BY ANDY GARDNER
North Country This Week

CANTON -- A juror in the Christopher Hebert murder trial said comparing recorded conversations to the defendant’s testimony on the witness stand helped persuade jurors to return a guilty verdict.

Hebert, 47, was found guilty of second-degree murder following a weeklong trial and just under seven hours of jury deliberations. The jury decided that Hebert murdered Lacey Yekel on or around June 7, 2014 in Massena. Her skeletal remains were recovered from a wooded area near the Massena Industrial Park on Aug. 29, 2014. He faces a minimum indeterminate sentence of 15 years to life at his May 6 sentencing.

“I would say listening to the tapes … what we found was a lot of what the defendant said in his overdose story was bits and pieces of other people saying ‘I could see this,’” said juror Jake Newman after the trial adjourned. He was the only juror who agreed to speak with reporters at the conclusion.

He was referring to tapes where Hebert discusses the murder with his ex-girlfriend, Brandy Bressard. There are two other tapes the jury heard where Hebert discusses the killing while incarcerated in the St. Lawrence County jail on a tapped phone line.

Newman said after intense discussions on Wednesday night, jurors were able to sleep on what they’d seen and returned Thursday with a much better grip on the evidence.

“I think last night we talked through some of what we’d seen … we all just needed a few hours to step back and think about it on our own,” Newman said. “We went around this morning and talked about how we’d gone home and thought about it.”

Jurors on Thursday morning asked the court to replay Bressard’s taped conversations, and a separate phone call from Hebert in jail to Julia LaRock where she gives an opinion on what she might believe if Yekel’s death was truly by drug overdose. Hebert on Wednesday took the stand and claimed Yekel died after injecting cocaine and he hid the body because he was wanted by parole officers and didn’t want to be blamed for the death.

Newman said some of the jurors, who were not familiar with the underworld of drugs and crime, had trouble wrapping their minds around the concept of trading stolen guns for cocaine. Witnesses, including Hebert, testified that Yekel and the defendant had been using cocaine at a residence with a third man, Gerald Dissottle, who also testified. Hebert was providing the cocaine. Yekel had told him she would give him guns she had stolen from a relative in exchange for more of the drug.

“Where some people got hung up was the day at Jerry Dissottle’s,” Newman said. He said that some of the jurors had initially become confused on how the guns fit the narrative, possibly because of the volume of testimony they heard.

“When we came back and realized all that … wasn’t something out of the blue,” he said.

Newman said what also convinced the jurors that Hebert was confessing to a real murder, not lying for clout, was that he consistently told the same story over time, but minor details changed, as can be expected over several years.

When asked if the jury could have convicted without hearing Hebert on tape describing the murder, Newman said “I don’t know, hard to say, it was a substantial part of it.”