The murder trial of a 24-year-old woman accused of killing an ex-boyfriend and former classmate in a treehouse near her home began this week in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Julia Enright, an Ashburnham phlebotomist also working a side-hustle as a dominatrix, was 21 when she allegedly stabbed 20-year-old Brandon Chicklis between 10 and 12 times, wrapped his body in a blanket and trash bags, and left it by the side of a New Hampshire highway. She has been charged with first-degree murder and has pleaded not guilty.
In their opening statements on Monday, prosecutors alleged Enright, whom they characterized as obsessed with blood, domination, and murder, lured Chicklis to a treehouse outfitted with restraints, according to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.
“Do you think we could add bubbles to a blood bath?” a prosecutor quoted Enright as having texted her boyfriend, John Lind, on June 22, 2018, a day before the state posited the murder occurred. According to court records, eight days before Chicklis was last seen alive, Enright tried to bribe Planned Parenthood into allowing her to keep a fetus she aborted so she could “play with” its bones, the prosecution said.
A lawyer for Enright argued that she stabbed Chicklis in self-defense after he sexually assaulted her. “This is not a heartless killer,” said Louis Badwey, who referred to Chicklis as a “rapist.”
First Assistant District Attorney Jeffrey Travers told jurors on Monday that the treehouse was where Enright and Chicklis had had sex before while dating in high school. Chicklis, remembered by his family as a Life Scout who loved the outdoors, had apparently asked Enright to meet him half a dozen times in the months leading up to his death. She had toyed with him, Travers said, “pulling him in and then pushing him away again.”
In June 2018, Enright finally texted Chicklis to meet her at the treehouse to drink and “party.” Separately, she told her boyfriend, John Lind, that she had a “surprise” for him. After she’d killed Chicklis in the treehouse, the prosecutor said, Enright and Lind dumped his body off Route 119. Chicklis’ body was not found until weeks later.
On Tuesday, New Hampshire’s chief medical examiner, Jennie Duval, testified that conducting an autopsy on the badly decomposed remains had been challenging. His body was mostly “skeletonized,” she said, but his t-shirt had at least a dozen slits consistent with stab wounds.
After the murder, Enright set about establishing an alibi, according to Travers. She went out for sushi with Lind, who has not yet been charged, and began sending texts to Chicklis’ phone: “Why didn’t you show up to meet me?”
A court filing said that investigators who located the treehouse, referenced in texts between Enright and the victim, found “numerous stains” that tested “presumptive positive” for blood. Handles attached to the walls were “presumably used to attach restraint devices.”
Authorities searching Enright’s home also found vials of blood, a used condom collection, numerous knives, dominatrix materials, “plastic tubs with animal carcasses in various states of rotting,” and a “wet specimen,” according to court documents. Lawyers for the defense fought for hours to prevent much of the evidence being admitted to court, arguing that it was irrelevant and unfairly prejudicial, the Telegram & Gazette reported.
In the end, Worcester Superior Court Judge Daniel M. Wrenn had to issue a line-by-line ruling on which exhibits would be admitted. Among those he excluded were photos of “a bucket of organs” and a video of “the defendant licking blood from a body part.” Wrenn also ruled out a number of Enright’s writings and journal entries for the trial, which is expected to run until the week of Thanksgiving.
An affidavit captured some of Enright’s entries in her notebooks, recovered by authorities. “I daydream about it on occasion,” she allegedly wrote, according to The Boston Globe. “I just have this insatiable curiosity to kill a person.”