What made this Phoenix woman shoot her husband dead?

On the evening of July 31, 2012, Rebekah Mellon killed her husband in the living room of their Phoenix home. The question no one has answered ye is why. 

The Arizona Republic/January 3, 2017

By Richard Ruelas

This much is clear: On the evening of July 31, 2012, Rebekah Mellon entered the living room of her central Phoenix home armed with a handgun. Her husband was sitting on the couch, talking on the phone. She raised the gun, drew a bead and fired.

She sat down on the couch as he lay dying and lit a cigarette.

Finally, 23 minutes later, Mellon called 911 and reported the shooting.

Mellon told police she came out of her bedroom to find her husband injured. But her stories kept changing. And investigators found the gun, the suspected murder weapon, between the cushions of the couch where she had sat.

Police arrested Mellon on murder charges and put her in the back of a police car, where she passed out and fell asleep.

Investigators searched the scene and discovered that the home was wired with surveillance cameras and that the shooting, and Mellon’s post-murder cigarette, were captured on video.

The killing became fodder for news stories, not just in Phoenix, but nationally and internationally. Camera crews showed up to capture Mellon's "perp walk" into jail.

Mellon would be charged with murder in the first degree and ordered held in jail on a $1 million bail.

Police would not have to do much work to figure out the particulars of the murder. The question was not who did it, but why it happened.

Mellon would be assigned a defense attorney who would hire experts to talk with her. What they learned read as luridly as a pulp novel.

A woman from a rural, religious home moves to the big city and finds work at a strip club. Vulnerable after a troubled childhood, she meets a wealthy man 15 years her senior who takes care of her financially. That relationship, according to her account, some of which is backed up by police reports, would turn jealous and then abusive.

Her defense to the murder would not involve claiming she did not do it, but that she deserved some mercy.

The argument would be that the circumstances of her life and her relationship with her husband propelled her inexorably toward what she did: grab a gun, walk into the living room, aim the weapon at the man and pull the trigger.

A feeling of abandonment

Rebekah Cheever was born in Newport Beach, Calif., but spent most of her childhood in Omaha, Neb.

Rebekah, who told her story to a psychologist hired by her defense, described her upbringing in a “hyper-religious” home. Her mother tightly controlled what television shows her three daughters watched, Rebekah said. The cartoon characters the Smurfs, she said, were deemed “magical.” When Rebekah learned the Beatles’ song “Yellow Submarine” at school, her mother complained that her daughter was being taught the devil’s music.

As she told the psychologist about her move into adolescence, she described a series of scenes where men tried to force themselves on her.At times, she was able to fight them off; other times, she was not.

Rebekah told the psychologist she was not close with either of her parents and as a teenager, she felt her parents rejected her. She was sent into the custody of the child protective agency of Nebraska, shuttling between foster and group homes, with occasional extended stays at her parents’ home, she said.

Her parents could not be reached for comment.

That feeling of abandonment, she said, would stay with her.

The psychologist, John Toma, wrote in his report filed with the court that Rebekah would become an adult with "no self-esteem," one who would allow people "to use and abuse her."

From Nebraska to Minnesota to Arizona

At 18, Rebekah graduated out of state custody. She moved into the Omaha basement of her boyfriend’s mother, starting a series of intimate relationships that she said often left her bruised and afraid for her life.

When she raised the possibility of leaving Omaha, her boyfriend would throw her across the room. “I was always bruised and stuff,” she told the psychologist. Once, when she talked about leaving, he pointed a gun at her, she said.

One night, she sneaked out of the home and fled to Minnesota. She said she thought it was a warm state and was surprised to see snow.

A woman at the cheap hotel she checked into told her she ought to be in Arizona. The idea would stick.

Rebekah said she got work at the Planet Hollywood in the Mall of America. She met a fellow mall employee and before long, they eloped to Las Vegas to get married. He was 19. She was 18.

She had a son by him. She also said she suffered abuse. He stopped working and, to support the family, she started dancing in night clubs. Sometimes she would win amateur nights, earning $100 or $300. Soon, she started working at strip clubs where she found regular customers who were attracted by more than her body.

