CHAPTER 24

When Judge Seamans asked John Moses if his client wished to address the court, the attorney indicated his client did.

Standing next to his lawyer, Stephen Scher spoke so softly he could barely be heard. “Your Honor, I understand the workings of the court and the finding of the jury,” he said, his hands clasped in front of him. “I would like to say the testimony I gave was truthful.”

With that, Stephen Scher turned around and faced the second row on the left side of the courtroom where Michael and Suzanne sat motionless next to their mother. “I did not kill the father of my children,” Stephen Scher said, looking directly at them. “I maintain my innocence.”

There was no reaction from the Dillon children or from Pat Scher.

Moments later, Judge Seamans imposed the sentence. “Stephen Barry Scher, the jury having found you guilty, I hereby sentence you to eternal life in prison at the state correctional facility.”

Sheriff Dick Pelicci handcuffed the doctor and along with several state troopers led him out of the courtroom. Judge Seamans rose from the bench. The proceedings were over.

Instantly, reporters and well-wishers crowded around Larry and Jo Dillon and Joann and Alan Reimel. When asked by reporters for his emotions at the moment, Larry Dillon clutched his cane and practically whispered his response. “I feel okay. Once in a while it was a little rough.”

Jo Dillon told the press that the ordeal brought them closure, but no happiness. “I prayed this day would come. I’m so relieved it’s over, but I have no joy, because we’ve lost our grandchildren.”

Larry Dillon nodded. “We still love them,” he said quietly. “We’ll wait to hear from them.”

Shelly Wolfe, Jo Dillon’s niece, added, “We look forward to the day that Michael and Suzanne at least understand why their grandfather did this before he died.”

Minutes later, a crowd gathered by the back entrance to the courthouse as Sheriff Dick Pelicci led Scher to a waiting car, bound for the Susquehanna County jail. When the doctor emerged, several onlookers cheered and applauded. Upstairs in the courthouse, Pat Scher watched from a window. “You bastards,” she said through gritted teeth.

Reverend Farwell stood by Pat’s side, equally bitter. “Just listen to the cheers,” he snapped angrily to a reporter. “Honest to God. A man has been separated from his family.”

*   *   *

After Scher’s departure, Joann Reimel and Shelly Wolfe headed across a small park to the Montrose firehouse, followed by a small army of supporters and television crews. The crowd grew silent as a weeping Joann Reimel declared, “This is for my brother.”

Her cousin Shelly began to push the old fire bell, rusted from years of disuse. In the cool evening air, the bell tolled twenty-one times, signaling each year since the death of Marty Dillon.

An echo remained at the end, seemingly hanging in the air. By now, Bonnie Mead and Tom Sivahop had pulled up to the firehouse. The couple had been en route to Montrose from Tom’s home in Wilkes-Barre when they heard the verdict on the car radio.

In front of the firehouse, Bonnie and Joann embraced. Then Paul Kelly, the local attorney who’d grown up with Marty, arrived and presented the secretary a trophy he and his wife, Pam, had made in anticipation of a guilty verdict. It read: “Bonnie Mead: Wow, you were right!”

“It’s justice,” Bonnie said, waving the trophy and hugging her friends, one by one. “It’s about time.”

Joann nodded, wiping away tears. “My big thing is my brother,” she told the gathering, pointing to the sky. “He did this from up there. But he had to do it through Mr. Campolongo. On June 2, 1976, it was between a doctor and a lawyer, and the doctor won that day. But today, the lawyer won.”

Later, Robert Campolongo, Bob O’Hara, Lieutenant Hacken, and the troopers stopped by Joann and Alan Reimel’s home where a small crowd of the Dillons’ friends and family had gathered. That evening, at the Montrose House, Bob O’Hara and the others mused about Stephen Scher’s curious words during the sentencing. O’Hara noted the odd way the doctor referred to Marty Dillon, as “the father of my children.”

“That’s what profilers tell you—to look for the way suspects give their statements,” O’Hara said to the others, who nodded in agreement. “They don’t use proper names and they put some distance between themselves and the victim. It tells you something.”

The following evening, Larry and Jo hosted a buffet for about forty people at the Montrose House to thank everyone for all they’d done. Kerry Graham and Kendall Strawn came, and so did Bonnie Mead, Tom Sivahop, Robert Bartron, and members of the state police and the attorney general’s office.

The Dillons made it clear they did not consider the dinner a celebration. “There is no joy,” Jo’s cousin Bill Nash explained to a reporter. “A man going to jail for life is a sad, sad thing. The family members weren’t present for the cheering. We would never have done that.”

At the dinner, Bob O’Hara shook Larry Dillon’s hand, and embraced Jo Dillon. He told the couple he was very glad to have met them and thanked them for their support during the trial. Jo Dillon reminded him of his own mother, always encouraging and optimistic. Throughout the trial she repeatedly told the prosecutors and state police how much she appreciated their work, and that regardless of how the verdict turned out, she thought they had done an excellent job.

Midway through the dinner, O’Hara went to get some punch and noticed a collage of photographs of Marty that Larry and Jo had assembled in the back of the dining room. Among them was a 1968 wedding picture of a smiling Marty Dillon and his new bride, Patty Karveller. But it was an enlarged black and white photo of Marty with three year old Michael on his lap, the two faces intently looking at each other, away from the camera, that moved O’Hara most.

