CHAPTER 2

The shotgun blast tore into Marty Dillon’s chest, entering just above the sternum and instantly destroying his heart. Blood spattered on his clothes, the instep of his left boot, the ear protectors and sunglasses he wore, and the tree stump beside him. Microscopic droplets were expelled into the air at least five feet, far enough to settle onto the jeans and boots of Dr. Stephen Scher.

In the stillness of Gunsmoke the body of Martin Thomas Dillon dropped facedown on the ground, the clay pigeons falling from his hands. The echo of the gunshot blast faded, and once again there was only silence.

Dr. Stephen Scher drew a sharp breath. Just weeks earlier, Patricia Dillon had ended their yearlong affair, after her husband had at last demanded that she make a choice. And she had. She would stay in the marriage. She would stop seeing the doctor.

But now, in a moment, in the pull of a trigger, that decision had been reversed. Two lives collided in the blast of a shotgun. Now all that remained was for the victor to take all.

In the mind of Dr. Stephen Scher, it was his due. He was, after all, a physician—a healer, they called him. He would now have the life he wanted, the life that had belonged to Martin Dillon.

It was by chance that Scher’s opportunity arose: alone with Dillon, unexpectedly. A couple of beers for courage. A shotgun. A hurried plan. How effortlessly it came together, how natural it felt to step into another man’s dreams.

*   *   *

But now, as the sun dipped lower into the Endless Mountains, a single focus emerged for Dr. Stephen Scher: self-preservation. Before the first telephone rang in Montrose, before state troopers arrived to cordon off the scene, the coroner was called, the families were notified, and the newspapers were alerted, the explanation must be ready. With the mistaken belief that the secrets of the forest were forever kept, the possibilities began to tick in the mind of Stephen Barry Scher.

With a single push, the doctor rolled the body of his rival onto its back. He laid down the 16-gauge Winchester several feet away, the muzzle pointed toward his victim’s head. He bent over and untied Marty’s right shoelace. As he prepared to leave, in his final moment alone at Gunsmoke, Stephen Scher reached into the young lawyer’s pocket and removed his car keys.

This time, Scher would drive.

*   *   *

At first, Andrew Russin didn’t recognize the tall, husky man at the door. The Russins didn’t get too many visitors, living way up a dirt and gravel road in Silver Lake Township as they did. The older man had just quit gardening after his wife, Anna, called him in for supper. He hadn’t heard the BMW pull into the driveway, just a sharp rap at the front windowpane.

“There was an accident and Marty’s dead,” the stranger said, his voice expressionless. “He was shot.”

Russin swiftly made the connection. He’d met Dr. Scher once, not long ago, up at Gunsmoke when the Wednesday Club members were shooting skeet. Marty had been particularly upbeat that day, even inviting the older man to join the group. Russin was fond of the young attorney. The doctor’s announcement was hard to believe.

“Are you sure he’s dead?” he asked.

Scher nodded.

Russin noticed a ring of blood around the doctor’s mouth. “What did you do, try to give him artificial respiration?” he asked.

Scher told him he had. Then he added that Russin needed to call for help.

As Scher waited in the kitchen, Andrew Russin phoned the Silver Lake Ambulance Squad and reported an accident at Gunsmoke. When he reappeared, Scher asked him to return with him to the Dillon property, and the older man agreed, beckoning to his son David to join them.

Before they left, Russin turned to Scher. “Do you want to wash up?” he asked. “There’s a bathroom right here.”

Scher refused. As the men began to leave, Anna Russin stopped her husband at the door. “Here, take this,” she said softly, holding out a worn blanket. “Cover him.”

Russin and his son followed the BMW driven by Stephen Scher in Russin’s 1966 white Jeep. About a half mile up the road, at the turn for Gunsmoke, Russin stopped and told David to get out and wait at the corner for the ambulance.

“Stand there,” he explained carefully. “If someone comes, tell them which way to get to the Dillons’.”

Andrew Russin proceeded about a mile and a half to the Dillon trailer and then followed the doctor by foot up the path. At first Russin could see only the soles of a pair of boots, but as he continued up the slight upgrade, the crumpled figure on the ground came into view.

The two men stood silently over the body.

“He fell on his gun,” Dr. Scher said quietly. “He shot himself.”

Andrew Russin nodded. He had no reason to question the doctor. Russin himself had been handling firearms since he was sixteen years old, growing up in nearby Carbondale, and he owned an extensive collection of rifles and pistols. He often told his children when they were small that he always assumed every gun was loaded. A man couldn’t be too careful, he’d say. Accidents happen.

Russin took the blanket his wife had given him and began to cover the body. Stephen Scher walked behind him, and out of the corner of his eye, Russin saw him pick up the 16-gauge Winchester, lying in the shade of an ironwood tree.

As Andrew Russin watched in alarm, the doctor lifted the gun by the muzzle, eased it back like a baseball bat, and with full force swung it directly at the ironwood.

“Don’t!” Russin shouted.