“I would sit and listen to my customers and they would give me like $500 or $200,” she told the psychologist.

She would leave her husband. She said she gave his picture to bouncers at the clubs where she worked so they could keep him out.

A regular customer gave her $20,000 to move to Arizona. Soon after, she started working at Bourbon Street Circus, a strip club in east Phoenix. There, she met Donald Mellon, known at the club as D.J.

Following the murder, Rebekah's defense attorney arranged for her to be interviewed by Rick Ross, who made his name in deprogramming people caught up in cults. Ross wrote in court documents that abusive relationships can appear to be like one-man cults. He said Rebekah's upbringing, with its string of abusive relationships, made her prime to find another one.

"(She was) very vulnerable when she first met D.J. Mellon," he wrote.

A stormy relationship brews

Donald Mellon came from a family that owned McDonald’s restaurants in the western suburbs of metropolitan Phoenix. Those franchises made his family, and Mellon himself, well-off.

As soon as he was legally allowed to enter, Donald started going to Bourbon Street Circus. He had been a regular at the strip club since about the time Rebekah was in first grade. A club employee told Donald he needed to meet Rebekah, then 23,  because she was “right off the bus from Nebraska.”

They got to know each other. Donald told Rebekah that he had just fired his receptionist and that maybe she could work for him.

They had lunch at a Chinese restaurant to discuss the possibility. There, he told her he couldn’t have her work for him. Instead, he wanted to date her.

She moved in with him in October 2003.

She said he did not initially introduce her to his family or his kids. At the time, he was going through a divorce.

“I thought I wasn’t good enough to be in front of his parents,” she told the psychologist.

After six months of dating, Rebekah said, Donald started to get jealous about “small stuff.”

He asked her not to dance anymore. She quit. When she landed jobs at a restaurant or department store, she said, he would show up and make a scene and she would either quit or be fired.

He told her to stay home and she did, making herself responsible for the domestic chores of the house. He was critical of the job she did there, too, she said.

“Everything revolved around him in his world,” she told the psychologist. “I thought I was a horrible person, a horrible mom, horrible wife, a whore.”

He told Rebekah that her friends had made advances toward him. He would frequently make derogatory comments about them. Eventually, she said, her girlfriends stopped coming around.

Abuse, then a wedding

Donald got his first tattoo in Florida and soon became obsessed, Rebekah said. He would sometimes make her get matching tattoos. Though, each had at least one tattoo specific to themselves. Donald had Rebekah's name tattooed across his chest. Rebekah, according to a police report, had a tattoo above her genitals that read “DJ’s Playhouse.”

She said Donald started frequently abusing her when he was drunk, throwing her to the ground or sometimes choking her.

Friends would later tell detectives that the two would often fight when they were drunk. Sometimes it would escalate into violence. Friends said that half the time he started the fighting; half the time, it was Rebekah who instigated it.

Donald's family did not approve of the relationship, with one daughter telling police Rebekah was "weird." His ex-wife and his children would later tell Phoenix police detectives that Donald changed dramatically after meeting Rebekah. His ex-wife said he was never abusive in their relationship. She left him, she said, because he wanted to continue his partying ways.

The family told police they thought Rebekah was with him solely for his money.

Donald asked Rebekah to marry him and vowed, according to Rebekah, that he would not be as jealous once they were engaged.

The ceremony was in Huntington Beach, Calif., in May 2005.

But, she said, the abuse did not stop after that. Instead, it escalated.

The conflicts escalate in public

In April 2006, Rebekah and Donald Mellon were walking out of a bar in the Mill Avenue district of downtown Tempe.  Both had been drinking, according to the Tempe police report that would be filed after the events of the evening.

The two were arguing and pushing each other. One man told police he saw Donald kick Rebekah a few times. An off-duty deputy with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office happened to witness the scene, decided to follow the two and called Tempe police.

The deputy told officers that he saw Rebekah walk backward quickly away from Donald. Then, the deputy said, he saw Donald get within a foot of Rebekah and head-butt her.

