The murder of Michelle Young and the trials of Jason Young: A timeline of events

The murder of Michelle Young in 2006 sounded like a sordid made-for-TV movie plot: Still-new mom pregnant with a second child is found bludgeoned to death in her Raleigh home while upwardly mobile husband is away on a business trip.

Except this was real, and what might take two hours to play out in a television documentary dragged on for years before an arrest was even made. To almost no one’s surprise, Young’s husband, Jason, was charged in his wife’s death.

The case captivated the public from the time Young’s body was discovered, through the three-plus years it took investigators to build their case, to the evening Jason Young was arrested and through the two trials it took to get a conviction and life sentence.

Even now, the case fascinates true-crime enthusiasts, who got a new 90-minute podcast this week about the case from “Let’s Go to Court,” titled “The Murder of Michelle Young.”

The News & Observer covered the case. Here’s a timeline.

1995: Michelle Marie Fisher, a native of Long Island, N.Y., moves to Raleigh to attend N.C. State University. Her first year, she’s a cheerleader for men’s football and women’s basketball. She joins a sorority the following year.

1997: Michelle meets Jason Lynn Young while out one night with friends at the now-defunct Have a Nice Day Cafe in Raleigh. She pulls him onto the dance floor to join the fun.

1999: Michelle graduates from NCSU with a degree in accounting.

2003: Jason and Michelle Young marry in October. Jason’s rescue dog carries their rings down the aisle during the ceremony.

2004: In spring, the couple’s first child, a daughter, Cassidy, is born.

2005: The Youngs buy a $379,000 house in the Enchanted Oaks subdivision near Lake Wheeler in Raleigh.

May 2006: The couple are involved in a single-car wreck outside Brevard, in which their Mitsubishi goes off a mountain road, down and embankment and is partially submerged in a river. Michelle, pregnant at the time, suffers a miscarriage after the wreck. The state trooper who investigated the wreck later says he saw nothing suspicious about it, but prosecutors will suggest otherwise after Michelle’s death, noting that the couple had increased their life insurance not long before the crash.

Summer 2006: Jason Young starts a new job as a salesman for a medical records software company, getting enough of a raise that Michelle makes plans to drop to part-time hours in her job as a senior financial consultant in the tax department of Progress Energy. Michelle gets pregnant with her second child, a son.

Nov. 3, 2006: Michelle’s sister, Meredith Fischer, gets a text from Jason asking her to run an errand for him at the house. Fischer arrives at 1:30 p.m. to find her sister’s body, cold, stiff, bloody and face down in the master bedroom of the house. She finds the Youngs’ 2-year-old daughter under the sheets of her parents’ bed, uninjured and asking questions about what’s wrong with her mother.

Michelle Young was 29 years old. Her husband was 32.

Later, Jason Young, who left the night of Nov. 2 to go to Hillsville, Va., for a business meeting and then to Brevard to visit his mother and stepfather, comes home, accompanied by family members. He talks briefly with investigators, hires an attorney and never cooperates with police again.

November 2006-February 2007: In search warrants, investigators say that they found blood in a Ford Explorer they seized from Jason Young, and say Young was in nearly constant contact with a married Florida woman named Michelle Money, a former sorority sister of his wife’s, in the months before Michelle Young’s death.

Warrants also say Michelle Young was “stressed out over money” and furious about a California vacation her husband took without her. The paperwork also says Young had “substantial” life insurance policies on his wife, later revealed to be worth $1 million.

January 2007: An autopsy shows that Michelle Young died of blows to her head that caused multiple skull fractures and brain hemorrhaging . She was also strangled, the report says, and had 13 lacerations on the back of her head. Her lips were badly bruised and several of her teeth were knocked out. A strand of hair stuck in blood was found in her left hand. The autopsy finds no evidence of sexual assault but indicates she was struck more than 30 times.

July 2007: Progress Energy, Michelle Young’s former employer, offers a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in her killing.

November 2007: More than a year after the murder, investigators return to the house to study “marks and stains” that had not been analyzed. The house is up for sale.

August 2008: Previously sealed search warrants show that blood matching Jason Young’s DNA was found at the scene of the crime, as well as shoe prints in blood that match shoes he owned.

October 2008: Michelle Young’s mother files a wrongful death suit against Jason Young, in part to try to compel him to answer questions about the case. He has 30 days to respond, but doesn’t.

Dec. 5, 2008: A Wake County judge rules on the wrongful death claim, finding that Jason Young killed his wife. The judge also bars Jason Young from collecting on the life insurance policy on his wife.

In documents connected to the civil case, sheriff’s investigators reported that Jason Young’s computer was used to search the Internet on topics including “anatomy of a knockout,” “head trauma knockout,” and “divorce” before his wife was found dead.

Documents also show that investigators suspected the Youngs’ toddler daughter was drugged with an over-the-counter medication at the time her mother was killed.

March 16, 2009: Another Wake judge orders Jason Young to pay his wife’s family more than $15 million in the second phase of the civil suit.

Dec. 14, 2009: A grand jury indicts Jason Young on a first-degree murder charge 37 months after his wife was found dead.

June 2011: Jason Young’s trial on murder charges ends with the jury deadlocked eight to four in favor of acquittal. During the proceedings, Young testified that he was 169 miles away in a Virginia hotel when his wife was killed. Prosecutors said he left the hotel shortly after his arrival, took time to disable security cameras in a side entrance stairwell, returned home, killed his wife and left their daughter alone with the body.

March 2012: Jason Young is convicted in a re-trial and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

April 2014: The three-judge N.C. Court of Appeals vacates the guilty verdict against Jason Young and orders a third trial in the case, saying evidence presented in the wrongful-death civil suit had unfairly influenced his ability to get a fair trial.

August 2015: The N.C. Supreme Court overturns the Appeals Court decision, denying Jason Young a third trial.

February 2024: State prison records show Young, now 49, is at medium-security Piedmont Correctional Institution in Salisbury.

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