Town note
The community was named for the rice industry that was there.
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He studied at Boston University, Northeastern Law School and Georgetown, where he took an LLM in national security and cybersecurity. He was commissioned as a Navy officer in June 2006, served as a JAG, completed two tours in Iraq, prosecuted courts martial in Sicily and by 2008 was defending naval personnel in Norfolk. In 2009 he married Heather, and the couple struggled to conceive because of a medical condition; she declined fertility treatment and they had no children. By 2015 he was working at the Pentagon in the International and Operational Law Division, managing agreements with navies worldwide, and the couple lived at Adrian Drive in Alexandria, Virginia.
The marriage ended in divorce in 2016. In the divorce hearings he claimed to have millions of dollars, and the settlement required him to pay Heather $1.5 million. He never paid her a penny. Three weeks after the divorce he met Mindy Ruth Mebane on OkCupid. Mindy, born around 1982, was the eldest of three siblings, the daughter of Frank III, a minister, and Betsy, and the family was close-knit and religious. She had a bachelor's degree from Armstrong State University and a master's in public and international affairs from Virginia Tech, and had worked as a legal secretary before moving into the nonprofit sector. Their first date was at the Black Wall Hitch restaurant in Alexandria, and they married on 9 October 2016 at Morven Park in Leesburg, Virginia.
In the summer of 2016 Nick's name appeared in a Washington Post article about a Marine court martial involving classified information; he had written the legal memo quoted in it. From late 2017, he said, an FBI agent named Jim McIntyre came to the house after Nick reported bank accounts being drained, mail going missing, vandalism, nails in the tyres and anonymous death threats. McIntyre, he said, blamed overseas hackers targeting military members and then, later, told him that his father Wayne was behind the local harassment, that Wayne was not his biological father, and that Wayne wanted him back in the family with Mindy as the obstacle.
The couple began moving constantly. Over four to six years they moved somewhere between fifty and a hundred times, across Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia, living out of plastic bins and communicating only through the Signal app. Nick said he had $32 million in stock from a software company called Apis Limited, held in a trust that McIntyre managed. In reality, a Navy friend, Cameron Nelson, had given him her credit card details to cover a rental in an emergency, and he ran up $200,000 on it over a few years.
In November 2019 the couple moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where Nick said he was beaten with a baseball bat and kicked in the face. He called neither the police nor a hospital. In February 2021 the whole group, including Mindy's parents, moved into the Hilton Head house of her brother Frank IV, a police officer, and stayed sixteen months. In March 2022 Mindy announced that she was pregnant. In June 2022, after Frank IV evicted them, they moved into East 65th Street in Savannah, an Airbnb bungalow costing $4,500 a month. Nick said he had just sold a short horror story to Sony for $300,000, and on 27 July 2022 he bought a 2022 Ford Explorer for $46,000 in cash.
He sent her flowers, and in November he paid for four new tyres and headlights on her car.
Mindy's parents left for Hilton Head on Wednesday 23 November 2022. On Saturday 26 November Mindy texted Nick that she was going to hospital, and she was never seen alive again. The medical examiner later placed death between 27 and 30 November. On Monday 28 November Nick bought a seven-piece deer processing kit at Bass Pro Shops. On Tuesday 29 November he left the Savannah house at 8.30am, bought a Milwaukee knife at the Home Depot on Abercorn Street at 8.56am, drove south on Interstate 95, stopped at a Marathon station in Midway at 10.30am and switched his phone off at 11am. The Explorer's GPS showed it entering the Portal Hunting Club near Riceboro through Jones Road at 11.15am and staying within a three-mile radius for two hours. His phone came back on at 1pm, a Riceboro town camera caught him leaving at 1.30pm and by 3pm he was back in Savannah getting the car washed.
On 1 December a man at a birthing centre somewhere in the Savannah area told him that Mindy had died suddenly, apparently after being left alone in a bathroom. He told her family that she had died at the birthing centre from a stroke or heart problem and that the baby had not survived. He later collected what he was told were her ashes from a man on the side of a road in Montgomery, Alabama, paying $5,000 in cash for a bag that also contained her engagement and wedding rings.
On 2 December at 4.50pm the hunter David Owen Lovett shot a deer at the Portal Hunting Club and his dogs led him to a headless, legless torso. Investigators found a black plastic tote, a red-handled Milwaukee knife wrapped in Clorox wipes and more than a dozen wipes scattered around. On 3 December the hunter Philip McCaller found a right leg 2.5 miles away, on 5 December cadaver dogs found the left leg, and on 7 December GBI agent Lindsey Smith noticed disturbed earth beneath a pine tree and, three feet down, found the head. The autopsy showed nine lacerations to the head, one causing a skull fracture, defensive wounds on the arms and hands, cuts and bruising to the chest and abdomen, and tool marks on the bones consistent with power tools. She had not been pregnant, and a non-lethal dose of Benadryl was found in her liver tissue.
Heather recognised the forensic sketch as Mindy and contacted the GBI. On 20 March 2023 Nick claimed that his Explorer had exploded into flames with an $860,000 cashier's cheque inside. On 11 May 2023 DNA from Betsy confirmed that the body was Mindy's. He waived his rights and talked for two hours, describing McIntyre, the trust and a red-headed man to whom he said he had handed two totes and swapped cars. In a second interview in Georgia later in May, told that his wife's body had been found, he said, "That's impossible, she was cremated", and then, "Jim must have lied to me". Asked to describe McIntyre, he said average height and average build. Told that his car had kept transmitting location data while his phone was off, he said, "I didn't know cars could do that".
Samantha annulled the marriage. The defence argued that he had lived in genuine fear of McIntyre for years. Betsy, the medical examiner, the Airbnb owner and the toolmark and DNA analysts testified. Nick took the stand and repeated the story of McIntyre, the $32 million, his father's plot and the roadside ashes; the gallery laughed when he said he had been unhappy with his wife's care.