FREEHOLD - Gisella Vargas recalled a day more than a quarter century ago when her mother sent her to check on her brother’s girlfriend.
Vargas said she went to the Long Branch apartment that Ana Mejia shared with her brother, Nicky Vargas.
Mejia’s two young children were in the living room, she said.
“I asked Laurie, ‘Where is your mom?’ and Laurie told me, ‘Mom is sleeping.’"
It was around 2 p.m. on Dec. 8, 1994, Vargas told a Monmouth County jury Monday.
She said she went straight to the bedroom.
“The first thing I saw — I saw a bra on the floor, so I started thinking something happened,"Vargas told the jury. “Then, I got closer to the bed and that’s when I saw the big cut in her neck."
She left the two children behind in the apartment in Long Branch to go to her nearby apartment to call 911; Mejia and her brother didn’t have a phone in their apartment, Vargas testified.
“I was screaming and crying,"she said. “I told Laurie to stay there, I was going to come back."
When she returned to Mejia’s apartment, the police were already there, Vargas said.
Vargas’ testimony came at the trial of Dolores Morgan, 69, and her son Ted Connors, 49, both of Delray, Florida.
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Morgan and Connors are being tried for the murders of Mejia, 25, who was Morgan’s daughter, and Morgan’s husband, Nicholas “Bruce"Connors, 51.
Morgan, then known as Dolores Connors, came home from work on May 14, 1995, and found Nicholas Connors shot to death in the family’s Long Branch home — a little more than fivemonths after Mejia was found stabbed to death in her apartment.
A cooperating codefendant, Jose Carrero, 50 of Jackson, testified last week that Morgan enlisted him and her son to kill Mejia because she believed Mejia was going to inform police about herand her son’s drug dealing. Carrero testified Morgan again enlisted them to kill her husband to collect on a life insurance policy and because her husband was planning to hire a private investigator to look into Mejia’s death.
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Vargas told the jury that Mejia and her brother seemed happy, but that Mejia had been acting differently since her boyfriend was arrested in a drug case on Dec. 2, 1994, and was being held in jail.
“She looked very nervous,"Vargas told the jury. “She wasn’t eating and she wasn’t sleeping."
Vargas said she wasn’t aware that Mejia had also been arrested in the case, although she said neither Mejia or her boyfriend had jobs, and they likely got their money from selling drugs.
Asked if Mejia told her she was being threatened, Vargas responded, “That’s what she said."
Vargas explained the process in which her brother contacted his girlfriend while he was in jail — he would call his mother, who would call his sister, who would then go and get Mejia to come to his sister’s house to take his phone call.
Mejia never missed a phone call from her boyfriend, Vargas testified, being questioned by Meghan Doyle, assistant Monmouth County prosecutor. Asked by Doyle why her mother asked her to check on Mejia on Dec. 8, 1994, Vargas replied, “Because she was calling Ana and Ana didn’t pick up the phone,"despite having later testified that Mejia and her brother didn’t have a phone.
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During cross-examination by Morgan’s attorney, Jason Seidman, Vargas said Mejia and her brother weren’t married because Mejia was married to someone else at the time. Mejia’s son was her boyfriend’s child, while her daughter was her husband’s child, she testified. After Mejia’s death, the two children went to live for a while with Mejia’s husband in New York, she said.
Steven Padula, now chief of staff at the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office who was a crime-scene detective in the 1990s, testified he was sent to photograph and process the scene of Mejia’s murder.
Asked to identify one of his crime-scene photographs, he said, “It’s an incise wound to the left side of Ana Mejia’s neck; it’s an open wound that extends to the back of her neck."
He said there was a heavy concentration of blood on the bedsheet and mattress. It was later determined there was a mixture of contributors to DNA found on the bedsheet, and that Mejia, Ted Connors and Carrero were excluded as contributors, while Mejia’s young son was determined to be the source of DNA from saliva on the sheet.
Despite advances in DNA testing over the years, the evidence on the sheet hadn’t been retested since 2002, Padula said, being cross-examined by Jonathan Petty, Ted Connors’ attorney.
Nicholas Connors’ daughter, Denise Savage, testified about learning of her father’s murder and of a complicated family dynamic.
Her father was having an affair with Morgan, whom Savage referred to as “Doris,’’ and he later married her, leaving Savage and her sister behind at their Eatontown home with their mother,Savage testified.
Savage told the jury she was 6 when her father left and went to live in Long Branch with Morgan.
“We would spend weekends with my dad and Doris,"she said.
Savage said Doris had a son, Ted, who was about a year younger than she was, and her father and Doris had two children together, whom she referred to as “my brother, Nicholas,"and “my sister, Nicole."
Then, another girl came to live with the family as a teenager, Savage said.
“She was introduced to me as Ana,"Savage testified.
Savage said Ana was a girl who Doris used to babysit for in the Dominican Republic, who was “having a hard time in her country, and they wanted to bring her over here to have a better life."
As Savage got older, she said Doris started spending a lot of time taking Nicholas and Nicole to the Dominican Republic, leaving her father alone.
Asked about her relationship with Doris, Savage replied, “She was the other woman for my father. I was told to be respectful. It was fine."
Questioned about the four other children that had joined her father’s family, she said, “They had the life that my sister and I didn’t have, but he loved every one of us."
Savage testified about receiving a phone call in December 1994 from her father telling her that Ana was murdered.
“My dad was distraught,"she said. “It was like he lost a child.
“He was upset and wanted to understand what had happened, why it happened,"Savage testified. “… I was told later that he had hired a private detective to look into it."
In May 1995, Savage said she went to her father’s house on the Saturday before Mother’s Day, before Doris was leaving for her night shift at work, to give her a Mother’s Day card and to discuss her upcoming wedding with her father. The next day, police came to her house and told her she needed to call home. When she did, “I was told that my father had passed away,"she said.
Later on, when Savage was helping her stepmother pack up the Long Branch house so she could move to Florida with the children, Doris told her she thought her husband’s murder was related to the sale of the engineering firm where he worked and that her husband’s partner “had something to do with the murder so he wouldn’t have to split the proceeds."
Being questioned by Seidman, Savage said she didn’t receive payment from a life-insurance policy his firm had on her father and she didn’t remember ever signing a waiver to have any proceeds paid to her mother instead of her.
Seidman asked Savage if Doris ever gave her a cash gift.
“Yes, for my husband’s and my wedding,"she said.
The defense attorney asked her if Doris helped her and her husband purchase their first home.
“We bought it with money from the wedding,"she said
Savage also testified that she didn’t know Carrero, despite that Carrero testified he lived in the Connors’ family home rent-free during the time frame that Mejia and Nicholas Connors were murdered.
Gregory May, a retired Long Branch police officer testified that he responded to the Connors’ home for the scene of Nicholas Connors’ murder.
“The victim was lying on the couch,"he told the jury. “I saw nothing but blood on the right temple area of his head."
May testified he didn’t recall seeing the victim’s wife at the scene, but Seidman produced May’s report from 1995 in which he wrote, “The wife of the victim was sitting there crying."
The trial is before Superior Court Judge Joseph W. Oxley.
Kathleen Hopkins, a reporter in New Jersey since 1985, covers crime, court cases, legal issues, unsolved mysteries and just about every major murder trial to hit Monmouth and Ocean counties. Contact her at khopkins@app.com.
