I covered my first murder in 1977, when a woman's nude and headless corpse washed ashore in Willowick, Ohio, near where I lived. I was working for the Journal newspaper chain there at the time and was awakened around noon by a call from another reporter who'd heard about it on the police scanner at the office.
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When I got there, she was lying half in and half out of the water. She looked like a store mannequin. A store mannequin without a head. Detectives were taking pictures of her, though I don't think the pictures were of much use to the investigation. Clearly she had been killed somewhere else and her body dumped into the gray waters of Lake Erie.
The cops groused about their bad luck. She could just as easily have washed up 500 yards down the beach, where Willowick ended and gave way to Eastlake, another bedroom community east of Cleveland.
Eventually, they identified her through fingerprints and pinned the killing on her boyfriend. He'd fled to India, and detectives were dispatched to bring him back. They never found the head.
Later I would discover that it's almost always the boyfriend, the girlfriend, the husband or the wife. Once in a while it's the father. Or the kid. I've never had any experience with a mother killing a child, though it happens often enough.
Once, over coffee in a courthouse cafeteria, I listened to an acquaintance sob as he described the circumstances surrounding his wife's killing. He was drunk and she'd been running around, he said. He pumped five .44 Special slugs into her back at close range, a course of action the district attorney's office viewed as excessive. He did five years for manslaughter and died of cancer within six months of his release.
These sorts of homicides, known to investigators as "domestics," are the least interesting of all murders, rivaled only by "public service" killings, in which one dirtbag rubs out another, usually after a disagreement over drugs or money.
I bring all this up because some of you were asking where I was all last week. As it happens, I was down in Corry, Pa., taping an episode of Court TV's excellent program, "Forensic Files."
Corry's a picturesque rural hamlet nestled in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains about an hour's drive from Jamestown, N.Y. For eight years I covered local government, cops and courts for the Corry Journal, a small daily newspaper owned then and now by legendary Pennsylvania newspaperman George Sample.
It was a fairly bucolic sort of life. Certainly, I remember it as that. I bought a small farmhouse outside of town, coached Little League baseball, went fishing a lot and fired large caliber handguns in an abandoned gravel quarry near where I lived. I made a lot of friends, paid my bills and tried to live a respectable life.
But the small-town tranquility was shattered in 1988, following the arrival of another Ohio transplant.
Like me, David Carl Copenhefer was in his 30s, came to Corry with a wife and young son, and had a certain fondness for the products of Colt and Smith and Wesson. There, the similarities ended. He was a religious man, and had in fact been brought to town by the pastor of the local Presbyterian church. He bought a house in a swank subdivision and opened a bookstore in Corry's priciest retail strip. He became a rising star in the local Chamber of Commerce.
There was one other thing, something he didn't share with his new friends and neighbors. Some years earlier, he'd been tried and acquitted on a charge of first-degree murder.
It was on a Sunday, and we'd just gotten home from a New Orleans vacation when George Sample called and told me that Sally Weiner, wife of a local bank branch manager, had been kidnapped. Her body had been found an hour or so earlier by a farmer in a remote wooded area. She'd been shot, execution-style, once in the back of the head.
I got busy in a hurry. Other than a couple of domestics, even the old-timers couldn't remember the last time there had been a murder in Corry. I called my friends in the city and state police, and at the FBI office up in Erie. I loaded up my camera, found a fresh notebook and headed out to the crime scene. My day ended sometime the next morning, when a task force of local, state and federal law enforcement officers raided Copenhefer's home. They formed a perimeter around the house, and there were a dozen young FBI agents with M-16 rifles and night-vision scopes.
"This is the biggest story this town's ever seen," George told me as Copenhefer was led handcuffed from the house. "Do what you have to and don't worry about how much it costs."
For the better part of the next year, I covered the case to the near exclusion of everything else. I didn't get home much. New stories surrounding the killing broke almost every day. At one point, Copenhefer attempted to hire a hitman to assassinate the lead FBI agent and a witness in the case. I traveled to Ohio to investigate the circumstances surrounding his first murder trial, and to Pittsburgh, where the jury was selected for the Weiner case. I was having a ball.
The trial itself lasted five weeks, six days a week. The testimony from Sally Weiner's husband and son was wrenching. The testimony from the killer's wife and son was no less so.
"Please don't kill my dad," the kid implored the jury.
But the evidence was overwhelming and Copenhefer was sentenced to death. The prosecution brought in a parade of scientific types, including a metallurgist, an entomologist, a computer expert and a document examiner, to link him to the kidnapping and murder. It was this mountain of forensic evidence that intrigued the show's producer, Don Kaiser.
After several lengthy telephone conversations about the case, Don made the trip to Corry and spent a couple of days at the library, copying scores of articles I'd written all those years ago from the microfilm archive they keep. The project got the green light and went into full-scale production last week.
I mentioned that I made a lot of friends in Corry, and two of the best are Ken and Patsy Nichols. Ken, now retired, served as police chief, safety director and mayor there over the years, while Patsy has been Corry's district justice for four decades. They keep a hunting camp a few miles outside of town in Warren County and offered to put us up.
The Redhead was apprehensive about the prospect of meeting up with one of the black bears living in the neighborhood, but I reminded her that we were, after all, in a hunting camp and there were guns about. In the evenings, deer fed on apples in the orchard out back and every morning a family of fat and apparently fearless woodchucks grazed in the clover.
Shooting was set for Wednesday, and we met with Don and his production crew at 11:30 in the morning. I'd cajoled George Sample into to coming along, thinking that these young television journalists might get a kick out of meeting one of the old school, who came up when cigarette smoke hung thick in the newsroom and a bottle of whiskey could be found in most every desk. In short time, George had his own part in the show. We had lunch and headed back to the Corry Journal building.
I'd been interviewed for television before and they were generally rushed affairs conducted by harried local TV reporters who had to have the story on the air by 5 o'clock. It soon became apparent that this was going to be a little bit different.
The pre-interviews lasted well into the afternoon, and the elaborate camera, sound and lighting equipment took a while to set up. The excitement generated by a film crew in the small town almost equaled that surrounding the murder of Sally Weiner 16 years earlier, and there were plenty of curiosity-seekers as well as old friends stopping by. Meanwhile, the staff of the Journal was busy trying to put out that day's edition. There was a carnival-like atmosphere.
George and I had our faces powdered and sat under the hot lights, one at a time, for what seemed like an eternity. Sometimes, Don would ask the same question in three different ways in an attempt to get the perfectly phrased answer. If your voice cracked or the beads of sweat on your forehead became too visible, forget it. They'd stop the camera and apply some fresh powder. You'd take a drink of water and do it over again.
After the interviews were concluded, we went out to the newsroom where they shot footage of George at his desk talking on the telephone and me chain-smoking and typing on a word processor. The whole thing took eight hours and when it was over we were all tired and hungry. We went out to dinner, and it was midnight before the Redhead and I got back to the camp. Still tired when we woke up the next morning, we decided to stay an extra day.
Don said we did fine. I guess we'll find out in January, when the Copenhefer episode of "Forensic Files" is set to air.
You know, everybody says the television business is all fun and glamour. Don't you believe them. Compared to the newspaper business, it's sheer murder.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Sept. 28 2004 |