The prosecutor couldn’t take his eyes off the image of the young lawyer, just about his age, and his boy. O’Hara, too, had a young son, Ryan. He felt a well of emotion swell within him. Then, Ann Vitale walked over and stood beside him. Her eyes, too, quickly filled with tears.

“That’s what this was all about,” O’Hara said quietly, and Stephen Scher’s former wife nodded.

The next morning, the prosecution team packed up their belongings and at last checked out of Montrose House, saying good-bye to owners Rick and Candy Rose. Michael Giangrieco, the coroner’s solicitor, helped Troopers Steve Stoud and Jamie Schultz load boxes of files from the prosecutor’s third-floor office into their cars for the trip back to Harrisburg. The three men discussed the verdict.

“He sealed his fate when he took the stand and lied again,” Giangrieco said with a shrug. “What he said didn’t fit the evidence. That’s why it didn’t take long to convict him. There’re no winners in this. It’s a tragic situation for both families.”

At the Public Avenue Deli, where hordes had gathered every day, it was quiet for the first time in months. Throughout the day, owners Beverly and Henry Kinsey chatted with customers about the outcome of the trial. Beverly had been one of the first to hug Jo Dillon after the verdict was read. She felt a particular kinship with the older woman—Beverly, too, had lost a child, more than a decade earlier. Her eight-year-old daughter had suddenly developed a virus and by the time she was rushed to the hospital it was too late. It had been important to Beverly to know all the details of why her child died. She understood how much that, too, must have meant to the Dillons.

“They finally got their answer, which is what Larry and Jo deserved,” Beverly told customers.

Within days of her husband’s conviction, Pat Scher drove ten hours home to Lincolnton to pick up Jonathan and almost immediately turned around and brought him back to Montrose. She stayed on for several more days at her relatives’ home, meeting with John Moses in Wilkes-Barre to discuss the appeal.

She bid an emotional good-bye to her children as they flew to their respective homes, Michael to Las Cruces, Suzanne to Colorado Springs. For the second time in their lives, the Dillon children had lost a father.

Michael seemed to bear his pain quietly, but Suzanne did not. A month after her stepfather’s conviction, the young woman wrote a scathing letter to the editor of the Susquehanna Transcript, lashing out at the newspaper and the Montrose community for creating a circus atmosphere and for decimating her family.

My brother and I struggle to keep our head above the surface of the water, and fight desperately to keep our mother and younger brother up there with us. Our lives have been destroyed, not just Stephen Scher’s. My mother. My little brother. The Dillon family. Think about that as you ring the firehouse bell and cheer. Think about how peaceful my father’s rest must be watching his children suffer so. Think about it as you smugly relive the drama and excitement of your participation in the spectacle.

Congratulations. Good job. You won.

Suzanne R. Dillon

There was even more pain to befall the Dillon children. Just two months after the stepfather’s conviction, their mother was charged with a crime as well—two felony counts of perjury, two counts of making false statements under oath, and obstruction of the administration of the law—for lying about her affair with Stephen Scher. It was in a 1995 deposition to the Dillon’s attorney, Peter Loftus, in which she made that claim, hoping to halt the exhumation proceedings by dispelling the possibility of a motive for Stephen Scher to have killed Marty Dillon. For several weeks after Scher’s conviction, Susquehanna District Attorney Charles Aliano, weighed whether to bring charges against Pat. In the end, he did.

“We can’t have people lying in court,” he told reporter Carol Crane from the Wilkes Barre Citizen’s Voice newspaper. “Our system is based upon people having respect for the oath they take.”

After the trial ended, Larry and Jo Dillon concentrated on catching up with their daughter’s three boys, attending the soccer and basketball games they’d neglected during the busy previous months. But the loss of their son’s children remained a constant ache, a solemn reminder of the risk they took when they urged the state police to investigate Marty’s death.

Yet God answered their prayers in the fall of 1997, when the police investigation revealed the truth about what happened at Gunsmoke and Dr. Stephen Scher was brought to justice. And now they wonder if there is a chance for another miracle—that one day their grandchildren will return to them. Larry and Jo will wait for Michael and Suzanne. Their patience was rewarded once before.

*   *   *

Today, the ironwood tree at Gunsmoke still bears a small ovoid scar from where Stephen Scher smashed the Winchester, and a plain iron cross embedded in a granite boulder marks the spot where Marty Dillon died. The trailer is gone now, a spacious cabin in its place, with black-and-white photos of Marty hanging on the walls. Most days, Larry and Jo feed the deer in the woods apples that Bill Nash brings them from his orchard, and they sit on the front porch and read. They still walk up to to the clearing at Gunsmoke and visit Holy Name of Mary Cemetery, both the unmarked grave where their son is buried, and the site of his tombstone. On it, beneath the name Martin Thomas Dillon, is etched a phrase from the Book of Wisdom, the irony of which is not lost on Larry and Jo Dillon and all those who loved a young lawyer named Marty in the hilltop town of Montrose, Pennsylvania, back in 1976.

The just man, though he die early, shall be at rest.