CHAPTER 15

Stephen Scher learned of the coroner’s report in a phone call from Peter O’Malley, interrupting the doctor’s workout at a Lincolnton gym. The attorney got right to the point. “Steve, I think you’re about to be arrested.”

“What should I do?” the doctor asked, starting to panic.

Not one to withhold dramatics, Peter O’Malley told him to get out of Lincolnton, fast.

“I’ll tell you one thing I want to prevent,” he said. “I don’t want them picking you up in North Carolina and taking their good-natured time, staying overnight and throwing you into county jail. Who knows what will happen to your virginity along the way? You’re not in good physical shape. People in prison do those things. I think you should come up here and surrender.”

Stephen Scher didn’t argue. He was petrified. “I’ve got to get my clothes,” he said.

“Stay at the gym,” O’Malley instructed. “Call your wife. She’ll pack a suitcase for you. Just get here as fast as you can.”

As soon as he hung up, Peter O’Malley began to make phone calls. If the Schers were coming to Pennsylvania, the press would surely like to know about it. He first called Chip Wilson, a reporter for the Charlotte Observer who’d been poking around Montrose in recent days. Wilson had stopped by O’Malley’s Waverly home the evening before.

The reporter had been in touch with Susquehanna County officials, keeping up with the exhumation hearings from the Observer’s Gastonia bureau, not far from Lincolnton. After lobbying his editors for several weeks, Wilson finally received the go-ahead to pursue the story in Montrose. The day after he arrived, the coroner ruled the Dillon death a homicide. For Chip Wilson, the timing couldn’t be better.

On the phone, O’Malley told the reporter that Stephen Scher was likely to be arrested but that he didn’t want that to happen on North Carolina soil. He explained that the Schers were on their way to Pennsylvania; they might be available to the press the following day.

Chip Wilson was hopeful he’d have a chance to talk to the Schers. His interview with O’Malley the day before had gone fairly well—he found the lawyer frank and quotable. Chip had been surprised, however, at how stridently O’Malley attacked Larry Dillon, branding him “vicious” and “a bitter old man” for pursuing what he called a nineteen-year vendetta against his client.

*   *   *

On the day of Robert Bartron’s announcement, Pat and Stephen Scher drove ten hours from Lincolnton to Waverly, arriving at their attorney’s home after two in the morning. Stephen Scher walked through the front door with a heavy heart. The last time he’d been to Peter O’Malley’s place had been three days after the shooting, when he’d tearfully related his story, convinced that Jock Collier would soon have him arrested. Collier was long gone, but Stephen Scher’s fears seemed to be nearing reality.

O’Malley made coffee and the Schers stayed up for a few hours, talking.

“Steve, we all know they’re going to arrest you,” O’Malley told him bluntly. “They’re not going to sleep until they do. It’s a little dangerous, but let’s accelerate the process. Let’s call their bluff. Tell them to put up or shut up. Take the bull by the horns. Enough rumors and innuendo—if they have a case, they’re going to arrest you. If they don’t, they’re not going to do anything. It’s a crazy long shot. Most defense attorneys would never do anything like this. I lay it at your feet. You and Pat decide.”

The Schers did. They took their attorney’s advice.

“Let’s call the press conference,” Stephen Scher announced. “I want to tell my side of the story.”

The next morning, O’Malley’s secretary called the local television stations and newspapers, he had a sign made, “Press Conference,” and ordered sodas and ice. The phone never stopped ringing. “Take a helicopter if you have to,” O’Malley urged one reporter who called for directions.

When Chip Wilson arrived at O’Malley’s home, Pat Scher, wearing jeans and a dungaree shirt, opened the front door. At first Chip thought the striking woman must be the daughter, Suzanne, but when she began complaining about how unfairly the press had been treating her family, he suddenly realized that this was the doctor’s wife.

By midafternoon, about thirty reporters had gathered, mostly from the Binghamton, Scranton, and Wilkes-Barre areas. They set up cameras and microphones in O’Malley’s living room.

The attorney opened the news conference dramatically. “This is probably the most unusual press conference you were ever at. I want to make a preliminary statement and I’ll be finished. I’ll turn Steve and Pat over to you. Enough is enough. State police, put up or shut up. You’ve harassed this man, you’ve harassed his family, neighbors. You told his daughter you’d buy her plane ticket if she’d come out and testify against him. She says, ‘Keep your plane ticket. He’s been my father ever since I was a little girl. I never heard him raise his voice, lose his temper. He never killed anybody.’ Put up or shut up. Dr. Scher wants to be booked, fingerprinted, and mugged because he feels that he is innocent.… We are coming after them and they will pay dearly, all of them, including Dr. Mihalakis and his phony report.”

Then it was Stephen Scher’s turn. He cleared his throat and chose his words carefully. “I want to come forward, present myself to the state police and turn myself in and say, ‘Arrest me and let’s get on with this trial so I can forget about the last 19 years,’” he said firmly. “I did nothing to deserve this. I’ve been unfairly persecuted for the past 19 years. It’s destroying my life … People don’t look you in the eye and call you a murderer but they talk behind your back and your children hear it.”

A reporter asked him to explain what happened at Gunsmoke.

Scher repeated his original story. “He saw a porcupine. He grabbed my gun and ran down the trail. I heard a click and then I heard the gunshot. I couldn’t see him. I shouted something, I can’t remember. I found him about three feet from the trail.”

Another journalist questioned Pat, wanting to know if she’d ever asked Stephen Scher if he was telling the truth about that day.

