National Football League

Perjury charge dropped against Hernandez's fiancee; did she ever tell the truth?

Published May. 15, 2015 12:08 p.m. ET

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Aaron Hernandez’s fiancée walked out of a Massachusetts courtroom Friday a free woman – the perjury charge against her dismissed in the wake of her testimony in the former football star’s murder trial.

For Shayanna Jenkins, it was the reward for providing damaging testimony against the former New England Patriots tight end – the father of her daughter – in a trial that saw him convicted of murdering Odin Lloyd.

For Bill McCauley, the prosecutor who secured that murder conviction against Hernandez, it was the price that had to be paid to get a key witness on the stand.

Friday’s hearing before Judge E. Susan Garsh lasted less than a minute. There was no discussion.

But plenty of questions remain.

Within hours of the discovery of Lloyd’s body on June 17, 2013, gunned down in a secluded gravel pit in North Attleboro, Mass., the investigation’s focus fell firmly on Hernandez. Detectives found keys to a rented Chevrolet Suburban in Lloyd’s pocket – a vehicle that Hernandez had signed for. They found numerous text messages in Lloyd’s phone from Hernandez, setting up a middle-of-the-night meeting to “step out.”

They quickly discovered that Hernandez’s fiancée and Lloyd’s girlfriend were sisters.

But they faced plenty of obstacles.

Two others – Carlos Ortiz and Ernest Wallace Jr. – were with Hernandez and Lloyd when the murder was carried out. Ortiz cooperated but proved to be a witness with zero credibility, his story shifting each time detectives talked to him. Wallace refused to roll over.

Prosecutors had no murder weapon, but they developed a theory after watching hours of surveillance footage from Hernandez’s home and poring over numerous messages from his phone: That Jenkins, acting on his orders, secreted the murder weapon out of their house and ditched it. That theory was backed, in part, by home surveillance footage of her struggling to carry a black trash bag, loaded with something rigid and bulky, out of the house and to her sister’s car. That footage, captured the day after Lloyd’s body was discovered, dovetailed with her borrowing her sister’s car, under the guise of running to the bank to get cash to pay her housekeepers and driving away – she was ultimately gone about 30 minutes.

But when they got her before a grand jury, in two sessions in August 2013, Jenkins frustrated prosecutors, providing elusive answers about what was in the bag, where she went and what she did with it.

Ultimately, the grand jury indicted her on a single count of perjury, and prosecutors alleged she lied 29 times in her grand jury testimony. In Massachusetts, perjury in a first-degree murder case can carry a penalty as severe as life in prison.

That provided prosecutors with power.

Then they went to court and upped the ante. McCauley obtained a court order granting Jenkins immunity from prosecution for anything she might disclose on the witness stand in Hernandez’s trial. When Garsh signed that order, on Feb. 10, it effectively backed Jenkins into a corner, taking away her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and leaving her with two choices – testify or face a contempt citation and a jail term.

When Jenkins took the witness stand, in two sessions on March 27 and March 30, she clearly remained in Hernandez’s camp. She wore her glittering engagement ring, and her answers were peppered with, “I don’t recall,” and “I don’t remember.” She contended that she tossed the trash bag into a dumpster but could not remember where it was located.

All of that testimony fit with the narrative the prosecution wove of Lloyd’s murder.

And so it was that Patrick Bomberg, another of the prosecutors in the Hernandez case, filed a simple motion on Thursday, barely more than a page long, requesting that the perjury charges be dropped.

Friday morning, Garsh granted the motion, and it was over.

Outside the courthouse, Janice Bassil, Jenkins’ lawyer asserted that prosecutors sought the perjury charge for one reason and one reason only: to have a hammer to force Jenkins to the witness stand.

“Quite frankly, the charges never should have been brought,” Bassil said. “She made an honest mistake in the grand jury.”

A reporter asked Jenkins how she was doing.

“I’m feeling great,” she responded. “So I’m happy to start my future with my daughter and move forward.”

But she ducked a question about whether she was still with Hernandez, answering, “Eh.”

“Do you feel like you cooperated?” someone else asked.

“She did what she had to do, under the law,” Bassil said.

The mystery of whether that box contained the murder weapon – and what Jenkins did with it – endures.

And so does something else that’s not known: Whether Jenkins’ testimony actually mattered to the jurors.

Shortly after Hernandez was convicted, and after Judge Garsh sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole, the 12 jurors who deliberated and three alternates met with reporters in room on the second floor of the Fall River Justice Center. Barely two minutes passed before Jenkins’ name came up.

“Did you believe Shayanna was telling the truth?” a reporter asked.

There was an awkward pause, and then several jurors started laughing.

“No comment,” one of them said, and the laughter ratcheted up a notch.

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