Witnesses: Accused admitted killing dad

CARIBOU – Two close friends of a man accused of murdering his father 18 months ago testified Tuesday that he told them he shot his father within hours after doing it.

Floyd Bolstridge of Presque Isle testified Tuesday afternoon that Michael D. MacDonald told him he shot his father while Bolstridge was driving MacDonald to Aroostook County Jail in Houlton, where MacDonald gave himself up to police.

MacDonald, 27, has pleaded not guilty to murder and to a charge of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person. He also has pleaded not criminally responsible by reason of insanity. He has been held in Aroostook County Jail since he gave himself up in the early morning hours of April 22, 2004, just hours after his father’s body was found.

It is alleged that he shot his father, Michael E. MacDonald, 58, in the elder MacDonald’s home the evening of April 21. It is alleged that after shooting his father with his own 20-gauge shotgun, he beat him with the butt of the firearm, then stabbed him multiple times in the back and chest.

Police found the elder MacDonald lying facedown in a large pool of blood on the linoleum floor next to kitchen cabinets in his modest Route 11 bungalow in Masardis. He had been shot in the side of his face, his head was bashed, and his back was covered with stab wounds.

Bolstridge, a cousin of MacDonald’s, had spent part of the afternoon of April 21, 2004, with MacDonald before dropping him off at the Ashland One Stop. Bolstridge returned to Presque Isle and received a call from April Hill at Presque Isle at about 10 p.m.

“She came out of her house,” Bolstridge tearfully testified. She told me what he had told her.”

Andrew Benson, assistant attorney general, stopped Bolstridge from relating Hill’s conversation because of the hearsay nature of the testimony.

As Bolstridge drove MacDonald from Presque Isle to Houlton to the jail, “He told me he shot his father in the face,” Bolstridge testified.

When Bolstridge asked him why, “He said, ‘I should not have done it that way.'”

Earlier Tuesday, Hill testified that MacDonald was dropped off at her home shortly before 10 p.m. April 21, 2004, by people in a pickup truck.

“The last time he was at my home, we argued, and now he wanted to say goodbye,” she testified. “He said he did something stupid. He said he shot his dad and beat him with the butt of the gun.”

That’s when she called Bolstridge.

MacDonald’s two friends testified that MacDonald told them of being molested by his father and a friend of the father’s. They also testified that MacDonald feared his father would do the same to his 6-year-old son, Tyler.

Unhappy MacDonald family members murmured during testimony regarding rumors that the elder MacDonald had molested his son.

Earlier Tuesday, Dr. Margaret Greenwald, Maine’s chief medical examiner, testified that the elder MacDonald died of a shotgun wound, blunt trauma to the head and multiple stab wounds.

She testified that the shotgun blast to the right cheek broke both sides of the man’s jaw and exited through the neck. He had seven round injuries to the face and head from blunt force trauma, and 20 stab wounds to the left side of the chest, left shoulder and back. Some stab wounds were as deep as 7 inches, penetrating the lungs, liver and stomach.

She had been to MacDonald’s home in Masardis during the early morning hours of April 22, 2004, and conducted a 41/2-hour autopsy at Augusta the next day.

Maine State Police Crime Lab experts testified that blood found on the younger MacDonald’s jeans, socks and hiking boots – which he left at this father’s house, blood on the muzzle of the shotgun found at the scene and on the blade of a nearly 14-inch kitchen knife found at the scene all were matched to the elder MacDonald by DNA.

MacDonald’s parents were divorced, according to defense attorney Eugene McLaughlin. His mother lives in New Hampshire. He has one sister, Bo Knight, who was at court the first two days of the trial, and two half-sisters.

The younger MacDonald lived with his mother for a time in New Hampshire, and relocated to his father’s home at Masardis when he was a teenager. He lived with his father until about one week before the elder MacDonald was killed.

After leaving his father’s home, he lived with friends in and around Masardis and Ashland.

The alleged killer got rides with several friends before making it to the Aroostook County Jail a few minutes past midnight April 22. One friend drove him from Ashland to his father’s home; others gave him rides from Sheridan, just north of Ashland, to Presque Isle and then to Houlton.

After bringing 19 witnesses to testify, Benson concluded his case after lunch Tuesday. Defense attorneys McLaughlin and James Dunleavy called three defense witnesses Tuesday afternoon before the trial was recessed until Wednesday morning, awaiting arrival of psychiatrists and psychologists from Portland.