Earlier I wrote that Thomas Collard, whose wife June had been missing from upstate New York since 1980, had been charged with her murder. A few weeks ago, Thomas lead the police to a body buried on his former property in New York. To no one’s surprise, DNA testing confirmed that the remains were June’s. Presumably a plea agreement will follow.
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The Charley Project Blog 
Thomas collard did NOT lead police to Junes remains. at the time of the search toms lawyer refused the DA and state police’s request for tom to go to minerva and help in locating Junes remains. the lawyers reasoning was he was going to go into the grand jury and say with no body there was no proof June was dead.
tom consented to helping the state police BEFORE he was given a lawyer, but oncehe was given a lawyer the lawyer said no tom could not help them lo cate June.
So the DA and state police, the town folks of minerva and escavations teams from other towns like glans falls and lake George, along with archiologists all went to toms property in minera/olmstedville and through many days dug up toms property. they dug up over 1000 square feet for over 5-6 days until they located some bones. the archiologist confirmed the bones were human then they sent the bones off to ferensics for autopsy and DNA.
THomas Collard played NO part in locating June collard. the whole time the search was on he refused any comments, any questions and his lawyer refused to let him help in way.
if you’re going to tell the story then get your facts straight!
another thing if you are truly following this case you know that there will NOT be a plea deal. in one of the very first interviews the DA did was stating there will be no plea deals on this case.
you know you are really bungling up your telling of this case. makes a person wonder how many of your other blog articles on this blog about missing persons is factual and how much is fabricated by you.
after seeing what you have been writing about this case I would not be surprised if all your other articles are fabricated, and half truths.
http://www.northcountrygazette.org/2011/02/04/minerva_manslaughter/
Manslaughter Plea In Minerva Cold Case
“Thomas Collard, the man charged with killing his wife 30 years ago and then throwing her body into a sewage pit has pleaded guilty to first degree manslaughter….”
Uh… Karen? I would appreciate it if you toned down your attitude. Meaghan is not personally involved in the cases she profiles and gets all her information about it from the media, which she has no control of the accuracy of their content. Every thing that she put down about this case can be quoted from them.
First off, when Meaghan said that Thomas Collard ‘lead the police to a body buried on his former property in New York’ she was repeating what this WCAX News article said here at http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=12874517 , and I’m quoting here “Police say Collard has told them where they can find the body”. If you know differently, then I have no problem with you saying so on this blog, but since the media didn’t say that, Meaghan couldn’t know about it either.
Secondly, I didn’t see any articles anywhere where the DA said there wouldn’t be any plea deals. If they are there, then fine, feel free to bring it up, but lose the attitude. Meaghan does exhaustive research into the more than 6,000 missing persons cases on her site, and she does it alone. She doesn’t deserve to be crucified by you because she didn’t find every single article. Meaghan’s reasoning that a plea deal was likely in the works was due to the article at http://poststar.com/news/local/article_b8208e6e-a4a4-11df-9e03-001cc4c03286.html where they state “They got a break when new evidence in the case, which has not been disclosed, prompted State Police to re-interview Thomas Collard where he lived in Alabama and he allegedly confessed, telling investigators where they could find his late wife’s body.”. He waived formal extradition proceedings in Alabama to be brought back to Essex County to face a charge of second-degree murder. He signed at confession which you can read at http://blackpearl.wcax.com/documents/img-727131303-0001.pdf . Murderers almost NEVER do all that unless offered a plea deal. They have no reason to provide that information to the cops unless they WERE offered a deal by the prosecution and they believed they would likely be convicted even if they stayed silent. If you re-read what Meaghan says, she said “Presumably a plea agreement will follow” and not that she knew there was one.
You also castigated her for saying that her daughter Tammy was the middle child instead of the oldest. Well, she got her information from the media that she WAS the middle child at http://poststar.com/news/local/article_ef4de394-94ed-11df-a70d-001cc4c002e0.html . She had no reason to believe otherwise. And she wasn’t “taking the word of someone who killed his wife then spread the story that she abandoned her children for another man and move to Texas then waited 30 years to confess” as you said on her blog at https://charleyross.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/husband-charged-in-30-year-disappearance-of-wife/ . That was reporting WHAT HE SAID, not that Meaghan was taking his word for anything or believed what he said was the truth.
You may have a personal interest in the case, which makes you hypersensitive to information that the media never gets all of, but that doesn’t give you the right to slander Meaghan’s reputation and say that she was likely fabricating what she posted on her profiles. Meaghan has created and run the single largest database of missing persons in this country outside of the Federal Government and she does it all by herself while working another job. Contrary to what you have been saying, she wasn’t “bungling up the telling of this case”. Everything she posted can be confirmed by checking the news websites she used as source information. If you had bothered to read any of them, you would know that.
