Denvalyn Minott, the second witness in the murder trial of Everton “Beachy Stout” McDonald and his co-accused Oscar Barnes, testified on Thursday in the Home Circuit Court, in downtown Kingston, that the businessman pressed him to murder his wife Tonia McDonald.

McDonald and Barnes are being tried for the July 20, 2020 murder of Tonia, whose charred body was found on the Sherwood Forest main road in Portland with multiple stab wounds and her throat slashed.

Minott, who had confessed to his involvement in the murder, is already serving a 19-year sentence for the crime.

According to Minott, McDonald contracted him to murder Tonia and gave him strict instructions that she was not to be shot. The witness claimed that the businessman ordered that she be stabbed and her throat cut.

“I spoke to him in his supermarket in Portland. He and I were talking about Mrs McDonald. He said, ‘Mi can’t afford fi give you a job to do and you nuh do it’. He said I was taking too long and that I was an idiot. I told him I was going to make it work. He said, ‘Just come on, man, just do the thing, man’. The job was killing Mrs Mac. He said if mi can’t manage he would make one of the boys from town do it. I told him that I would do it and that he should not give away the work,” Minott testified.

Minott, a fisherman who also did small-scale farming in his yard before his conviction, told the seven-member jury and presiding Judge Chester Stamp that he first became aware of Beachy Stout one day in 2020 when he heard someone shout the name at a fishing beach in White River, Portland. The witness said McDonald was in a black BMW motor vehicle at the time.

He said he next saw McDonald when he visited the businessman’s supermarket in Port Antonio to seek a job.

“The Saturday when I saw Beachy Stout again, it was at his supermarket. I told him I needed some work. I told him that when the goods truck come in, I could hand down rice, sugar, and so forth. He said to me, ‘Mi have better work for you’. That’s when he went into his pocket and went on the phone. He showed me a lady on the phone who I never saw before. He then said to me that he wanted her dead. I told him I couldn’t do it, because I never did anything like that before,” the witness said, explaining that the woman on the phone was Tonia.

However, McDonald insisted that he could do it and offered him $3 million for the job.

“He said, ‘You can do it, just make your price’. I told him I couldn’t do it because I didn’t know how to do those things. He said to me, ‘I will give you $3 million to do it’. I told him alright and then left the office,” Minott told the court.

He said that after the initial encounter, he continued to link up with McDonald in person and on the phone.

He also said that McDonald took away his personal phone and told him that he wouldn’t be needing it anymore. The witness testified that he changed phones and SIM cards very often at McDonald’s request.

He said that it was after many meetings with McDonald about the planned murder that the businessman started to express concern that he, Minott, was possibly incapable of carrying out the mission.

He claimed that during a meeting with the businessman in his office, McDonald took out a scandal bag with cocaine and snorted the drug before alleging that Tonia had hacked his bank account and had stolen $31 million.

He said the businessman, after snorting the cocaine, uttered, “Da gyal yah fi dead enuh”.

“He said he didn’t want her to get any gunshot. Him seh him want me to stab her up and cut her neck. He said, ‘All you have to do is go over to the house with her and wait until she comes out of the car’ and then mi kill her inna the yard,” Minott said.

The witness claimed that although he told McDonald that he had never done anything like that before, the businessman nevertheless constantly pressured to get the job done, and so he hooked up with Oscar Barnes, the co-accused.

The witness said he met Barnes at Manchioneal Fishing Beach in 2020.

“I spoke to him for around six or seven minutes,” Minott told the court, adding that he had other conversations and meetings with Barnes.

“The last time I saw him was the night of Mrs McDonald’s murder. He and I went to the location where the murder took place,” he claimed.

The witness told the court that Barnes was well aware that the purpose of the link-ups between both of them was to plan Tonia’s murder.

The trial is scheduled to resume on Monday.