Dateline: Silent Witness - Who was Michelle Young and what happened to her? Disturbing details of the 2006 murder, revealed 

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Dateline: Silent Witness (Image via X/@DatelineNBC)
Dateline: Silent Witness (Image via X/@DatelineNBC)

Dateline: Silent Witness, which aired on NBC on May 11, 2018, re-investigated the harrowing murder case of Michelle Young. Young, a 29-year-old woman living in Raleigh, North Carolina, was pregnant with her second child when she was found dead in November 2006.

The official synopsis of Dateline: Silent Witness reads as follows:

When a young woman, Michelle Young, is found dead in a field on the outskirts of Green Bay, Wisconsin, a Fitbit helps detectives solve the mystery. Andrea Canning reports.

In November 2006, a pregnant Michelle Young was found dead in her apartment's master bedroom, with her two-year-old daughter by her side. She suffered various blows to her head and was also strangled to death.

More on Dateline: Silent Witness in our story.


Dateline: Silent Witness- Details of Michelle Young's 2006 murder

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Michelle Fisher, a Long Island native, moved to Raleigh to attend university, where she met Jason Lynn Young in 1997. After going out on many dates, the couple finally married in a small ceremony in 2003 and had a daughter the following year.

After tragically losing their second child in a car crash, Michelle was expecting again at the time of her death. They recently bought a $379,000 house in the Enchanted Oaks subdivision near Lake Wheeler in Raleigh, and Jason had also taken a new job, which allowed Michelle to take some time off from her job and focus on her pregnancy.

However, everything changed on the fateful day of November 6, 2006. Meredith Fischer, Michelle's sister, was asked by Jason to fetch something from the house. But when she arrived at her sister's home, she found her face down, bloodied, cold, and dead in the master bedroom, and her two-year-old daughter alive beside her corpse.

The autopsy revealed that Dateline victim, Michelle, died of skull fractures and brain hemorrhaging, and she was struck more than 30 times on her head. In addition, the report also revealed that she suffered from 13 lacerations and was also violently strangled. The cops also found multiple bruises on her lip, and several of the Dateline victim's teeth were missing.


Dateline: Silent Witness- Jason Young was found guilty of her wife's murder

After Michelle's death, the cops found out that she was having problems in her marriage and was stressed financially. Jason was also in contact with a married Florida woman before his wife's death and had also taken a vacation to California without his family.

In addition, the cops found substantial evidence to prove Jason had killed Michelle. They found blood samples on Jason's Ford, several samples of blood, and a bloody bootprint on the crime scene, matching Jason's DNA. He also had a $1 million life insurance policy against the victim.

Jason's computer history also revealed that he had searched for “anatomy of a knockout,” “head trauma knockout,” and “divorce” on the Internet before his wife's murder, which was enough to conclude that he was the culprit.

After a retrial, Jason was finally found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment on a first-degree murder charge, without the possibility of parole. While he applied for a third retrial through the Appeals Court, the N.C. Supreme Court denied his plea in 2015.

He is currently serving his sentence at the Piedmont Correctional Institution in Salisbury.

Also Read: Dateline: Who was Michelle Reynolds and what crimes did she commit?


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Edited by Zainab Shaikh
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