For Christopher and Matthew, the path was not so trouble-free. Christopher was arrested for assault, resisting arrest and drug possession. Matthew once hit a teacher and spent time at Sheppard Pratt, the psychiatric hospital, and the Woodburne Center, a facility for behavioral problems, according to family members. All of that was before McKay reunited with them after getting out of prison in Delaware. Most of the time since then, the three have been behind bars, charged with Fertitta's murder.
Because of their conflicting accounts, delineating each of their roles - if any - in the killing has been elusive.
Matthew didn't do himself any favors with his different versions of events, particularly when he added one more. He allegedly told friends that he himself had fatally shot Fertitta (still getting the cause of death wrong). When police found his DNA - from sweat - in Fertitta's loaner car after he said he had never been in it, they became convinced of his involvement.
If the state can be said to have a theory of the crime, it started to emerge in October 2007 when Christopher pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of accessory after the fact.
According to the statement of facts assembled by Anne Arundel County prosecutors, McKay called Christopher during an argument with Fertitta, but when he arrived, he found McKay's boyfriend already dead, and his mother sitting on the stairs covered in blood. "I [messed] up," he told authorities she said to him. "I had to do it. He found out about the credit cards."
In the prosecution's narrative to the judge, Fertitta had realized that McKay had been stealing from him, and he had told friends that he intended to confront her with a choice: Pay him back or he'd go to the police.
Prosecutors suggest that she settled on a third option: killing Fertitta.
Christopher told authorities that his mother said she had considered burning the house down but rejected that course because it was too similar to the events surrounding Downs' death. "That would be too much of a coincidence," Christopher quoted his mother saying, "two house fires, two bodies." Instead, Christopher said, he helped his mother move the body out to Old Mill Road, where they doused him with gasoline and set him on fire.
As a result of his guilty plea, Christopher was sentenced to five years in prison. What his plea didn't settle was Matthew's role. No evidence surfaced in Christopher's plea that put Matthew at the murder scene, and Christopher's lawyer later said that Christopher never saw his younger brother that night.
