Everton “Beachy Stout” McDonald used one of his workers to keep tabs on his second wife as he strongly suspected that she was in romantic relationships with other men, including a policeman.

Beachy Stout is on trial in the Home Circuit Court in downtown Kingston for the July 2020 murder of his second wife, Tonia McDonald. Oscar Barnes, a co-accused in the matter, is also on trial.

Tonia’s partially burnt body was found slumped beside her razed motor vehicle on the Sherwood Forest main road in Portland with her throat slashed.

This first witness has been testifying since the trial started on Tuesday.

The seven-member jury of four men and three women learnt from the witness, who was a former employee of Beachy Stout at his supermarket in Portland, that his boss ordered him to go and check bank lines to see if his wife was conducting business there as she said she would.

“I did a lot of errands for him. He would send me to the bank to find out if Tonia was there. I did that every time he asked. Once I told him that she was there and he was satisfied, he didn’t say anything,” he said.

The witness claimed that on one occasion Beachy Stout ordered him to “lef di shop” and sent him to a specific bank to see if Tonia was there.

“I looked and didn’t see her and I was afraid to go back and tell him that I didn’t see her. [Luckily,] when I looked, I saw her come to the shop, so I didn’t have to tell him anything,” the witness said.

The witness further told the court that Beachy Stout called him into his office one morning and asked him if he knew a man by the name of Jacob. He instructed the employee to find out where Jacob’s office was.

According to the witness, sometimes in the mornings Beachy Stout would ask him if he thought Tonia was good for business, to which he responded, “Yes”; however, Beachy Stout disagreed.

The former employee of Beachy Stout said his boss referred to Tonia as lazy.

“He would ask if I didn’t realise that the shop was running down. He wondered if Tonia was taking money from the business. He wondered if the business was leaking. He said he left the house from early and she didn’t come out yet. He said he was going to teach her a lesson because she needs to come out of the house and go to work. He said he was going to stop the helper from coming because his wife was lazy. He said his other woman was cleaner than her,” the witness said.

The former employee said that in 2020 Beachy Stout expressed to him that he felt Tonia was disgracing the McDonald name.

“He said he was tired of her disgracing him and that he couldn’t walk and hold up his head. He asked me where she goes to whenever she is missing from the shop. He asked if I realised that she was missing at a special time of the day each day. I told him I didn’t know.

“He said, ‘Why this woman don’t stop take up all kinds of men?’ I had no clue what he was talking about. He asked if I knew Tonia had a man who was a police. Otherwise from that we would have conversations where he said he would kill the police bwoy. He would say things like, ‘Mi ago kill da bwoy deh inuh,’ ” the witness recounted.

The witness said on one occasion Beachy Stout called him and another security guard into an office upstairs in the supermarket, where he sat looking at pictures on a desktop computer while lamenting that Tonia was disgracing him.

The witness said Tonia was in the photos and she was nude in some of them. He also claimed that one of the pictures showed her drinking from the same glass as a man with whom she was believed to have been intimate.

“We didn’t want to look at the pictures, and he said, ‘Look, man! Open your eyes and look.’ I had to look, because I couldn’t do anything. I saw her opening up her private parts. He said, ‘You see how she skin out like a dog. A suh she skin out herself to any and any man’. We saw a picture with she and the policeman sitting down side by side like lovers. He said she was spending off his money on the policeman. He said, ‘Him don’t want her inuh. A just mi money him want’, ” the witness said.

The witness said the businessman continued to skip through the photos on the computer and was furious that there was a naked picture of him while in a bathroom.

“It was like a video call and she snapped the picture. Mr Mac zoomed in on one of her pictures and said, ‘A dem thing yah she a do, a tattoo man name pon her hand.’ There were other pictures of her breast alone.”

The witness added that Beachy Stout had plotted to use acid to disfigure the faces of both Tonia and the policeman.

The trial continues today with more testimony from the former employee.