Chapter 12 – Repudiation
Thursday September 22, 1966
When Thursday’s court session was convened, District Attorney Alvin B. Lewis Jr was seated in the front row along with several policemen. Because of Lewis’s involvement in the investigation, he was listed on the defense’s potential witness list. At the start of the trial Judge Gates had declared that all witnesses would be isolated from the courtroom until it was their time to testify, so Defense Attorney H. Rank Bickel requested Judge Gates to invoke the sequestering rule. Hence, Lewis as well as all the policemen who were expected to testify for the defense were ordered out of the courtroom.
In a statement to the jury at the opening of the case for the defense, Defense Attorney Edward H. Miller told the jury that even though the confessions were permitted to be introduced as evidence, a confession cannot be considered by the jury unless the defendant makes it of his own free will.
He then went on to say that the absence of a lawyer for the defendant until after he confesses may affect the question of whether the confession is voluntary.
The first witness for the defense was psychiatrist Dr. John Hume of Hershey. He told the jury that Sites was suffering from an alcoholic impairment of his brain at the time Mrs. Layser was murdered. The impairment, the physician explained, disrupted Sites’s orientation, thinking, memory, and judgment processes.
Dr. Hume further testified that in his opinion Sites was not aware of the nature and consequences of his acts.
In his direct examination Dr. Hume, who is 37, told the jury that he has had 10 years of training and experience in psychiatry. Most of his work in this field has been in the U. S. Navy and at the Norristown State Hospital.
As he detailed the results of tests made of Sites and members of his family, Dr. Hume described the murder trial defendant as having had a different childhood from his five brothers and one sister, due to the fact that Sites lost the sight of one eye at the age of two. He was cut by a piece of glass.
Sites is a passive type of individual suffering from a feeling of inadequacy and insecurity. The feeling is in part due to his eye condition. As a boy Sites liked to do household chores for his mother and in his married life he performed chores which, Dr. Hume said, are not normally those performed by men. [Blogger’s note: Huh?!]
He expressed the opinIon that at the time of Mrs. Layser’s death Sites was suffering from what he termed “an acute brain syndrome” that he said was characterIzed by impairment of the brain due to a toxic agent.
“The toxic agent was alcohol” he added, and he said that in this case there is a difference between Sites’s mental condition and common drunkenness.
Dr. Hume outlined to the jury several previous periods of what he termed blackout on the part of Sites after he consumed alcohol. He said Sites had on one occasion altempted to give his car away and another time had attempted to dissuade customers from buying Christmas trees he was selling.
[Blogger’s note: Put a pin in this psychiatrist’s testimony. You may want to refer back to it.]
The second defense witness was U. Samuel Weiss, Richland, the father of Sites’s wife, Diane, 24.
He recounted a conversation with Sites outside the Reading Hospital on Dec. 27, in which he asked Sites whether he had murdered Mrs. Layser.
“Sam, I must be involved, I was there,” Sites was quoted as having said.
Other testimony given by Weiss was apparently designed to show the trend of the murder investigation before Sites was advised of his rights.
Also testifying were Gene A. Sites, 31, and Randy Sites, 15, both of Newmanstown, brothers of the defendant.
Gene told the jury about being in a pinochle game at the Newmanstown hotel part of the time his brother was there. He sald he observed his brother drink five to six glasses of beer in about an hour and a half. Randy, a milk truck helper, told of having seen Dennis drive away from the Newmanstown hotel between 4:00 and 4:30 AM on December 24.
Leo Sobolewski, Newmanstown, a fellow milk truck helper, corroborated the testimony by Randy Sites.
The following policemen were called as witnesses to relate that they were present when Sites made the taped confessions: County Detective John F. Lenker; State Police Sgts. Stanley Pijar, and Robert Shuck, State Police Cpl. Eugene F. Rickert, and Richland policeman David Sheetz.
The next witness for the defense was Dennis Terry Sites, the defendant himself.
When he first began to testify Thursday afternoon, Sites was asked to relate his personal history. He listed his birth date as February 7, 1943. He said he graduated from Richland High School in 1961, where he pursued the commercial course, and for about three years prior to Mrs. Layser’s death he was employed as a chemical operator by Whitmoyer Laboratories at West Myerstown. He and his wife are parents of two sons, one born on December 14, 1962, and the other born the morning of December 24, 1965.
