Credit: West Virginia Regional Jail
Anna Marie Choudhary pled guilty to killing John McGuire in 2019 — and she says she was made to do so by her father and sister…who got married a few weeks later.
Yes — you read that right. As a matter of fact, it was that very night Anna killed John that led to her father and sister getting married. They got married after not only murdering someone, but then having a Valentine’s Day dinner.
via People:
But it wasn’t until after the meal — steaks, potatoes and a bottle of wine — that “things started to get strange,” said Anna Marie Choudhary, a third member of the family who, according to the Bluefield Daily Telegraph, joined in the murder of her sister’s boyfriend.
That night, John Thomas McGuire “was struck on the head with a wine bottle, tied up, tortured, injected with methamphetamine, strangled, buried, disinterred, dismembered and then buried again,” according to the outlet.
On Wednesday — following the guilty pleas and convictions of her father and sister — Choudhary, 33, of Boone, N.C., pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the 2019 death of McGuire, 38, reports WVNS.
Choudhary’s sister, Amanda McClure, and McGuire were a couple at the time of his murder inside the home where Choudhary lived with their father, Larry McClure Sr., in Skygusty, West Virginia.
Authorities located McGuire’s body in September 2019 in a shallow grave on the property after Larry told police where to find it while being questioned for another offense.
Larry pleaded guilty last July to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison; Amanda, whom he married, pleaded guilty the same month to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 40 years in prison, reports the Daily Telegraph.
Choudhary described events surrounding the murder during her court hearing, according to the newspaper:
About two weeks before Valentine’s Day, McGuire and Amanda were traveling from Minnesota when their vehicle broke down in Indiana. Larry and Choudhary went to pick them up and moved them into their home.
The couple were “coming off meth pretty hard,” Choudhary said, and decided to brew a new batch with ingredients that Larry helped them buy. Although the ingredients failed to coalesce properly, Amanda McClure retained the liquid in a jar.
Choudhary said that during this time, she saw her father “go off to the side” to speak with her sister, but Choudhary said she wasn’t yet aware of an intimate relationship between the two. She also said her father asked her to cut up some pieces of rope — a request that didn’t seem strange at the time.
Then came the holiday meal, where Amanda kept the wine bottle close at hand.
“When Larry said he wanted to play a game, a trust game, Amanda had been joking about how she was able to get out of anything,” said Choudhary. “She was able to tie herself up and nobody will believe she could tie herself up that way.”
During the game, McGuire’s feet were tied. Larry “sat down and, I don’t know, it was a grin that I’ll never be able to describe,” said Choudhary. “But as John sat up and bent over to untie his feet, and it all happened so quick, but Amanda stood up and grabbed that bottle and bashed him over the back of the head with it. And the next thing I know John had reared up and was leaning back against the wall holding his head.”
“And that’s when Larry looked at me and told me if I knew what was best for my children and wanted them to live, I would follow all instructions that were given to me from that moment on.”
She said Larry and Amanda tied up McGuire, accusing him of being a federal informant, with both Larry and Amanda yelling “and demanding to know who he was.”
“John kept telling them, ‘You have the wrong person. I don’t know who you’re looking for, but you have the wrong person,’ ” Choudhary said.
They prevented Choudhary from leaving, she said, and kept torturing McGuire through the night, before moving him to a bedroom where he was hogtied with a rope around his neck.
They threatened to inject him with a truth serum, drive him back to Minnesota in the back of a truck “and basically leave him there for everybody to find,” Choudhary said.
Then Amanda presented two syringes, which Choudhary said she later learned were filled with the “bad batch” of meth. “They told me that since I was the one with the nursing experience, I was going to be the one to inject him,” she said. “And they gave me the syringes and instructed me to inject him into the carotid artery.”
Cloudhary did as she was told, and alleged that afterward, Amanda said, “Well, that should be enough to kill him.”
It didn’t.
“They stood over me and told me I needed to finish it and needed to strangle him,” Cloudhary told the judge, “so that’s what I did.”
Larry stood on McGuire’s back while his face was pushed “into the cushions” and the rope around his neck was pulled, she said. Amanda sat by McGuire’s head, laughing and “asking him, did he really believe he was going to end up back north?”
They then made Cloudhary gather the man’s belongings and burn them in a bonfire, after which she said she was told to put the body in a garbage bag.
The effort required her to snap the body’s limbs out of the rigor mortis that had set in.
“That’s not a sound I ever want to hear again,” she said. “They instructed me as to what to do and stood back and watched me do it.”
Rather than dump the body in a mine shaft “where it wouldn’t be found,” as Larry had initially suggested, she said the trio drove around the rest of the day before stopping to dig a grave together.
Afterward, Larry and Amanda “went on like nothing happened” and “started having a relationship as soon as he was buried.”
About two weeks later, she said, “Amanda insisted that she wanted proof that he was actually dead and had me uncover the body, and started ranting and raving about how she didn’t think he was actually dead because the hair on his head was still growing and everything.”
Larry said “he would make sure,” then took bed rails and a sledgehammer “and pounded them through the body and down into the ground,” she said.
Around the same time, she said, the father and daughter drove across the state line to Virginia to apply for a marriage license. They were married March 11, 2019, in Tazewell County, Va..
“They took me and said I needed to act like a happy witness,” said Choudhary.
In a criminal complaint, West Virginia State Police allege that Larry and Amanda had sexual intercourse at the Skygusty home.
On “the very night they were married,” Choudhary said, McGuire’s body was uncovered again, dismembered, then reburied in two separate places because Larry wanted to landscape the property for sale and didn’t want the remains to be found.
Choudhary said she was eventually able to get away to North Carolina, and was there when she heard her father had been arrested.
Larry, who was a registered sex offender, confessed his role in McGuire’s murder in a letter obtained by authorities. “I just want it over,” the letter said. “NO TRIAL. NO TAXPAYERS MONEY SPENT FOR A TRIAL. It is hard for the state of WV to fight against itself because I plead guilty/no contest. Thank you for your time on this matter.” It was signed, “Larry Paul McClure Sr.”
Choudhary was scheduled to go to trial next month. Her guilty plea to second-degree murder carries a prison term of up to 40 years.
“When you strangled John, you knew at the time that was wrong?,” McDowell County Circuit Court Judge Ed Kornish asked Choudhary during her plea hearing, which was conducted by teleconference, reports the Daily Telegraph.
“Yes, your honor,” she answered. “But look at my other options. I didn’t feel that I had a choice.”
Send them all to jail. Not rehab — but jail.
