Chapter 6 – Preliminary Hearing
Tuesday December 28, 1965 – Thursday December 30, 1965
Judge G. Thomas Gates wasted no time in appointing two defense counsel, H. Rank Bickel Jr. and Stanley W. Katz, to represent Dennis Terry Sites, the accused killer of Mrs. Carrie Batdorff Layser, at a cost of $500 each plus reasonable expenses. Although Lebanon County had a public defender, murder was not one of the crimes the public defender was responsible for defending.
The newspaper reported that county jail officials claimed that Sites had been “very cooperative” and appeared no different from the other inmates who were there for much lesser offenses. “He looks like he might be here serving a 10-day sentence”, muttered one guard.
The commonwealth charged Sites with murder for the beating death of Mrs. Layser, but although District Attorney Alvin B. Lewis Jr. claimed a sexual assault was involved, Sites was not charged with any sexual crime. The preliminary hearing was scheduled for Thursday afternoon December 30 at 1:30 PM before Jackson Township Justice of the Peace George Hixenheiser. The commonwealth only needed to present a minimum amount of testimony at the hearing, just enough to convince the justice that there was enough evidence to continue to hold Sites.
When the preliminary hearing convened, it was brief indeed.
The charge filed against Sites stated “that he did unlawfully, willfully, feloniously, deliberately, premeditatedly and with malice aforethought kill, and murder one, Carrie Batdorff Layser, at her home, located at the corner of Linden and Poplar Streets, in the Borough of Richland, by beating her about the head and body.”
The commonwealth put on two witnesses, and the defense, as expected, none.
Dr. A. H. Heisey, the coroner for Lebanon County, testified that Mrs. Layser died of shock as the result of blows administered by fists. Further, he testified that the beating was so severe that two of her teeth were knocked out, and he found one tooth in Mrs. Layser’s stomach and another in her throat. He was able to give the time of death as between 3:00 and 7:00 AM on the morning her body was found. He said that when he first saw Mrs. Layser’s body on her bed, she was clad only in panties and that there was blood on the bed linen and on the walls.
Sgt. Stanley Pijar of the Jonestown State Police stated that Sites gave two statements to police. In the first Sites claimed he had not been in the Layser home at the time of the murder.
In the second Sites gave a full confession of the killing and the events leading up to it. He told how he entered the home, went upstairs, and encountered Mrs. Layser who called out, “Who are you? What do you want?”, and then he threw her on the bed.
Also revealed for the first time publicly, as part of his statement, Sites said that he was acquainted with Mrs. Layser’s daughter Darlene from school and that he sometimes visited the Layser home. About three years previously in 1962 he had gone to the Layser home to return a bassinet and he had “propositioned” Mrs. Layser because he wanted to have an affair with an older woman. He said she became angry, so he apologized.
Throughout the course of the 40 minute hearing Sites himself was seen chewing gum and at times beating a slow rhythm with his fingers on his knee; he seemed totally disinterested in the hearing.
Based on the testimony, Justice Hixenheiser held Sites for further court action.
The story of Sites’s propositioning Mrs. Layser was nearly as explosive as the murder itself. For the next few days, as I recall, it seemed that’s all that anyone could talk about—a 19 year old kid (as Sites would have been at the time) propositioning a 60-something widow because he wanted to have an affair with an older woman. It seemed that nobody had ever heard of anything like it before. If the the prosecution wanted to get people talking about the case, they couldn’t have released a juicier detail than that nugget.
The next steps in the legal process would be for Sites to appear before Judge G. Thomas Gates for arraignment where he could enter a plea of guilty or not guilty. A plea of not guilty would be sent to the grand jury which was scheduled to meet in February.
His trial could then be set for March.
Assuming everything went as planned.
Interlude
Flashback to Sunday March 3, 1963 – Mid-June, 1963, Phoenix, Arizona
Lois Ann Jameson, an 18-year-old girl, took a bus late at night from her job taking tickets at a local movie theater in Phoenix. She got off the bus a few blocks from her home. The night was very dark, there was no lighting on the street, there weren’t even any sidewalks, so she walked on the side of the street.
Without warning a car pulled up beside her, and a man jumped out and dragged her into the car. He tied her up and drove her to the desert where he raped her. Then he took her back into town and tossed her out of the car.
Fortunately, she was able to keep her cool, and she took note of the kind of car, the unusual pattern of the seat covers, a strange rope handle on the back seat, and a partial license plate number.
She provided all this information to the police when she reported the attack.
Unfortunately, these were the days before DNA testing, so there was no conclusive evidence against her attacker.
Lois was understandably afraid to walk home alone, so her brother would meet her at the bus stop and walk her home.
But she had given him the same description of the attacker’s car that she had given to the police, and while he was waiting for her bus, he noticed a car driving very slowly around the neighborhood, and he thought it matched the description she had given. So he called the police.
Carroll Cooley, a police officer with the Phoenix Police Department in 1963, got the call, and eventually he and his partner Wilfred Young located the car parked outside a house and knocked on the door.
A young man named Ernie came to the door with no shirt and no shoes and messed up hair. They told him this was a police matter and could he come down to the station, and he agreed.
At the station he was put in a lineup. Afterwards, Ernie asked how he did and the officers implied that he had been positively identified.
After two hours of interrogation Ernie hand-wrote a confession to the kidnapping and rape of Lois Jameson. Then he was brought to meet the victim for positive voice identification. Asked by officers in her presence whether this was the victim, he said, “That’s the girl.” The victim stated that the sound of Ernie’s voice matched that of the culprit.
Ernie was convicted at his trial in mid-June although his attorney, 73-year-old Alvin Moore, objected to the introduction of the confession.
Moore appealed.
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