Prologue – 1965
January 1965 – Thursday December 23, 1965
It seemed like it was going to be a quiet Christmas season in Richland, Pennsylvania, that December, 1965.
Events in the rest of the world weren’t impinging too much on residents of this small borough in Lebanon County with a population just short of 1300 people in the 1960 census.
True, recent graduate of Elco (short for Eastern Lebanon County) High School and Richland native Dennis Heberling had been drafted and sent overseas to that remote country where there was some conflict going on, Viet Nam, as some of the news reports still called it in those days. But that distant war didn’t really affect most folks yet, unless you happened to have a cousin or perhaps a brother who was serving over there.
January of that year had seen Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in to serve his first full term as president, the horror of the assassination of his predecessor John F. Kennedy finally being put into the rearview mirror, or so he hoped.
On January 26 Kevin McCarthy, who would become 55th Speaker of the House, at least for a short time, was born.
In February civil rights leader Malcolm X was assassinated in Manhattan.
The Sound of Music premiered in March starring Julie Andrews as a nun who teaches a group of children how to sing and then leads them over the Alps to escape from the Nazis. It became a multi-year runaway hit and global sensation.
Also in March, Selma, Alabama, became famous for several bloody and deadly clashes between civil rights demonstrators led by Martin Luther King, Jr. against white supremacists.
In April My Fair Lady, which famously refused to cast Julie Andrews in the role that she made famous on Broadway in favor of an actress who couldn’t sing a note to save her life (but kept Marni Nixon gainfully employed), won the Oscar for Best Picture. However, Julie took home the gold statuette for Best Actress for her role in Disney’s Mary Poppins. Just you wait, Henry Higgins!
Also in April:
Richard Hickock and Perry Smith were executed by hanging in Lansing, Kansas. They would later be immortalized in Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel In Cold Blood.
The first SDS march against the Vietnam War drew 25,000 protestors to Washington, DC. No one from Richland attended.
The New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows reopened. Several folks from Richland drove to NYC to see it.
On April 2 Rodney (“Can we all get along?”) King was born.
In May the University of California, Berkeley made the news, and not for the last time, when students burned their draft cards and 30,000 attended a teach-in.
June was quieter when Gemini 4 Astronaut Ed White made the first U.S. space walk.
In July Bob Dylan released his single “Like a Rolling Stone”, and LBJ increased the number of U.S. troops in South Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000, and doubled the number of men drafted per month from 17,000 to 35,000.
August:
LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, outlawing literacy tests and other discriminatory voting practices that caused widespread disfranchisement of Black Americans, or Negroes as they were still called in those days.
The Beatles performed the first stadium concert at Shea Stadium in New York City. Of course, nobody in the audience could hear a note that they played because the teenage girls were screaming their little heads off, because that’s what one did at a Beatles concert. The Beatles could barely hear themselves play. It was because of this that in due course they stopped touring and began to grow apart as they each developed their own interests. This is what led to their eventual breakup, not Yoko Ono, as many folks mistakenly believe. It was all the fault of the screaming teenage girls!
The Watts Riots began in Los Angeles, California.
Sandy Koufax pitched a perfect game against the Chicago Cubs in September. Hurricane Betsy caused 76 deaths and $1.42 billion in damage in New Orleans, the last major hurricane to strike New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina 40 years later. What some people think of as one of the worst sitcoms in history debuted that month—My Mother the Car—but two of the writers were Allan Burns and James L. Brooks, who went on the create one of the best and most beloved sitcoms in history—The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
In October LBJ signed into law an immigration bill that abolished quotas based on national origin. Anti-war protesting increased (but not in Richland), and the New York World’s Fair closed, suffering heavy losses. Apparently not enough folks from Richland went for a visit.
November was memorable for the Northeast Blackout of 1965: Several U.S. states (Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and portions of New Jersey) and parts of Canada were hit by a series of blackouts lasting up to 13½ hours. And “The Impossible Dream” became a reality when Man of La Mancha opened in New York City and went on to win five Tony Awards including Best Musical and Best Score.
On November 30 Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara had a son named Ben.
A Charlie Brown Christmas debuted on CBS in December and went on to become a perennial favorite to this day.
The week of December 25 The Beatles had the number one song with “We Can Work It Out” while The Byrds had dropped into fourth place with “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season)”. Moving up the chart was Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” at number eight.
Thursday December 23, 1965
The final day of school before the holiday was Thursday December 23, and Lebanon County in general and Richland especially seemed headed toward a pleasant, long, quiet Christmas weekend.
The young couple Diane and Dennis Sites (she was 23, he was 22) had been married for three and a half years, had a three year old son, and were expecting their second child with Diane due any moment, maybe she’d even have a Christmas baby. Wouldn’t that be something? They lived in an apartment building on the corner of Park and Main Streets in Richland. Dennis was an attentive husband, often helping out with the household chores, but now he was getting antsy, waiting for Diane to deliver. He had grown up in nearby Newmanstown, and that’s where most of his friends still lived, as well as several of his brothers, so he hopped into his wife’s 58 Chevy and drove to the Rising Sun Hotel to have a few drinks with the gang.
Carrie Layser, a 66 year old widow, had been living on her own since her oldest daughter moved out of the house a year or so earlier, and she was doing well managing a real estate and insurance business. That Thursday afternoon Carrie drove herself and her friend Bessie Krumbine to visit a mutual friend in nearby Newmanstown. They returned to Richland about 7:00 PM and chatted a bit in front of Bessie’s home at 11 Poplar Street. Then Carrie drove off to return to her home on the corner of Linden and Poplar Streets to spend a quiet evening at home alone.
It was the last that anyone would see Carrie alive.
Except her killer, of course.
| Previous | Next |