James Ray III's Montclair murder trial begins in Newark this week

Nearly five years after James Ray fled his Upper Montclair house en route to Cuba, with his girlfriend and the mother of his daughter dead in the living room, his murder trial will begin in Newark.

On Wednesday, Judge Verna Leath will hear opening arguments from assistant prosecutors Michelle Miller and John Petillo; the defense will be mounted by Thomas Ashley and Brooke Barnett.

A pre-trial hearing in September 2019 hinted at the courtroom drama that could be in store. With Ray sitting before Judge Leath, the attorneys argued over the admissability of an 18-page journal he had penned about the killing of Angela Bledsoe and his flight from Montclair to Texas, first in his BMW and then by hitchhiking on tractor-trailers to Texas, then to Mexico and Cuba, where he was turned over to FBI agents on October 31, 2018.

Barnett is the fiery criminal defense lawyer featured in the Sundance Channel's “Brick City,” the Peabody-Award-winning documentary series about Newark that ended in 2011. She also starred in the 2013 reality show "Jersey Strong."

Sequence of Events

The killing took place the morning of Oct. 22, 2018. Around 11 p.m., on a tip from Ray’s brother, police discovered the body of 44-year Angela Bledsoe in the stately six-bedroom stucco house at 304 North Mountain Ave., near Anderson Park, that she shared with Ray.

She was shot once in the jaw and three times in the back, according to evidence presented at Ray's November 2018 detention hearing. The time was 11:15, as evidenced by a crime-scene photo of a stopped wall clock that had been hit by gunfire. The crime-scene photo was taken by Ray.

The two were a power couple in New York. Ray, 55 at the time of the shooting, was a lawyer with an MBA. Bledsoe was a financial adviser who'd worked for JPMorgan Chase and other securities firms and was a high-profile leader with service organizations in the Black community.

According to Ray’s diary, he shot Bledsoe in self-defense after the two argued about their relationship while he was cleaning his guns, two H9s and an HK45, in the living room. Ray, a former Marine, wrote that Bledsoe pointed a gun at him and, "scared and out of options," he grabbed a gun on the table and fired at her. When Bledsoe started towards him, he wrote, he ran into the bathroom, and when he emerged with his gun pointed in front of him, "she pointed the gun at me, and I fired…. I couldn't stop firing."

At the detention hearing, Ashley argued that Ray shot Bledsoe in self-defense and fled to Cuba because he feared no one would believe that he acted in self-defense. In a letter he wrote to his brother, Ray said, “I am scared and don’t want the long burden of a trial to prove my point nor want to face jail time if the jury doesn’t agree.”

At the hearing, the prosecution asserted that Ray had many hours to stage the photo and write up the journal entry on the killing. Assistant Prosecutor Timothy Shaughnessy added,  "To be shot in the back, your honor, does not sound like self defense."

After killing Bledsoe, Ray wrote, he drove to Summit to pick up the couple’s daughter, 6-year-old daughter Alana, at her language immersion school, and then brought her to a Texas Longhorn steakhouse in Springfield, where he left her in the care of his brother.

In his daughter’s suitcase, he had stowed a confession note, which his brother reported to the police, and which led them to Bledsoe’s body.

According to his diary, Ray ditched his BMW 328i at Newark Airport (where it was later recovered by police) and took a cab to Philadelphia, where he spent the night on the street with the homeless. There, he took apart the murder weapon, an HK45, which he later discarded in pieces at various rest stops, he wrote. The next morning he took a cab to a Pennsylvania truck stop where he hitched a ride in a tractor-trailer, and then others, to Ohio, Memphis and Laredo, Texas. From there he took a bus to Monterrey, Mexico, and flew to Cuba, according to his diary.

He was apprehended by U.S. authorities nine days after the killing, on Oct. 31, 2018.

The judge and jury will have several complex narratives to unravel. In addition to questions about the veracity of the journal, which Miller has argued gives Ray an opportunity to “manipulate certain facts to present himself in a positive light,” and the defense has argued could be prejudicial to Ray, there are questions about his relationship to Bledsoe and his apparently concurrent marriage to a woman named Cheryl, with whom he has two grown children and had previously lived with in the North Mountain Avenue house.