She fell to the ground, according to the police report.

Donald then picked up his wife and walked toward a waiting cab. According to the police report, the deputy went up to Donald, identified himself and showed his sheriff’s badge. Donald used an expletive in telling him to go away. He got into the cab.

The deputy told the cab's driver to wait because police were on the way.

Officers arrived and tried talking with Rebekah, who was seated in the cab. She told officers that she tripped and fell. “He didn’t do anything,” she said. Told there were witnesses who saw her husband head-butt her, she cursed at the officer. “I fell.”

Rebekah had a bloody nose, scratches on her arms and blood stains on her shirt. As an officer tried to take photos of her injures, she turned away and extended her middle finger.

Rebekah told police they were wasting their time. “I’ll be with him tomorrow, you dumb asses,” she told officers, according to the report.

Donald had a small scratch on his cheek and swelling on his right eye, according to the report. He told officers he and his wife were having “a discussion, that’s all.” He denied it was an argument. He said she turned to face him and tripped, causing her face to hit his face.

Donald was arrested on assault charges.

... and at home

In December 2006, Glendale police were called to the Mellon home after midnight.

Someone who was a guest at the home had called to report a family fight. That person, whose name is redacted from the police report, said the couple had been in an argument and that Donald shoved a pool table, breaking one of the legs off, and causing it to tip. The witness said that the two were often in arguments that would turn violent.

Officers saw the couple arguing inside a walk-in closet. He was standing over her while she sat on the floor crying, according to the report.

Rebekah refused to answer why she was crying in the closet. She also refused to tell police her name. She started screaming at officers to get out of her house. Eventually, she was arrested on suspicion of obstruction of justice.

By March 2011, the Mellons had moved to west Phoenix. Police went to that home because someone had hit the panic button on the alarm system.

Donald told police that his wife hit her face on the headboard. He said he was not sure who triggered the alarm but suspected it was the dog.

In a bedroom, officers talked to Rebekah. After giving her name, she looked at one officer, a female, and mouthed two words: “Help me.”

The officer asked a series of questions, seemingly designed to gauge the volatility of a relationship:

How frequently and seriously does your partner intimidate you or threaten you?

“Every day,” she replied.

How frequently does your partner demand you do things and verify you did them?

Mellon laughed. “Every day.”

Have you ever made it known to your partner that you wanted to leave? How did your partner react?

“Yes, I told him I wanted a divorce. The reaction was not good, got the usual.”

When she was told her husband had been arrested on assault charges, she became upset.

“You have no idea what you guys just did to me,” she said, according to the report. "He is gonna kill me. He's just gonna kill me."

Officers asked Mellon if they could take her to a friend's house or a shelter. She refused. Officers left a pamphlet about domestic violence on the bed and walked away.

According to the report filed by Ross, Rebekah was becoming "so disconnected from reality that she was effectively unable to help herself."

“In my experience," Ross wrote, "this inability to respond and sense of helplessness is not uncommon amongst the victims of abusive, controlling relationships.”

'The end is coming'

In the summer of 2012, Rebekah said her husband “got very paranoid.” He worried that she was setting him up, she told the psychologist who examined her.

By then, the Mellons lived in a $400,000 home in the Willo neighborhood of central Phoenix. According to Rebekah, Donald had changed the locks to deadbolts that could be operated only by a key he kept. He installed surveillance cameras in the home so he could monitor her, she said.

Prosecutors, in court filings, would say the surveillance system was installed because the couple's previous home in Glendale had been burglarized.

The cameras were trained on both the inside and outside of the home.

In late July 2012, Rebekah tried to leave her husband. He shot her iPod, broke her phone and locked her inside the home, she said.

She told the psychologist what she was thinking: “The end is coming.”

In the early evening of July 31, 2012, a woman and three boys were at the Mellon home. They were former neighbors from when the Mellons lived  in west Phoenix. The mother said she showed up at the home and was alarmed to see that Rebekah had been drinking heavily. She thought it best to take the boys to spend the night back at her home.

