CHAPTER 5

It was just after seven when two borough police officers rang the doorbell at 27 Lincoln Avenue, interrupting a lively conversation between Larry and Jo Dillon and their visitor, Sue Caterson, the couple’s closest friend. When Larry saw the officers he wasn’t alarmed. He was the town’s mayor, after all, and it wasn’t unusual to find police at the door.

But within moments his world collapsed. He and his wife gasped in anguish, holding each other, praying to God that what they were hearing was a terrible mistake. Their son, the officers reported somberly, had died in a shooting accident at Gunsmoke.

It was futile, he knew, but Larry Dillon asked if the police were positive Marty was dead. One of the officers radioed to the scene and swiftly received confirmation.

Jo Dillon reacted at once. “We must get to Pat,” she said.

Larry and Jo Dillon immediately got in their car and headed to Kelly Street, followed by the Montrose police. When they arrived, they discovered Pat’s father mowing the front lawn, and Pat, her mother, and the children were emerging from the house under construction next door.

Jo Dillon began to walk toward the group. She called out to Pat, her voice choked with emotion. “There’s been an accident.”

Pat instantly saw the agony on her in-laws’ faces and the sober expression of the borough police. Her heart began to race. This was not supposed to happen.

“I’ll spend the rest of my life taking care of Marty,” Pat called out to no one in particular, her voice rising in fear.

A pledge, a promise. But it was too late. Was it guilt mixed with sorrow that washed through Pat as her mother-in-law shook her head?

“Marty’s gone,” Jo sobbed, unleashing a torrent of tears.

*   *   *

Over the next half hour, the phone rang nonstop, and neighbors gathered on the sidewalk, stunned by the news. With a heavy heart, Jo Dillon walked to Joann Reimel’s house, to tell her of her brother’s death. In the kitchen of 7 Kelly Street, Pat phoned Dr. Raymond Bennett at the hospital, who informed her that the body of her husband was still at the camp.

“They should do something,” Larry Dillon said sharply when Pat got off the phone, “not leave him lying on the ground like an animal.”

With that, Larry announced he was going to Gunsmoke. By then, Jo had returned and begged her husband not to go alone. She called her son-in-law, Alan Reimel, and asked him to drive.

*   *   *

By now, it was almost dark, and back at Gunsmoke Stephen Scher started to complain again of chest pain. He’d been at the scene with officials for more than an hour and was anxious to leave. The pressure was getting to him.

When he asked Susan Strope of the Silver Lake ambulance squad to drive him to Montrose General Hospital, Trooper Hairston did not object and neither did the coroner. Indeed, John Conarton thought it was a good idea. In his mind, the doctor’s experience that evening had been extremely traumatic, losing his best friend the way he did. He might even be at risk for a heart attack from all the stress.

During the twenty-minute ride to Montrose, Susan Strope periodically observed her passenger, asking him how he was feeling. Each time, Scher said he was okay but then mentioned what he said was his greatest concern, what would now become of little Michael and Suzanne Dillon.

“I keep thinking about those little kids,” he told Strope several times. “I’m going to have to take care of those children.”

How nice that he cares so much for those poor fatherless children, Susan Strope thought.

At the hospital, Strope led Scher inside and left him with Dr. Bennett, then she headed back to Gunsmoke to pick up her husband. Despite his earlier claims of chest pains, Scher stayed only a few minutes at the hospital, just long enough to relate his account of the terrible accident once more and accept condolences from his colleague. He then walked home across Mill Street, took a shower, and changed clothes. Shortly after he got home, Paul Kelly and his wife, Pam, knocked at the door. Kelly, a local attorney, had been a childhood friend of Marty’s.

Upon seeing the couple, Scher immediately began to cry. He repeated his story again: the porcupine, the shotgun blast, how he’d tried to save Marty. The Kellys didn’t question his sincerity—they didn’t know him well and had not heard rumors of an affair between him and Pat. The couple gently offered their sympathies to the weeping doctor, and after a few minutes they left.

*   *   *

Word of the shooting death of Marty Dillon traveled quickly, and grief and shock permeated the small town. But the horror of the news was compounded for those who long suspected the affair between Scher and Pat Dillon and who believed the doctor capable of anything. For them, Scher’s account of what happened at Gunsmoke was instantly dismissed as fiction.