It was too late. The gun smashed into the tree, breaking in two pieces, cracking the stock and sending it flying more than twenty feet away. Stephen Scher’s voice, tinged with anger, boomed into the woods, splitting the melancholy quiet where the body lay. “This goddamn gun will never kill again!” he shouted.

An astonished Andrew Russin could only stare at the doctor. He sighed with relief that the gun had not discharged accidentally—for the second time that day.

At that point the first emergency medical technicians, Don and Susan Strope, arrived. It had been Susan Strope who’d taken Russin’s call on the emergency phone installed in her home, and she had immediately broadcast over the Plekturn radio a request for rescue squad members to head to the scene.

She’d been preparing dinner when the call came in, so Susan Strope turned off the stove and hurried to her 1969 Mercury. She was heading out of the driveway when she ran into her husband, who was just arriving home from work. When she told him about the shooting accident he got into her car at once.

At Gunsmoke, Don Strope jumped out as his wife parked by the trailer, and he trotted up the path. When he reached the crest of the incline and saw the two men leaning over a body, one of them with his face and hands bloody, Strope quickly turned around and took a few steps down the trail, putting up his hand and motioning to his wife, who was approaching, to stop. She did.

“Help this man,” he called out to her, pointing to Stephen Scher.

The doctor walked along the trail toward Susan Strope and then turned and buried his face against a tree. He wrapped his arms around the trunk and began to cry.

Susan Strope waited for a moment, unsure of how to comfort the distraught man hugging the tree. She touched him gently on the shoulder and identified herself, explaining that she was with the rescue squad. She asked what she could do to help.

“I’m having chest pains,” Stephen Scher said, gasping between sobs.

Concerned, Strope asked him if he had a heart condition and Scher nodded. When she asked if he had any nitroglycerine pills, the tearful man told her he’d already taken two.

“I’m a doctor,” he explained. “I’m Dr. Scher.”

Susan Strope had heard the name but had never met Scher. She led him to her car and motioned for him to sit in the passenger seat. She rummaged through her first aid bag and handed him a moist towelette.

“Why don’t you wipe the blood off your mouth and hands?” Strope suggested kindly.

By now, John Conarton, the Susquehanna County coroner, had pulled up to the trailer. Conarton had received a call from the county commissioner minutes after the radio call was first broadcast and headed over at once.

When he saw the coroner, Stephen Scher began to weep again. “My best friend,” he moaned. “I can’t believe he’s dead. He was my best friend.”

Choking back sobs, Stephen Scher told Conarton about the accident. Marty had been running with the Winchester and he fell. He must have tripped over some root on the ground. And the gun discharged.

“He was my best friend,” Scher repeated between sobs.

John Conarton listened sympathetically. He knew Dr. Scher from the hospital. A good man, he’d always thought, a respected physician. As far as he was concerned, there was no need for more questions, no point for further investigation.

Indeed, less than an hour after Stephen Scher shot Martin Dillon at Gunsmoke, the doctor happened upon extraordinary good fortune: His words and tears were enough for John Conarton. The coroner was sold.

Over the next half hour a handful of other officials arrived on the scene. Bob Elliott, a part-time game commissioner, was among the first. He’d heard the emergency radio call go out and immediately summoned a deputy, Jerry Thorne, and then proceeded to Gunsmoke from his house on Laurel Lake, about four miles away. A short time later, Conarton walked down to the intersection to meet the first Pennsylvania state trooper on the scene, William Hairston, and guide him to the Dillons’ property. Hairston had received a radio call at his base, Troop R in Dunmore, and responded immediately, arriving at about seven-thirty.

The moment the two men met on the path, John Conarton unequivocally stated what he’d learned in his few minutes at Gunsmoke, exactly what Dr. Scher had told him. “It is an accidental shooting,” the coroner said.

Hairston did not object to the coroner’s pronouncement. The trooper was a rookie—he’d never even been to the scene of a shooting death before. As he followed Conarton up the trail, Hairston learned that the distraught man sitting in the Stropes’ car was Dr. Stephen Scher, the only other person at Gunsmoke at the time of the shooting. The coroner told him it was all quite simple: Dillon tripped. He fell and shot himself in the chest. An accident. It was an accident.

At the scene, Hairston assumed jurisdiction for the Pennsylvania state police, taking over from the game wardens, and cordoned off the area. He walked around the body. He saw the black-and-gray ear protectors and a pair of sunglasses streaked with blood lying a few yards away. He observed the broken Winchester, the pump handle six feet from the body; the stock another twenty-five feet away. Nearby, he could see a tree stump spattered with blood, with a second firearm, a double-barreled shotgun, on top, with no rounds in either barrel. He noticed the blood on Dillon’s shoe. He observed that the lawyer’s right shoelace was untied.

Hairston asked Bob Elliott to clear the chamber of the Winchester, and the game warden did, removing the number 4 shot expended cartridge from the barrel and a number 8 shot unexpended cartridge from the magazine. Elliot then began to search the path for any protruding roots Marty might have stumbled on.

