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2006 Civil suit looms ahead
Published on Saturday, November 19, 2005
Cape Cod Times Archives
By ERIC WILLIAMS STAFF WRITER,
Published: November 19
Another Christa Worthington trial looms in Barnstable County, this one a $10 million civil matter. An undated file photo showing Christa Worthington, who was found killed in her Truro, Mass., home on Cape Cod in January 2002.
Even after Christopher McCowen was sent to jail as a convicted murderer last Thursday, there remains unfinished business, which could return criminal- trial witnesses to the stand, perhaps within a year.
In May 2005 - shortly after McCowen was arrested for killing Worthington - the executors of Worthington's estate filed a wrongful death lawsuit in Barnstable Superior Court seeking $10 million from McCowen and Cape Cod Disposal Co. The Lower Cape waste business employed McCowen when the Truro fashion writer was killed in January 2002.
Bruce BierhansAttorney Bruce Bierhans, who represents Cape Cod Disposal Co. owner Donald Horton, said the guilty verdict could affect the civil suit.
''It does, but only to a degree,'' Bierhans said. ''Obviously, my life and my job as an advocate would have been somewhat easier had there been an acquittal. But there are different issues in the civil case that did not exist in the criminal case, and those issues still have to be proven by the Worthington family.
''There's still the additional burden that the family has of proving that McCowen should not have been hired in the first place, and that we could have prevented the act that he may or may not have committed.''
Worthington's Depot Road home was on McCowen's weekly trash collection route. He worked for the company from June 2000 to November 2002.
Attorneys in the civil case had agreed to wait until the criminal trial finished up, said Bierhans, ''so that we knew what our respective burdens of proof would be going forward.''
Worthington attorney Chester L. Tennyson Jr. did not immediately return a call seeking comment, but an office worker said the case was still active.
Some of the same witnesses who testified during the bruising five-week criminal trial could be called to the stand again in the civil suit, Bierhans said. ''But there would probably be very different witnesses as well, because there are issues of (McCowen's) employment,'' he said.
During the criminal trial, Horton testified McCowen was an adequate trash collector who was appreciated by customers.
''Chris did a pretty good job,'' Horton testified. ''He could usually find the customers.''
Horton said elderly women along McCowen's trash route would bake him cookies, and that customers still asked about him. ''They loved him,'' Horton told the jury.
Bierhans estimated the civil case could be on track to be heard a year from now.
While the majority of wrongful death suits are based on claims of negligence, including incidents such as auto and workplace accidents, occasionally a murder victim's family will file a wrongful death suit seeking recovery of lost monetary support.
A jury in a California awarded the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman $8.5 million in compensatory damages after finding O.J. Simpson liable for their deaths. Simpson had previously been acquitted of their murders during a criminal trial.
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