She would later tell detectives that as she left Rebekah was upset.

Rebekah would tell police that she and her husband had another confrontation that evening. He threw her across the room and bruised her tailbone, she said.

That confrontation was not captured on the days' worth of surveillance video police captured from the home.

But others were.

A log that police made while viewing the hours of tapes shows a marital relationship that included hugging, cuddling and intimacy punctuated by acts of violence.

In one incident, the video showed Donald shielding his face as Rebekah took a swing at him. Police noted it was not clear if she made contact.

On another occasion, hours after she performed a sexual dance for him, the two were yelling at each other. He backed her into some object, according to a police report.

One morning, Donald saw his wife at his gun safe. According to police logs of the video surveillance, he yanked her back by her ponytail and threw her to the floor.

The cameras also captured the final act of violence in the relationship, which took place that evening.

Donald sat on the couch and called one of his daughters. He was leaving a message for her as Rebekah walked into the room.

According to the police report, an audio recording of the incident was captured on his daughter's cellphone.

"Hey, call me," Donald said on the message. That was followed by a phrase of surprise that included a curse word. He said something else that detectives could not quite decipher, but either option sounded angry and aggressive. Rebekah was heard making a noise, the description of which was redacted from the report. There was a loud noise. Then the call ended.

An unraveling? A meltdown?

Speaking later about the event, Rebekah Mellon said she could not remember specifically what she was thinking at the time of the shooting. Both she and her husband had been drinking, she said. She had some sort of “blackout.”

Ross, writing an opinion that would be part of a court filing, said Mellon knew her actions were likely being recorded by the surveillance system. “Based upon this fact,” he wrote, “it is difficult to understand why Rebekah Mellon would knowingly, with deliberate premeditation, murder her husband.”

Ross thought she must have "experienced a kind of unraveling or meltdown,” he wrote. “Her response to the situation doesn’t otherwise seem to make sense."

That opinion was filed as part of a defense motion asking for a plea deal that would see Mellon convicted of second-degree murder and face a possible minimum sentence of 10 years.

Prosecutors rejected that deal, asking the defense to “propose a more reasonable range” of prison sentence.

Mellon, unhappy with her defense attorney, asked to be assigned a new one. Jennifer Wilmot was assigned the case in summer 2015. Wilmot was one of two attorneys assigned to the high-profile murder case of Jodi Arias, who was convicted of killing her boyfriend but was spared the death penalty.

Wilmot, who declined to comment on the case, filed a motion this fall to consult with an expert. The court granted her request to seal that document from public view, keeping the latest defense strategy a secret.

The psychologist who talked with Mellon in 2013 said she was "polite, engaging and cooperative."

She showed signs of cirrhosis of the liver when she was arrested, according to court filings, but the symptoms have subsided and her health has improved while in custody.

In a late November court appearance, Mellon, Case No. 9 on that day’s docket, wore jailhouse stripes. Her long hair was no longer blond, but brown, with blond tips.

At the brief appearance, she said nothing to the court and betrayed no emotion.

The judge set a trial date for February. There was talk of a conference to work out a plea deal in January.

The final moments

This much is clear: On the evening of July 31, 2012, Rebekah Mellon entered the living room of her central Phoenix home armed with a handgun. Her husband was sitting on the couch, talking on the phone. She raised the gun, drew a bead and fired. Her husband fell to the floor.

She then sat down on the couch as he lay dying and lit a cigarette.

The video of the incident has no audio, according to a description in a police report. It is not known what, if any, words or noises were being made. But Donald Mellon did not die instantly.

The medical examiner would conclude he might have survived had he been attended to quickly. The bullet caused damage to the left side of his head, by his ear. But the bullet passed through him. Police found it in a living-room wall. It had struck the frame of a portrait of Rebekah that hung on that wall, an irreverent portrait of her on her wedding day, smoking a cigarette in her bridal gown.

According to a Phoenix police description of the video, 17 minutes after the shooting, Donald can be seen rising from the floor and laying himself on the couch.

Six minutes later, Rebekah called 911.