Bonnie Mead was among them. After work, she’d gone to the Orange Roof in New Milford, an ice cream shop, and was told by the owner that Montrose police had been calling around town looking for her. The twenty-one-year-old secretary drove immediately to the police station.

When she arrived, grim-faced officers asked her the whereabouts of Marty’s law partner, Robert Dean.

“He’s out all evening,” she told them. “Anything you want done, call Mr. Dillon.”

They asked again. Once more, Bonnie told them that Dean was unavailable and they should call Dillon.

Then one of the officers placed his hand firmly on her shoulder, his voice menacing. “Where is Bob Dean?” he demanded. “You have to tell us.”

Mead told him that Dean was at an E. F. Hutton stock party at the Treadway hotel in Binghamton. When she asked why they needed to know, no one answered. She got in her car and headed home, baffled.

When Bonnie pulled into the driveway, her mother, Ruth Mead, met her on the front porch steps. From the look on her face, Bonnie instantly knew that something terrible had happened.

“Mom, what’s going on?” she asked, her fear growing.

“You’d better come in and sit down,” her mother said.

In the house, Ruth Mead broke the news. “This is terrible,” she told her daughter softly. “Marty Dillon is dead.”

Bonnie’s reaction was lightning fast. “Oh my God,” she cried. “Everyone canceled today at Gunsmoke. Steve killed him.”

She put her head down on the kitchen table and wept.

Kendall Strawn echoed that sentiment. When Pat phoned him late that evening and told him there had been an accident at Gunsmoke and Marty was dead, Strawn listened silently, cursing his decision not to shoot skeet that day. He hung up the phone convinced that his friend had been murdered by Stephen Scher.

It wasn’t only friends of Marty’s who were suspicious. A trooper at Gunsmoke, unaware of any motive Scher might have had to kill Dillon, was circumspect as well. After the doctor left, Frank Zanin, the records and identification officer, pointed out numerous inconsistencies with Scher’s account of the victim falling on his gun. Zanin had investigated several hundred death scenes, and this one didn’t make sense.

“This couldn’t have happened this way,” he told the coroner and the troopers at the scene, pointing to Dillon’s untied shoelace. “Look at his shoelaces, look at the boot itself. It’s tight coming up the leg. The laces were just untied and laid this way. If he had been running, the top of that boot and the rest of the lacing would have been opened. It doesn’t make sense. Common sense tells you if you’re running the boot’s going to open up. You can’t run and not open up that boot. It’s impossible. And look at the cuffs of the pants. If you’re running, the pants are down—there’s no reason for them to be up.”

Zanin noticed the unbroken clay birds under the body’s left arm by the wrist and the skeet-throwing machine six feet away. Off from the right hand, about three feet from the body, he saw a set of ear protectors and sunglasses, spattered with blood. He could easily make out the markings on Dillon’s head where it had been worn—it was the only area that wasn’t spattered with blood. Clearly, the victim had been wearing the ear protectors, and someone had taken them off.

Zanin observed the position of the body, on its back, arms outstretched, the hole dead center in the chest. It was a large hole, not consistent with a contact wound and not compatible with the story told by Dr. Scher.

“It’s too big to be a contact wound,” the officer told the others. “It’s way over the size of the barrel itself.”

When Zanin questioned the blood on the left side of the ground, Conarton explained that was caused by the victim having been rolled over when he was found and given emergency treatment.

Zanin found that odd, too. The shot went right through the heart, he pointed out. There was no emergency treatment for that.

That’s automatic, he thought. You can see from where it went in that it had to take out the heart. That’s strange.

Frank Zanin continued to inspect the area. He saw the Ithaca double-barreled 20-gauge empty. Then he saw the Winchester in pieces.

“Which is which here?” he asked. “Who owns what gun?”

“Dr. Scher owns the gun,” answered Conarton, motioning to the 16-gauge, “and that’s the one that killed him.”

Zanin’s focus turned to the broken weapon. “What happened here?”

Conarton explained about Scher smashing the gun in anger as Zanin continued to inspect the firearm. The officer’s doubts were growing. There was no blood on the gun, not on the inside or the outside of the barrel. With a contact wound, he knew, blood spatter blows back out, to the inside of the barrel and outside.

