Blair Watts defrauded his business partner Jennifer Brown for months, prosecutors in Montgomery County said Thursday. And as his desperation mounted amid his crumbling restaurant plans, they said he killed her and dumped her body in a shallow grave.
“This is all circumstantial at best, and there isn’t enough to pass this level for a first-degree, intentional killing,” Mandracchia said.But First Assistant District Attorney Ed McCann disputed that characterization, saying the evidence, while circumstantial, was “significant and powerful.” Brown and Watts had known each other for awhile, and had hammered out a contract partnering in a restaurant Watts had hoped to open in Phoenixville, prosecutors said. Financial records showed that over the course of a few months, Brown had agreed to pay Watts $14,000 to be a partial investor in the eatery, Birdie’s Kitchen. She fulfilled that obligation, prosecutors said, well before January.
Other cell phone records placed Watts outside a warehouse in Royersford for an extended period the day after he reported her missing. Detectives researching Watts’ business activity found that he had grossly exaggerated the status of his restaurant venture, McCann said. He had repeatedly told detectives that he was weeks away from opening Birdie’s Kitchen.