Chapter 10 – The Scene of the Crime
Tuesday September 20, 1966
When court convened on Tuesday morning September 20 with the jury safely empaneled and sworn in, Assistant District Attorney R. Hart Beaver began his opening statement.
The commonwealth would seek to prove that at about 4:00 AM on December 24 of the previous year, Mrs. Carrie Batdorff Layser was brutally beaten to death in what she had the right to assume was the safety of her own home. Beaver went on to say that the jury had a threefold duty. First, to insure the defendant a fair trial “just as you would expect fairness if you were in his position.”
The second duty was to Mrs. Layser and her family, since “she was the victim.”
Finally, the third duty was to the living and to the community.
“This was not only a crime to Carrie Layser…it was a terrible crime to the community, and the community could not long endure if the crime goes unpunished.”
Beaver went on to tell the jury that the commonwealth would show that Sites was not a stranger to the Layser home, that he had been there at least four times before the day of the murder, and that Mrs. Layser’s daughter and Sites’s wife had been classmates. The commonwealth would further show that on the night of December 23 Sites left his home to go to a bar to drink with friends, that he had many beers and ginger beers, that he and his friends left the bar at closing to go to a diner, that early in the morning of December 24 Sites backed his car into the Layser driveway, broke a window, and entered the premises.
The commonwealth would show that once inside the house Sites removed his shoes and shirt and crept upstairs, and that as Mrs. Layser cried out he attacked her in an attempt at a sexual assault. “We will attempt to prove that Dennis Sites broke into her home and beat her to death in an attempt to rape.”
He concluded his 10 minute opening statement by saying that the commonwealth expected the jury to “return a verdict that appeals to your reason, conscience, and sense of justice.”
Upon the conclusion of the prosecution’s opening statement, the jurors were packed into a bus and taken to Richland to the house at the corner of Linden and Poplar Streets where Carrie Layser had lived for over two decades and where she was beaten to death.
Court reconvened when the jurors returned to Lebanon.
The first witness called to the stand was Mrs. Bessie M. Krumbine, 11 Poplar St., Richland. She told of going to Newmanstown with Mrs. Layser the night of December 23.
The next several witnesses were Mrs. Thomas Steinmetz of Poplar Street, neighbors Mrs. Eugene Keller and Mrs. Helen Getz, and part-time Richland policeman David. G. Sheetz. They described the events that led to the discovery of Mrs. Layser’s body.
“I stood at the top of the stairs and started to scream…I don’t think I kept quiet after that,” Mrs. Keller told the jury.
Mrs. Getz told of also looking into Mrs. Layser’s bedroom and saying, “My God! My poor Carrie!”
Officer Sheetz testified that he had been on duty the evening before and had driven past the Layser house once every hour but had seen nothing unusual.
Defense attorney Bickel cross-examined Mrs. Keller, Mrs. Getz, and Officer Sheetz at length in an attempt to show that the rear of the house where the garage was located was normally lit by two floodlights, but he wasn’t very successful.
State Trooper William J. Dee testified that he helped remove Mrs. Layser’s body from her home and turned it over to the pathologist.
State Trooper Raymond Stima, the final witness of the morning session, identified numerous objects, some of them blood-stained, that were taken from the Layser home. He also told of being present on December 26 when Sites directed the placing of his car in the same position in the Layser driveway that he said it had occupied the morning of December 24.
Good Samaritan Hospital pathologist Dr. Leonard Tanner showed the jury color slides to illustrate injuries that Carrie Layser sustained during the beating. One of the factors leading to her death was the severe beating about the head and face that caused brain damage, two fractures of the lower jaw, and fractures of both nose bones as well as other injuries. In addition to the cranial-cerebral damage, Mrs. Layser also lost a large amount of blood, which served to deprive her of the oxygen necessary for life.
Dr. Tanner said the entire upper part of her body showed signs of discoloration, with considerable hemorrhaging as the result of being struck by what he termed a blunt instrument. He was unable to identify the type of blunt instrument used, but he did say that a laceration can be inflicted by pressure on a bony part of the body without the use of a sharp instrument.
[Note that this differs from coroner Dr. Heisey’s testimony in the preliminary hearing; Dr. Heisey claimed the beating was done by fists.]
Mrs. Layser’s body showed evidence of 12 severe blows having been inflicted with the blows in the neck area being particularly severe.
Two of Mrs. Layser’s upper teeth were broken; one tooth was found in her stomach along with a quantity of blood.
There was no evidence that Mrs. Layser had been sexually assaulted.
Dr. Tanner estimated that Mrs. Layser lived less than two hours after she was beaten and that she died prior to 5:00 AM on December 24. Blood in her stomach indicated that she did not die immediately.
The autopsy also revealed that Mrs. Layser had breast cancer and was suffering from hardening of the arteries.
Donald Ray Strickler, proprietor of the Rising Sun Hotel, Newmanstown, testified that Sites came to his hotel between 8:00 and 8:30 PM on the night of December 23 and left about 2:00 AM when the place closed.
