Lawyer: Huards' death related to 'drug deal gone bad,' not Cassavaugh

The murders of Jennifer Huard and her brother Jeremiah Huard in 2006 were related to a failed drug deal involving several area men, but not Kirk Cassavaugh, according to one of his attorneys.

That’s what public defender Mary Ann Hornick told jurors in her opening statement during the first day of Cassavaugh’s double homicide trial in Belknap County Superior Court yesterday.

The former Belmont resident, 29, is charged with six felony counts of murder for killing both Jennifer Huard, 26, his former girlfriend, and her brother Jeremiah Huard, 29. Authorities say Cassavaugh killed the pair early in the morning on September 20, 2006 in his mobile-home on Horne Road then tried to get rid of their bodies by burning them in two trash piles behind the residence.

But Hornick told the 16-member jury panel Thursday afternoon that there was sufficient reason to doubt the case against her client.

“Jennifer Huard and Jeremy Huard were murdered but Kirk Cassavaugh is not the murderer,” she said.

Hornick admitted it appeared obvious on first glance that Cassavaugh was guilty of the crimes. But she said there were problems with the N.H. Attorney General’s case against him, including the testimony of Mark Thomson, who is scheduled to take the witness stand during the trial.

Thomson, who lived near Cassavaugh, told police he saw the young man violently beating up Jeremy Huard in front of his trailer the night of the murders, then drag a limp body that appeared to be Jennifer Huard from the structure. Cassavaugh later asked him to help him burn the bodies, Thomson said.

“What the police did not know was that Mark Thomson was withholding information from them,” Hornick told the jurors.

That information concerned the involvement of Jack Vincent of Northfield and Jeff Tarallo of Laconia, friends of the Huards and Cassavaugh, who were “looking to recoup from a drug deal gone bad,” the lawyer said. “Kirk was not involved in that.”

Hornick told the jury of eight men and eight women that the defense team would not be able to clarify who did kill the Huards but it could show that Cassavaugh had not and that evidence was manipulated to “point the finger” at him.

But Assistant Attorney General Elizabeth Baker said the state would be able to clearly show that Cassavaugh killed his former girlfriend and her older brother.

She told the jurors he referred to Jennifer Huard as “a miserable bitch” just hours after her death, and that he changed the story he told police about his involvement in the situation when he was questioned twice the day of the murders.

At one point during his second interrogation he paced nervously back and forth across a room at the police station and muttered, “This all stems from being kicked in the balls and pushed into my TV,” Baker said.

On the night before the murder, Cassavaugh and Jeremy Huard were doing drugs together in the Horne Road trailer, the lawyer said. Around 3 a.m. they received a phone call from Jennifer Huard asking for a ride home from a party at the home of Tammy Duve of Franklin.

The pair drove to the residence, which is located near the Salsibury town line, and then returned to Belmont, she said. During the ride, Cassavaugh and his girlfriend apparently began arguing and continued to do so when they returned to the trailer. Eventually the dispute “escalated beyond words.

“In the course of the fight he got his (Springfield) rifle and fired at Jennifer and then at Jeremy,” the lawyer said. “He shot Jennifer twice, one bullet piercing one of her lungs, and the other hitting her liver and heart.”

Cassavaugh then shot Jeremy Huard “once in the face and twice in the back,” she said. But when that didn’t kill him, Cassavaugh allegedly got a kitchen knife and stabbed him “again and again and again… a dozen times, and he died,” she said.

Baker said the defendant then tried to dispose of the bodies by putting them on two piles of debris in his backyard. “He dumped them like garbage,” she said.

Afterwards Cassavaugh “attempted to clean up his place” from blood and other evidence that had been created by the murders.

“He discarded the knife and his bloody clothes and shoes, which were never recovered.” And when police first questioned him, “he acted like noting had happened,” telling them that the Huards had walked out his trailer around 4 a.m.

“But the evidence will tell the true story of what happened,” Baker told the jurors.

After the opening statements, the jurors, attorneys, Judge Larry Smukler and Cassavaugh went on a “view” to visit some of the locations that will be related to the upcoming testimony. They stopped by the Duve home in Franklin and a location near the Coca-Cola plant on Rte. 140 but the only site they actually got out of their bus to view was the Horne Road trailer where the murders allegedly took place.

The trial is scheduled to resume today at 8:30 a.m. Judge Smukler told the jurors the trial is likely to last about two weeks.