Ray's history

In 2013, five years after he met Bledsoe, Ray was sued by a 23-year-old paralegal for sexual harassment after he told her he was a polygamist, talked to her about pornography and asked her to be his “third wife,” according to the complaint.

In a deposition for the case, which was settled for $35,000, Ray said he would soon be celebrating his 25th wedding anniversary with a woman named Cheryl, with whom he had two grown children.

Ray was also involved in the high-profile trial of Jelani Maraj, 38, the brother of rapper Nicki Minaj, who'd been accused of repeatedly raping his 11-year-old stepdaughter.

Ray, who said he'd been hired by the victim's mother, testified that he called Maraj's attorney demanding $25 million to resolve the case. When the lawyer told him Maraj had no money, Ray asked about his rap-star sister, according to a Newsday article.

The defense called the demand extortion. Ray said the alleged victim’s mother fired him over the incident.

The missing voice

The prosecution will have to counter Ray’s narrative and piece together what really happened on the morning of Oct. 22. At the 2019 hearing, prosecutors said they had not been able to gain access to Bledsoe’s cellphone, but recent advances in accessing encrypted cell phone information will likely have changed that.

Beyond a couple of chance interactions, there’s been little revealed by the Montclair community, where the family reportedly kept to themselves. But there was trouble behind the house's stately façade: Logs show that police visited Ray's house several times between 2013 and 2016. 

A call placed on June 26, 2016 asked for an officer to “keep peace while she gathers her belongings,” but it’s unclear if the woman was Bledsoe or Cheryl Ray, who had previously lived with Ray in the house.

In March 2013, Bledsoe called the NYPD to report that she’d been receiving texted “suicide notes” from Ray, according to police records. The police checked his law office at 445 Park Avenue and called the Montclair police, who visited his home.

They also checked for Ray at the DLV Lounge, the iconic bar and jazz venue in town that closed in December, which he visited several times a week, according to owner George Marable, who called himself a "good friend" of Ray’s.

A Montclair report dated the following day classified Ray as a "missing person," but there are no further reports on the incident.

The deceased

Friends of Bledsoe’s said she was a doting mother to Alana, a Girl Scout cookie mom and active in Jack & Jill of America, an African-American family organization. A Montclair neighbor said Bledsoe had enrolled her daughter in the town’s Sharon Miller Dance Academy; the 6-year-old was learning Mandarin and Spanish at Jump Immersion School.

In his diary, Ray said that on the morning of her killing, Bledsoe said she wanted to leave him and move to Florida, where her sister Lisa LaBoo lives. She was angry that Ray was preventing her because he wouldn’t give her permission to bring her daughter there, he wrote.

Leaving, or threatening to leave, a relationship is the "most dangerous time" for domestic violence victims, according to Linda Farstein, former prosecutor and chief of New York City's Sex Crimes Unit. Bledsoe's death was the third in Montclair in 2018 in which women were killed by their male domestic partners. The likelihood of intimate partner violence goes up when women attempt to break up with their partners, and having loaded guns in the mix is a lethal combination, experts say.

Ultimately, Bledsoe's daughter did end up in Florida with her aunt, but without a mother.

At the press conference following Ray’s capture, Bledsoe’s parents, Ray and Gaynelle Bledsoe, said they were caring for their granddaughter at their Maryland home in the summer and that Bledsoe’s sister LaBoo has custody during the school year.

Previous coverage of the case

Oct. 23, 2018: Montclair woman found shot dead in home; suspect remains at large

Oct. 23, 2018: Man wanted in Montclair fatal shooting was sued for sexual harassment in 2013

Oct. 26, 2018: New York power couple were a mystery in Montclair

Oct. 31, 2018: Montclair police reports reveal trouble at home of murder suspect

Nov. 7, 2018: Lawyer charged with killing Montclair girlfriend caught in Cuba

Nov. 9, 2018: Montclair murder suspect confessed in a note left in his 6-year-old daughter's suitcase

Nov. 13, 2018: Montclair homicide has a global twist with capture in Cuba

Sept. 25, 2019: Montclair man's 18-page journal on killing of girlfriend is focus of court hearing

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Montclair's James Ray murder trial set to begin on Wednesday