Fox family speaks about Evan Marshall

BY MICHAEL FRAZIER | michael.frazier@newsday.com

Jay Fox remembers the day in heart-wrenching detail.

He had just arrived home to find his daughter, hysterical, after she had discovered blood, shards of glass, and bloody footprints in their Glen Cove home.

Fox's wife, Denice, was nowhere in sight.

Police soon locked down the house as they combed it for evidence. So Fox went next door to a neighbor he hadn't yet met -- Jacqueline Marshall -- who offered to let him use her bathroom.

Within hours, police would arrest Marshall's son Evan after finding Denice Fox's body parts, which all the while had been downstairs in the Marshalls' basement, in plastic bags and garbage bins.

"When somebody close to you dies, everybody says time will heal wounds. I say that time gives you the ability to live with it," Fox said recently in the first public comments the family made about the events of Aug. 17, 2006.

"The wounds will never heal. The scars will always be there," he said.

Evan Marshall pleaded guilty to Fox's murder on Sept. 12, but that hasn't helped soothe the wounds of Jay Fox and his family because Marshall, 32, could be eligible for parole in 30 years.

"Somehow, it seems to be something that is improper, as far as justice is concerned, with sticking the burden of responsibility onto a family as opposed to the courts where it should be," Jay Fox said.

"How brutal does a crime have to be for there to be proper justice? I just can't think of a crime more brutal than this. ... It should not be our responsibility to make sure that Evan Marshall should not walk the streets again."

A family sentenced

In a way, said Fox's son, Andrew, Judge Richard LaPera has sentenced the family to a potentially years-long fight to keep a killer behind bars.

"We are at a point where 30 years from now, it's me and Rebecca [his sister] in front of a parole board with our kids and our friends and their kids," he said. "It's us trying to prove that this guy should not walk the streets so we can feel safe. We have an obligation to make sure, because of what happened to us, that the community is safe."

Jay Fox said that, since learning of his wife's murder, he hasn't been back inside his Glen Cove home. Andrew, an East Coast sales manager for Yahoo, recently moved to Manhattan from California with his wife, Erin, a writer for TV Guide, to be closer to the family.

Sitting together on a recent night at a Long Beach apartment where Jay now lives, Fox and his daughter, Rebecca, 23, and Andrew, 30, and, Erin, 31, broke their silence, and through tears and laughter remembered Denice.

"I think about her every single day, but I will never have the opportunity to have my mother-in-law. And my children will not know their grandma," Erin Fox said.

Denice Fox was killed a day after her 57th birthday. Her daughter, an art teaching assistant at a Manhattan private school, was the first to find something awry in their home.

"I opened the door and there was a horrific scene of pools of blood," Rebecca said. "I walked around the house and saw bloody footprints leading down to the basement."

She called her father, an accountant, who rushed home. "I immediately knew through his reaction it was my worst nightmare coming true," she said.

The Foxes, who had moved into the neighborhood a few months before the murder, never met the Marshalls, though they had spotted Evan Marshall in the neighborhood from time to time. Marshall sometimes stayed with his mother.