Mrs. Patricia Parsons, Newmanstown, and her husband, Rodney, testified to playing several games with Sites at the bar, including a bowling type game called shuffleboard and later on Sites and Rodney Parsons played some pool.
Mrs. Parsons said she had a conversation with Sites at the bar where he told her he had bought three suits for his wife for Christmas, and this led to a conversation about his wife being pregnant for the second time and about to have the baby any day now.
Mrs. Parsons went on to testify that he said he needed a woman and that he intended to see a friend of Mrs. Parsons the next day because he was desperate for sexual gratification. At least that’s the way her testimony was described in the family newspaper. Given that they were both drinking, it was probably more explicit than that. Then again this was Lebanon County in 1966 and she would probably have been reluctant to describe their conversation too graphically in open court. Possibly her testimony had been carefully prepped by the District Attorney’s office ahead of time and some euphemisms may have been suggested.
But the implications of her testimony were clear enough. Sites was frustrated by the extended pregnancy of his wife, and as he wasn’t getting any at home he was in search of female companionship wherever he could find it.
When Rodney Parsons got on the stand, he said that when his wife Patricia told him what Sites had said about the friend of his wife, he warned Sites to stay away from the woman. “Harold will knock your head off,” he told Sites.
Ronald G. Weidman, Newmanstown insurance agent, testified that he left the bar at closing time with Sites and two other friends, Gerald Lengel and John Shanfelder. Before leaving, however, Sites, grabbed a hat that had been hanging inside the hotel and climbed about three quarters of the way up a telephone pole to hang the hat up there.
Then the four of them got into a car owned and operated by Lengel and drove to the Blue Star Diner in Stouchsburg, where they arrived about 2:30 AM. They stayed there until about 3:30 AM.
In the diner Sites spilled a glass of milk. He asked a waitress for a towel and cleaned it up.
Weidman referred to Sites as “a little show-off drunk.”
When they got outside of the diner, he, Lengel, and Shanfelder got into Lengel’s car, but Sites crawled on the hood of the car. “Jerry said, ‘You may as well crawl the rest of the way,’ so he crawled up over the center of the car…over the roof and down the trunk,” Weidman said of Sites.
“Did he have any difficulty climbing the pole or going over the hood?” Beaver asked.
“None that I saw,” Weidman replied.
[Portions of this post were transcribed nearly verbatim from the Lebanon Daily News coverage of the trial written by James Shellhamer.]
Sidebar
R. Hart Beaver
In the August 29, 1963, edition of the Daily News it was reported that George and Bessie Steinmetz sold a property on the south side of Walnut Street in Richland to R. Hart and Joan L. Beaver for $11,000. That was an old farmhouse with a nice little plot of land near the edge of the borough.
On November 5, 1963, the Daily News reported Beaver as having passed the Pennsylvania Law Board examinations. Previously he had been a pastor at a church in Lancaster. He was formally admitted to the bar in February of the following year.
In March Beaver and L. E. Meyer were defense counsel for two defendants in a drag racing case. The prosecutor was District Attorney Alvin B. Lewis Jr. and the Judge was G. Thomas Gates. Beaver and Meyer won the case for their clients.
It seems that DA Lewis was quite impressed with upstart attorney Beaver and wanted him on his team, because a few days later this little item appeared:
And sure enough on April 16 it was reported that “Newly appointed Second Assistant District Attorney R. Hart Beaver will receive a salary of $1,800 annually, it was decided this morning during a meeting of the county salary board. An $800 portion of this salary will be taken from the $5,000 annual salary of First Assistant D. A. George E. Christianson. This means that Christianson will in the future receive a $4,200 annually.”
I assume that those ADA positions were part time jobs.
When he tried his first case as ADA in June, a drunken driving case, he secured a conviction.
Meanwhile, Beaver was becoming active in Richland’s civic affairs such as the Lions Club and church activities. Not only was he a Sunday school teacher (he was my teacher for the last few years that I went to Sunday school), but he sometimes substituted for Reverend Rodgers at the Lutheran services when the pastor was away or indisposed.
All this while he seems to have become the face of the Lebanon District Attorney’s office, making speeches at various functions and introducing guest speakers and such.
In April 1965 Beaver was elected president of the Richland Lions Club. He was also active in one capacity or another in the county March of Dimes campaign during this time period.
In January 1966 Beaver was made first assistant DA and George Christianson was changed to second assistant in order to give him more time to devote to private practice. At least that was the public reason given.
In April Beaver joined in an inmate’s petition seeking freedom from prison. Beaver said the inmate had served nine of the last twelve years in prison, and he felt that was enough. Judge Gates reluctantly agreed to the inmate’s release.
By the way, that photo above of Hart Beaver was presumably taken before he moved to Richland. I don’t recall ever seeing him with a full head of hair. Maybe he lost his hair when he left the ministry?
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