A Pennsylvania man who “viciously” murdered his girlfriend with a hammer and then attempted to conceal the crime has learned where he will spend the next several decades.
A Montgomery County jury took an hour and a half to convict Michael Carey Jr., 47, of first-degree murder and possessing an instrument of crime in the death of Jessica Zipkin, 34, last November.
Carey was then sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, which is Pennsylvania’s mandatory sentence for first-degree murder convictions.
According to the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office, Carey killed Zipkin in the afternoon of November 1 at the home they shared in Perkiomen Township. He is thought to have hit the victim over the head with a hammer over 20 times.
However, police did not learn of Zipkin’s death until after midnight, on November 2. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Carey waited ten hours to report her death, attempting to cover up the crime, prosecutors said in court.
Carey reportedly informed the building’s owner at around 1 a.m. that there was a dead woman inside his apartment. Then 911 was called, and responding officers discovered Zipkin face down on the bedroom floor, with a fatal wound to the back of her head.
Zipkin was pronounced dead on the scene, and Carey was arrested as a suspect. According to PerkValleyNow, an autopsy performed by the Montgomery County Coroner’s Office determined that the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head, and the manner of death was homicide.
Prosecutors described the death as a grisly murder.
Assistant District Attorney Christian Taffe cited a medical examiner who stated that Carey’s hammer strikes were so powerful that Zipkin’s brain was “partially liquefied,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer report.
Prosecutors added that neighbors heard a woman scream in their building, and less than ten minutes later, Carey was seen entering the basement of a nearby restaurant and throwing clothing in a trash can.
Carey took “conscious steps” to “conceal his crime,” Taffe told the Montgomery County jury.
These “steps” are said to have included showering, changing clothes, and disposing of evidence. In a recorded phone call from jail weeks after the murder, Carey told a friend, “I heard her take her last breath … it is what it is,” according to The Reporter newspaper.
It is unclear what triggered Carey, but his defense attorneys reportedly claimed he was under the influence of multiple drugs, including methamphetamine, and thus could not have planned a premeditated attack.
“We know how these drugs can overpower you, how these drugs can overwhelm you, and that leads to a loss of being rational, and a loss of being sensible,” defense attorney Scott Frame said during the trial.
According to her obituary, Zipkin left behind a sister, mother, and father, as well as a niece and several nephews.
“You viciously killed Jessica Zipkin,” Judge Wendy Rothstein told Carey in court, according to The Reporter. “There is no justification for that conduct. The brutality is difficult to describe.”
