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Published: Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009 / Updated: Thursday, Feb. 04, 2010 12:14 PM

Coroner reopens case in death of Fort Mill Town Councilman's daughter

YORK COUNTY -- 

Everyone agrees Melissa Huntley Motz was shot and killed in the passenger seat of her husband's blue Thunderbird eight years ago.

But police, prosecutors and the woman's family still cannot agree on who pulled the trigger in the parking lot of the couple's Rock Hill apartment Feb. 16, 2001, barely an hour after the two had argued at a Charlotte strip club.

Then-York County Coroner Doug McKown initially ruled the case a suicide. But he later changed his mind, saying he couldn't determine why the 35-year-old woman was shot.

Larry and Patsy Huntley of Fort Mill believe their daughter was killed by her husband of two months, James Motz, who had a history of violence, including with a former wife, court records show.

The Huntleys also say their daughter, a former teacher and debutante, hated guns and never showed signs of depression.

Rock Hill police reports indicated it was possible Motz killed his wife. But the 16th Circuit solicitor's office decided not to prosecute, citing insufficient evidence.

The solicitor's office has reviewed the case every few years for the Huntley family. Each time, prosecutors determine there's not enough evidence for a murder conviction.

In 2007, a lawsuit filed by Larry Huntley, a Fort Mill Town Councilman, ended with jurors determining Jimmy Motz did not kill his wife. But they found him negligent for leaving a gun near her while she was drunk.

Now, more than eight years after Melissa Motz's death, York County Coroner Sabrina Gast has reopened the case. She hopes new technology can help determine whether Melissa Motz put the gun under her chin and shot herself, or if James Motz shot her.

Gast said she revisited the case because the Huntley family still had questions about the killing.

“After looking at the case,” Gast said, “I thought we might be able to get more or new information by having someone else look at the evidence we had.”

Gast is waiting on results from a blood spatter expert, a pathologist in Florida who will examine blood on the couple's clothing to determine how close James Motz could have been to his wife when the gun was fired.

Gast said she doesn't know when to expect those results.

She's not willing to rush the case, which has sat open in the coroner's office nearly nine years. The Motz case is the first Gast has reopened in her year-and-a-half as coroner.

Court transcripts from the January 2007 civil trial paint James Motz's story of the last day his wife lived:

The couple drank beer and ate pizza before driving to the Paper Doll Lounge in Charlotte, a bar with topless dancers.

On the way, they stopped at a convenience store and each had another beer, maybe two. At some point in the night he smoked marijuana.

The couple had several more beers and liquor shots at the club on Wilkinson Boulevard. But they stopped drinking when James Motz accepted a table dance and his wife became upset.

She tried to call a cab.

“I just told her that I would take her home,” James Motz later testified. “We came together and there was no need to leave separate.”

James Motz escorted his wife to the car and helped her climb in.

Melissa Motz, who was “extremely intoxicated” by the end of the night, opened the car door to get out, but instead fell on the sidewalk in front of the club.

James Motz, a second time, helped his wife into the car.

The couple didn't speak on their way home in the Thunderbird, except when Motz called his wife “a stupid b----” who had “ruined a perfectly good evening,” he said in court.

During the drive, Melissa Motz opened the unlocked glove compartment of her husband's Thunderbird and grabbed a .32-caliber pistol her husband kept inside.

“I didn't see her doing it as a threat to herself,” Motz testified about the gun. “I didn't see her doing it as a threat to me. ... I just grabbed the gun, put it back in the glove compartment.”

That's where the gun stayed, Motz said, until the couple arrived at their apartment on Dutchman Drive in Rock Hill, about a 35- to 40-minute drive from the bar.

In the parking lot, Motz got out of the car to open the passenger door for his wife.

According to his testimony, Motz heard a “pop” as he was walking around the front of the car. He ran back to the driver's side and crawled in to check on her.

A longtime gun owner, Motz said he knew — and recognized, just then — the sound of a firing pistol. Melissa Motz shot herself, he testified.

“When I got back in the car, she was slumped over a little bit,” Motz said. “And I grabbed her face and shook it a little bit because I was trying to wake her up.

“I could just hear her breathing, and then I got back out of the car.”

Taking the gun in his own hands, Motz said, he fired four more shots into the air from the gun that his wife had used to shoot herself in the chin. He said he shot the gun repeatedly to draw attention to himself, so neighbors would call police.

Asked in court about his mental and emotional state after he saw his wife's gunshot wound, Motz said: “I think I just went crazy. …The worst thing imaginable had happened.

“I've read and heard about people that take their own lives and all, and I just always thought to myself that something horrific had to happen in that person's life. But nothing had happened in hers that I knew of. It just didn't make sense. It never will.”

Several residents called police, who arrived to find Motz yelling for help and his wife bleeding from her mouth in the passenger seat of his car, according to police reports.

Motz was on his hands and knees when officers pulled into the apartment complex.

He was arrested and charged that night with discharging a firearm within city limits, public disorderly intoxication and possession of marijuana. They found 9.1 grams of the drug after searching the Motzes' apartment.

