Fate of a Montgomery County man charged with killing his business partner is in a jury’s hands

After nearly a week of testimony, a Montgomery County jury began deliberating Tuesday in the trial of a Limerick man who prosecutors say killed his business partner and buried her body in a shallow grave.

Blair Watts, 33, has been charged with first- and third-degree murder in the Jan. 3 death of Jennifer Brown, who was found by a passerby in a hastily-dug grave about two weeks after she had been reporting missing.

After about two hours of deliberations, the jurors requested to be sent home for the night, to start fresh Wednesday morning.

Brown and Watts had been friends for years, and Brown had agreed to invest in Birdie’s Kitchen, a restaurant Watts had planned to reopen. Financial records displayed in court showed that since August 2022, Brown had given Watts more than $23,000 for the venture.

But Watts had spent nearly all of that money on himself, according to First Assistant District Attorney Ed McCann. In the weeks before Brown’s death, McCann said, she had begun to question Watts about the status of the business and how soon it would open. Those questions, McCann said, led Watts to kill Brown during a meeting at her home.

Shards of a hair clip Brown wore — the same one later found with her body — were discovered in the carpet of her home, prosecutors said. Cadaver dogs found evidence of a corpse in Brown’s kitchen, as well as in Watts’ red Jeep Grand Cherokee. Soil nearly identical to the kind Brown was buried in was also discovered in that Jeep.

“We’ll never know exactly what happened in that living room, but we do know that Jennifer Brown would no longer be his meal ticket,” McCann said in his closing argument. “He killed this woman in a brutal way, put her in a shallow grave, and left her son without an advocate. Today’s the day he’s held accountable for all of that.”

But Watts’ lawyer, Michael Coard, urged jurors to make their decision based on the law, not on sympathy for Brown, whom he described as a wonderful person.

“Yes, be sympathetic. Yes, be emotional,” Coard said. “But don’t let your sympathy and emotion overtake the oath you took.”

He told the panel that the prosecution, in its case against Watts, was relying almost exclusively on circumstantial evidence. A county medical examiner ruled that the cause of Brown’s death was from “unspecified means” but said her body showed signs of asphyxiation. No one, Coard said, could definitively say that Watts killed Brown, nor even determine exactly how she died.

“Is that proof beyond a reasonable doubt of first-degree murder?” Coard asked. “If this expert says ... unspecified means, if police say no sign of a struggle, if the only evidence of the crime scene was a broken hair clip, where is the evidence of first-degree murder?”

But McCann sharply rebuked Coard’s theory of the case, saying there was “an overwhelming web and weight of evidence” against Watts.

Brown was not aware, prosecutors said, that Watts had lost the lease to the restaurant’s planned location on Dec. 28, 2022. In text messages to her, Watts had touted significant progress in getting the space ready, and had told her the business would open by the end of January. None of that was true, according to evidence presented during the trial.

Cell phone records retrieved by detectives showed that Watts had been in possession of Brown’s phone when someone transferred $17,000 from her CashApp account to Watts’. He tried to use that money the next day to broker a new meeting with the owners of the building where he planned to open his restaurant, McCann said, adding that Brown’s body “wasn’t even cold yet.”

Additional phone records revealed that Watts returned to Brown’s house hours after her death, something he never disclosed to police.

And, in what McCann said was perhaps the most damning evidence against Watts, investigators were able to use his phone to trace his movements on Jan. 5 — two days after the slaying — to Brown’s burial site near a warehouse in Royersford. At the time, he said, Brown was still believed to be missing, and her body would not be discovered until days later.

“There is an overwhelming weight of evidence proving he killed Jennifer Brown,” McCann said.