Georgia 'House of Horrors' Dad on Trial in Zowey McCue's Death, a Las Vegas Photo-Shoot Killing, and a Tollbooth Death by Drunk Driver

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning. I'm Garrett Fisher and this is Daily Crime Injustice for Friday, June fifth, twenty twenty six. Three cases today in three states. In Lawrenceville, Georgia, a father named William McHugh is standing trial accused of trapping his own children inside what prosecutors are calling a house of horrors, a case in which his ten year old daughter, Zoe died. In Las Vegas, a twenty year old woman named Alessandra Blee has pleaded guilty in the shooting death of her friend, twenty three year old Mark Gown during a costume photoshoot. And in Daytona Beach Shores, Florida, a woman named Deanna Harrell is charged with killing a sixty three year old tolbooth attendant, Tammy Joe Baker, in what the sheriff is calling a drunk driving homicide. Look, I'm going to be honest with you.

0:58 The first story today is one of the hardest I've had to tell you in a while. It's about a little girl named Zoe McHugh and the house she lived in and the things that were done to her and her brothers and sisters inside it a house with a lock on the refrigerator, buckets instead of bathrooms, a bedroom that was actually a bathroom with a bed made out of a piece of plywood laid across a bathtub, and it took a fire, a fire set by one of those children, just trying to get out for anyone on the outside to find out what was. Happening on the inside. Then we go to Las Vegas, where a young man named Mark Goggin agreed to take some polaroid photos of two friends posing with guns. He took the pictures and then there was one more flash and it was louder than the others, and Mark in the camera both hit the floor. The woman who fired that shot just pleaded guilty, and wait until you hear what detectives found on her phone.

1:55 And finally to a toll booth on a Florida beach where a woman named tam Me Joe Baker went to work on a Monday morning the way she had for years. She stepped into that booth at twelve thirty eight and five seconds. By twelve forty she was gone thirty five seconds. We're going to talk about how thirty five seconds was all it took, and about every choice. That led up to them. Stay with me. I want to start with Zoe McHugh because before this becomes a story about a courtroom and a list of charges, it should be a story about a ten year old girl. She was ten years old. She had brothers and sisters.

2:38 She lived in a house in Gwynette County, Georgia, just outside Atlanta, and on the night of April seventeenth, twenty twenty two, she did not get out of that house. She died of smoke inhalation. She was ten. Someone has to say her name first, so I'm saying it Zoe. Here's what happened that night, as prosecutors laid it out this week in opening statements, there was a fire at the mceu home. Zoe's mother, Karina, got out and she got two of the boys out with her, a twelve year old and an eight year old. The father, William McHugh, wasn't home. He was working a shift at a waffle house with the oldest daughter, who was seventeen, and Zoe was left inside. When the first responders went into that house, they started noticing things, strange things. There was a lock on the refrigerator, not on the front door.

3:30 On the refrigerator. There were buckets of human waste sitting in the house because, as it turned out, there was no working plumbing. And there was a room that was supposedly a child's bedroom, except it wasn't a bedroom at all. It was a bathroom and the bed in it was a piece of plywood laid across the top of the bathtub. That's what the people who came to put out the fire found. And I want you to sit with the fact that it took a fire for anyone to see it. Now, the prosecutor in this case is named Wanda Vance, and she stood up in front of that jury and told them something you don't often hear a prosecutor concede right out of the gate. She told them that the man on trial, William McHugh, did not light the match. He didn't start the fire. The person who started the fire was his fifteen year old son. And here is what that child did after he set it. He walked six miles through the night until he reached a church and he asked the people there for help. He was initially charged with murder, a child charged with murder, but the first responders who dealt with him that night, realized very quickly that something was deeply wrong, not with what he'd done, but with what had been done to him. This was a boy who they say, did not know how to use a toilet, did not know how to use a ziplock bag. He told them he set the fire because he needed to escape that house. And then he described what escaping meant. He described beating. He described being made

