A highly educated military attorney from a small New Hampshire town told a jury he “loved being outdoors” growing up. “I still love being outdoors.”
Unfortunately for Nicholas Kassotis, born in Peterborough, New Hampshire and raised in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, his enjoyment of hiking and running will be forever no more.
The advanced-law grad from Georgetown University who grew up in the “Live Free Or Die” state will never live free again.
The only “outdoors” he will ever see is a prison exercise yard surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers.
Kassotis, 43, was sentenced to life without parole – plus 25 years – for murdering his second wife, cutting her into pieces with a long-blade Home Depot knife, stuffing her into two plastic garbage totes and scattering her remains over a three-mile area.
Mindi Mebane Kassotis’ headless torso was discovered in the woods on December 2, 2022 by hunters in Riceboro, Georgia. Her head was found a few days later.Kassotis was arrested in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on May 12, 2023.
His arrest came one day after his wife’s remains were confirmed through DNA.
For ten years he was a prestigious judge-advocate-general (JAG) in the U.S. Navy, and his wife, 40, was a writer and business owner.
The couple was living in Savannah when he beat her to death, cops say, after he learned she didn’t want to have children.
Prosecutors claimed the couple was on the run to avoid paying a $1.6 million divorce judgment to Kassotis’ first wife, and that he was having an affair with a woman, fiction writer Samantha Kolesnik, who later became his third wife.
During the affair he told Kolesnik he was a widower, that his pregnant wife had died of heart issues in the hospital. He told her that six weeks before he murdered Mindy.
The defense argued that the couple was actually running from a guy referred to as “Jim McIntyre,” and said the state’s case was circumstantial.
Kassotis admitted to buying the knife, a shovel, and a deer-processing kit and agreed he had traveled the alleged desecration route as documented by his phone.
He claimed he turned off the phone for two hours on the morning of November 29, 2022, for his own safety on the advice of “Jim McIntyre,” who he insisted was an FBI agent investigating alleged banking hacks and mail disruptions he and his wife were experiencing.
Kassotis, who admitted to the jury he was not a hunter, said he had bought the deer-processing kit as a present for his brother-in-law.
The jury didn’t buy it. And the judge who sentenced the former JAG officer said the “Jim McIntyre” character was created out of whole cloth.
Jury Foreman Kai Andrew spoke out after convicting Kassotis of murdering his wife, noting the lack of evidence around “Jim McIntyre’s” existence.
