http://www.timesargus.com/article/20100521/NEWS01/5210348Feds say Jacques tried to manipulate investigationMay 21, 2010
Michael Jacques
BURLINGTON – Michael Jacques, who is in jail awaiting trial for allegedly raping and killing his 12-year-old niece Brooke Bennett, is accused of being a master manipulator in the months leading up to the 2008 crime.
Court documents filed this week by U.S. Attorneys prosecuting Jacques allege he continued to try and thwart the investigators in his case even while in prison after his arrest in late June 2008.
"During July, 2008, while incarcerated, he devised a new scheme to undermine the investigation," according to a motion filed in U.S. District Court in Burlington.
Jacques' alleged jailhouse scheme involved planning a series of coordinated e-mails that were to be sent to the media, law enforcement officials, and a female juvenile other than Bennett whom Jacques had allegedly been sexually abusing, who is referred to in court papers as "J1."
A message Jacques allegedly wrote from prison "…threatened that J1's little sister (then nine years-old) would 'die like Brooke' if J1 did not continue to give false statements to officials," court papers state.
The message written from prison intended for J1 was made to look like it was from the "Breckenridge Program," a "powerful cartel" that purportedly provided sex training to girls, which police later determined was a fabrication, court papers show.
Leading up to Bennett's murder, Jacques used the threat of the Breckenridge Program to strike fear into J1 so she would help lure Bennett, of Braintree, to Jacques' house, according to authorities. Once Bennett was at his house in Randolph, authorities say, Jacques drugged and repeatedly raped her over a 12-hour period before murdering her and burying her body in the woods about a mile from his house.
To help him carry out the scheme from prison, Jacques allegedly tried with phone and handwritten letters to enlist an adult friend in Arizona to help send the e-mails.
"Jacques wrote out each of the e-mails, along with explicit instructions to his friend, about how and when to send them," court papers state.
The plan fell apart when the friend from Arizona cooperated with authorities, records show.
Jacques, 43, was first incarcerated on state charges for allegedly sexually assaulting a girl other than Bennett and spent months in Vermont correctional facilities before being indicted with a federal kidnapping charge in October 2008 and sent to federal prison.
Andy Pallito, the Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Corrections, said Jacques was jailed in state prison – mostly in St. Albans — from June 30 to Oct. 23, 2008.
It appears Jacques' attempt to disrupt the investigations was concocted in state prison; it was "devised" in July, court papers say.
Pallito said he was not sure whether Jacques' mail was being monitored from prison.
"The feds were more involved in this than we were," he said.
But Jacques would have been allowed to send letters from prison, Pallito said.
"He certainly would have been able to write letters within a pretty short period of time after being incarcerated," said Pallito.
Jacques would not have had access to e-mail, said Pallito, and federal court papers state that he used handwritten letters and a telephone to try to get his Arizona friend to send the messages via e-mail.
The court papers do not give many details about how the letters were discovered, and don't give the identity of Jacques' friend in Arizona.
Craig Nolan, one of the Assistant U.S. Attorneys prosecuting Jacques, said he could not comment on the pending case.
The newly released information about Jacques is in a 91-page court memo filed by the government that is the latest in the arguments between the defense and prosecution about applying the death penalty in Jacques' case.
Jacques is facing a federal capital kidnapping charge for allegedly using a means of interstate commerce – the Internet and text messages – to commit the crime, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
A motion filed on Jacques' behalf in March asks the court to "strike or modify the notice of intent to seek the death penalty," saying the federal death penalty "…operates in an arbitrary, capricious, irrational and discriminatory manner."
The counterargument prosecutors made this week called Jacques' attorneys' characterization of the death penalty law flawed.
"For all its various theories and angles of argument, the Motion suffers from one consistent and fatal problem: lack of support in the law," prosecutors wrote.
A judge has not yet ruled on the motion.
In addition to the death penalty argument, Jacques' defense attorneys have filed a motion to have the case tried outside Vermont and are challenging federal jurisdiction in the case. The defense argues that because the crime took place entirely in Vermont, it should be a state case.
Jacques, 44, is now jailed in the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.