5:02 to stand on milk crates or on cinderblocks for hours, and sometimes, he said, for days. He described a shot collar. He described children with no plumbing using buckets and being assigned the job of emptying those buckets once or twice a week. That was the childhood, as he described it, that he set a fire to get out of. And I need to be careful here and fair because that's the job. Those are his accounts, and this is a trial, and the jury hasn't weighed all of it yet. But the physical conditions of that house, the lock on the fridge, the buckets, the plywood over the bathtub, those aren't accounts. The firefighters saw those. And you don't lock a refrigerator by accident. That's not a mistake, that's a choice. We're not here because this family is poor. The prosecutor anticipated the defense, and she met it head on, because the easy story to tell a jury, the comfortable story, is that this was just a poor family that couldn't fix the plumbing and couldn't afford much food, and now the state is piling on. Vance told the jury in so many words, that is not what this is. She told them the reason the plumbing wasn't fixed and the reason the children didn't have enough to eat was not that the money wasn't there.

6:22 And then she told them what was in the house. A big screen television in the master bedroom, a telescope, two treadmills, a six foot privacy fence. So the money for a privacy fence was there. The money to keep the world from seeing in just not the money to fix the toilets the children were forbidden to have. She also told the jury that these kids were isolated from the world and homeschooled, except that homeschooled implies schooling, and she says there wasn't any. When the fifteen year old was handed forms to fill out, he reportedly couldn't spell his own name correctly. He spelled it differently every time time he tried a teenager who couldn't reliably write his own name. Nobody was paying attention to that boy. Nobody was paying attention to any of them. The defense and the mother. William McHugh, who is fifty one, has pleaded not guilty to all of it felony, murder, aggravated assault, cruelty to children, false imprisonment, rape, aggravated child molestation, and incest.

7:22 He is entitled to that plea. He is entitled to his defense, and he is presumed innocent of every one of those charges unless and until a jury says otherwise. That's not a formality to me. That's the floor we stand on. His attorney is a man named Thomas Clegg, and his argument to the jury was essentially, don't rush. He framed it as a question of degree. Did the kids have to empty some portable toilets because the septic system wasn't working? Probably, he said. Could the kids have been better educated, probably? Could they have had more variety in their meals? Probably? But that, he said, is not really why we're here. I'll let the jury decide what it's about. I'll just note that more variety in their meals is a remarkable way to describe a house where a child slept on plywood over a tub.

8:14 There's one more piece, and it matters. The children's mother, Coriina McHugh, has already pleaded guilty. She pleaded guilty to every charge she faced, including three counts of murder and false imprisonment, and she is awaiting sentencing, and the state intends to put her on the stand as a witness against her husband. The defense is ready for that. Cleig told the jury she's motivated to cut her losses, that she's scared of spending the rest of her life in prison, and that she's trying to save her own skin. Maybe she is. Both things can be true. A person can be trying to save herself and also telling the truth about what happened in that house. The jury will have to sort out which parts are which. We'll be following it when we come back Las Vegas. A costume photoshoot, a borrowed Polaroid camera, and a single gunshot that detectives say was anything but an accident.

9:13 Stay with me. The young man at the center of this next story was named Mark Santiago Gown. He was twenty three years old, and from what came out in the Grand jury. Here's a thing we know about him. He liked a girl. He told a mutual friend he liked her, that he talked about her all the time, that he thought their relationship was good. On the night he died, he'd brought a bottle of vodka over to a friend's place to share. He brought his camera energy. He agreed to take pictures of his friends because they wanted to dress up and have a little photo shoot. Mark gown was, by every indication, a young man who showed up for the people he cared about. Say his name Mark. What happened in that driveway?

10:06 This was August of last year in Las Vegas. There were four of them gathered at a home Mark, a woman named Alessandra Blay, a mutual friend named Maverick Crafts, and Crafts's boyfriend. They were drinking the vodka Mark had brought. He'd also brought a handgun, a compact glock. After the boyfriends fell asleep, the two women got to talking and the friend. Crafts told the grand jury that she mentioned to Blee how much Mark cared about her and Blee, she said, was disgusted by the idea, said they weren't dating. That she didn't understand why he thought she was his girlfriend, that she didn't feel that way about him at all. And then Kraft said, after the bottle was finished, Blee picked it up and slammed.