Zanin checked the distance. It was 252 feet from the trailer to the clearing. He measured the gun stand—98 feet from the trailer.

John Conarton was growing impatient. “This was an accidental shooting,” he said. “A man was running with his shotgun. He tripped over his laces, the gun went off. It was an accident. Let’s get some photos and that’s it.”

While Zanin took photos, Conarton went to the Dillon trailer to use the phone. He called Bartron’s Funeral Home. The owner, Robert Bartron, was the deputy coroner. Conarton had worked with him for years.

“We’re bringing you Martin Dillon from out at Gunsmoke,” Conarton told Bartron. “There was a hunting accident.”

Robert Bartron went downstairs to the preparation room to get ready. Although this was the kind of phone call he received every day, he felt particularly saddened this time. He and his wife were good friends of Larry and Jo Dillon. Barton had known Marty since he was a child.

At about eight-thirty the body of Martin Dillon was loaded into the Silver Lake ambulance at Gunsmoke, and Carol Gazda’s husband Tom, and his partner, Kevin Bruster, drove out to Russin Road, headed for the funeral home in Montrose. Troopers John Salinkas and John Fekette, who only hours before had chatted with Marty on Public Avenue, followed the ambulance.

By now, Susan Strope had returned from taking Scher to the hospital, and she and her husband were on their way home when they recognized Larry Dillon and his son-in-law heading in to Gunsmoke. The Stropes knew the Dillons casually from ballroom dance clubs they all frequented. Don Strope also knew Larry and Jo from Montrose, where he’d grown up.

The Stropes pulled over and got out of their car, and Larry Dillon did as well. He walked over to them, his eyes suddenly very old. The look on his face brought back an anguished memory to Susan and Don Strope. Three years earlier, the couple lost their eighteen-year-old son, Donald Robert Jr., whom they called Bob. The young man had been scuba diving in nearby Silver Lake and had run out of air. When he tried to come to the surface, he rose too quickly and died of an embolism.

The Stropes felt overwhelming pity for the man who stood before them. They understood too well the pain that wracked through him.

“You know what this is like,” Larry Dillon said softly, tears filling his eyes.

“We know,” said Don Strope, reaching out his hand, “and we’re so sorry.”

There weren’t any words to comfort Larry Dillon, the Stropes knew. Not at this moment, not ever. All they could offer were their prayers.

After the couple left, Larry Dillon and Alan Reimel proceeded to the scene. The coroner was still there, and so were some of the troopers. The two men went past the trailer and up the path. When Larry saw the pool of blood on the ground, he almost collapsed from grief. One of the troopers helped support the weeping man.

“Can’t something be done about this?” Larry asked, almost in a whisper.

“Yes, Mr. Dillon,” the trooper told him. “We’ll take care of it.”

For a while, Larry and Al Reimel stood sorrowfully by the spot where Marty had died. It didn’t make sense to them. Marty tripped and fell in the exact spot where they’d been shooting the birds?

“Something’s funny here,” Alan Reimel told his father-in-law softly.

In the quiet of Gunsmoke, by the crest of the mountains and forests where Larry Dillon had taught his son to hunt so many years ago, the heartbroken man nodded. He thought so, too.

*   *   *

Most everyone had left by the time the two men decided to return to Montrose. Larry Dillon told Al Reimel to go on ahead—he would drive his son’s BMW home. When Larry arrived back at 7 Kelly Street, Pat told him that Marty’s body was at Bartron’s Funeral Home and she wanted to see him. Larry did too.

Alan Reimel drove them and stayed in the car. When Larry and Pat were alone in the funeral home, waiting to be shown the body, Pat confronted her father-in-law. “Larry, you don’t think Steve killed him, do you?” she asked.

Larry Dillon paused for a moment. “Pat, I don’t know just what I think right now,” he said quietly.

Pat Dillon just stared at him. “You bastard,” she said sharply.

*   *   *

Marty Dillon’s father and widow were ushered into the basement where his body lay, a large towel covering his chest. Larry couldn’t bear to stay more than a few moments. Left alone, Pat lifted the towel, stared at the gaping hole in her husband’s chest, and broke into tears.

