Afterword
Every once in a while since I’ve moved to Philadelphia, someone that I knew from Richland or other Eastern Lebanon County community will ask if I’m not afraid of the supposedly high crime and murder rate of the big bad city, and I usually point back to the Carrie Layser murder as an example of “it can happen anywhere.” Understandably there might be more crimes where the population is denser, but small towns aren’t exempt from brutal, senseless murders.
I didn’t know Dennis Sites back in 1965, but I knew who he was. I recall seeing him around school about a year or so after we moved to Richland. He was one of the older kids that seemingly everyone knew, even if they didn’t know him personally. I know I thought of him as athletic, so I very well might have seen some of the baseball games he played in.
When he and Diane were married, I recall seeing the two of them, a very attractive couple, around town, and I guess I must have seen them on the porch of their apartment building because I knew that’s where they lived. But that’s all I knew about them. I’m sure I never had occasion to speak to either of them, not even to say hello.
I didn’t know Carrie Layser at all. Nor did my sister, Donna. But one time Donna saw a woman walk past our house wearing a very bright red outfit, and our grandmother told her that that woman’s name was Carrie Layser. Later on, after Carrie’s death, my grandmother, who was about the same age as Carrie, told Donna that Carrie tended to wear bright colors and had a very outgoing personality.
Donna reminded me that we received an early alert of Carrie’s murder. Our uncle Mark drove over from Manheim, and when he saw all the activity at Carrie’s house, he stopped to ask what was going on, and then relayed the news to us.
A few years later, when Shirley and Richard Weinhold were living in Carrie’s former house, their daughter Jill invited some friends, including Donna, for a sleep-over. They conducted a seance in the room where Carrie was murdered to see if they could contact her spirit. Apparently it was quite scary.
Did either of the juries get the verdict right? I only have the newspaper articles to go on, but assuming that they are reasonably accurate, I have to conclude that this was a clear case of first degree murder, and even the second trial appeared to establish that. Perhaps it was the greater number of men on the second jury that tipped the balance to second degree, or perhaps there was just one lone holdout who refused to vote for first degree. We’ll never know.
What we do know is that those court appointed defense attorneys took their jobs seriously and advocated zealously for their client, and that’s what they were supposed to do. If I ever get into any kind of trouble requiring legal aid, I hope I can get attorneys as zealous as they were.
I think they were sensible to stop the appeals process. Even if they were granted yet another trial (highly unlikely in my non-lawyerly opinion), I think second degree murder was the best possible verdict they could hope for anyway. Had there been a third trial, I think it’s a safe bet that the commonwealth would have been out for blood and would have gone after Sites with a vengeance—and had they gotten a first degree murder conviction they might very well have pressed for the death penalty just out of spite.
What about the Miranda decision and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court using that as the basis for overturning the first trial?
While I believe strongly in the Miranda decision and feel it has done much to help protect the rights of the accused (remember that everyone is given the presumption of innocence and many people who are arrested are not guilty; our rights are there to protect innocent and guilty people equally), I think the Supremes were wrong to apply it in this case. Of course, I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on this blog. The Miranda decision was brand new at the time, and it was probably difficult to decide just when to apply it. And of course, I’m taking the law enforcement officers’ word as to when and how they informed Sites of his rights.
Did the prosecution err in giving the jury too many possible verdicts to choose from? Why didn’t they include additional charges like attempted rape or breaking and entering? If the jury had found Sites guilty of a felony wouldn’t that automatically lead to a first degree murder conviction rather than second degree? Once again I am not a lawyer and I simply do not know.
How about the sentence? What was the right sentence to mete out to Sites?
There you have me. In general I’m opposed to incarceration except in cases of violent crimes or when the offender is likely to be a menace to the community.
This was a violent crime, but Sites was apparently drunk out of his gourd when he committed it. But nobody forced those 26 beers (or however many there were) down this throat. And Carrie Layser’s death was particularly brutal; essentially she was tortured to death in her own bed.
I could go over the various theories of the purposes of punishment and I still wouldn’t know what the correct sentence was in this case. It’s true that Sites seems never again to have gotten into trouble with the law, but there was no way of knowing that at the time of sentencing. For that matter I accept all the testimony of the character witnesses at his trial; this brutal act was seriously out of character for him. In his day to day life he seems to have been a responsible, reasonable, well-liked fellow, not prone to anger. Did it make sense to place him in a prison with hardened criminals for years?
And if not prison, then what?
I don’t have a good answer.
What about the judge allowing the jury to see those color slides of the autopsy? I’ve served on the juries for two murder trials where the crimes were considerably less brutal and gory than they were in this case, and in neither of them were pictures of any kind of the autopsy introduced. In one of the trials the judge got angry at the prosecutor for even trying to introduce a black and white photo of the victims at the crime scene. I fail to see what probative value those color slides added regarding the guilt or innocence of the defendant.
As I was reading and re-reading the testimony about the night in question, I couldn’t help but think there were moments where if someone had shown just a little bit of judgment, perhaps the murder could have been avoided. If the proprietor of the bar had cut Sites off when he saw how drunk he was getting, or even just forced him to slow down on his drinking. Or if Sites’s friends, rather than taking him back to his car, had instead driven him home and saw to it that he got into his apartment safely. Of course I’m applying 21st century hindsight. Bartenders didn’t cut customers off back then. The designated driver hadn’t been invented yet.
But I still have one more major question.
Why Carrie?
Accepting the psychiatrist’s explanation that the murder was “the result of a psychiatric explosion, triggered by the facts that Sites’s wife was about to give birth to a child and [Sites] had been drinking” that still leaves out a couple of important factors.
It seems clear that Sites had a powerful sexual attraction to older women.
None of us can control whom we are sexually attracted to. Most of us are attracted to the opposite sex, some to the same sex, some to both sexes in greater or lesser measure. Some are attracted to older people, some to younger, some to just one particular type of person, others to a broader range of types, there are many varieties of sexual attraction. Some of this is controlled by genetic factors, some by environmental factors, it’s not clear yet just how or when sexual attraction is set in any individual.
But society expects individuals to keep their sexual impulses under control.
Sites, in addition to his conventional sexual appetite as evidenced by his marriage, clearly had a strong attraction to older women. Hence, his proposition to Carrie Layser because he wanted to have an affair with an older woman. When she rejected his advances, he kept his impulses under control for three years.
Until a night filled with excessive alcohol apparently released his inhibitions.
But still there’s the question of why Carrie?
Why did he approach Carrie Layser in the first place? Did he have some reason to believe she might accept his proposition? If so, what was it?
When I was researching Carrie’s life and discovered that she had a child out of wedlock in 1921, I tried to see if that had had any negative repercussions in her life. I couldn’t find any, but of course, if she had been ill-treated or shunned during those first few years in the 1920s, there probably wouldn’t have been any record of it in the newspaper. Later on, however, she became a very well-respected member of the community, so I reached the conclusion that, although there might initially have been some problems, she and the community had long since put those behind her.
But just recently I came across a piece of information that made me reevaluate that conclusion. Apparently there were rumors still circulating about her in the 1960s, they just never reached my ears. As it was relayed to me recently, the word was floating about that she “enjoyed entertaining men.” Presumably that was a holdover from her having given birth to an illegitimate child 40 years earlier.
Is it possible Dennis Sites heard those rumors? Probably in a cruder form? Is that why he fixated on Carrie Layser? Because the tongue-wagging gossips in Richland were still painting her with a scarlet A?
Once again, we’ll never know, but it’s food for thought.
It does perhaps give an answer to “Why Carrie?”
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