10:48 It down on Mark while he was asleep. The two women moved to another room and decided to put on costumes and do a polaroid photo shoot. Mark good naturedly agreed to be the photographer. They went out to the driveway and the two of them posed on the hood of a truck with knives and with guns while Mark took the pictures. And then Kraft said there was one more flash, louder this time, and Mark and the camera fell. He'd been shot once in the neck. The bullet traveled down through his body and out his back. At first, officers thought it might have been a terrible accident, two kids playing with a loaded gun, A horrible mistake.

11:29 It happens, and if that's where the evidence had stopped, that's probably where this story would have stopped too. What was on the phone. It didn't stop there. Detectives looked at Blee's social media, and a homicide detective named Casey Kirkgard told the grand jury what they found. Was, in his word, problematic. He described images and messages showing what he called almost an obsession with guns, and specifically with wanting to shoot someone and get away with it. Investigators ran a keyword search across her counts. The words gun and guns came up more than two hundred times. And then there was a message she'd sent to another person online. I'll paraphrase it carefully. She wrote that she would kill prostitutes and bury them in the New Mexico desert. When detectives brought her in and confronted her with that, she said it was a joke. But then she said something that made it a much stranger joke. She told them she had a personal intimate knowledge of women being buried in the New Mexico desert because she said her grandfather was a serial killer who'd been convicted in New Mexico.

12:34 Investigators identified her grandfather as a man named Joseph Blee. And here I have to be precise, because the precision matters. Joseph Blee is. A person of interest in the disappearances of ten to twelve women in New Mexico, the cluster of cases often called the West Mesa murders. He has not been convicted of those killings. What he was convicted of were sexual assaults connected to several women. So the granddaughter's claim isn't quite the claim the record support, but the fact that she reached for it that when she was cornered about a dead friend, the thing she offered up was a family legacy of buried bodies. That tells you something about the world inside her head. Alexandra Blia is twenty years old.

13:18 She was originally charged with open murder. On Tuesday, she pleaded guilty to amended charges in voluntary manslaughter and kidnapping as part of an agreement, and under that agreement, the expectation is that she'll serve about five years in prison. Her sentencing is set for July twenty ninth, five years for Mark Goggin's entire life. I'm not the judge, and the sentence isn't final until it's handed down. There may be reasons in the evidence, problems of proof, questions about intent, the difference between what you suspect and what you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that made the prosecution take this deal rather than risk a trial. That's the real, unglamorous machinery of the justice system, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't exist, but I'd ask you to remember, Mark's family is sitting with a number now, and the number is five.

14:10 You weigh that against two hundred mentions of the. Word gun and a stated wish to shoot someone and get away with it, and you tell me how that math feels. Her name was Tammy Joe Baker. She was sixty three years old. She was a longtime employee of Vlusha County, Florida, the kind of person who shows up year after year to do an ordinary job that keeps an ordinary place running. On Monday, that job was working the toll booth at the Dunlawton Avenue Beach Approach in Daytona Beach Shores. Her family says her birthday was just around the corner. Her granddaughter, we're told, was at the scene.

14:54 She was a grandmother. She was somebody's whole world. The sheriff there is a man named Mike Chitwood, and he put the whole horror of it into one sentence. Tammy Joe Baker entered that booth at twelve thirty eight and five seconds. By twelve forty she was dead thirty five seconds inside that little booth before a truck came through it. You're here, the sheriff said, and you're gone. The booth, he said, wasn't made of anything that could stop a truck. Lifeguards ran to her. A young woman on the scene started CPR. None of it could have mattered. He believes she was killed close to on impact. Now here's where the sheriff says, that truck came from. And I want to walk it with you because this is a story about a chain of choices. The driver is a thirty five year old woman named Diana Harrel. And I'll say clearly she is charged, she is not convicted. And everything that follows is the allegation as the Sheriff's office has laid it out. They say Harrol was working that morning at a little shop that rents golf carts and bicycles.

16:01 Sales were slow, the weather was turning, and her boss sent her home early. According to investigators, she did not go home. She went to a lounge where they say she had a couple of rum and cokes and part of a shot over about an hour and then, and this is the detail. The sheriff says she admitted to in an interview. They alleged she'd poured out part of a bottle of gatorade, filled it back up with vodka and was drinking that too. By twelve twenty nine, the nine to one to one calls were coming in. A couple reported a driver who'd hit a mailbox, clipped a trash can, and was coming the wrong way, nearly hitting them head on. Another caller described a blonde woman in a Chevy truck all over the road heading straight for them.

