Out of Options, Only Hope Remains

Old and infirm, Neda Hoerner would sit in her picture window watching the world pass by her Susquehanna Twp. home. She probably didn’t notice someone was watching her as well.

At 10 a.m. March 13, 1995, two days after the anniversary of M. Geneva Long’s slaying, a visiting nurse found Hoerner’s Walnut Street home on fire, an hour after another nurse had left. Firefighters found Hoerner’s battered body in her bedroom. There were no signs of forced entry.

Hoerner was wearing only a shirt. Like Long and Goldy Snyder, she had suffered a severe beating and apparent sexual assault and was strangled. Her ribs were broken, and telltale shoe impressions were seen on her chest.

“The stomping is particularly severe because of the torn pulmonary arteries and extensive trauma to the heart,” wrote Dr. Wayne Ross, the pathologist who conducted the 77-year-old woman’s autopsy.

Bruises on her head showed the perpetrator likely held her by the neck and slammed her head against a firm object. She was raped, but this time, unlike the Snyder and Long murders, investigators detected semen on her body.

A few blocks away, a box with Hoerner’s name stamped on it, a towel from her house and some coins were found at a bus stop.

Andrew Dillon, a parolee suspected in the murder of an elderly woman in Scranton, had signed out of a halfway house 13 times between Jan. 18 and March 23, 1995, to go to a drug counseling center a block north of Hoerner’s home and for job interviews at a car wash a block and a half east of her home.

Dillon lived less than 100 feet from Long when she was murdered. He frequented Snyder’s bait shop, which was a few blocks from where he lived on Boas Street.

It wasn’t until July 4, 1995, after an 81-year-old Lucy Crable was killed in her Boas Street home, that investigators announced they believed her slaying was connected to those of Snyder and Hoerner.

h4. The Dillon angle

Crable was found on her living room floor with one of her stockings wrapped around her neck. She had been brutally beaten about the face, and bruises to her head appeared to have been caused by someone banging it against the floor. She had been beaten so hard that her dentures left impressions that could be seen on the outside of her lips and cheek.

Bruises on her shoulders and chest suggested someone had kneeled on top of her and beaten her face. She had also been raped.

Unlit matches were scattered on the floor around her body.

Her killer had cut a screen and lifted a hasp to open the door.

A neighbor saw Crable’s backyard gate open about 2 p.m., noticed the slit in the screen and called police.

Another neighbor saw a black man wearing green workout pants with a black stripe and a white muscle shirt entering Crable’s backyard. The neighbor later picked Dillon out of a photo gallery of 44 black males.

Dillon had been at an Independence Day picnic with his girlfriend and her family. He left about noon wearing green workout pants and a white muscle shirt and returned later wearing shorts.

A task force organized a day after Crable’s murder immediately zeroed in on Dillon, who was living a half-block away. They learned he was the prime suspect in the October 1990 murder of Agnes Deluca, who was beaten, raped, strangled and stabbed in her Scranton apartment. Scranton authorities had failed to notify the Department of Corrections that he was a murder suspect.

Police said DeLuca’s killer left the gas on in her apartment in the hopes it would start a fire to cover up the slaying. But investigators said the killer broke a window to get into the apartment, which let the gas escape.

Dillon was arrested and charged with DeLuca’s murder on Sept. 30, 1995.

Police searched the Boas Street apartment Dillon shared with his girlfriend and found a white jewelry box and a pendant with praying hands that belonged to Crable.

Because an arrest had already been made in Long’s murder, she was not included in the task force investigation, although Dillon’s actions at that time were on a chart in its command center.

Detectives in the Long investigation checked out the Dillon angle, but tried to place him in Long’s apartment with two other men who had already been charged with the murder, David Gladden and James A. Carson Jr. On July 18, 1995, Harrisburg police investigator Dennis A. Woodring questioned Carson, who said Dillon wasn’t with him.

h4. Encoding the plan

Ann W. Burgess, a profiler and nationally known expert on sexual homicide who reviewed the cases at the request of The Patriot-News, said the five murders are so similar that authorities should rethink the Long murder investigation.

“I think the important thing is that he confessed to the four [which] raises the likelihood that this particular victim [Long] was also one of his victims,” Burgess said. “You have the close proximity, the method, the amount of aggression used, the method of killing, the age, the race. My golly, with all of this it certainly should be reviewed.”

Burgess, a professor of psychiatric nursing at Boston College who helped the FBI develop its criminal profiling techniques, said sexual killers’ motivation typically is a fantasy centering on sexual rage and their killings are often planned for lengthy periods of time.