Al Reimel drove Larry and Pat back to Kelly Street, and Larry went inside to get his wife. The Dillons were leaving when Stephen Scher’s car pulled up. The three stood on the lawn for several minutes, as Scher haltingly explained what had happened to Marty and expressed his despair at losing his friend.

“I’m very upset,” he told Larry Dillon. “I’m a very lonesome man.”

Marty’s father did not answer. He was in shock, in total disbelief that this was really happening, that his beloved son was gone and in front of him was Dr. Stephen Scher, crying, talking about a terrible accident. As the Dillons drove away that night, spent, Stephen Scher headed inside 7 Kelly Street to see Pat.

It was another seminal moment in the doctor’s life, when he faced the woman he loved and related his story about the death of her husband. If he was worried about her reaction, he needn’t have been.

Pat was seated on the living room sofa clutching tissues. By now, a small crowd of friends and family had gathered. A neighbor was taking care of Michael and Suzanne.

Fighting back tears, Stephen Scher walked over to Pat and placed his hand gently on her shoulder. “I’m sorry this happened,” he told her, his voice cracking. “He was chasing one of those damn porcupines, and he fell.”

Standing in the living room that night, Dr. Stephen Scher once more recited the story he’d concocted, slightly different from the version he’d just told Trooper Hairston and John Conarton. This time he said that he and Marty had gone back to the trailer to get cigarettes and that they were inside when Marty spotted the porcupine. Dillon grabbed the nearest gun lying by the screen door and ran out. Then Scher heard the shot.

The thoughts running through Pat Dillon’s mind as she heard her lover recount the death of her husband remain a mystery. Why would Marty, with his bad back, run with a loaded shotgun? He was so safety conscious; it didn’t make sense. Why, too, would he have grabbed Scher’s gun instead of his own? For that matter, why was he so intent on killing a porcupine?

If Pat Dillon suspected that Stephen Scher was lying, it wasn’t apparent. Not on the evening of June 2 and not for the rest of her life.

It was to be the ultimate act of denial, the subconscious wish come true that somehow, miraculously, she could escape her marriage, change partners, and, most important, avoid the messy repercussions of divorce and the inescapable charges of her own infidelity. By accepting Stephen Scher’s story, she could maintain the image she’d created in childhood of the good Catholic girl, the persona that mattered most to her. For just as Stephen Scher was now free to take over the life Marty Dillon had created, so, too, could Pat Dillon embrace a new role—the doctor’s wife. It was a title that she had been taught meant something special. Earning it simply confirmed the message so definitive in her upbringing, that she was just a little bit better than everyone else.

But that night, as mourners filed in and out of 7 Kelly Street, emotion surged and Pat cried bitter tears, unleashing the pain of losing the man a part of her still loved, of guilt over her betrayal of him, and of fear for her and her children’s future.

*   *   *

It was past midnight when the troopers and John Conarton finally left the funeral home. Alone in the basement, Robert Bartron started to embalm the body of Martin Thomas Dillon. Doubts about what he’d been told by Conarton troubled the deputy coroner. Like many others in the small town, Bartron had heard the rumors about Patty and Stephen Scher and often saw the two together, especially since his funeral home was across the street from the hospital. He didn’t know what to think. He knew that many people in town disliked Scher, but Bartron never had any problem with him. The doctor had even delivered Bartron’s son.

Later that morning, when Bartron noticed that an ecchymosis had formed on the body’s left side—what looked like a large brown bruise—his concerns increased. The deputy coroner knew that any break in the circulatory system allowed the embalming fluids he’d injected as well as blood to spill into the surrounding tissue, forming the spot. But it was the position of the ecchymosis that disturbed him. How could a shot from a fall enter the body at that angle? It suggested to him that the shot had traveled right to left and downward rather than straight through his body. If Dillon had fallen, as John Conarton had told him, surely the path would have been upward.

Alone in the basement that morning, Robert Bartron’s discomfort grew.

*   *   *

Of all the people who suspected that the death of Martin Dillon was not an accident, Ann Scher brought a particular knowledge. She not only knew about her estranged husband’s love for Patty Dillon, she knew he was capable of killing.