16:44 Nine minutes later, that truck went through Tammy Joe Baker's toll booth at an estimated forty miles an hour, and then the sheriff says it kept going toward the ocean like it was trying to get away, until it bogged down in the sand. When officers reached her, body camera video shows her being taken into custody. She was, they say, cooperative with the officers themselves, but as she was being walked to a patrol vehicle, she turned to a bystander who was filming and said, can you please not record this? Can you please not record this? A woman was dead in a toll booth fifty yards away, and the concern was the camera, why the arrest took a few days. There's one more thing you should know, and I'm going to handle it plainly and then move on because it deserves care, not spectacle. After the crash, Harold told officers she wanted to take her own life. She was placed under a mental health hold and taken for treatment before she could be booked. That's the reason she wasn't formally arrested until Wednesday morning, after she was medically released. She's charged now with vehicular homicide and DUI manslaughter, and she had her first court appearance scheduled for yesterday afternoon. I'm not going to dress that part up and I'm not going to dwell on it. A person in crisis is still a person. But a person in crisis who gets behind the wheel of a truck has put everyone on that road inside the crisis with her, and one of those people was Tammy Joe Baker, who did nothing that morning except go to work.

18:14 Both things can be true. We can hold space for a human being in a dark place, and we can refuse to let that erase the woman in the booth. Accountability doesn't have a legal department, and it doesn't have an excuse big enough to cover thirty five seconds. So that's where we are this Friday. A father in Georgia on trial over a house that firefighters had to walk into to believe. And a ten year old named Zoe who didn't get out, a young woman in Las Vegas who pleaded guilty after a photoshoot ended with a gun shot. And a twenty three year old named Mark who was just there to take the pictures. And a toll booth on a Florida beach where a grandmother named Tammy Joe went to work and never came home.

18:56 Three cases, three families that didn't ask to be on this show. The thread running through all of them isn't bad luck. It's choices. A lock on a refrigerator, a finger on a trigger, a bottle of gatorade filled with vodka. Somebody chose and somebody else paid for it. The least we can do is say their names and pay attention, because somebody has to. I'm Garrett Fisher. Take care of each other this weekend, and do better before you go. If this episode meant something to you, share it, Send it to one person who follows these cases. The way you do word of mouth is genuinely how This show finds the people who need it, and if you're listening on Spotify, drop us a comment. Tell me which of these three you want us to stay on as it develops.

19:43 I read them and they shape what we cover next. Wherever else you're listening on YouTube anywhere alike. A follow a rating helps more than you'd think. We'll be right back here, same time, with whatever the court's hand us next. This program covers active and ongoing legal proceedings. William McHugh has pleaded not guilty and his trial is in progress. Everything described about that case reflects allegations and opening statements by the prosecution, not findings a fact, and he has presumed innocent unless and until a jury convicts him. Karina McHugh's guilty plea and pending sentencing are reported as a matter of court record. Alessandra Blay has pleaded guilty to amended charges of involuntary manslaughter and kidnapping. The approximately five year term described is the expected outcome under her plea agreement and has not yet been imposed, with sentencing scheduled for July twenty ninth. Regarding her grandfather, Joseph Blew, he is a person of interest in the New Mexico cases known as the West Masa murders, and was convicted of sexual assault. He has not been convicted of those killings, and any statement to the contrary attributed to the defendant is unproven. Deanna Harrell has been charged with vehicular homicide and dui manslaughter. She has not been convicted, and all accounts of her conduct that day come from the Volusia County Sheriff's Office and remain allegations. Her reported age has been listed as both thirty five and thirty six. Details

21:16 of the victim's age have varied slightly between sources. Her court proceedings are ongoing as of this recording. Reporting in this episode is drawn from Court TV and additional public reporting where sources differ or details are unconfirmed. We've told you so. This program is for information and commentary and is not legal advice. Today's episode also touches on mental health, crisis and suicidal thoughts. If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available in the US. You can call her text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at nine to eight eight