The murder trial for a Warren man believed to be tied to the slaying of a Silsbee woman has been pushed to at least later this summer.
The Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office confirmed that the July trial date has been rescheduled until at least Aug. 2.
The district attorney’s office was not able to confirm the exact reason for the change, which is not unusual in the summer months. This week’s court documents show that an attorney in the case was on vacation, which is sometimes a common factor for a delay.
Police used DNA to link Daniel Andrew MacGinnis to the 1988 killing of Patricia Ann Jacobs, of Silsbee.
Jacobs, 36, was reported missing on Oct. 6, 1988, after she failed to return home from work the night before. Her truck was found in the parking lot of the Silver Spur tavern in Hardin County the morning after. A short time later, body was found in the Neches River in Port Arthur.
An autopsy showed she had drowned but suffered blows to the head and had been in the water about 12 hours, The Enterprise previously reported. The death was investigated as a homicide.
MacGinnis, who denied involvement with the crime and is now in his 60s, was questioned at the time of the crime, but investigators initially found no link between the two, leaving the case open for decades.
In recent years, DNA from Jacobs’s clothing matched DNA taken from Jacobs in Texas and California, where he was convicted in previous attacks on women. DNA testing was not available to investigators at the time of the crime but later was performed after Jacobs’s daughter asked authorities to reopen the case.
In the years surrounding the slaying, MacGinnis also was convicted of sexual assault of a 19-year-old, forcibly raping a 35-year-old woman in California and found guilty in Texas of the attempted aggravated kidnapping of a 39-year-old woman.
MacGinnis is serving a life sentence, which he received in 2019 in Tyler County on charges of unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon. He also received a 99-year sentence at the time for possession of a controlled substance.
The sentence follows the 2004 shooting of his 60-year-old girlfriend Nelda Faye Widener. Widener’s death originally was ruled a suicide and unchallenged until MacGinnis in recent years was linked to Jacobs’s case. The Texas Rangers are now reexamining Widener’s death.
MacGinnis allegedly had an argument with Widener over money the day before she was found dead in her rural Jasper County home. She had signed “$600 or $700” in checks to him, Lt. John Cooper of the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office previously told The Enterprise.
“Just the position of the body and the position of the gun looked suspicious to me,” Lt. John Cooper of the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office told The Enterprise in 2019.
According to previous Enterprise articles, Cooper and Jasper County Sheriff Mitchel Newman met with Joe Haralson of the Texas Rangers to discuss the case at the request of Widener’s family.
“We want this family to have justice,” Haralson said in 2019. “If she was in fact murdered, then we want to do whatever needs to be done to look at all the facts. We don’t want to be centered on one person; we want to look at everything.”
Other law enforcement agencies have since contacted Jefferson County to arrange for the transport of MacGinnis to their jurisdiction to question him about other unsolved crimes.
meagan.ellsworth@beaumontenterprise.com
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