≤br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Yesterday at 8 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Suitcase Killer: The Melanie McGuire Story, based on a true-crime story that took place in 2004 in Middletown Township, New Jersey. When the Lifetime version starts, Melanie State (Candice King) and Bill McGuire (hot stud-muffin Michael Roark) are working together at a fast-food counter where the work uniform is a singularly hideous blue plaid shirt, though both of them are working their way up. She’s attending nursing school and he’s studying to become a full-time professor – though we’re never told where or what subject he’s teaching. Melanie and Bill start a hot affair that includes him taking her to the big casinos in Atlantic City and telling her he’s going to release her “inner gambler.” Soon Melanie moves out of her parents’ home to live with Bill and he proposes marriage to her, though just before the wedding she gets a nocturnal visit from one of Bill’s ex-es, Marci Polsky (Hayley O’Connor), who tries to warn her off Bill. Marci tells Melanie that Bill is a compulsive gambler and womanizer, and also a domestic abuser, but of course Melanie doesn’t believe a word of it and the marriage goes ahead. Five years later, in 2004, Bill and Melanie have had two sons but their marriage is not a happy one: he’s constantly screaming at her, often for no apparent reason, and also dashing for days at a time to hang out at the casinos and share hot tubs with multiple women.
Bill also talks about moving to Virginia to be with his family, but Melanie thinks that’s a terrible idea because their jobs are in New Jersey – by now Bill is an adjunct professor on a tenure track and Melanie is a nurse at a fertility clinic. In fact, she even closes a deal to buy a house in New Jersey to tie up Bill’s money and make sure he can’t blow it all on gambling and women. Melanie finds a phone number for one of Bill’s alternate sex partners on a slip of paper in Bill’s pocket (back when people used to exchange phone numbers on paper instead of just entering them on their own phones), and then goes ballistic when the same woman shows up at Melanie’s fertility clinic asking to dnoate her eggs. No doubt believing that what’s sauce for the gander ought to be sauce for the goose as well, Melanie begins an affair with Dr. Brad Harris (Jackson Hurst), the staff doctor at the clinic, and he assures her that though he’s technically married he and his wife rre separated and in the process of getting divorced. The two get even hotter soft-core porn scenes than Melanie and Bill had – Bill and Brad (or the actors playing them) both have pecs to die for, which added to this film’s entertainment value for me – and things come to a head on the night Melanie wants to celebrate closing on their new home while Bill laments that that’s $500,000 he can’t gamble and whore away.
The accusations against Melanie are that she forged a doctor’s signature to obtain chloral hydrate, a knockout drug with which she spiked Bill’s wine; then she used a gun she had bought at a gun store in Pennsylvania and shot her husband twice in the head. Then she dragged his body and spent the next two days dismembering his corpse in their bathtub, packing the pieces in a set of designer luggage they owned, meticulously cleaning up to make sure there would be no traces of blood in their home, and as a final insult she loaded the suitcases containing her husband’s remains into her SUV and drove the 700 miles to Virginia Beach, Virginia, as if this was her final insult: “You wanted to move to Virginia Beach so bad? Well, here it is!” Alas for Melanie, she forgot to clean the residue off her shoes and so bits of human debris got tracked into her SUV, where police forensic examiners traced them through DNA and proved they’d been part of Bill’s body. In real life, the first suitcase found on the Virginia Beach shore was discovered by a family – a husband, wife and their two kids – but in the movie it’s discovered by a lone woman dressed way too scantily to be believable as a beachcomber, and wielding a metal detector.
What’s odd about this movie is that, though no writers are credited (either on the film itself or on imdb.com), whoever wrote the script seems to have had a hard time believing in Melanie’s guilt. Her defense was that Bill had been killed by Mob types to whom he owed money, and though the police got Dr. Brad Harris to turn against her and threatened to charge him as an accomplice, the phone calls he placed to her to try to get a confession out of her generated nothing of the sort, just continued protestations of her innocence. The writer(s) and casting director(s) pulled a curious trick with the casting of Patti Prezioso, the assistant district attorney for the state of New Jersey; the real Patti Prezioso, whom we got to see in a 15-minute “Behind the Headlines” mini-documentary Lifetime showed after the feature, was relatively short and had long, curly black hair. In the film she’s played by Wendie Malick as a tall, blonde no-nonsense hardass who refuses to entertain any other suspects besides Melanie and chews out an African-American detective on her staff for referring to the bits of Bill found on the floorboards of Melanie’s car as as “skin fragments.” Prezioso wants to call them “human sawdust,” and for good measure she insists that the investigators in her office refer to Melanie not as “the suspect” but as “the defendant” even before Melanie is formally indicted. The way Prezioso is portrayed in the script makes her seem like a zealous, unscrupulous prosecutor railroading an innocent defendant just to score the brownie points for a conviction.
Indeed, the script goes out of its way to depict Bill McGuire as a despicable excuse for a human being whom the world is better off without – indeed, had Melanie claimed to have killed him in self-defense after a long history of beng abused, she might have had a better shot at an acquittal even though she’d have been in the all-too-familiar Catch-22 of abused wives: since she never reported the abuse to the police or told her friends about it, we had only her word for it that it happened. Melanie ends up with a high-powered attorney representing her, Joe Tapacino, who says he took her case because “Patti Prezioso is a bully, and I take down bullies,” but he was unable to do anything to keep her from being convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Director Nicole L. Thompson strengthens the case for Melanie’s innocence by staging the scenes supposedly representing the prosecution’s case against her insoft focus, while the scenes showing her side of the story are hard-edged and crystal-clear. It’s an oddly schizoid movie in that it’s easy to see why the jury convicted her – both on the extensive forensic evidence against her and the sheer unlikelihood of her story – but at the same time Thompson and her writers are using every trick in the cinematic book to bolster the case for Melanie’s innocence.
At least part of that is due to the animate kewpie-doll performance Thompson gets out of Candice King as Melanie; she goes through the entire second half of the movie with an air of “Who, me?” every time she’s confronted with the horrific accusations against her. In one of the scenes showing the prosecution’s view of what happened to Bill, we hear the sound of an electric bone saw cutting up Bill’s corpse; we never actually see the saw in action (this movie was already pushing the envelope of basic cable: its rating was TV-14, with special alerts for language, sex and violence, so seeing Melanie chop up Bill’s body would have been way past the limits) but we certainly hear it, and this explains why the police originally investigated Dr. Harris as an accomplice: it’s hard to imagine how Melanie could have procured this grisly piece of equipment without borrowing it, with or without authorization, from her workplace.
