PORT ANGELES — Melissa Leigh Carter thought she knew the street life of Port Angeles and had little to fear, according to a friend who had warned her: “It’s getting crazier — a lot more dangerous people out there.”
“She said that she knew the streets,” Duane Stephan told a Clallam County Superior Court jury Monday, “and knew how to take care of herself.”
Stephan — repeatedly claiming a loss of memory wrought by alcohol and illicit drugs — testified in the trial of Robert Gene Covarrubias, charged with first-degree murder in the 15-year-old woman’s death.
Stephan said he last saw Carter walking toward downtown Port Angeles from a drugs-and-drinking party Dec. 23, 2004, in the Chinook Motel, 1414 E. First St.
Her nude, bruised body was found less than three days later in a brushy hollow along a muddy path that led from North Vine Street to the Waterfront Trail about a block east of downtown.
According to a forensic pathologist, she had been strangled there.
Trial starts second week
Testimony entered its second week Monday and likely will last through this week and one more.
Stephan testified that he used methadone, methamphetamine and the prescription painkiller Percocet along with his pal, Travis Criswell, who was Melissa’s boyfriend.
Criswell and Carter planned to marry, Stephan said, and move to Alaska.