“The frequency helps to encode the plans, the fantasy, and it’s just a matter of time until he carries it out,” Burgess said. “He was able to see all these victims frequently, whether that was passing them in their residence, outside their residence or waiting for transportation. They may have even known him to say ‘Hi.’ ”

Although Dillon had been arrested for the Scranton murder in September and Dauphin County authorities had identified items taken from the Crable murder in his apartment, he was not charged in the Harrisburg-area slayings until DNA from the Hoerner crime scene was matched to him.

That match was made seven days after Gladden was convicted of murdering Long.

h4. Conflicting statements

The Gladden trial took three days and only included five witnesses – a pathologist, three police officers and Carson. The lawyers and the police officers all knew about the pending charges against Dillon, who was living in a room less than 100 feet from Long’s apartment. But the jury didn’t.

The officers were permitted to say information from a confidential informant led them to Carson and Gladden without identifying Donald ‘Goofball’ Walborn, the child molester and thief who originally implicated the pair in an apparent attempt to save himself from rape charges.

Gladden’s attorney, Allen C. Welch, tried to suppress the statements Gladden made before his grandmother stopped the interview, saying he wasn’t mentally competent.

Then-District Attorney John F. Cherry fought the motion, saying he believed Gladden understood his rights and knew exactly what he was doing by saying he didn’t.

According to transcripts of the interview, Gladden started balking at signing the rights waiver when officers began accusing him of the murder.

Officers repeatedly asked him if he understood his rights, and he repeatedly replied he didn’t understand why he was being accused.

Woodring testified that he didn’t think Gladden, who at 37 didn’t know his Social Security number, had any mental deficiencies but was lying when he talked about a yard sale at his grandmother’s home. Gladden claimed he had shoveled snow off the yard for the sale.

Judge Jeannine Turgeon allowed the statement to come in and later allowed Woodring to tell the jury he thought Gladden was lying. The police officers all testified at length about Carson’s statements without any hearsay objections.

Instead of pursuing the Dillon angle – he could have asked any officer about the serial slayings and where Dillon lived when Long was murdered – Welch pursued a theory that Carson was the killer. Welch said he had turned up evidence that Carson had tried to choke someone nine years earlier while he was a student.

When it finally came time to present that evidence, Turgeon would not allow it because it was too old and not similar enough to the Long murder.

Ironically, she compared it to the case of a serial killer she had handled where prosecutors were able to tie murders into one case saying they fit a common scheme, plan or design.

Welch said he did not ask about Dillon because he was assured by police and Cherry that they had ruled him out.

“They were adamant about it,” Welch said. “My recollection is Dillon’s name was raised, and I was assured with the utmost assurance, while they couldn’t go into detail on it, man of his word to another man of his word, that Dillon had been excluded.”

Cherry, now a judge, said he doesn’t recall all the facts of the case but he was under the impression that Carson had passed a follow-up polygraph test. He said he didn’t think it would be appropriate for him to comment in detail on the case.

Cherry said Woodring would be better able to answer questions about details of the investigation, but Woodring did not return telephone calls seeking comment for this story. The other police investigator, Walter B. Coy, died in May 2004. At trial, Welch tried to tear apart Carson’s conflicting statements. Police and Cherry characterized those inconsistencies as not uncommon because criminals will sometimes try to distance themselves from the crime initially before they finally admit involvement.

On the other hand, police elicit confessions by letting suspects minimize their involvement, which experts on wrongful convictions say sometimes lead to false confessions, especially from mentally deficient suspects.

*Attorney Justin J. McShane, who agreed to represent Carson for free in the interests of justice, said he believes Carson was pressured into confessing that he had burglarized Long’s apartment with Gladden to save his life.*

*”I find it completely possible that any man with a terminally ill mother who begged him to take the deal would perjure himself to avoid the death penalty,” McShane said. “People, more than we as a society would like to think, unfortunately plead guilty to crimes every day across the entire U.S. to minimize the consequences or to get it over with.”*

Welch also asked what kind of deal Carson was expecting since he had pled guilty to third-degree murder seven months before the trial. Carson said he only cooperated because he didn’t want to face life in prison or the death penalty.

If Welch’s investigator had requested a copy of the transcript of Carson’s guilty plea, Welch would have known that the deal Carson cut left him facing a maximum 5- to 10-year term, which included the murder as well as the other charges.

Carson said authorities got his mother to talk him into cooperating and accepting the plea and testifying against Gladden.

He was eventually sentenced to 2 to 10 years. He told The Patriot-News that deal was on the table but was not announced at his guilty plea. At his sentencing, Cherry told Judge Turgeon that Carson was the only available witness against Gladden and that he had passed two lie detector tests.

In less than three hours, including lunch, the jury convicted Gladden of second-degree murder, which carries a mandatory term of life in prison without the possibility of parole, and burglary, robbery, arson and conspiracy.

