MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – For more than three decades, Monongalia County’s prosecuting attorney has chosen her words carefully presenting to jurors, responding to judges and interviewing crime victims.
While wrapping up her final days in office, narrowing down the list of adjectives to describe her career wasn’t the easiest on-the-spot task for Marcia Ashdown.
“Exciting, scary, humbling, funny. Just everything that you can think of is a reaction to the work I do, that we all do, in the office,” Ashdown listed on WAJR’s Morgantown AM.
Ashdown’s professional path took her from Iowa to Illinois and then Kentucky before she and her husband, Gerald, settled into their long-term legal careers in Morgantown.
More than 35 years later, the prosecutor and constitutional and criminal law professor coordinated their retirements to begin in 2017.
Prior to the filing period to run in the May 2016 general election, Ashdown chose not pursue a re-election bid.
“We’re not working in nice places where you only see the good things and the nice people. So, overall, it will be good not to have that on my mind.”
She said success in some cases means striking a good balance “not just to get the greatest conviction that might be possible but to do what seems fair and just.” Ashdown added, “I’ve tried to that. I have tried to lead my staff in that direction. I think that we’ve all done that as well as we could.”
There are countless notable cases to cross her desk. But, two stand out as garnering the most attention locally and nationally.
Ashdown and her office handled the James Michael and Skylar Neese murder cases.
“You don’t, in a city this size, expect to have occurrences like that and experience those kinds of crimes. So, we really went on a ride with those cases.”
Michelle Michael, a nurse practitioner, was convicted of first-degree murder and first-degree arson. During the sentencing, Ashdown called the murder a “peculiar crime.” Michael went to prison for injecting her husband, James Michael, with a paralytic drug before setting fire to their home with him inside.
When two Monongalia County teenagers stabbed their high school friend Skylar Neese to death and left her body in a wooded area in a neighboring Pennsylvania county, Ashdown said she and her office braced themselves for a case like no other.
“It truly was just a horror story for months. We just kind of suffered through that for a long time not to mention our work with Dave and Mary Neese and just the torture they went through and still do.”
Shelia Eddy pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in Neese’s July 2012 death. Rachel Shoaf pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.
Ashdown said she will be walking away from trial weeks in Monongalia County that had her office juggling 20 to 30 trials at a time.
Beginning January 1, 2017, the Ashdowns likely won’t be fretting over a calendar.
“We’ll do some traveling. We’ll do some more visiting of our daughter and family out of state and just have an open schedule rather than schedules to keep,” said the attorney.
Ashdown’s final day in office is December 31, 2016. Assistant prosecutor Perri Jo DeChristopher, who won the Primary Election and ran unopposed in the General Election, will replace Ashdown.