Melissa Motz died a short time later at Piedmont Medical Center.

Jurors in the civil suit awarded $25,000 in actual damages to Larry Huntley, who learned on his wedding anniversary that his daughter had died of a single gunshot wound to the head.

They ruled that James Motz was responsible for his wife's wrongful death.

James Motz couldn't be reached for this story. Buddy Motz, chairman of the York County Council, said he has been unsure of his brother's whereabouts for years. James Motz's defense attorney in the civil suit, James Boyd, no longer represents Motz and said he also is unsure where Motz is.

A Piedmont Medical Center spokeswoman said James Motz was admitted Sept. 26 for treatment and discharged Oct. 24. They could not comment on his condition or his reasons for being in the hospital.

Rock Hill police reports indicate it was possible that James Motz placed the gun under his wife's chin and pulled the trigger while they both were seated inside the car, shortly before arriving at their apartment.

They cited the wound, the path the bullet traveled and James Motz's criminal history, along with two small pinch marks on the palm of Melissa Motz's left hand.

Investigators also found Melissa Motz's dried purple blood around James Motz's fingernails and more of her blood on his palms and clothing, reports say.

They detected gunpowder on right-handed Melissa Motz's left palm, but none on James Motz, even though he told police he fired the same pistol four times into the air as a call for help after Melissa Motz fired the first shot that killed her.

A man standing less than 50 feet from the Thunderbird that night told police he heard only four gunshots.

Rock Hill Police declined to comment on the case.

But Charles Cabaniss, the police captain on the case who has since retired, said Motz acted “unusual and unnatural” when police arrived.

“Was Mr. Motz suspect? Absolutely,” Cabaniss said.

“Did I charge him with everything I could? Absolutely. Could I prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he killed Melissa Motz?

“The solicitor didn't think so.”

Tommy Pope, who was the 16th Circuit solicitor when Motz was shot, said then there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute James Motz in his wife's death.

After reviewing the case this month, Pope said police and detectives did a thorough job investigating, but that “too many loose ends” wouldn't hold up in court.

“You cannot convict a person of murder on speculation,” said Pope, now a private-practice attorney in Rock Hill.

His successor, Kevin Brackett, also reviewed the case with the Huntley family this spring and refused to proceed with a criminal prosecution “on a gut feeling.”

Years later, the facts of the case haven't changed, Brackett said.

Neither has the Huntleys' suspicion that the system failed them.

“There's something going on,” says Larry Huntley. “Someone is hiding something… Someone is covering up for him.”

James Motz was divorced twice before marrying Melissa Motz, and both marriages ended in physical cruelty, court documents show.

An ex-wife, Sandy Motz, told police after Melissa Motz's shooting that James Motz often pulled pistols and placed them under her chin when they argued.

“When he would point the gun at me, he would say, ‘I ought to kill (you),” Sandy Motz said in a written statement to the Rock Hill Police Department in 2001.

“He even offered me a gun and told me to kill myself ‘so I won't have to,' ” she wrote. “This happened plenty of times. ... It was a common thing for Jimmy to do.”

Sandy Motz couldn't be reached for comment.

James Motz's arrest record from the State Law Enforcement Division shows he was convicted of two assault charges, two assault and battery charges and one criminal domestic violence charge in the 1980s.

In March 2008 and January 2009, he was arrested for driving under the influence and spent 30 days in jail this year on his second DUI.

The Huntleys believe their former son-in-law's family name protects him from being prosecuted for their daughter's death.

James Motz's brother, Buddy Motz, had been a York County Council member for about six months when Melissa Motz was shot.

Buddy Motz, now the council's chairman, said his political ties played no role in the investigation.

“To think that I would be able to sway someone,” Buddy Motz said, “or that I would sway someone, and have influence over the (police), the coroner and the solicitor, and everyone else who was involved in the case, as a newly elected official is absurd.”

Motz said he has never been close with his brother, who is nine years younger and has gone down an opposite path.

“Justice will be served,” Motz said, “and whichever way it's served, that's fine with me.”

Gast said after the blood spatter results arrive, she might hold an inquest — a coroner's jury of six community members — to determine Melissa Motz's manner of death.

In an inquest, the jury hears testimony from analysts and investigators who handled the evidence and performed the autopsy. In Melissa Motz's case, the jurors would decide if she died from suicide, homicide, or an undetermined manner.

They also could hear testimony from family members and law enforcement officials.

Gast could use the jury's decision to rewrite Motz's death certificate, then send the ruling to the solicitor's office, which isn't required to prosecute even if the jury rules homicide.

An inquest “would only prompt the solicitor's office to look at the case again to see what, if anything, they could do with it,” Gast said.

“It's still their decision as to whether they think there's enough evidence,” she said. “They have a certain standard of evidence they have to present to a jury.”

Solicitor Brackett said he would review any new evidence, although the burden of proof at a coroner's inquest is “nowhere near the same as a criminal trial.”

Gast hasn't decided whether she'll call an inquest. If she does, Motz's case would be the first inquest in her time as coroner.