Rather than stand trial next week and face a possible death penalty, Clem Beauchamp is expected Friday to plead guilty to the murders of a Delray Beach mother and her two young children.
A tentative plea deal calls for Beauchamp, 38, to take responsibility for the heinous slayings of Felicia Brown, 25, Jermaine McNeil, 10, and Ju’Tyra Allen, 6, in exchange for three consecutive life sentences.
If Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Charles Burton accepts the proposed terms, it would resolve a case that was first reported after the March 2011 discovery of the children’s decomposing bodies inside luggage dumped in the canal separating Delray Beach and Boca Raton.
Their murders enabled detectives to identify Brown, whose body was found at a West Palm Beach trash-processing facility in August 2010. The woman had the names Jermaine and Ju’Tyra tattooed on her leg. Another breakthrough in the case later allegedly tied Beauchamp to dumping the bags with the kids’ remains.
A hearing on the plea deal is scheduled for 8:30 a.m., according to court records. Defense attorney Ronald Chapman could not be reached Thursday despite a call to his office, while defense attorney Michael Maher answered a call but quickly said he had to go.
Beauchamp’s pending guilty pleas angered Yves A. Gissome, brother to Brown and uncle to the children; he said he was shocked to get the news from Assistant State Attorney Terri Skiles.
Gissome told the Sun Sentinel he had long hoped a trial would not only provide justice for his family, but also help expose weaknesses in the criminal justice and social services systems. Jury selection for a monthlong trial had been set to begin Monday.
“I can’t fight the situation and I have to be diplomatic,” Gissome said Thursday when asked if he was disappointed the death penalty appeared to be off the table. “Those kids should have been alive.”
The kids had been living with Beauchamp for about six months after Brown, his on-again, off-again girlfriend, vanished the previous summer, according to court files. Brown was gone with “no warning and no goodbyes” because Beauchamp had killed her, Skiles wrote in a September pleading in the case.
Beauchamp, in one interview with detectives, insisted he had loved the boy and girl as if they were his own kids, records show. He said he taught Ju’Tyra how to swim and ride a bike, and played football with Jermaine.
“Ju’Tyra calls me Dad,” he said. “Jermaine…he’s like a son.”
At one point during the interrogation, Beauchamp looked at photographs of the dead children.
“I wouldn’t do nothin’ like that,” Beauchamp said, before he asked for a lawyer. “I wouldn’t help nobody do nothing like that.”
Beauchamp repeatedly said he walked the children to their school bus stop on Feb. 22, 2011, and that they were going to be picked up after school by Brown’s fiancé. He did not see them after that morning, he told detectives.
Autopsies showed Jermaine McNeil died from a hit on the head, while Ju’Tyra died from a lack of oxygen — her face was wrapped in tape.
Last month, Beauchamp’s attorneys said they planned to argue Beauchamp’s life should be spared, partly because he was extremely mentally disturbed at the time of the killings. The defense listed as experts two doctors to testify Beauchamp has substantial brain damage, wrote lawyers Chapman and Maher.
Prosecutor Skiles had written Beauchamp deserves death for a variety of reasons, including the ages of the young victims, and that the crimes were “especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel” and committed in a “cold, calculated and premeditated manner.”
Beauchamp already is a convicted felon, currently serving a 10-year federal prison term he received in 2011 for possessing an illegal handgun silencer. In December 2014, he also pleaded guilty to two unrelated drug crimes from April 2010 and received a three-year prison sentence.
Federal prosecutors have alleged Beauchamp may have been motivated to kill Brown because she was a key witness against him in the gun case.
The firearms charge against Beauchamp came about after Brown’s car was repossessed from his Delray Beach home in 2009. A tow-yard employee found a black bag containing a .22-caliber revolver and a homemade silencer, and 12 rounds of ammunition. Brown told the employee the bag was her boyfriend’s.
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