Hairston and Conarton walked back to the trailer. The trooper asked Scher to follow him to his police car, and the doctor did, getting into the passenger seat. Hairston and the coroner climbed into the backseat, and the trooper pulled out a pen and pad of paper.

“What happened?” he asked Scher.

The doctor began to speak. Hairston scribbled notes, writing in the first person, keeping up as best he could.

“We came up to do some skeet shooting,” Scher told him. “We had shot about 20 rounds and decided to take a breather. We went back to the trailer to get some more beer. Marty had some potato chips. We sat around for a while, talking about an upcoming murder trial. We got some more rounds and went back up the trail. We shot a couple more rounds and Marty wanted to go back to the trailer to get his cigarettes. I loaded my shotgun so I’d be ready for the next round. Marty unloaded his and set it on the stump. We started walking down the trail and I laid my gun on the stand you passed coming down the trail. As we went a little farther Marty turned around and said he saw something in the open field and that it might be the porcupine his dad had been after. He then told me to keep my eye on it and he ran up the trail and grabbed my gun from the stand. I heard him cock it, then I heard the gun go off. I yelled to him, ‘What the hell are you shooting at? You missed him.’ But I couldn’t see him from where I was. So I go up the path and I saw him lying on the ground face down. I ran up to him and turned him over and saw him bleeding from the chest. I tried to stop it but I couldn’t. I gave him mouth to mouth but I knew he was dead.”

Scher turned to John Conarton, who was nodding understandingly. “John, I’m a doctor,” he said. “I knew he was dead. Then I turned and started running down the trail and I started to get chest pains so I turned around and went back to get the car keys out of Marty’s pocket. I then drove to Russin’s place and told him what happened. Me and Russin came back and I took him where Marty was. I looked down and saw the gun and picked it up and said, ‘the goddamn trigger got a twig in it’ and at the same time smashed it against the tree. I know I shouldn’t have done that.”

It was done: Stephen Scher’s first words to authorities describing the tragic, bizarre accident to befall Martin Dillon in the woods of Gunsmoke. It was an account that would ring hollow for those who understood guns and the trajectory of bullets, for those schooled in examining blood spatter and crime scenes. But mostly, the story of the porcupine in the woods at Gunsmoke, of Dillon snatching the doctor’s Winchester off the stand and running with a loaded gun, of Scher, his back turned, walking down the path to the trailer would immediately arouse suspicion in those who knew Stephen Scher and Martin Dillon. And in the days that followed, as the doctor was forced to repeat his account of that evening to friends, family, and officials, the facts would change, in the smallest of details, in the subtlest of ways, as lies tend to do. It would fuel the belief in many that something very different occurred on June 2, 1976.

But now, as dusk fell, Trooper Hairston offered no reaction to what he’d just heard and asked no further questions. He simply folded the paper with Scher’s explanation, put it into his pocket, and got out of the car. He soon received a radio call to meet Frank Zanin, the records and identification officer from Gibson Barracks, at the entrance to Gunsmoke and to lead him to the scene. For the next hour or so, Hairston, the coroner, and game wardens continued to walk back and forth, from the body to the trailer, taking measurements and photographs, talking in low voices.

Stephen Scher waited quietly by the cars. While the authorities were up at the clearing, the doctor could relax. After all, he believed he was shielded from judgmental eyes.

He was wrong.

Carol Gazda was watching. The volunteer first aid technician had been seated in her 1969 Chevelle parked a few yards away from Scher for more than an hour; in fact, she’d arrived shortly after the Stropes. She’d heard the call over the Plekturn radio and immediately headed over, taking along her five-year-old daughter, Cindy.

But when Carol Gazda got to Gunsmoke and began walking up the path, she saw that her husband Tom was already on the scene. He caught sight of her and frantically waved her away. “Out of here now with her!” he shouted, pointing to Cindy. “Turn around. Go! Right now! I don’t want her to see this!”

And so Carol had grabbed her daughter’s hand and led her back to the car. And it was there that she waited. She had no idea what was going on. She didn’t know who any of these people were. Carol had never met Marty Dillon. She’d never heard of Stephen Scher.

She did not know that he was the man who stood in front of her, alternately leaning against the Stropes’ car and walking around it. But she could hardly take her eyes off him.

Because over and over, Carol Gazda watched behavior she could hardly believe. A man sitting quietly, looking as if nothing was wrong, placid and calm. Then someone would appear from inside the trailer or up the path. A trooper, the coroner, an EMT worker. And the man in front of her, as if on cue, would suddenly begin to cry. “My best friend,” he’d sob. “He was my best friend.”

For a little more than an hour, Carol Gazda watched Stephen Scher turn off and on half a dozen times, calm in his solitude, breaking down the moment anyone approached.

“I can’t believe it,” he’d sob. “I can’t believe my best friend is dead.”

It was the strangest sight Carol Gazda had ever observed. She felt as if she were invisible, the only witness to this inexplicable scene. For some reason, Stephen Scher didn’t notice her sitting quietly in her car.

She had no idea what she was seeing. She only knew something felt terribly wrong. Who is this guy? she thought.