In 1981, a suspect was arrested, charged and tried in an unsolved murder case from 1977. The result of the trial was that the individual was acquitted.
At the end of March 1977, Mrs. Jennie E. Barr, an elderly widow, was found dead in her den in her home in Tremont, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. The cause of death was strangulation and she was also sexually assaulted. Investigators ruled the death a homicide.
This murder was the first of four that occurred in the Lykens Valley area in a less than three-year period between 1977 and 1979 – all of elderly widows.. To this day, none of the four murders have been solved.
The story of the arrest, charging and trial is told here in a 12 part series through articles published in the Pottsville Republican.
From the Pottsville Republican, 6 Jun 1981:
Jury deliberations start
By MATT PURCELL, Staff Writer
The jury in the murder trial of 24-year-old William J. Harner was instructed by the judge this morning on the law as it applies to the case, and then began its deliberations.
Harner, of 14 N. Crescent St., Tremont, is charged with criminal homicide in connection with the death of a neighbor, 76-year-old Jennie E. Barr.
Her body was found in the den of her home at between 10 and 10:30 p.m. March 31, 1977, with an autopsy placing the time of her death at between 10 p.m. March 30 and 6 a.m. March 21, according to testimony.
Friday, the defense completed its case by calling three witnesses to the stand, drawing two rebuttal witnesses from the commonwealth.
First-degree verdict asked
The seven men and five women of the jury then listened intently as the defense and the prosecutions presented their summations, with the commonwealth asking for a verdict of first-degree murder.
Defense witness Scott F. Koch, 24, Tremont, testified that he was with Harner on the evening of March 30, 1977. He said they went to his home after 10 p.m. and watched television in the basement, viewing the program “Charlie’s Angels” until its conclusion at 11 p.m. He and Harner talked for 15-20 minutes, after which Harner left, Koch said, adding that he then went to bed.
Under cross-examination by Assistant District Attorney Thomas J. Nickels, Koch said he did not recall what Harner was wearing that nigh or what he may have told police in 1977 about Harner’s clothing.
The commonwealth called trooper Eugene R. Taylor as a rebuttal witness to Koch’s testimony. Taylor said when he interviewed Koch on April 1, 1977, Koch said Harner had left his home at 10:30 p.m. on March 30. Koch stated that he remembered this because the defendant left when “Charlie’s Angels” was half-over, Taylor said, adding that Koch also told him Harner was wearing a “plaid button-type shirt” and blue jeans.
Mother tells of scene
Betty Harner, the defendant’s mother, testified that she and her husband went to Mrs. Barr’s home on the night of March 31 after being called there by Mary Freeze and Charles Freeze, who moments before had found the victim’s body. She testified that she did not see some of the objects in the den located where they are on a commonwealth exhibit diagramming the alleged condition of the room when the body was discovered.
One item on the diagram, a knitting bag, was not in the room at all, she said.
Commonwealth witnesses, in testifying earlier in the trial on two verbal confessions allegedly made by the defendant, said that Harner confided to them that during this struggle with the victim she stuck him in the arm with green knitting needles. Harner on Thursday denied committing the murder on making any confessions.
State police said that the needles were not tested for blood stains until after Harner’s alleged confession to them on February 18 of this year. They were in the possession of Marilyn [Barr] Ord, Palmerton, daughter of the victim, from the time when the Barr home was cleaned out following the murder until several days after the 18th, according to her testimony Wednesday.
Differences in accounts
Mrs. Harner said Friday that after the body was found she went with District Attorney Richard B. Russell, a Tremont resident, to check the home for anything unusual, as she was familiar with house.
The witness said that while looking over the middle bedroom of the home, she saw the knitting bag and a pocketbook in a closet, and that Russel asked her to take them into the den. Mrs. Harner said she did so, standing them up on a tray table, adding that this was where she saw them last.
Russell recalled to the stand by the prosecution, testified that he did not direct Mrs. Harner to pick up the bag or the pocketbook and did not see her touch either item. He added that he does not recall seeing the pocketbook at all.
The knitting bag was located on the floor “right inside the front door” of the den when he arrived at the home, he said, as depicted in a commonwealth photo of the crime scene. Mrs. Ord said this is where her mother always kept the bag.
Mrs. Harner, who said she used to perform Mrs. Barr’s housecleaning because the elderly widow had trouble walking, also testified that all the first floor windows of Mrs. Barr’s home had triple-tracked storm windows. She described their operation for the jury, saying that they cannot be opened from the outside.
Junior Harner, father of the defendant, concurred with his wife’s description of how the den appeared when they arrived. He testified that he saw her place the bag and pocketbook on the tray table. Harner said that during the course of the night he believes he saw “a few dozen” people enter the den.
