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The Morning Call, one of the two daily newspapers that competed aggressively in the Easton market, carried an average weekday’s typical mix of stories about community happenings, political bickering and criminal doings that Thursday morning, June 15, 2000.
Community happenings included a children’s sing-along at Centre Square downtown that day and a free “Rhythms of the River” folk concert on Sunday evening at Riverside Park. Graduation ceremonies had been held in schools the day before, and Thursday’s paper contained names of valedictorians, lists of proud winners of various scholarships and end-of-the-year awards, and comprehensive rosters of graduates. Along with photos depicting the cheers, embraces, tears and farewells of the last day of school was a photo of a carefree thirteen-year-old showing off on a pogo stick.
Local political issues covered in Thursday’s paper included a plan to keep adult entertainment businesses out of downtown Easton. No such businesses currently existed in the city, but the potential for one arose a month ago when Easton’s most famous resident, boxing great Larry Holmes, floated the notion of a strip club on Northampton Street, the main thoroughfare cutting through the city. Backlash had prompted Holmes to kill his proposal voluntarily, but now city fathers wanted to put a nail in the coffin.
The paper that day published an essay by Northampton’s county executive Glenn Reibman urging support of a $110-million bond intended to create jobs, preserve landmarks, redevelop industrial areas and preserve open space in the Lehigh Valley, a geographical designation encompassing Northampton County, Lehigh County and their three cities: Easton, Bethlehem and Allentown. He invoked a rosy image of the Eisenhower era, when “America was entering into a period of unmatched prosperity, and Bethlehem Steel was operating at full capacity.” The essay went on to point out that a decline in steel and heavy manufacturing, as well as a shrinking corporate tax base, had brought the Lehigh Valley to an economic crossroads. Reibman, a Democrat, wrote of his vision for the area “to rise above partisan politics and historical disputes” and a desire “to return this once-great center of commerce and industry to the powerhouse that it was.” A vote on the bond would take place that very night.
Criminal doings reported in the paper included coverage of the verdict reached after just three hours of jury deliberation in the trial of Lawrence Peterson Jr., a thirty-year-old Easton man convicted the day before of rape, attempted murder and other offenses. Peterson had smoked thirty-six bags of crack, over a three-day stretch, before setting out on a rampage of terror and violence. He beat a woman with a wooden paddle until it broke over her head, and then he stole money and her car. He stuffed a rag soaked in pine cleaner into the mouth of a nine-year-old girl and sexually assaulted her. He stabbed a woman on the street. And finally he tried to run down police, who shot him in the leg.
This was the major news of the day in Easton the morning of June 15. The weather was fair, seasonally warm and sunny.
Richard Allen Deemer, an equipment operator with the city of Easton’s highway department, had been laboring near a place commonly called “the falls,” a spillway behind a gravel parking lot and an unoccupied park-system building known as “the old canal museum.”
It was about one o’clock and Deemer’s crew had just finished up at the site for the day. The crew had parked its John Deere front-end loader outside the gate between the parking lot and the falls. It was a great spot to be working this time of year, especially on a fine spring day.
A coworker remained below, in the fish hut by the falls, when Deemer himself began locking up the two steel beams that swung together to form a gate to keep motor vehicles out of the falls area. He would recall being in the middle of shackling the gate, the hush of the water tumbling down behind him, when a red Honda Accord pulled off Route 611 and into the parking area of canal park.
The events that unfolded next would mark the beginning of an episode in Easton’s history that would shock, stun and sadden the tight-knit city for many months to come. But Deemer had no way of knowing what was in store when he looked up from the gate.
Michelle and Keary were running out of places to look. Last night had been a long night, and neither had slept.
Now it was almost one o’clock in the afternoon.
They were traveling Route 611. Michelle had the wheel. The falls loomed up ahead. It was a park along the canal where the water tumbled over structures called fish ladders, creating a waterfall effect.
The falls held special meaning. One of them had suggested it to the police last night. Maybe the cops had looked there already; maybe they hadn’t. No harm in the girls checking for themselves.
Michelle’s vodka had worn off many hours ago, and now she looked spent. She flicked on her blinker ahead of the parking lot, approached slowly and swung the red Honda into the gravel lot.
There it sat. The silver Pontiac Sunfire.
“I could kill her!” Michelle shouted. It was so like Devon to do something like this when she drank. Pass out somewhere, and have everybody up worrying all night.
“This is the last time she’s going to do this to me,” she swore to Keary.
Michelle pulled up close behind the other car. The girls got out.
“Go talk to her,” she told Keary. “Go see what she’s doing.”
Keary got out, circled around the front of the Sunfire and called out, “She’s not in there.”
“What do you mean she’s not there?” Michelle retorted.
Keary shrugged and went back for another look. She couldn’t see very well through the windows. She tried the door handle, but the car was locked. She put her face to the glass and saw something.
Michelle did not go to the car right away. She spotted a man bending over the gate between the parking area and the falls. She approached him, calling out questions.
Richard Deemer looked up as the slim blonde neared.
“Do you know how long that car has been sitting there?” Michelle asked, referring to the silver Pontiac.
Deemer squinted past the big yellow John Deere.
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”
“It belongs to a friend of ours,” Michelle explained. “We’ve been looking for her.”
Now Keary was calling out to Michelle.
“It looks like she’s sleeping in the back!” An edge of panic crept into her voice.
Keary dug for her own key ring. It had a set of keys to the car. She found the Pontiac key and slid it into the lock.
