Chapter 18 – The Second Trial
Saturday November 30, 1968 – Saturday December 7, 1968
As the December 1968 court term for Lebanon County approached, history was about to be made: two murder trials were about to be conducted simultaneously, one for Dennis Terry Sites and the other for Antonio Morales.
For potential jurors this meant that if they were rejected for one of the trials, they could get a second shot at the other one.
For readers of the Daily News this meant two meaty stories to devour each day, as each trial was expected to last about a week.
Juries in both trials were to be sequestered at the Treadway Inn, meaning more business for the Inn and more reasons for the taxpayers to grex and groan about the high cost of justice.
If you want to read about the Antonio Morales trial, you’ll have to find another blog, as I’m only writing about the Dennis Terry Sites trial right now.
Jury selection began on Monday December 2, 1968, for the second trial of…
Oh, wait. You don’t really want to read about the second trial, do you? After all, it was nearly an instant replay of the first trial, just not very instant.
Instead of eight men and four women jurors, it had ten men and two women, plus two alternates who didn’t have to deliberate.
The judge was Judge Meyer rather than Judge Gates, prosecutor was ADA George E. Christianson rather than R. Hart Beaver, and the defense attorneys were the newly appointed team of James T. Reilly and Frederick S. Wolf.
The jury didn’t take a field trip to the Layser house, presumably because it was inhabited by new owners, Shirley and Richard Weinhold, and the commonwealth didn’t present the Sites confessions into evidence because the Pennsylvania Supremes said that was verboten. But the pathologist showed his colored slides of the autopsy, the fingerprint, hair, and blood evidence was introduced which showed that Sites was at the crime scene. The witnesses still testified that he was horny as hell (my words, not theirs), and so on.
When the defense put Sites on the stand, Christianson, on cross-examination asked him about propositioning Mrs. Layser, and he admitted to that.
So the jury had pretty much the full picture, just not in Sites’s own words.
As his wife had divorced Sites since the first trial, she was not there to hold his hand throughout the trial, so there was that.
After closing arguments and the charge from the judge on Friday December 6, the jury retired to its chamber and began to deliberate.
After six hours of deliberation at 11:00 PM on Friday night the judge sent the jurors to the Treadway Inn for the night after they informed him they were not near a verdict.
They recommenced deliberations on Saturday morning and after two hours they told the judge they could not reach a verdict.
The jury foreman Hillman G. McGee told the judge, “We are making no progress.”
It appeared that after all this time and a second trial, the jury was hopelessly deadlocked.
Would Judge Meyer have to declare a mistrial?
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