Harner also testified that he saw his son at 12:30 a.m. on March 31. He had been in bed and was awakened by the sound of two autos starting outside, he testified, and when he went downstairs to the bathroom, he saw his son lying on a couch.
Summations
Testimony was completed prior to the lunch recess and the jury then returned to the courtroom to hear defense attorney Wallace C. Worth, Allentown, and Nickels present their summations, with the defense attorney addressing them first.
Worth said the jury has no duty to “look for a sacrificial lamb to offer up to the gods.
“There is no evidence to the effect that he is guilty,” the attorney said of his client.
Worth continued that a state police criminalist testified that he examined samples of Harner’s hair and clothing. And nothing, nothing, related to his man (Harner),” Worth said.
He said that his client did “everything they (police) asked of him.”
The attorney then turned to Harner’s testimony that he saw Delbert R. Straub, Marietta, waling along Crescent Street, where Mrs. Barr lived, with blood on his hand early on March 31. (Straub also testified during the trial, saying that he was in Tremont that night at his father’s home but was not on the street and had no involvement in the incident).
“Isn’t it amazing” that Straub was in Tremont when Mrs. Barr’s body was found. Worth said, noting that Straub lived in Lancaster at the time.
Straub also testified that he smoked pot that night as Harner had said he saw him do, and may have mentioned as “affection for older ladies,” Worth said. Straub testified that he refers to his wife as his “old lady.”
Concerning testimony by commonwealth witnesses and the defendant that Harner wept at Mrs. Barr’s home after he body was found, Worth said, “he happened to like Mrs. Barr. I didn’t know it was a sin to cry.”
Worth: What possible motive?
The attorney asked “what possible motive” Harner could have had for killing Mrs. Barr and questioned, “Doe he look like the kind of man that could pull a perfect crime?”
Worth said that police “were determined” to solve the murder, and “they made up their minds who they were going to solve it with.”
He termed the alleged confession “an unbelievable tale,” and asked the jury to “separate the wheat from the chaff” in the evidence.
His counterpart, Nickels, said the commonwealth met its burden of proof, and sought a ruling of first degree murder from the jurors. He requested that they take into account the “severe beating, culminating in the conscious act of strangulation” which caused the victim’s death.
The assistant district attorney outlined a “pattern of behavior” by Harper for the jurors.
He told them that the first statement Harner made to police was that he saw Delbert Straub “with blood on his hands” early on March 31. He did this after he had only been asked, “what do you know about this case,” Nickles said. Police were not aware when Mrs. Barr had been murdered, “but the defendant pointed to an incident that occurred at least 24 hours before,” said Nickles.
Concerning Harner’s weeping at Mrs. Barr’s home, he asked, “Were those loud sobs the result of regret that Jennie Barr was dead, or remorse for the act of this defendant?”
He noted Russell testified that when Harner arrived at the Barr home after the body was found, he immediately tried to go to the den, and then later attempted to look down into the basement.
Nickels said much of Harner’s cooperation with police was directed at the third person he had brought to their attention, Straub.
He said since the kitchen door was open, the “most obvious and simplest way” would have been to enter and exit by the door.
“If it’s (the confession) a fabrication, why go to the trouble of cooking up an open storm window?” he asked, holding up an April 1, 1977, photo of the north side of the Barr home showing five windows, with four closed, and one open.
He asked why commonwealth witnesses would have made up the broken cellar window to the home, which he said a picture shows was a “very concealed point of exit.” He also questioned why the testimony on Mrs. Barr washing underwear in her bathroom would be fabricated.
“I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, why would you create problems for yourself?”
Everything that Dr. Robinson testified that did not incriminate Harper, the defendant agreed with, but he disagreed with the rest, Nickels said.
Nickels termed the knitting needles a “piece of physical evidence” the police didn’t have until after the alleged confession took place.
The assistant district attorney told the jury that there was no evidence to link Harner to the crime “until he started to talk” and spoke of “items that only” the murderer could have known about.
A trooper testified that when Harner called his attorney’s office from the state police barracks, he overheard the defendant say, “I killed the lady. I just went nuts,” Nickels noted, saying that this alleged remark went “uncontradicted by the defendant.”
The trial, which began Monday morning, has been held before Judge Joseph F. McCloskey in Schuylkill County Court.
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For all other parts of this story, see: A Trial & An Acquittal, 1981.
For all parts of the story of the murder, see: Who Killed Jennie E. Barr?
News clipping/article from Newspapers.com.
Corrections and additional information should be added as comments to this post.