Roommate Murder Case Goes To Jury Defendants Blame Each Other In 1995 Killing

While a jury sized her up, Marcella Taylor locked round, sad eyes on her defense attorney.

Taylor, 23, is accused of robbing and killing her Spokane roommate last summer, stuffing the body in a clothes hamper and dumping it in a Stevens County lake.

Prosecutors say she had help from boyfriend Willie Richardson, 19, who also is on trial for first-degree murder. They’ve portrayed Taylor as a scheming, vicious woman who orchestrated the robbery and connived Richardson into going along.

But during closing arguments in the weeklong Spokane County Superior Court trial Tuesday, Taylor’s lawyer said there was “very little evidence that Marcella did anything at all.

“What have (prosecutors) shown?” John Rodgers asked the five-woman, seven-man jury. “That she’s kind of a bad egg? That’s not evidence of anything.”

It was the first offer of a defense from Rodgers, who said there is nothing to implicate Taylor but Richardson’s own account of the murder.

“Marcella has been made to look like a real hound,” he said.

Rodgers told jurors to compare Taylor’s petite size against the 6-foot-2-inch, 200-pound Richardson. Sitting next to him in a flowery dress and ponytail, Taylor appeared frail, her hands clasped gently in her lap.

Which one could more easily hold down a 115-pound victim, bind her mouth, eyes, hands and feet with duct tape, roll her body into a hamper and carry it to a car, Rodgers asked. “Look at them,” he said of the defendants. “Who is more able?”

Deputy Prosecutor Dannette Allen said both are to blame.

“These two together, while committing the robbery … killed Koralee Dixon,” Allen said. “Do not let your sympathy allow them to flee justice.”

Allen said Taylor hatched the robbery plan last June 16, after Dixon returned from a two-week stay in Reno, Nev., with more than $1,000 in cash. She convinced Richardson to help her by lying - telling him she was pregnant with his baby and needed money.

The two then went into Dixon’s room, stuffed a blue bandanna in her mouth and taped her face, Allen said. They took Dixon’s money and jewelry and left.

Richardson, however, said he returned a short time later and found Taylor there. She told him Dixon was dead and had the body wrapped in a bed sheet.

He told police he carried the hamper to Dixon’s car, drove with Taylor to a lake near Tum Tum and dumped it into the water.

After his arrest weeks later, Richardson saw photographs of Dixon’s body and noticed the duct tape was “clearly different” than it had been the night of the robbery, defense attorney Scott Mason said.

The added tape suggests Taylor caused Dixon’s death while Richardson wasn’t there, said Mason, who is representing Richardson.

“He is guilty of trying to rob (Dixon),” Mason said. “But does that make him guilty of her death? Not by the evidence we’ve seen.”

Jurors will resume their deliberations this morning.

, DataTimes