Former boyfriend of convicted murderer Julia Enright seeking to toss perjury evidence

WORCESTER — Jonathan Lind, the man charged with helping Julia Enright hide the body of the man she murdered in an Ashburnham treehouse in 2018 , asked a judge to exclude key evidence against him Wednesday, alleging his rights were violated before he testified to a grand jury.

“It (was) a perjury trap,” Kevin C. Larson, Lind’s lawyer, alleged in Worcester Superior Court regarding authorities’ actions surrounding his client’s testimony at an October 2018 grand jury.

Lind is the former boyfriend of Enright, the former Ashburnham phlebotomist and dominatrix serving a life sentence for the murder of her ex-boyfriend, Brandon Chicklis of Westminster.

Authorities told jurors at Enright’s high-profile 2021 trial that Lind helped her dump Chicklis’ body off the side of a highway in New Hampshire after she stabbed him to death inside a treehouse she’d outfitted with restraints near her home.

The case featured a glut of unsettling evidence, including writings in which Enright alluded to being "turned on" by what happened, a sketch she did of a woman disemboweling a person who'd been restrained and evidence she tried to bribe Planned Parenthood to release to her a fetus she had aborted.

Enright, during testimony in which she claimed self-defense, implicated Lind in helping her move Chicklis’ body . Prosecutors argued the evidence showed she had a fascination with death and had committed the crime as a "surprise" for Lind, with whom she'd engaged in violence-themed sex acts.

Prosecutors at trial suggested Lind did not welcome the surprise and helped her move Chicklis' body to New Hampshire, where it decayed for weeks on the side of Route119 before being found by a family drawn to a smell .

Lind invoked his Fifth Amendment rights shortly before trial and did not testify. Shortly after Enright was convicted, prosecutors indicted him on charges of accessory after the fact, perjury, misleading police and illegally conveying a human body.

Larson, at a 2021 court proceeding, argued authorities “sat on” the charges for years because the evidence was weak , and called Enright’s testimony “self-serving.”

Role reversal in arguments

However, in court documents and arguments Wednesday, Larson and prosecutors engaged in a role reversal of sorts, with Larson at times highlighting potential strengths of the authorities’ case and prosecutors' at times potential weaknesses.

That’s because Larson, while not conceding his client’s guilt, is alleging that prosecutors violated Lind’s rights by not informing him of his rights against self-incrimination before his testimony in front of a grand jury probing Enright in October 2018.

Larson alleges that authorities, before Lind’s testimony to the grand jury, knew from cellphone evidence they’d gathered that, if he testified consistently with interviews he gave them in preceding months, he would be committing perjury.

Larson said authorities in October 2018 already had ample evidence that Lind’s cellphone traveled to the property near Enright’s home on June 23, 2018 — the day of the murder — as well as to the area in Rindge, New Hampshire, that night and following day where Chicklis' body and car were eventually discovered.

Larson argued that authorities, after Lind cut short voluntary questioning about the whereabouts of his cellphone June 23 and June 24, placed what amounted to a “perjury trap” by calling him to the grand jury.

Based on an affidavit from Lind and testimony from his mother, Larson argued authorities served Lind with notice to appear in front of the grand jury with just 12 hours’ notice, and that police and prosecutors, when he showed up, told him he didn’t need a lawyer.

'Large intimidating men'

Lind’s mother, Jennifer Jones, testified at a hearing May 13 that police dismissed a query she made about a lawyer, and that “large intimidating men” pulled him away for questioning before his grand jury testimony, official courtroom audio obtained by the Telegram & Gazette shows.

One of the investigators on the case who questioned Lind and met with him before his grand jury testimony, State Trooper Shawn Murphy, testified May 13 that he didn't recall Lind or his mother asking about a lawyer.

Murphy said if Lind had asked about a lawyer, that would have been handled by the assistant district attorney who was present, Terry McLaughlin.

In court Wednesday and in a written motion, Assistant District Attorney Shayna Woodard argued Jones was not a credible witness, arguing her testimony was inconsistent on cross-examination.

In court papers, Woodard argued that Lind, contrary to his lawyer’s assertion, was not a target or potential target of the investigation at the time of his grand jury testimony — something case law requires him to be informed of.

Larson noted in court papers that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has held that if a prosecutor has a reason to believe a witness called to a grand jury is either a target or is likely to become one, the witness must be told that they can refuse to answer a question if a truthful answer would tend to incriminate them, and that anything they do or say can be used against them in a future legal proceeding.

He argued that Lind, during his grand jury testimony, made both incriminating statements and statements that formed the basis of his perjury charge — an outcome he argued prosecutors could have foreseen.

