After a Phoenix woman shot her husband, she sat down to watch him slowly die while she smoked a cigarette. Only then did she call 911. She claimed she found him “injured” when first responders arrived, but that was a huge mistake.
Rebekah Mellon claimed she had an abusive childhood in Oklahoma and escaped state custody at the age of 18. To make ends meet, she became a stripper, and after a brief marriage, she relocated to Phoenix, where she met Donald Mellon, whom she would later marry.
Donald Mellon hailed from a wealthy family that owned McDonald’s restaurants in Phoenix’s western suburbs. An employee at the strip club where Rebekah worked told Donald he should meet her since she was “right off the bus from Nebraska.” Donald was ten years Rebekah’s senior.
The pair had been married for seven years when Rebekah entered the living room of her central Phoenix home armed with a handgun. Her spouse was on the couch, talking on the phone. She raised the gun, took aim, and fired the gun. As he lay dying on the couch, she sat down and lit a cigarette. Finally, 23 minutes later, she contacted 911 to report the shooting.
Rebekah told the police that she came out of her bedroom to see her husband injured, according to reports. Her stories, though, kept changing. The gun, the alleged murder weapon, was discovered between the cushions of the couch where she had sat, according to investigators. Rebekah was arrested once police discovered her enormous mistake.
According to AZ Central, Rebekah Mellon was unaware that the entire altercation was recorded on the couple’s home camera system. The video shows Rebekah sitting on the L-shaped couch, smoking a cigarette after she shot Donald Mellon. It also shows a bloodied Donald crawling into the picture and pushing himself off the floor and onto the couch.
Donald would have survived the injuries if medical professionals had arrived sooner. Prior to learning about the surveillance video, Rebekah’s defense team planned to plead guilty to manslaughter charges, which would have resulted in a sentence of seven to ten years. The police would not have to work too hard to determine the details of the murder. Not who did it, but why did it happen, was the question.
The defense team for Rebekah Mellon hired psychologists to examine her life. She said she had been abused by her husband for years, and the defense intended to use it as the cause for her crime. In a memorandum filed with the court, her attorney, Jennifer Willmott, stated that if the matter had gone to trial, she would have argued that Rebekah acted in self-defense.
Willmott stated that Rebekah Mellon was in a state of fear for her life as a result of the physical violence she allegedly endured at the hands of Donald. However, the trial would have included a presentation of the footage of the shooting and its aftermath.
After seeing the home surveillance video, Maricopa County Supreme Court Judge Pamela Gates advised Rebekah Mellon to take a plea deal. Judge Gates stated that jurors who sympathized with the Phoenix lady as a victim of domestic violence—some of which was also captured on security footage—would also watch her “sit in the same room with someone and patiently let him die.”
Rebekah decided that taking the plea bargain was in her best interests. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Spousal abuse is real, and no one is saying Rebekah Mellon was not a victim. However, she crossed the line when she turned into a perpetrator of incredible violence by becoming her husband’s sole judge, jury, and executioner.
