Inset left: Michael Carey Jr. (Montgomery County District Attorney”s Office). Inset right: Jessica Zipkin (Obituary). Background: Michael Carey Jr. being escorted by a law enforcement officer (Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office).
A Pennsylvania man who “viciously” murdered his girlfriend with a hammer and then tried to conceal the crime has learned where he will spend the coming decades.
A Montgomery County jury took an hour and a half to find Michael Carey Jr., 47, guilty of first-degree murder and possessing an instrument of crime for killing 34-year-old Jessica Zipkin last November. Carey was then sentenced to life in prison without the possibility for parole, the mandatory sentence in Pennsylvania for first-degree murder convictions.
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Carey killed Zipkin at the home they shared in Perkiomen Township on the afternoon of Nov. 1, the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office said. He is believed to have hit the victim over the head with a hammer more than 20 times.
But police reportedly did not hear about Zipkin’s death until the clock had passed midnight and Nov. 2 had begun. That is because Carey waited ten hours to report her death — spending the time trying to cover up the crime, prosecutors said in court, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
At about 1 a.m. that morning, Carey reportedly told the owner of his building there was a dead woman inside his apartment. Then, 911 was called, and responding police officers found Zipkin face down on the bedroom floor, with a fatal wound to the back of her head.
Zipkin was pronounced dead at the scene, and Carey was arrested as a suspect. An autopsy conducted by the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office ruled the cause of death blunt force trauma to the head and the manner of death a homicide, PerkValleyNow reported.
Prosecutors described the death as a grisly killing.
Assistant District Attorney Christian Taffe cited a medical examiner stating Carey’s strikes with the hammer were so powerful that Zipkin’s brain was left “partially liquefied,” the Philadelphia Inquirer report adds. Prosecutors added that neighbors heard a woman’s screams in their building, and less than ten minutes later, Carey was seen entering the basement of a neighboring restaurant and discarding clothing in a trash can.
Carey took “conscious steps” to “conceal his crime,” Taffe told the Montgomery County jury.
These “steps” are said to have included showering and changing clothes in addition to the disposal of evidence. Weeks after the murder — in a recorded phone call from jail — Carey told a friend, “I heard her take her last breath … it is what it is,” investigators testified, per The Reporter newspaper.
It is unclear what set Carey off, but his defense attorneys reportedly argued he was under the control of several drugs, including methamphetamine, and thus could not have planned a premeditated attack.
“We know how these drugs can overpower you, how these drugs can overwhelm you, and that leads to a loss of being rational, and a loss of being sensible,” defense attorney Scott Frame said during the trial.
Zipkin left behind a sister, mother and father, a niece and several nephews, according to her obituary.
“You viciously killed Jessica Zipkin,” Judge Wendy Rothstein told Carey in court, according to The Reporter. “There’s no justification for that conduct. The brutality, it’s just hard to even describe.”