Several years earlier she’d come home one night from showing one of the dogs to a Boy Scout group and found Shadow’s kennel empty. The Schers had owned Shadow for a few years, and Stephen Scher himself had been training her for obedience. Lately, though, the dog hadn’t been performing well. She kept failing recall—when Scher would beckon her, Shadow wouldn’t budge.

Ann could tell that her husband was losing interest in the dog, and with his consent, she spoke to the breeder who had bought Shadow’s mother to see if she was interested in buying Shadow. The breeder was.

The two women were in the process of negotiating a sale when Ann came home that evening and saw Shadow’s run empty. She went into the house and found her husband watching television.

“Shadow’s kennel is empty,” Ann said. “Where is she?”

“I shot her,” Scher said, his eyes never leaving the television.

It was dark, so Ann knew that he hadn’t been working with the dog and grown frustrated or angry. He’d simply decided that Shadow no longer served a purpose. For Ann, all the marital problems seemed to pale against this new insight into her husband. He was a man she didn’t know anymore. He frightened her.

And so when she learned about the death of Marty Dillon, Ann never doubted that Stephen Scher had once again arranged a situation to suit himself. At that point, though, Ann was almost too emotionally distraught to care.

Indeed, in an ironic twist, Ann Scher had tried to take her life the very day Marty Dillon was shot. In a further coincidence, her life was saved because a friend tried to reach her to tell her what had occurred at Gunsmoke.

For months after Stephen Scher moved out, Ann Scher had been contemplating suicide. The depression she’d been suffering as her marriage came apart grew deeper until at the end of May she’d had enough. She was exhausted emotionally and felt trapped and frightened. In the last year of her marriage, Ann had unwittingly signed over joint assets, bank accounts, Keoghs, and stocks to her husband. Scher had told her that it would be easier for them to buy stocks and securities if she presigned some papers. She later learned that he’d used her signature to take their assets out of her name.

He hadn’t been able to take the real estate they’d bought together, but there was little equity as it was. Now, her checking account almost depleted, Ann had been putting in ten-hour days as a microbiologist at Binghamton General Hospital. Before work and late at night she cared for the dogs as well as feeding some thirty-five head of cattle and other animals. The responsibilities of the farm overwhelmed her. So did her loneliness.

She had decided she would take her life on the evening of June 2, when she had the next three days off from work. That way, no one would look for her.

Ann somehow managed to get through her shift from eight until six-thirty and then drove home, parking her car in a small shed where it would not be visible. She wrote a note to a friend, a nurse at Montrose General named Donna Sands, and carefully outlined what she wanted done with her animals and her possessions.

She didn’t say why she wanted to die. Her self-esteem had ebbed so low that she didn’t think anyone would care. In the most bizarre of coincidences, Ann Scher, knowing nothing of the events at Gunsmoke, took twelve Pertofranes, a handful of Triavil and several Percodan a few hours after her husband pulled the trigger of his 16-gauge Winchester.

At about nine-thirty she lay on the couch and hoped death would come quickly.

But life had more to offer Ann Elias Scher, and with the good fortune of a close friend’s concern, her suicide attempt failed. Earlier that evening Donna Sands had phoned to tell Ann the news of the shooting at Gunsmoke and became worried when she didn’t get an answer. So Donna drove to the farm and saw that Ann had parked her car in the shed, which she knew was unusual. She tried the front door and found it locked. Then she went to the rear of the house and looked through the glass sliding door and saw Ann’s purse on the dining room table.

Her heart pounding, Donna Sands discovered an open window and crawled through. She discovered Ann stretched out on the sofa, barely coherent, her pulse rapid. Sands quickly called an ambulance.

Ann Scher was admitted into the intensive care unit of Montrose General Hospital just after ten o’clock and treated for an overdose. The next morning, she awoke to find Donna Sands and Dr. Jim Miller standing by her bed. Donna asked her if she was alert enough to hear some news. Ann said she was.

Donna Sands told Ann Scher about the events of the night before, that her estranged husband had been skeet shooting with Marty Dillon at Gunsmoke, that there had been an accident, and Marty Dillon was dead.

Ann Scher just looked at them. For a moment, there was silence. Then Ann spoke. “He killed him, didn’t he?”