And if you have problems spelling and can’t remember which words have capital letters, then write it on a WORD document then spellcheck before cutting and pasting on her blog. You write like a drunk dyslexic.
here is the recent article done by a reporter and news paper that does not ad lib nor add misinformation to their articles. This article is about THIS mornings hearing.
IF the writer of this blog wants factual information THIS is the newspaper to use for the Thomas Collard case. The newspaper company resides in Elizabethtown ,NY where Thomas is being tried and does a great job making sure they only print factual information about Essex county. In Fact this newspaper and its reporters have received many awards for their factual and great reporting of the news and stories of interest to the Essex County communities.
http://pressrepublican.com/breaking2/x1967875024/Collard-officially-indicted-on-murder-charge
Justin THINK ABOUT IT! many times in the newspapers and news casts it was states he was up on Murder two charges and all lesser charges the statutue of limitations has expired on at 5 years. the defence took the issue to the grand jury trying to say the arrest and charges were not valid because what happened didnt fit the crime. the first article about his first arraignment stated those facts and the news cast where the DA stated no plea deals in this case was during one of the interviews she did from the crime scene and also after the press hearing in minerva tot he media.
I corrected the writer of the blog on who Tammy was because the article stated she was the oldest child. Tammy is not the oldest child. many news articles and news casts even stated the childrens ages. Thomas Jj is the oldest child. Tammy is the middle child of the three children born to June. no news cast nor article got that wrong so there was no reason why the blogger should have gotten it wrong if she was going by news articles and news casts.
the blogger getting her information from the media um Im assuming she has her own brain. if your going to report the news you dont just put it out there blindly. theres USA laws about writing mis information about others. its called slander and libel. just because others put out garbage and rumors about others like some news reporters do does not make it right and ok for others to do.
a good reporter of the news researches their information, they dont just put the information out to the public blindly relying on other media for accuracy.
your opinion of my being a drunk dyslexic is duly noted thank you for your opinion. everyone including you have a right to their own opinions in the United states of america.
Just like I have the USA right to think and state my opinions about this bloggers reporting of this case.
You certainly seem to know more about this case than me, but you do not know as much about the law as you think you do, Karen.
To begin with, a plea deal need not necessarily involve pleading to a lesser charge. Many plea deals have the person plead guilty to the original charge, in exchange for not getting the maximum sentence. For example, a person pleading to first-degree murder in exchange for the prosecutor not seeking the death penalty. One of my own relatives was charged with a crime and got a plea deal in this manner — he pleaded guilty to what he was charged with, and they sentenced him to probation rather than the maximum term of five years in prison. With all the evidence that’s available, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for either Thomas Collard or the state to take this to trial. He’ll lose and it will be a waste of money. My guess is that eventually he will plead guilty or no contest to something. This is my opinion based off of many similar cases I’ve studied.
Second, I don’t know if you saw, but I did correct the thing about Tammy being the middle child in my original post when you pointed out the error. However, I believe what I originally said was that Tammy was the oldest daughter. That’s true, is it not — the oldest CHILD is a son, then there’s Tammy, then another girl.
Third, you clearly have no idea what slander and libel actually are. You can look this up, and to make it easy I’ll summarize it for you: slander is spoken and libel is written. In both cases, a person guilty of slander/libel has to be saying/publishing incorrect and defamatory statements, deliberately, to maliciously try to ruin another person’s reputation. If a slander/libel suit goes to trial in America, it’s up to the plaintiff to prove that the statements were false and that the person making them knew this and was purposely saying them to hurt others. Even if what I did post was incorrect, it defamed no one and I was not making deliberate errors.
Fourth, the Press Republican article you yourself linked to as a source of accurate information says this: “Mr. Collard allegedly told police that, after determining his estranged wife was dead, he threw her body out the kitchen window into a hole dug for a sewer.” So he told them where he’d put June’s body — that is, he did, in a sense, lead them to it, even if he didn’t personally walk them to the spot.
Fifth, I’m not a reporter. I don’t do any original research and instead simply post news items on my blog and make comments about what I think of them. If you look at other entries on my blog about other cases, you’ll see they all get exactly the same treatment as June’s did.
Sixth, if you think my blog sucks so much, why are you still reading it? Whoever is holding a gun to your head forcing you to read my posts really ought to stop.