No change in trial date for ‘Beachy Stout’
Published:Saturday | June 17, 2023 | 1:08 AMTanesha Mundle/Staff Reporter
JUSTICE VINETTE Graham-Allen yesterday warned that she will not be changing the September 18 trial date for the Portland businessman Everton ‘Beachy Stout’ McDonald, who is to be tried for the murder of one of his two wives, who he is alleged to have ordered killed.
“There will be no vacating of the trial date in this case,” she cautioned yesterday when the matter was called up for a trial readiness hearing.
“We are glad for that,” answered attorney-at-law Christopher Townsend, who has been brought into the matter to join McDonald’s legal team.
“I underscored from the last time that this is a firm fixed date from that time. “There will be no adjournment of the trial date,” the judge added.
The trial date was scheduled from last October, after the 68-year-old defendant was denied bail.
The businessman is to be tried for the murder of his second wife Tonia Hamilton, whose throat was slashed in July 2020.
He is jointly charged for murder with Oscar Barnes.
Tonia’s partially burnt body was found with the throat slashed inside her burnt car along the Sherwood Forest main road in Portland on July 20. The woman was lured to a deserted area where she was stabbed and her car set ablaze.
The trial readiness hearing was fixed for yesterday but was postponed to July 31, due to the absence of Barnes’ lawyer, Earnest Davis, who is overseas for medical reasons.
Justice Graham-Allen, in the meantime, has ordered both parties to execute the agreed document in the case.
The court heard that both parties have agreed the postmortem report and the lawyers and defendants were to sign the documents but that was pushed back to the next hearing date.
The prosecution is also to confirm the availability of all its witnesses for the trial.
Barnes’ bail was subsequently extended, but before he left the courtroom the judge, after ascertaining from him that he was not aware that his lawyer was overseas, warned him to keep in contact with his office.
“Keep in touch because the trial date not going to move, a from last year it set and it must start,” she advised.
The judge and jury trial, which is expected to last seven weeks, will see the prosecution calling 25 witnesses.
McDonald is expected to call seven witnesses while Barnes plans to call one witness as well as testify in his own defence.
A third man, Denvalyn Minott, said to be the contract killer, pleaded guilty to Tonia’s murder in September 2020 and was sentenced to 19 years in prison.
Minott, in a witness statement, claimed that he was offered $3 million by McDonald to kill his wife.
The Portland fisherman claimed that ‘Beachy Stout’ gave him clear instructions on how his wife should be killed.
“He didn’t want Mrs McDonald to be shot, but that she was to be stabbed up and her body burnt,” he told detectives, according to prosecutors.
Minott, however, admitted that he gave the “work” to another man known to him only as ‘The Yute’.
Meanwhile, a trial date for the other matter in which McDonald is alleged to have murdered his first wife, Merlene, has not yet been settled.
She was shot dead outside her home in Boundbrook, Portland, in May 2009.
It is alleged that McDonald paid a police detective to kill his wife after their marriage crumbled and she left the matrimonial home.
A case management hearing was previously set for January 25, 2024.
McDonald, who appeared in court yesterday, was remanded.
Attorneys-at law John Jacobs, Courtney Rowe and Earl Hamilton are also representing McDonald.