Murder charge comes after grand jury about-face

PALMER — Lisa Donlon made her first court appearance Monday after being charged with murdering her husband, Jason Donlon, Oct. 5.

Donlon, 38, didn’t say a word Monday as she sat in yellow prison scrubs, shackled to one other prisoner, shielded from news media in the gallery behind her blonde hair.

In October, Palmer District Attorney Roman Kalytiak described how Donlon’s case had gone before a grand jury, which had declined to charge her with murder. That same grand jury, Kalytiak said Monday, decided just before Christmas to go ahead with charges.

What has changed in the interim?

Kalyitak said that since grand jury proceedings are secret he couldn’t be specific about what evidence was presented when. But he noted that the grand jury process used in this case is not the way it is most commonly employed. In most cases, prosecutors come to the grand jury with a list of charges they think the evidence warrants. Jurors then decide if the prosecutor’s take is correct.

“This was more of an investigative grand jury,” Kalyitak said. “They had the ability to ask for more follow-up.”

He said that process meant all the information didn’t come out at once.

“I think it’s fair to say that as the months went by the DA’s office got more information from the troopers,” he said, choosing his words carefully so as not to reveal exactly what that information was.

The question at the heart of the case, he said, was whether Donlon was justified in shooting her husband.

“It’s fair to say that that was probably also the issue that the grand jury had to decide (this month),” Kalytiak said.

Donlon told prosecutors she had been abused. Kalytiak described the abuse as “torture” and said Donlon’s husband intended to continue the abuse the day he was shot.

Donlon fired six bullets into her husband’s body while he was in bed, likely sleeping, Kalytiak said. A family dog also was shot.

Jason Donlon’s family disputes that he was abusive. His aunt, Jennifer Thomson, described him in an e-mail to the Frontiersman as “an honorable man.”

“Jason was an honorable man who was trying to deal with a wife that was very fragile mentally. The things that were said about him were untrue. I think the DA needs to eat some crow,” she wrote.

She pointed out that her nephew had never been charged with domestic abuse. Court records show that is true, at least in Alaska, though in 2006 there was apparently a domestic violence protective order in place since he was charged with violating it. Lisa Donlon has a similarly clean criminal history in Alaska.

Thomson said her hope now is that the criminal trial will be short and lacking in drama.

“All we really want is for the boys to be able to get on with their lives with the least amount of trauma,” she wrote.

Kalytiak said that the jury got Donlon’s side of the story straight from her mouth. Which means that she decided on her own to go in and tell her story — according to the U.S. Constitution, a court can’t force a person accused of a crime to testify.

At Monday’s hearing, Donlon’s bail was kept where it was set after she was arrested, at $100,000. She will also need to find a third party to watch over her before she can be released.

Her attorney, Zachary Renfro with the Palmer Public Defender’s office, asked for a hearing at which that bail amount might be reduced, but Superior Court Judge Vanessa White told him to put it in a written motion. Court records later in the afternoon showed one was scheduled for Wednesday. Though it will likely be pushed back, Donlon’s trial was scheduled for March.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.