Guilty: Jury convicts man accused of killing New Haven homeless woman
- Jamie Duffy
- 34 minutes ago
- 3 min read
ALLEN COUNTY, Ind. ---Years from now, Jonathon Mattix will still be telling his story in prison, possibly convincing himself if he hasn’t already, that he shot his gun in self defense.
No kidding, he’ll tell them. A 54-year-old woman who lived in the woods between Wayne Haven Street and the river, just a short bike ride from his mother’s mobile home on Moeller Road, grabbed his .38 special and turned it on him.
He'd only gone to her campsite to retrieve things she’d stolen from the trailer when he allowed her to come inside and take a shower. She'd been "wide awake and happy to see him," he told New Haven police detective Jeffrey McCracken.
That doesn’t add up to the story he wrote in 40 long pages to his ex-wife in Ohio, a journal full of violence and confession written in February and March she finally turned over to police in July, Chief Deputy Prosecutor Tom Chaille said Thursday in closing arguments.
First day of trial coverage here:
Mattix, 38, was found guilty of murder in Allen Superior Court before the jury’s lunch arrived. Breaking around 11 a.m., it couldn’t have been an hour before Chaille reported there was a verdict.
The murder took place Jan. 3, investigators estimated. Mattix was arrested on a warrant at the mobile home Jan. 22, and was charged with murder five days later. Dawn Kovach lay deceased in her tent for 20 days until Sgt. Landon Sell went to check on her.
Mattix's public defender, Robert Scremin, got creative and persuasive during closing arguments. The surveillance footage showed someone on a bike, but who was it really? he asked.
And the witnesses who told police what they knew, none of them came forward until the gun wielding Mattix was behind bars Jan. 22 on an arrest warrant out of Van Wert, Ohio, Scremin said.
Mattix had wanted a lodger at his mother’s trailer out of there. He said the lodger had apparently borrowed money from his mom and didn’t pay it back.
The lodger told police a story of Mattix bragging that "Dawn wouldn’t be coming around anymore" while playing with shell casings from the four bullets he shot into her skull. Forensically, the projectiles found in Kovach's body matched Mattix's gun sold to an unknowing buyer who freaked out and contacted Crime Stoppers.
His live-in girlfriend, Sarah, had also been angry at Dawn for taking things, stuff like hair spray and children's blocks. But she couldn’t remember anything, Scremin pointed out, until two or three interviews with Detective McCracken.
Chaille said in closing arguments that Mattix warned his girlfriend he was going to kill Dawn if she stole anything and when he did kill her, probably on Jan. 3, he seemed happy and “proud of killing her,” she said.
In his lengthy letters to his ex-wife, Mattix said “he shot her without thinking twice. I would do it again and again and again," Chaille said.
“I watched her bleed out standing over her,” Mattix wrote.
Before closing arguments, Scremin tried to include a “lesser included” charge of manslaughter and acting under “sudden heat” in addition to Mattix’s claim of self defense.
But special judge, David Laur, denied those requests explaining that neither consideration had been introduced in court. Mattix did claim self defense in his police interview.
The jury obviously didn’t believe the self defense charge. Images shown in court of the four bullets at the right side of her face were clustered, fired at close range and quick and successive, not the result of a struggle Mattix claimed there was.
“Dawn is telling us the defendant is lying,” Chaille said.
Unusual in the police interview video was Mattix’s habit of playing to the camera, facing the lens while denying he knew her, then admitting he knew her a little and then getting to the part about shooting her once by accident and then two or three more times.
But he left out the part that he left her deceased in the freezing cold and snow.
Mattix will be sentenced Nov 10. No doubt, he will tell the judge he intends to file an appeal.