Opinion ID: 2365333
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Reactivated Investigation

Text: Jeffrey Snyder was the District Attorney of Susquehanna County from 1988 until 1996. In 1989, District Attorney Snyder received a telephone call from Al Riemel, a social acquaintance of the Snyder family and the brother-in-law of Martin Dillon, requesting a meeting at the home of Lawrence Dillon, the father of Martin Dillon. Prior to this telephone call, Snyder had not conducted any review of the Dillon case, but had the District Attorney's Office investigative file retrieved from storage in order to review the matter. District Attorney Snyder reviewed the Dillon file, but found that it contained little to no information and decided to meet with the state police to discuss the status of the case. At the behest of Lawrence Dillon, Snyder arranged meetings with the original Pennsylvania State Police investigators, Troopers John Salinkas and John Fekette, and reviewed the state police investigative file. District Attorney Snyder agreed to have the facts as developed by the investigation to that point presented to a panel of medical experts who were holding a conference at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. In May of 1989, Snyder went to the conference to get some consensus from those in the forensic field about whether Dillon died by accident or was murdered. The conference attendees consisted of medical examiners, pathologists, and coroners. Three members of the Pennsylvania State Police accompanied Snyder to the conference, along with Dr. Isadore Mihalikis, a forensic pathologist who actually presented the case to the conference attendees. [5] Following this presentation, a significant majority of the conference members opined that a self-inflicted gunshot wound, either accidental or intentional, caused Dillon's death. Snyder viewed this vote as an overwhelming defeat for the prosecution and concluded that no successful prosecution could be mounted at that time. Although the investigation remained open, the Susquehanna County District Attorney's Office took no substantial steps to advance the investigation for the next five years. In 1990 and 1991, Lawrence Dillon retained private investigators to look into the case and unsuccessfully petitioned to have Dillon's body exhumed for another autopsy. At that time, Snyder felt that the efforts of the Dillon family were counterproductive to a successful resumption of the investigation. [6] However, in 1994, again at the urging of the Dillon family, two Pennsylvania State Police officers who had no previous involvement in the case were brought in to reexamine the evidence, conduct interviews with witnesses, and, in Snyder's words, winnow out the rumor, the innuendo, that in my opinion riddled much of the material that was already on file. The rumor referred to by Snyder was the report that Scher and Dillon's wife, Patricia, [7] had been having an affair before Dillon's death. These rumors were known to investigators at the time of the incident but, for reasons that do not appear in the record, were not pursued. The officers who were placed in charge of the state police investigation in 1994 reinterviewed witnesses and interviewed additional witnesses who had not been questioned in 1976. Based on this renewed investigation, the Commonwealth finally developed evidence of a motive for Scher to murder Dillon that had not been developed in the earlier investigation: namely, that Scher and Patricia had been having an extramarital affair prior to Dillon's death. In 1995, the Commonwealth successfully petitioned, in spite of the objection of Patricia Scher, [8] to have Dillon's body exhumed for a second autopsy. Following this second autopsy in April of 1995, the Commonwealth obtained support from its expert forensic pathologist, Dr. Mihalikis, for the position that the physical evidence of Dillon's gunshot wound was not consistent with an accidental discharge of a dropped shotgun. The Commonwealth [9] concluded that it possessed sufficient evidence to prosecute murder charges successfully and charged Scher with first-degree murder in June of 1996.