“I never had any reason to,” Pat responded tersely. “I have seen him carry dead patients to a stretcher, afraid that the undertaker would be too rough. I’ve seen him sit up with sick children. I know him as a kind and gentle giant. He is a healer. After Marty’s death, everyone said to me, ‘If you need any help, call us.’ But he was the only one to help us.… My children have been irreparably damaged. It’s been cruel and malicious and vicious and hateful. To think for even a second that something would happen where he would destroy a life—it’s incomprehensible.”

Dr. Scher was asked point-blank if he killed Marty Dillon.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “Marty said, ‘Wait here.’ It was the last time I saw him alive. I heard nothing at first, then I heard a click and then I heard the shotgun.”

He told the reporters how he had tried to save Dillon. “His face was ashen and blood was spurting from his chest,” he said, his voice quivering. “I knew it was hopeless, but I kept trying; he was my best friend.”

O’Malley closed the press conference by facing the television cameras and announcing his home address so the state police knew where to find his client. He told the police Scher would be waiting for them.

*   *   *

The Pennsylvania state police were amused by O’Malley’s tactic but had no intention of arresting their suspect just yet. They taped the press conference off the television news and jotted down various remarks Scher had made.

When reporters called the barracks for the department’s response, Sergeant Raymond Hayes issued a brief statement. “Although we are very hopeful a successful prosecution will be initiated, it is doubtful that an arrest will be made in the immediate future. Loose ends have to be addressed. The burden of proof is on us. We cannot go forward on hearsay or innuendo.”

*   *   *

Watching the television news that night, Ann Vitale was pleased that she had little reaction to seeing her former husband again. This is just a man I used to know, she thought.

She decided if he’d been able to destroy her, if she’d wound up living in squalor and working at McDonald’s as he’d harshly predicted, she might feel differently. But Ann had a good life, a happy marriage, financial security. She felt no animosity toward Stephen Scher.

She marveled, though, at how she could still read him, even after all these years.

“I knew him for sixteen years, and he’s just the same as he was,” she told Bonnie Mead later. “The only giveaway that he was agitated or annoyed were particular gestures and phrases that he used that haven’t changed. Yeah, they got to him. He’s not as collected as he’s making out to be.”

Once the press conference aired, Channel 16 in Scranton sent a camera crew to Lincolnton. A reporter went door to door, asking if neighbors knew that Dr. Stephen Scher was being investigated for a nineteen-year-old murder in Pennsylvania.

From that point on, the Schers’ friends and parishioners from St. Dorothy’s rallied around them.

Susan Burris and her husband, Ray, who ran a chiropractic office in town, had met the Schers at baseball games, track meets, and PTA meetings. The Burrises’ son, John, was around the same age as Jonathan Scher. The couples quickly became good friends, and Susan Burris began to take her children to see Dr. Scher. Susan found him a giving man. She remembered how Dr. Scher had hurried from church to care for John when the boy burned himself on a friend’s wood stove.

Susan Burris couldn’t fathom the accusation coming out of Montrose. How can they even say that? she thought. How in the world can you say someone like him is capable of murder? He could never. He’s in the business of saving lives, not taking them. I would bet my life. It’s a family wrongly accused. His priorities are his patients.

Burris believed what Pat had told her in confidence as they’d become closer friends. She’d talked about her marriage to Marty and how his father never liked her and had been stirring up trouble ever since the shooting accident. Pat told Susan that Larry Dillon deeply resented her marriage to Stephen Scher. He couldn’t accept it; he wouldn’t leave them alone.

It’s politics, Burris thought, when she heard the latest news from Pennsylvania. Things like that happen in families. They get mad, jealous.

Joan Mauldin thought so, too. A retired magistrate, the red-haired widow had been going to Dr. Scher as a patient ever since he’d opened his practice. When she heard of the allegations against the doctor, she told her son, Don, and daughter, Joyce, that it was absurd. Dr. Scher was a gentle man, a kind, compassionate physician. Mauldin had been to lots of doctors in the past who hadn’t made her feel nearly as comfortable.

“I cannot imagine the person I know ever even being accused of something like that,” she told her children. “Such a kind, gentle person, so dedicated in helping to heal and cure. I cannot believe he’d ever do anything to harm anybody. He acts like he has the time. He takes the time to listen to what problems you have.”

The Reverend Farwell was the only one in Lincolnton who wasn’t surprised by what was happening in Montrose. Once the fight over the exhumation ensued, the Schers had confided in Farwell about everything—detailing their version of the events at Gunsmoke and the Dillon family’s malice toward Stephen Scher. Pat told the priest how Marty’s parents never liked her, that they didn’t care for Italians. The Schers maintained that after Marty’s death they went in different directions, getting together much later.

The Reverend Farwell steadfastly believed in Stephen Scher’s innocence. He tried to reassure the couple that the police investigation would go nowhere.

“It won’t happen,” he kept telling them. “It’s grasping at straws to reach the conclusion they’re trying to reach. It’s far-fetched.”

The Schers kept the priest updated about the hearings and called to let him know about the coroner’s ruling. To The Reverend Farwell, the responsibility of this entire mess lay squarely on the shoulders of Larry and Jo Dillon. The elder Dillons, he felt, had simply never resolved their sorrow over the death of their son.

This is a reaction to their lack of grieving, this revenge and vendetta, the priest thought. Accidents do happen. Certainly you could draw colorful stories, but the people making these accusations have axes to grind.

The priest reassured Stephen Scher that God was with him. The Lord, Farwell told him, would hear his prayers.