Lori White may not have known the Wholavers, but she felt moved to walk a mile and a half through snow flurries last night, carrying a white candle, to mourn their deaths.
She and a number of other Middletown residents trudged from the high school and past the house where Jean, 43, and her daughters, Victoria, 20, and Elizabeth, 15, were shot to death on Christmas Eve.
Then it was on to a local church, where they joined other residents stunned by the shootings in the small, quiet town for a memorial service for the family, hoping to find solace and closure.
A crowd of at least 250 people filled the sprawling sanctuary of Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic Church, the Middletown church where the Wholavers worshipped, singing hymns and praying. The crowd was so large that borough police directed traffic along Race Street to avoid jams.
“It’s so sad for a small town,” said White, clutching the charred stub of her candle after the 45 minute service. “I just live here, and it’s such a sad thing. It felt good to come and put an end to it – for me.”
The Wholavers were shot in the head sometime Dec. 24, authorities said. Their bodies were discovered Christmas Day in their North Union Street home after relatives in Johnstown, expecting the trio for the holiday, called police.
Police have arrested Scott Lewis Wholaver, 28, of St. Benedict, Cambria County, the brother of Jean Wholaver’s estranged husband and the girls’ uncle, and charged him with homicide, but authorities said they don’t believe he was the triggerman.
Scott Wholaver told police that he drove Ernest Wholaver, 42, the girls’ father, to the victims’ house in a truck owned by their family’s business and let him out. Ernest Wholaver returned about five to 10 minutes later “excited and shaking,” and then concocted a false alibi about the slayings, according to a police affidavit that quotes Scott Wholaver.
Scott Wholaver was committed to Dauphin County Prison without bail. Ernest Wholaver was held in the prison last week on charges that he sexually molested his two daughters. The molestation charges were filed in July, and Ernest Wholaver was to stand trial later this month.
Authorities have said Ernest Wholaver, who remains in jail, is a suspect in the killings but has not been charged. At the time of the killings, Ernest Wholaver was free on $100,000 bail on the molestation charges. He was taken to prison Thursday after his bail bondsman revoked the bond out of concern that he had become a flight risk.
Friends, co-workers, schoolmates, fellow parishioners and strangers filled the church, some for comfort, some to honor the memory of the victims.
Three priests led the service, on an altar still decorated for Christmas, featuring wreaths and trees wrapped in white lights, and poinsettias filling a space beneath a towering crucifix.
“They were shaped in equal parts of humor and of love, and in a world bent with much anger and much hate.. they were remarkably open and friendly, generous and trusting,” said the Rev. Louis Ogden, pastor of the church. “They loved, they loved life, they loved one another, and in their own ways they loved their God.”
Friends filled banners of wide white paper with inscriptions of sadness, of joy in. knowing the trio. The messages were written in pencil, pen and marker on the banners, which sat on a long table in the church lobby.
“Some people come into our lives and quickly go,” one message read. “Some stay for a while and leave footprints on our hearts. And we are never, ever the same.”
The service began with “Amazing Grace” and featured priests reading sections of the Bible, including Lazarus’ rising from the dead. Victoria Wholaver’s fiancee, Jeff Martin, and their 9-month-old daughter, Madison, sat in the front, just as they had during the trio’s funeral service last Friday in Johnstown.
Moments of silence filled the sanctuary after each reading, and the only sounds were the sniffling of crying mourners.
The Wholavers’ deaths are a “tragedy that has touched the very core of our lives,” Ogden told the crowd. Residents needed to come together last night “to petition on God to help us live with the confusion and the doubt and the pain and the uncertainty that touch our hearts at this very moment,” he said.
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