Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
On May 5, 2004, a group on a fishing trip was out on the water near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, off Virginia Beach, when they came across a suitcase.
It was a dark green Kenneth Cole, the kind you would wheel through any airport. One of the men thought it must have blown off a car on the bridge.
There was a boy on board, and he wanted to see what was inside.
Inside were black garbage bags. Inside the bags were human remains.
On May 11, a second suitcase turned up. On May 16, a third. They matched. It was a set, and together the three bags held the body of one man. He had been shot twice, in the head and in the chest.
Virginia Beach police had no name for him. So they had a sketch of his face made and put it on the local news.
“Well, I’m a single mom now”
A woman named Sue Rice saw the sketch on television and thought she knew that face. There was a red mark on it that she recognized. She pushed her husband, John, to call Crime Stoppers.
Fingerprints from an old reckless driving arrest in the 1980s settled it.
The man in the suitcases was William “Bill” McGuire, 39. He was a Navy veteran and a computer programmer who also taught at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He lived in Woodbridge, New Jersey, about 250 miles from where he was found. He had two small sons.
He also had a wife, Melanie, 31, a nurse at a fertility clinic in Morristown.
Bill’s friends already knew he was missing. Weeks earlier, his sister Cindy had called John Rice. “John, is Billy there?” she asked. Melanie had told the family that the couple had argued and Bill had left.
After the body was identified, John spoke to Melanie. This is what she told him.
“Well, I’m a single mom now.”
The story she told
Melanie’s account was simple, and she had given it under oath.
On April 28, 2004, the McGuires closed on a new house. That evening Bill called friends to tell them. During the night, she said, they argued. He struck her, for the first time ever. Then he walked out.
On April 30 she stood in front of a judge in family court and testified to it. She said she did not know where her husband was. She got a temporary restraining order against him.
There was one more thing that made it look as if Bill was still out there. In the early hours of May 2, she later told his sister and a detective, a call from his cell phone showed up on the caller ID at the apartment. By the time police told her he was dead, she had filed for divorce, moved out of the apartment and given away his clothes.
There were reasons to look elsewhere. On June 4, police found Bill’s Nissan Maxima in a tow yard in Atlantic City. Security video showed it being left at the Flamingo Motel, though not who was driving. Bill gambled heavily, and Atlantic City was where he went to do it. Her lawyers would later lean hard on that, and on talk of mob ties.
And she was small. Bill stood 6-foot-3 and weighed 210 pounds. Police searched the apartment and found no trace of a shooting.
In the fall of 2004, Virginia handed the case to the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office. Investigators looked at the computer from the McGuires’ apartment, and at what had been typed into it in the weeks before Bill vanished.
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