“Rhis is the worst verdict I’ve had in Dauphin County in the last 10 years,?” Welch said after the trial. “If you can convict somebody on the testimony of James Carson, then you can convict anybody of anything on nothing.”

h4. A renewed look at the evidence

This summer, The Patriot-News asked District Attorney Edward M. Marsico Jr. to review his office’s files in the case.

Oddly, crime scene photos of Dillon’s victims were in the Gladden file. There was also a fax of a newspaper article about Dillon from the city detective who arrested Dillon.

When told of the circumstances of the case, Marsico assigned his first assistant, Francis T. Chardo, to review the case. Chardo in turn assigned county detectives who work alongside Woodring in the county detective’s office to take a renewed look at the evidence.

When they found there was no semen on the swabs taken during Long’s autopsy, they hinged their hopes of solving the case with a polygraph.

Attorney Royce Morris, who is representing Gladden, agreed to let him be polygraphed. They cooperated with the district attorney’s investigation because Gladden’s case is too old to raise appeals unless new evidence is discovered.

The unwritten promise was if Gladden passed, the prosecutors would take steps to free him. Patrick Kelly, a former FBI agent, was hired to conduct the polygraph.

On Sept. 6, Gladden failed.

Chief County Detective John Goshert said that based on his review and the polygraph results, he’s convinced Gladden is guilty.

“My view now is they got the right guy, because I take a lot of stock in the polygraphs that were last done,” Goshert said. “I think Gladden was involved in it. I believe Carson had something to do with it. There’s nothing to substantiate that Dillon had anything to do with it. That was worth looking into. I don’t think it was time wasted.”

Prosecutors declined to speculate on whether they thought Gladden could be convicted if a jury heard all the evidence. But they say they believe they could probably convict Dillon of murdering Long, given the pattern of his other known killings, if not for Gladden.

There might be one slim hope for Gladden, who needs new evidence to get his case back in court.

Although there was no semen detected on swabs taken from Geneva Long’s body, the pathologist who autopsied her said it appeared she was raped. Dr. Richard Saferstein, former head of the New Jersey State Police crime lab and the author of textbooks on criminalistics and forensic serology, said given the violence of Dillon’s rapes, there may be skin cells on the swabs, which could be detected using today’s DNA technology.

“It may not be the case, but it’s certainly worth looking at if you want to answer the questions,” he said.

Chardo said he was investigating having the tests performed.

h4. Ten years later

Cherry spared Dillon the death penalty in exchange for his plea to the Goldy Snyder murder, for which they had no evidence against him except for the similarities to the other slayings.

Serving four consecutive life terms, Dillon refused to talk to county investigators in September and did not respond to a letter from The Patriot-News.

Carson, who was continually denied parole and served the whole 10 years of his term, was arrested in July on drug paraphernalia charges.

He was jailed after fleeing from county investigators who wanted to talk to him about his recantation in the Gladden case. He eventually failed a polygraph test on Oct. 3. He said investigators had accused him of lying and they were arguing before he was hooked up to the machine.

In the meantime, Donald Walborn, the man who steered the investigation to Gladden, was released in July after serving the entire 10 years of his 5- to 10-year term. He told The Patriot-News that police had offered him $25,000 for information about the Long murder, and he was still looking for ways to collect it.

Walborn was willing to place two more perpetrators in Long’s apartment at the time of the murder. He had misunderstood a letter sent to him by a reporter that said the reporter suspected someone else was involved in Long’s slaying.

Walborn named another man he claimed was with Gladden and Carson. When asked about Andrew Dillon, he said Dillon was at the murder scene as well. When asked to describe Dillon, he couldn’t say if he was white or black because he claimed he had talked to him about the murder through a closed door.

A Patriot-News reporter took Walborn to the state police barracks where he registered as a sex offender, giving his sister’s Lykens address. He then asked to be dropped off in the city.

Ten days later, Walborn was charged with sexually assaulting a 19-year-old retarded man who was living in a rooming house on Camp Street where Walborn was staying.

Goshert said he doesn’t believe anything Walborn says and doesn’t consider him a factor in the equation, even though he was the one who started the investigation into Gladden.

“I think whoever talks to him, he tells them what they want to hear,” Goshert said. “If I asked him isn’t it true you saw Gladden on the moon yesterday, he’d say ‘yea, I definitely saw David Gladden on the moon yesterday.'”

Meanwhile, contacted yesterday, Gladden’s family was burying his 72-year-old mother. Gladden’s brother Ramon said she had suffered a stroke several months ago and died Dec. 5.

Ramon Gladden said his brother was not permitted to attend the funeral.

“I hope something comes of this,” he said, when asked about The Patriot-News articles.