By Eric Francis, Standard Correspondent
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — Jurors returned a pair of guilty verdicts late Thursday night for voluntary manslaughter and attempted second-degree murder against a South Royalton widow in connection with the 2011 double shooting in Bethel that left a drug dealer dead and nearly killed his teenage girlfriend.
Emily Perkins, 29, the mother of two young daughters, reacted in horror, covering her mouth with her hand and shaking after the jury foreman announced the verdicts following nearly 10 hours of deliberations.
Perkins, who had been out on substantial bail that her family had posted following her initial arrest in February 2014, was ordered held without bail and was whisked away to jail Thursday evening pending her sentencing hearing later this spring where she faces the potential of up to life in prison.
Perkins had testified that it was actually her deceased husband, Michael, who died of a brain tumor at the beginning of 2014 who’d been involved in the shootings at Scott Hill’s trailer on the morning of Nov. 8, 2011.
Much of Perkins’ defense revolved around a “confession letter” exonerating her that had purportedly been written and then largely forgotten about prior to her husband’s death and which surfaced in the hands of the defense team after Perkins’ arrest when it was reportedly discovered by her late husband’s best friend amongst his personal effects.
Prosecutors questioned both the authorship and the accuracy of the letter which they suggested had been concocted well after the shootings in an attempt to shield Perkins from the consequences of what they suggested was largely a robbery of prescription Percocet painkillers by Perkins carried out on the spur of the moment when she went to trade one of her husband’s handguns to Hill for pills.
In his closing argument on Thursday morning, Special Prosecutor Christopher Moll told the jury that it looked to him like the apparent evidence of a “violent struggle” at the scene, a scenario which played a central role in the supposed confession letter, was actually the result of the badly wounded Jozefiak struggling on the floor of the tiny dining nook in Hill’s trailer.
Moll pointed out that Jozefiak, who survived for three days on the floor before she was discovered lying only a couple of feet from Hill’s body and airlifted to the hospital, was still capable of slight uncoordinated movements even though one entire side of her body had been paralyzed by a bullet that had burrowed deep into her brain.
Over the course of those nearly 72 hours, Moll suggested, Jozefiak could have knocked over the chairs and shoved the kitchen table a few feet while she was making those kinds of agonized movements even as her injured brain was swelling dangerously inside her skull. Jozefiak would eventually spend months undergoing rehabilitative therapy to learn to walk and talk once again although she has testified during the trial that her memory stops at the point she and Hill sat down to play a game of cribbage on the morning of the shooting.
“We know that movement was with great difficulty, but she was moving everything she could,” Moll theorized, saying it appeared that ultimately “she got stuck in the corner like a wind-up toy. She couldn’t back up.”
Moll suggested that the cribbage cards police found all across the floor were actually dropped by Hill when he was shot and then later moved in clumps by Jozefiak’s legs over time as she crawled slowly over them for hours.
“These cards weren’t strewn,” Moll argued to the jurors, “They were pushed millimeter-by-millimeter over the course of three days by Emma Jozefiak.”
Much of the rest of Moll’s closing argument focused down on the hour between a pair of text messages, the last one ever sent by Hill which asked if Perkins was on her way to his trailer and one from Perkins’ phone to a group of her friends announcing she had a bunch of Percocet pills for sale, that became the”`bookends” for the time period in which the shooting had to have taken place.
While defense attorneys had argued there was still time for Emily Perkins to have left Hill alive at the trailer and for Michael Perkins to have arrived after she’d left and then carried out the shootings, Moll stridently presented a timeline based on texts and witness accounts which he said would have made it impossible for Michael to have been there when Emily Perkins and the confession letter said he was.
The lone survivor reacted with glee and relief Thursday night after the jury returned its verdict against Perkins.
“I’m so happy! This probably won’t even sink in until I’m home,” Jozefiak beamed as she made the rounds hugging family members, friends, Prosecutor Moll and a detective. “My heart’s been racing, my hands have been shaking,” she noted.
Asked if she felt justice had been done so many years after she was shot, an event she testified earlier in the trial that she does not remember and which left her with a bullet permanently lodged deep in her brain, Jozefiak exclaimed, “Oh god yes.”