Michelle left Deemer to join Keary.
Keary opened the car door. Michelle took a step back. Something smelled bad. She put her hand over her mouth.
Keary reached into the back.
“Baby, are you OK?” she asked.
She shook her friend, who was curled up on the backseat.
“Michelle! She won’t wake up.”
Keary saw that her friend’s lips and eyebrows were discolored.
“She’s purple!” she called over her shoulder. The panic had grown full-fledged now, bordering on hysterics. “We have to take her to the hospital!”
Michelle stepped closer and looked into the car, where Keary was cradling their friend’s hand. That smell again. She backed away and doubled over, retching.
Keary broke out into sobs.
Deemer would recall at future proceedings that Keary “started to panic,” screaming, crying and shouting that Devon wasn’t moving. At that point Deemer himself went up to the car to see what the trouble was. Both doors were open, and Keary was on the driver’s side of the car and Michelle on the passenger side.
“They were frantically panicking,” he said. “They were screaming, crying, ‘She’s not moving. Is she breathing?’”
As hysterical fear overcame them, Deemer tried to calm the girls.
“They were just frantically crying, screaming, ‘Is she alive? Is she breathing?’ I just told them both to back away from the car, calm down.”
Next, Deemer said, he looked into the car himself, ducking between the open door and the car with both hands raised.
“At that point I proceeded to look into the car. Now, when I went in between the door and the car itself, I had both hands in the air, because I didn’t want to touch nothing.”
It was only a quick glimpse, but it was enough to persuade him that something was seriously wrong with the woman in the car. Her face looked yellowish.
“I believed that there was a serious problem,” he said.
“The discoloration told me that she was probably not alive or at least that she was not breathing.”
The sobs coming from the two young women were softer now, but persistent. Michelle stood near the car. Keary stepped back and sat on a landscaping tile. Deemer urged them to move away from the car.
As he began to make the emergency call to county dispatch, he remembered Michelle wanting to call 911 herself from her cell phone. He convinced her to let him make the call. Being a city worker, he knew he could establish two-way communications directly with county emergency dispatch and the call would be recorded, which might prove important later.
Easton patrolman David Beitler was alone in his patrol car at the heart of the city, Centre Square, where the cheery sounds of a children’s sing-along featuring rhythm instruments and made-up lyrics had been punctuating the traffic noise since noon. A call came over the radio, dispatching him to the old canal museum on Route 611 to check out a report of a body found in a vehicle.
Beitler, who’d been with the Easton Police Department (PD) since 1997, made note of the time: 12:55 P.M. Weaving through the lunchtime traffic snarls, he piloted the cruiser out of Centre Square and down toward the river and Route 611. Because he was already mobile when the call came, he made good time, being the first law officer to arrive.
Arriving at the park, he recognized city worker Rich Deemer in the parking lot, along with two young women. He pulled his patrol car behind a silver car on the left side of the lot, seeing that the passenger door was open.
A yellow John Deere front-end loader sat to the right of the car and a red Honda Accord was off to the rear.
Beitler got out of his car and approached Deemer, who quickly pointed him in the direction of a silver car parked just ahead of the patrol car, facing the river. Beitler approached the car from the side of the open passenger door, bending so he could see inside. A key ring dangled from the ignition. A woman lay in the backseat.
He crouched lower, trying to see around the front seats.
The woman wasn’t moving.
As first responder, it fell to him to check for signs of life, so he leaned the passenger seat forward and ducked behind it.
The woman was curled in a fetal position, facing the trunk. Some kind of green jacket covered her upper body. He noticed what looked like grass or mud stains on her lower back, legs and sneakers.
The patrolman reached back delicately, careful not to disturb anything. At this early stage, he could not know what kind of situation he was facing, but if it turned out that a crime was involved, everything and anything might be crucial evidence. It was imperative that evidence remain uncontaminated.
He touched her, pressing his fingertips to her skin. It was cold, lifeless.
Beitler retreated from the dim, stale interior of the silver car, stepping out into the daylight and fresh air coming off the river to contact his supervisor, who would, in turn, assign detectives to come on down and start the investigation.
It wouldn’t be long now before the detectives, rescue personnel and other authorities, such as the coroner and district attorney, arrived.
While he waited, Beitler went to gather information from Deemer and the two young women. Deemer told the patrolman he’d been in the area since the morning and hadn’t witnessed any suspicious goings-on.
Beitler took the names of the two girls for the report he’d have to write later. The shorter of the two was a nineteen-year-old South Side girl, Michelle Hetzel, of West St. Joseph Street. Her companion gave her name as Keary Renner, her age as nineteen and her address as the Mineral Springs Hotel, a tavern and rooming establishment up the river in Forks Township.
The girls told Beitler that the person in the car was a friend of theirs who’d gone missing the night before. The last time they’d seen her was just after midnight.
Michelle Hetzel said they’d been out looking for her all night, and they’d reported her missing at 3:00 A.M. to Forks Township PD. She was teary.
Beitler glanced around, alert for any stray details he might have missed, anything that might prove significant later on. He thought the skinny blonde looked nervous. He took in the scene, the people, the vehicles. Something on the red Honda caught his eye: a narrow, rectangular rainbow decal. Just like the one on the silver car.
Maybe it didn’t mean anything. Maybe it did. In any case, it was another detail that would go into his investigative report. It was something to point out to the detectives, who were just starting to arrive.