Woodard, while not disputing that Lind wasn’t given a “target” warning, argued that he was not at that point a target or potential target, saying that he gave investigators plausible enough explanations that might explain the movements of his phone.

She further argued that Massachusetts courts have not accepted the “perjury trap” as legal doctrine, and that none of the cases Larson cited protect Lind for lying under oath.

“Even if the defendant was a target of the grand jury investigation — which the Commonwealth does not concede — he is not absolved from committing a separate offense of perjury,” she wrote.

The Superior Court judge hearing Lind’s motion, Karin Bell, asked numerous questions of both sides Wednesday, including multiple questions to Woodard about the evidence they had on Lind before his grand jury testimony.

“How is he not reasonably likely to become a target as an accessory to murder?” Bell asked, noting that prosecutors, before his testimony, had GPS evidence tying Lind's cellphone to the area of the crime, the area where Chicklis’ body was found, and the area where Chicklis’ abandoned car was found.

Info not necessarily enough

Woodard argued that the information, while “suspicious,” was not necessarily enough absent Enright's testimony. She, during the course of arguments, noted that Lind had told investigators he may have given out his phone to others and might have traveled to New Hampshire to get cigarettes.

Woodard also argued the questions to Lind at the grand jury were focused on Enright and their relationship, and noted that Lind wasn’t arrested until Enright testified years later.

The rationale behind the decision not to charge Lind earlier is one authorities have not detailed publicly. Bell did not ask about the time delay between the murder and the charge directly, though on May 13, in posing a legal hypothetical, she asked Larson: “What if, at the time they put your client at the grand jury, they had no — knowing everything they knew, they had no intention of charging him, but once publicly Ms. Enright testified as to his role they, for a variety of reasons, felt they had no choice, and at that point decided they were going to charge him?”

The question was asked in the context of ferreting out a legal standard that should be applied in the case. Larson responded that, in his view, the standard wouldn’t be impacted by the answer to the question, and Woodard declined to add anything to the discussion at that point.

A spokesperson for Worcester District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr.’s office noted Wednesday office generally does not comment on ongoing cases outside of court.

Larson told the T&G after the hearing he couldn’t speculate on the reason prosecutors did not charge Lind until after Enright's trial.

Even if grand jury testimony were excluded from evidence in Lind’s case, prosecutors could still move forward with him on most of the charges, including accessory to murder. The primary charge that would likely need to be dropped would be perjury, which carries the stiffest penalty he faces, of up to 20 years in prison.

While Lind is scheduled for trial Aug. 19, Larson asked for a continuance of that date Wednesday, saying that “recent” conversations with his client are likely to result in him having him evaluated for “criminal responsibility.”

Larson did not elaborate in court on the reason behind the statement, and Bell declined to delay the trial date, telling Larson to file any such requests in writing if needed.

According to state jury instructions, a person is not criminally responsible if, at the time of the crime, they had a "mental disease or defect" that made them unable to understand the criminality or wrongfulness of their conduct.

The defense, otherwise known as the insanity defense, is rarely successful.

Larson declined to comment on the topic of his client’s responsibility to the T&G. Lind declined a request for comment outside the courtroom as he left with his parents, directing comment to Larson.

Contact with Enright after arrest

According to past court proceedings, Lind maintained contact with Enright for years after her arrest.

Among a variety of evidence prosecutors presented at Enright’s trial were allegations that she and Lind engaged in sexual “blood play,” as well as evidence she texted him about a “surprise” and asked about whether one could blow bubbles in a “blood bath” in the days before Chicklis’ murder.

In response to a question about Lind Wednesday, Larson told the T&G he believes Lind to be a “victim” of Enright’s. Asked to elaborate, he said more information would come out in court.

Bell is slated to deliver a ruling on the motion to suppress the grand jury testimony within 30 days.

Family members of Chicklis, as they have done throughout Enright and Lind’s court proceedings, attended Wednesday’s hearing. They did not wish to comment.

At Enright’s sentencing , they described Chicklis as a longtime Boy Scout who lived up to the credo of that organization by living with honor and integrity .

Enright, convicted of second-degree murder, will be eligible for parole after 25 years, the maximum time allowable under statute.

The second-degree verdict was a sign, experts told the T&G, that jurors, while rejecting Enright's self-defense claim, did not wholly adopt either side's version of events.

They noted juries can sometimes come to "compromise verdicts" if opposing views can't be harmonized; the T&G reached out to all 12 jurors by phone or at their homes in the days after the verdict, but none agreed to comment.

Contact Brad Petrishen at brad.petrishen@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @BPetrishenTG.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Former boyfriend of convicted murderer Julia Enright seeking to toss perjury evidence