagues pulled phone records, bank records, emails and employment files. Several things she said on this tape did not hold up.
She gave 6:28 a.m. twice, and a detective repeated it back to her. But according to the phone records in the case file, the first text from Howard’s phone to his supervisor (“Sorry man won’t be in today I am in the emergency room”) was sent at 6:20 a.m., eight minutes before the time she gave for the first shot.
She first said she had texted his boss that he had quit. The records show a series of hospital messages that day, starting with that 6:20 a.m. text.
She said she bought the gun “probably a week or two before,” and later “within a week.” The receipt shows she paid cash for the revolver on June 9, four days before the shooting. The ammunition she had ordered online was delivered on June 8.
She called it “a last minute decision.” Detectives later found that a $30,000 Globe Life insurance policy on Howard had been applied for online on May 15, four weeks before he died, with Marcia as the beneficiary. She never mentioned it.
At 42:09 a detective suggests she “had all day” to think up a story before Howie got home, and she says “Yeah.” She did not mention that at 9 a.m., two and a half hours after the time she gave for the shooting, she sat down at Landmark Plastics to sign paperwork for a new job. The HR manager told a detective she did not seem upset in any way.
She described a few texts and a story about him leaving town. The records show much more: weeks of messages from Howard’s phone to his boss and his sons, a Facebook post in his name on July 31 asking people not to contact him, and a request from his email account to cash out his retirement fund. The pension paperwork went back in November with a signature that was not his.
None of the sons detectives interviewed backed her account of years of physical abuse. Howie told them he had never seen his father hit his mother. She told the detectives on this tape that she had never reported any abuse to police and never told her family he had hit her.
Asked how many times she fired, she said five, then “either four or five.” That night an X-ray at the medical examiner’s office showed four bullets in his head.
What happened to her
Marcia Eubank was charged with murder that night and booked into the Summit County Jail at 8:27 p.m.
On December 21, 2018, she pleaded guilty to murder with a firearm specification, tampering with evidence and abuse of a corpse. On February 8, 2019, Summit County Common Pleas Judge Kelly McLaughlin sentenced her to life in prison. She will be eligible for parole after 20 years.
Howard Eubank was 54. You can read the whole story, from the text Howie sent his mother to the signature on the pension papers, in our main article: Mom Pretended to Be Their “Missing” Dad for Six Months. Then Her Son Climbed Through a Window.