During his direct examination he was relaxed, polite, and the picture of a crew-cut, all-American boy, who under other circumstances might have been chatting about a business deal instead of telling what he did a short time before he allegedly committed a brutal beating-murder.
Under cross-examination by Assistant District Attorney R. Hart Beaver, however, his mood quickly changed. A defiant tone crept into his voice and before long he was giving what courtroom spectators considered smart-aleck answers.
Beaver’s first questions concerned the amount of beer Sites had drunk at a Newmanstown hotel the night of December 23 and the morning of December 24. Sites said he drank 20 to 30 glasses.
As Beaver sought to pin down the number to a specific figure, Sites said “twenty-six” rather heatedly.
Beaver then attempted to get Sites to estimate how many drinks he had by 10:30 or 10:45 PM.
“I don’t keep a notebook when I drink beer!” the witness replied.
“How many did you have by 11 PM?” Beaver asked.
“That page in my notebook is a little blurrier than the last page,” Sites retorted.
“Were you a little drunk?” Beaver inquired.
“I don’t think so.”
While the testimony by Sites was not generally a great revelation over what had already been given by the commonwealth, it did fill in some missing details.
The major discrepancy between the testimony by Sites Thursday afternoon and his two taped confessions played Thursday morning, concerned what happened in the Layser home.
Sites said that after drinking the “26” beers and three to six ginger brandies at the Newmanstown hotel, he and three companions went to the Blue Star Diner, Stouchsburg, and he remembers eating eggs and spilling milk but doesn’t recall cleaning up the milk. Nor did he recall a conversation with a waitress or leaving the diner.
The next thing he does remember, he told the jury, was getting out of his car at what he thought was his own home.
He said he saw lights, tripped, fell, and then tried to open a door.
“I jiggled it and it was locked,” he said and he explained that he thought his wife was angry at him for staying out and had locked the door.
Sites said he next found himself upstairs in what he thought was his home and heard someone say, “Who are you? What do you want?”
“I threw my arms out at something or someone,” he told the jury. He said the next thing he knew was that he awakened and realized that he wasn’t in his own home.
“I was lying aside of Mrs. Layser in bed. I looked over and saw her and everything went through my mind at once…my wife having a baby…I thought I better get out of here.”
Sites further said that he noted that Mrs. Layser was “pretty well beaten and covered with blood.” He said he called to her and also shook her and when there was no response he decided she was dead.
From this point his testimony followed that of the confessions in which he told of going to the bathroom, finding a pair of pink panties which he put on Mrs. Layser’s nude body, dressing himself, putting the broken door-glass under the TV set, and then leaving the house and driving home.
Although he admitted making the taped confessions, Sites testified that some of the answers he gave were suggested by the police officers who questioned him. He also explained that when he awakened in the Layser home and found Mrs. Layser was badly beaten and he was the only one there he presumed that he was responsible for the beating. This was his explanation for some of his statements in the confessions. Although he admitted that about three years ago be had propositioned Mrs. Layser when he went to her home to return a bassinette, he denied under cross-examination that he planned to go to the Layser home the morning of December 24. He said Mrs. Layser had repulsed his advances when he propositioned her three years ago.
Beaver asked Sites why he had drunk so much at the Newmanstown hotel.
“You drank so much because you planned to go over there?”
“No!”
“You had sex on your mind, didn’t you?”
“No!”
Throughout his examination Sites denied that he had been advised of his constitutional rights to remain quiet and to have a lawyer. At one point Beaver read from a transcript of prior testimony concerning a reference Sites had made to a TV crime program to emphasize that he knew what his rights were.
This was a point that Bickel had tried to make during his his cross examination of commonwealth police witnesses. Bickel put considerable stress on the question of at what point the murder investigation turned from an investigatory procedure to an accusative action directed at Dennis Terry Sites, and thus at what point was it necessary for Sites to be informed of his rights.
Sites was arrested and charged with the murder December 26, two days after it occurred.
Students of the law generally agreed that while Bickel’s efforts may not have much weight as far as the Sites jury is concerned, they could be important if a guilty verdict is appealed.
Bickel placed in the record the fact that Sites did not have an attorney until after he had made the confessions and was charged and jailed.
[Portions of this post were transcribed nearly verbatim from the Lebanon Daily News coverage of the trial written by James Shellhamer.]
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