Prosecutors laid out the case Friday against the Durham man who forced his children and followers to call him "Lord" and feared him. Peter Lucas Moses faces first-degree murder charges in the deaths of Jadon Higganbothan, 4, and Antoinetta Yvonne McKoy, 28.
Prosecutors said they will seek the death penalty against him. Defense attorneys didn't speak in his behalf at a court hearing Friday. Prosecutors said Moses killed Jadon because he thought the child was gay and McKoy after he learned she couldn't have children and wanted to leave the group.
Jadon's death
Jadon's interaction with one of those children, prosecutors contended in court Friday, led to his death.
Sometime in October 2010, prosecutors told the judge, one of the women told the defendant that Jadon had hit another child's bottom, and Moses retaliated because he thought the boy might be homosexual - partially because the child's father had left his mother.
Homosexuality, Cline contended, is frowned upon by the Black Hebrews, so the defendant asked the boy's mother to get rid of him.
Moses then ordered two of the other women to set up computers and speakers in the garage, prosecutors contend, then the defendant took the boy into the garage, where music and the Lord's Prayer in Hebrew blared, and a gunshot sounded. One of the women told investigators the boy was shot in the head.
Some of the women cleaned up his bloodied body, prosecutors said, then put it in a suitcase in the master bedroom until Moses complained about the smell.
McKoy's death
Though prosecutors are not sure of the date when the violence occurred, they argue that McKoy, a woman who knew Moses in high school, was killed weeks, maybe even months after the boy.
McKoy, who kept a diary, found out she could not have children and wrote in several entries that she worried that "Lord" might kill her, according to prosecutors.
McKoy tried to escape the house right before her death, according to a neighbor whom investigators interviewed.
On one day in late December, she ran to the neighbor's house and asked to use a cell phone to call her mother in Washington.
The neighbor thought the woman was mentally troubled and had run away from a group home, and did not call police.
The other women came out of the house where McKoy had been living and wrestled her to the ground, then dragged her back inside, the neighbor told investigators.
The defendant then beat McKoy repeatedly that day and tried to strangle her with an extension cord. McKoy, according to the informant, begged for her life.
The defendant then got the gun that had been used to kill Jadon, the informant told investigators, took it to the bathroom, and then one of the women shot her while playing the same music that had blared from the garage when the boy was shot.
McKoy's body was kept in a large trash bin inside the house, according to prosecutors, before it was buried in a shallow grave alongside the boy's, at an Ashe Street house where Moses' parents lived for a time.
Investigators discovered the remains in June, months after their investigation began as a missing person case.
Read more: http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/9836148/
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