WILKES-BARRE — Almost as soon as he walked into the crime scene, state police Cpl. John Chulock said he knew something wasn’t quite right.
He explained why Tuesday during the first day of testimony in the murder trial of Jessica Alinsky.
Chulock was responding to a hysterical 911 call Alinsky made the night of Sept. 2, 2011, saying she had a fight with her boyfriend, Matthew Ryan Gailie, and that he had shot himself in the head at their home on Muskegon Circle in Hazle Township.
Gailie, a 34-year-old corrections officer at State Correctional Institution/Frackville, was covered in blood on the floor between a couch and a coffee table, his head propped up by a pillow against a kitchen chair. Graphic photos jurors saw showed Gailie’s bloody shirt pulled up, exposing his chest, and his left index finger in the trigger guard of a black pistol.
The scene was odd, Chulock said, because he knew Gailie was right-handed.
Less than a month earlier, he had cited Gailie and Alinsky for harassment over a domestic disturbance that ended with them smashing each other’s electronics.
Outside on the porch, Alinsky was on an “emotional roller coaster” as she offered several different explanations for what had happened, ranging from suicide to an accidental shooting when she tried to grab the gun during a confrontation, he said.
The scene also struck Chulock as strange because dispatchers had told him Alinsky, now 32, reported she had moved the gun, yet Gailie’s finger was still on the weapon, which was in an improbable position to have been fired by the victim.
“It was upside down in his left hand,” Chulock said. “It struck me as odd.”
The oddities didn’t end there.
During opening statements Tuesday morning, Assistant District Attorney Jill Matthews told jurors it was almost unheard of for a suicide victim’s finger to be found still in the trigger guard.
Matthews alleged Alinsky shot Gailie, then moved his body from where his blood had pooled on the couch to where police found it. She then cleaned up in a bathroom where police found blood on the door, wall and floor, she said.
“There was diluted blood all over the bathroom floor and in the bath tub,” Matthews said.
Next to the body was a torn bank statement from 2008 with a bloody hand print on it, she said. However, the gunshot to Gailie’s face — fired from about seven inches away — immediately incapacitated him, she said.
“The moment that bullet entered his head, it was lights out for Matthew,” Matthews said. “Matt did not handle that bank statement. It had to be the defendant.”
Matthews said that while Gailie lived paycheck-to-paycheck, he wasn’t in dire financial straits. According to Matthews, the reality was that the couple’s lease was about to end and they planned to go their separate ways when it did. Alinsky wouldn’t allow it, she said.
“This is a tale of manipulation. This is a tale of loss of control,” Matthews said. “She was used to having control over Matt and she was losing control over Matt.”
For the first time, Alinsky’s defense offered its take on the events of that night during opening statements.
Defense attorney Demetrius Fannick described the couple as troubled, having had a number of prior arguments and altercations.
The night of the shooting, Alinsky went out with a group of co-workers to the Bottleneck Saloon and got so drunk a waitress cut her off, he said.
“She’s stop-serving-you-alcohol drunk,” Fannick said. “She was asked-to-leave-the-bar drunk.”
A co-worker brought Alinsky home but left before Gailie returned from work a short time later, he said. When Gailie arrived, the couple again got into an argument that escalated quickly, with neither party offering to take a step back and cool down, he said.
“This all escalated rapidly,” Fannick said, noting Gailie pulled through the gate of their community at 10:47 p.m. and the shot is alleged to have come at 11:34 p.m. “The evidence will show that there was nothing planned. The evidence will show that this argument was provoked by Matthew.”
The attorney did not offer an explanation for what exactly transpired to cause the fatal gunshot and acknowledged Alinsky had initially lied to a 911 call taker and to state police. But he asked the jury to consider her drunken state and the panic she was feeling at the moment.
“She didn’t lie because she planned with premeditation and specific intent to commit murder,” Fannick said, noting that Alinsky begged the call taker to save Gailie. “She didn’t want him to die. She wanted him to live.”
That sentiment seemed to play out in a hysterical, often-unintelligible 911 call Alinsky placed at 11:47 p.m. the night of the shooting. In it, she tells call taker Gina Domashinski she had been in a fight with Gailie and that she heard a shot, then came downstairs to find him bleeding.
“I think he’s dead. I think he killed himself,” a frantic Alinsky said, going on to question the 21-minute response time. “Where are they? He’s bleeding to death! ... I love you Matthew. Please don’t leave me.”
Jurors heard testimony from neighbors Tracey Grohol, 43, and her son Samuel, who said they heard a single shot followed by silence at 11:34 p.m. that night.
During her opening statement, Matthews questioned why Alinsky would have wasted about 15 minutes before calling for help.
Alinsky has admitted she delayed the call because she “needed time to think,” Matthews said.
“Or did she need time to make it look like a suicide?” the prosecutor asked. “It’s enough time to cover up first-degree murder.”
Testimony resumes today at 9 a.m.