In the hours after the decomposing remains of RIchard Young were found in a Maquon storage unit on Oct. 7, 2022, his longtime girlfriend experienced a medical emergency and was taken to OSF Saint Mary Medical Center in Galesburg.
From her hospital bed with monitors beeping, Marcy L. Oglesby was read her Miranda rights.
Then she was interrogated from that hospital bed, often gesturing with her hands but showing little emotion.
Knox County State’s Attorney Ashley Worby entered that video into evidence and played it for the court on Wednesday afternoon before the state rested its case against Oglesby, 53, who is charged with Young’s murder.
Oglesby is accused of putting eye drops in Young’s coffee beginning in the summer of 2021, then hiding his body in a Maquon storage unit across the street from their home when he died in late October of that year.
She is also charged with aggravated battery by administering a toxic substance and concealment of a homicide.
Young’s partially mummified remains were found in a cardboard box in the storage unit after a report of a foul odor coming from Unit 29 of Roberts Self-Storage, almost a year after Oglesby put his body there.
‘He was so sick’
In the hospital video, recorded by a state trooper’s body camera on Oct. 8, 2022, Oglesby tells an investigator she and Young were in a relationship for more than 20 years.
“He was a bit of a bully and I let him bully me because I’m a doormat,” she says.
Oglesby admits to investigators that Young died in 2021. She tells them he had COVID-19 and suffered falls, dizziness, an ear infection, and nausea prior to his death.
“When he got COVID, I couldn’t get him to go to the doctor. He was so sick. He was throwing up for two weeks,” she says.
Oglesby tells investigators that Young tested positive for COVID at home, but his symptoms were not “respiratory” so he never sought medical attention.
In the video, she describes having to help Young up after many falls, one of which broke his nose.
“In actuality, the more he was in this position, the worse it was on me,” she says. “My back was breaking and I’d say, honey, please. Don’t do this to me. My body can’t take it.”
An online Nigerian lover
Oglesby and Young lived in a Maquon home owned by Karen Doubet, described in court as Oglesby’s godmother. Oglesby calls her “mom” in the hospital bed video but Doubet is not her biological mother.
“They tolerated each other,” Oglesby says of Doubet and Young’s relationship.
Oglesby also says the women struggled to get Young to pay his fair share of household expenses. Oglesby tells the investigator she worked in the medical field for many years.
“Karen and I spent the last twenty years paying for almost everything,” she says.
She tells the investigator that she loved Young, but wasn’t in love with him.
She says he moved to Kentucky for a while in 2020 and she had an online, romantic relationship with a Nigerian man named Sunday “Sunny” Emosivbe she was working with to open an art gallery.
“Sunny and I would talk,” she says. “I never met the man.”
Oglesby tells the investigator she was having a mid-life crisis and “took solace” in her relationship with Sunny, in part because her relationship with Young was strained.
“I was with someone who was 22 years older than me and not the most affectionate person in the world,” she says.
But she tells the investigator that she and Young were looking to buy a house in the country together, and he was excited to be able to tell his sons that.
An Indian burial
In the 2022 video, Oglesby tells the investigator that Young fell in the bathroom while sick with COVID-19 and later died in his motor home, which was parked outside the house. She didn’t notify anyone about his death and instead concealed it by putting his body in a large cardboard box and pushing it across the street to the storage unit.
She says she did that because she wanted to be able to fulfill his wishes to be buried at an Indian mound near Maquon.
“All I could think about was, so much for any dignity I hoped to give him,” she says in the video.
Once he was in the storage unit, Oglesby says she planned to find a way to fulfill those wishes.
“I hadn’t figured it out yet, how to report his death,” she says. “It just kept getting bigger. A lie gets bigger.”
Young’s medications
About an hour into the hospital video, the investigator tells Oglesby that things are going to go better for her if she tells the truth.
She then admits that she’s written “one or two” checks from Young’s accounts since he died.
Asked what medications Young was taking, she lists Tylenol, Advil, something for anti-nausea, and an antihistamine. The investigator asks if she’s sure he wasn’t taking any other medications.
“Oh no, no, no, no. No. Everything that he was taking was things like to get his balance back and for the nausea and all of that,” Oglesby says in the video.
That statement contradicts what Doubet said under oath during the first day of the trial.
On the witness stand, Doubet said Oglesby asked her to buy eye drops in the summer of 2021. She then saw Oglesby putting the eye drops in Young’s coffee.
In exchange for that testimony, murder charges against Doubet were dropped.
Oglesby was initially charged in 2022 with concealment of a death.
As the investigation progressed, and as toxicology reports were completed, charges were upgraded to murder in early 2023.
A forensic pathologist testified on the second day of the trial that Young’s cause of death was tetrahydrozoline intoxication.
Tetrahydrozoline is the active ingredient in over-the-counter eye drops such as Visine.
‘Weak as a kitten’
Prior to showing the hospital video, Worby called Timothy Spitzer to the stand. He’s a Digital Forensics Investigator with the Galesburg Police Department who analyzed several mobile phones for the Knox County Sheriff's Office.
“The first phase of the analysis is to try to determine who was using the device,” he said.
Through looking at stored logins, web history, photos, and contacts, Spitzer was able to determine that a Samsung mobile phone provided to him by the Knox County Sheriff’s Office belonged to Young.
He testified that by extracting data from the phone, he could see patterns of behavior in the phone usage.
He said between July and August of 2021, the patterns of behavior detected on the Samsung included an interest in guns, trucks, and pornography.
But he said that pattern changed after Nov. 1, 2021.
“After that it was art galleries, chicken recipes, Facebook, and a Yahoo account that was not associated with Rick Young,” Spitzer said.
Likewise, there were a number of selfies of Young that were taken on the Samsung phone prior to Nov. 1, 2021, but there were none after, Spitzer said.
Worby asked Spitzer, based on his analysis, who he believed the user of the phone was before Nov. 1, 2021.
“The user was Richard Young,” he said,
Worby then asked who the user was after Nov. 1, 2021.
“The user was Marcy Oglesby,” he said.
With Spitzer on the stand, Worby also went through transcripts of numerous messages extracted from the Samsung phone using digital forensics software, showing another pattern.
The messages were to Young’s ex-wife, his sons, friends, and acquaintances.
There were patterns in those, too, according to the testimony.
Spitzer read select messages aloud at Worby’s request. The early messages from July 2021 included selfies Young sent wearing a new cowboy hat and discussion about the weather, with lots of exclamation points.
In later messages, he texts people that he contacted COVID after receiving the one-shot Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine.
He texts that his head is spinning and he is “weak as a kitten.”
He texts that one Friday and Saturday, he threw up 11 times.
He texts that his dizziness is from COVID, but the test kits are hard to find.
Spitzer read a text message from Young’s phone dated Nov. 1, 2021.
It said, pretending to be Young, that he didn’t have a voice, but was feeling better, and was headed to the doctor.
He read a text from Nov. 15, 2021, that said Young was at Mayo Clinic and one from Nov. 16, 2021, that said the infection had damaged his inner ear – and that Oglesby would call the recipient.
Text messages from Young’s phone continued well into 2022, including a birthday message to Young’s son.
The defense is expected to call witnesses Thursday morning.
Oglesby has waived her right to a jury trial, so the case will be decided by Judge Andrew Doyle.
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