White River Junction
Perkins took the stand on Tuesday and told jurors her now-deceased husband, Michael, shot and killed Scott Hill, 48, and wounded Emma Jozefiak, then 19, at Hill’s Bethel trailer on Nov. 8, 2011. Michael Perkins would have told police that same story if he had known his wife was in jeopardy of being charged, she testified.
“He never would have allowed this to happen,” Perkins said.
He would tell her, “I won’t let you burn for this.”
Michael Perkins never got the chance, however; police arrested Emily Perkins on Feb. 6, 2014, two weeks after her husband succumbed to brain cancer.
“They charged me after he was dead,” a tearful Perkins said.
Authorities initially charged Perkins with attempted second-degree murder in connection with Jozefiak’s wounds. Prosecutors charged her with the second-degree murder of Hill just days before the trial started on March 11.
“Emily, did you shoot Scott Hill?” lead defense attorney Devin McLaughlin asked Perkins on Tuesday.
“No, I did not,” the soft-spoken Perkins said.
“Did you shoot Emma Jozefiak?” he asked.
“No, I did not,” she said.
In a series of interviews in the months after the shooting, Perkins gave police an ever-shifting account of her involvement in the shooting — including telling them at one point that she shot Jozefiak after Jozefiak shot Hill.
She testified Tuesday that she made up the stories to protect her terminally ill husband from the police investigation. The couple had two children; their eldest daughter turned 8 on Tuesday. By misdirecting, she could afford them more time with their father.
“There are three people in this world that mean more to me than anyone else,” Perkins said. “Michael was one of them, and the other two needed him.”
From the stand, Perkins denied any involvement in the shooting, and told jurors she knew only what little her husband told her, which included where Hill and Jozefiak were positioned after they were shot: Hill was dead on the floor and Jozefiak was dead at the kitchen table .
At one point, Michael Perkins asked his wife if she thought he was a “murderer,” Perkins said.
When she replied “no,” he said, “that’s all you need to know,” she testified.
On cross-examination, lead prosecutor Christopher Moll touched on discrepancies between what Perkins told police over multiple interviews and what she testified to in court Tuesday.
Moll pressed Perkins on how she obtained the details about the crime scene she told police about in those interviews, details that Moll said could only have been known by someone who had been at the scene.
An example, he said, was Perkins telling police the trailer smelled of urine. (Earlier in the trial, a police investigator testified the smell of ammonia in the trailer was overwhelming when Hill and Jozefiak were discovered three days after the shooting.)
“How would you know that?” Moll asked.
“That’s what I had heard afterwards,” Perkins said.
Several of Moll’s questions to Perkins centered around the .22-caliber pistol Perkins gave Hill as collateral for a Percocet pill on the day before the shooting occurred.
On the day of Michael Perkins’ only police interview, Jan. 26, 2012, Emily Perkins told police she had reason to believe the weapon used in the shooting was the couple’s pistol.
What made her believe that, she testified, was Michael Perkins made a comment to her that police wouldn’t be able to “trace anything,” such as bullets, back to the gun. Worried about Michael’s involvement at that point and thinking the police may link the gun to them anyway, she spoke up, she said.
By doing so, Moll said, she directly connected the couple to the shooting.
“Didn’t you think that would place Michael in more danger?” Moll asked.
“No, sir, I did not,” Perkins said. “I was throwing my arms in front of Michael and the police.”
The same day police spoke to her husband, they also interviewed Emily Perkins twice. In those interviews, she rarely disputed having been at Hill’s trailer on the day of the shooting.
On Tuesday, Perkins testified she went to the trailer around 10 a.m. to pay Hill for a Percocet pill she had gotten the prior day and retrieve the gun. While there, she asked Hill if he would keep the gun in exchange for more pills. He accepted the offer, but told her to come back later when another individual at his house had left, she testified.
When she returned a short time later, she said, Hill met her in the driveway with five more pills for the gun, then “all of the sudden” pushed her up against her car and put his hand up her shirt.
“I don’t make deals like this; You’re going to owe me a lot more than just a gun,” Hill said, according to Perkins.
Perkins said the gun went off in the driveway, startling both her and Hill, so she dropped it on the ground, jumped in her car and rushed home. When she arrived, she testified, she told Michael about her encounter with Hill. (Jozefiak and another young women testified at the start of the trial that although they had sex-for-drugs arrangements with Hill, he never forced himself on them.)
“You could see him flair up,” she said of her husband. “He said I’m going to take a drive.”
About an hour later, Michael Perkins came back home with a bottle of pills and said “you don’t need to worry about Scott any more,” Perkins said.
In a disputed confession letter purportedly written by Michael Perkins, the writer said Hill needed to “pay for what he tried to do to you,” but that killing him hadn’t been the plan.
Perkins testified that she didn’t know about the letter until April 2014, when a friend of Hill’s brought it forward. Perkins said the handwriting in the letter was her husband’s. It was addressed “Hun” and signed “Your Husband,” which were signature trademarks of Michael’s, she said.
A defense expert who did a handwriting analysis on the letter couldn’t conclude whether Michael Perkins wrote it because she didn’t have sufficient writing samples with which to compare it. Perkins said her trailer was cleaned out while she was incarcerated after her 2014 arrest and most paperwork was thrown away.
“It was Michael’s handwriting,” she testified.
Perkins said she had mixed emotions about the letter.
“Initially, I was so angry because he just left me in this sh–,” Perkins said. “But I found some relief in knowing it was not intentional. I never wanted to believe it was intentional.”
Michael Perkins had the final of three brain surgeries in August 2012. Less than 18 months later, he was in hospice care and he died on Jan. 23, 2014.
By the time his health began to rapidly decline in late 2013, Perkins testified, the couple hadn’t heard from police since March 2012. Moll asked Perkins why she didn’t call the police so her husband could tell them what really happened, even if it was from his deathbed.
“It was nearly two years later,” Perkins said. “That was not our focus.”
When Perkins stepped down after about four hours of testimony, the prosecution recalled Jozefiak to the stand.
She testified to jurors she had seen Perkins inside Hill’s trailer multiple times to execute drug deals, contradicting Perkins’ testimony that said she had never made a transaction inside.
The defense rested Tuesday afternoon. Attorneys are scheduled to give closing arguments beginning at 9 a.m. today.
Jordan Cuddemi can be reached at jcuddemi@vnews.com or 603-727-3248.