Murder in a Small Town – Introduction

May 2024

I’ve been wanting to write about this case for some time.

It was well over ten years ago that my sister reminded me of the biggest story to hit the Borough of Richland during the time we were living there, i.e., the murder of the 66 year old widow Mrs. Carrie Batdorff Layser in 1965.

Both of our memories were a bit foggy, although hers was better than mine. We began searching the web, and shortly we had found enough material to sate our curiosity, at least temporarily.

I knew there was a lot more to the story.

Several times during the intervening years I did some more searching and kept finding more details. Articles from the newspaper archives were my main source, of course, but there were other veins of information as well.

And I kept wanting to write a series of blog posts but just never got around to it.

Finally a few weeks ago, Cindy Behney asked if I had ever written about the case.

When I had a weekly radio show on WMSP in Harrisburg back in 1979-80, we had a very rough rule of thumb that every phone call or letter that we received from a listener represented anywhere from 500 to 1000 other listeners. So using that as my yardstick, if Cindy was interested in reading about the murder and its aftermath, there must be quite a few other potential readers as well. Maybe not 500, but several of my Richland history blog posts have continued to find readers via the search engines.

I had mentioned the possibility of writing about the case to someone awhile back and was asked why? Why write about an old murder case, why dredge up old buried and possibly best forgotten memories?

My answer is twofold.

One, I think Carrie Layser deserves to be remembered for herself and the remarkable and resilient person that she was, and not merely as the victim of a grisly crime. The more I delved into her story, the more I discovered what an interesting life she led.

Two, it’s a good story, the equal of many of the true crime cases that are bubbling their way to the surface these days.

This series is based almost entirely on publicly available information: newspaper clippings from a newspaper archival service and other information that can readily be found via the internet. It’s supplemented with a small detail or two by memories that I have from having lived through that period or from others who have memories of the time.

A small disclaimer is required. The bulk of the story is based on newspaper articles published in the Lebanon Daily News and probably written by James Shellhamer, the father of a classmate of mine. I say probably written because he was only given two bylines but it seems unlikely that the Daily News had multiple reporters writing the daily reports. Also, when reporters were subpoenaed about the trial coverage, he was the only witness from the Daily News to testify. Most of the time I’ve been able to rewrite and summarize the story into my own words. The big exception is the trial coverage. When we get to the trial, I had two problems. Trying to figure out in what sequence the witnesses were called, because journalistic practice requires leading with the most important item and adding less important details later. Also, trying to paraphrase the testimony that was already being paraphrased, I felt might lead to distortion. So other than removing redundancies and trying to copy and paste the witnesses into the correct order, I pretty much just copied Shellhamer’s prose. It’s about the best I could do, not having access to the trial transcripts.

In general when I use quotation marks I’m echoing a quote that was contained in a news article. In a few cases I took the liberty of inventing some dialogue, but it was based directly on descriptions found in the articles. I don’t think I strayed too far from the facts. Similarly, in a very few instances I extrapolated from the articles to describe what someone may have been thinking.

A few of the posts contain what I call Sidebars. These have information about people who figure prominently in the case or fun facts about the trial that I couldn’t work into the main body of the story. Also, there are a couple of what I call Interludes that describe events taking place outside Lebanon County before and during the time of these events that end up having a bearing on the case.

I do regret that I wasn’t able to describe the effects the murder had on the community, but then I’m not Truman Capote and this isn’t In Cold Blood.