‘You need to be punished,’ judge tells Bucks woman before imposing life sentence in pharma exec’s murder

Dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, Jennifer Morrisey, the 35-year-old former strip club dancer who 1½ years ago fatally shot a Bucks County pharmaceutical executive with whom she had a tumultuous relationship, was sentenced Friday afternoon to a mandatory term of life in prison.

“Ms. Morrisey, what you have done to yourself you have deserved,” Bucks County Court Judge Raymond F. McHugh told her. “You’ve made bad decision after bad decision after bad decision.

“You were callous, you were shallow, and you need to be punished for that,” McHugh said before sentencing Morrisey on charges of first-degree murder, tampering with evidence, and possession of an instrument of a crime.

A jury in Doylestown had convicted Morrisey on Feb. 1 in the shooting death of Michael McNew, 64, a divorced district sales manager for pharmaceutical giant AbbVie and the father of two.

McNew had met Morrisey at the strip club where she danced, and during a four-year relationship, he wooed her and provided her with a life of comfort. She once lived with him in his Washington Crossing home.

But their relationship was volatile, and on Aug. 6, 2017, after a quarrel in which he told her he was putting her belongings in storage and ordered her to never return to his house, Morrisey returned and shot him once between the eyes.

In court Friday, Deputy District Attorney Christopher W. Rees read a victim-impact statement by McNew’s son, Patrick.

“Innocent children are no longer innocent because of Jennifer Morrisey,” said the statement, in which Patrick McNew wondered if the truth of his father’s murder would be told to the two youngest of his father’s four grandchildren. “We will begin lying to our children to protect them."

Good memories of his father will be “suppressed by mental images of my father sitting in his favorite chair with a bullet in his head,” the statement said.

Katie Anderson, McNew’s daughter, told the judge how she was pregnant with her son when she received a call about her father’s death. Her relationship with her father had been strained by his relationship with Morrisey, she said, but things were improving, and her father was “excited to be a grandfather again.”

To have lost him “to someone my father trusted and took care of is nearly unfathomable,” she said.

“I will never forgive her,” Anderson said of Morrisey, but added that she hoped Morrisey will one day own up to what she did and “recognize the pain and sadness she has inflicted on us all.”

When the judge asked Morrisey whether she had anything to say, she simply said, “No.”

Investigators had uncovered a venomous text exchange between Morrisey and McNew in the hours before his death. In it, he alternated between telling Morrisey he loved her and asking her to come over, and threatening to shoot her. She, in turn, boasted she would “gut” McNew like she was “field dressing a deer.”

Morrisey’s lawyer, S. Philip Steinberg, has said that McNew turned possessive when Morrisey began to date other men.

Morrisey testified at her trial, claiming the shooting was accidental. She said that afterward, she sought the advice of her boyfriend, Charles “Ruthless” Kulow, a member of the Breed motorcycle gang, whom she said later disposed of the gun used in the shooting.