A New York man was charged Thursday in the 2003 murder of an NYPD detective’s 20-year-old daughter. Fox News reports that Edward V. Holley, 42, is accused of beating Megan McDonald to death in the back seat of her white Mercury Sable and dumping her on the side of a road in Orange County, New York, March 14, 2003.
“I’m definitely not guilty. I love Megan with all my heart,” a wheelchair-bound Holley, who had a romantic relationship with McDonald before her murder, said Thursday while being escorted into a police vehicle, video from WCBS shows.
Holley was paralyzed from the waist down in a 2007 car accident, the outlet reported. He has been in prison since 2021 for an unrelated drug charge, according to New York State Police.
“We used modern-day technology and applied it to 2003, and we were able to come up with good results to assist the case … within the past year,” New York State Police Lt. Brad Natalizio, who helped lead the investigation, told Fox News Digital.
A felony complaint filed in Orange County alleges Holley “did knowingly and intentionally cause the death of Megan McDonald by striking her multiple times in the head with a blunt instrument.”
McDonald and Holley had been in a “romantic relationship” that McDonald apparently tried to end just days prior to her murder. They got into an argument March 10, 2003, according to the complaint.
Holley also “owed the victim a substantial amount of money that was causing hostility between the two leading up to the homicide,” the document states.
Additionally, witnesses saw Holley’s purple Honda Civic, described as “the loudest car in town,” following McDonald in her white Mercury March 14, the morning of her murder.
A medical examiner determined her cause of death to be repeated blunt-force trauma to the head.
