Monday, February 25, 2013
While it is widely believed that serial killer Edward Surratt is responsible for their deaths, he never admitted to the slayings nor was he ever charged in their deaths.
Richard Hyde, the principal of Fern Hollow Elementary School in Moon Township, was talking with a friend on the phone in the bedroom of his home he shared with his wife, Donna and two daughters. That was about 1 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 3, 1977. During the conversation, he heard glass break in a window on the other end of his ranch home. After hanging up, he walked past a nightstand that contained a loaded gun and proceeded to the hallway, according to a story in the Beaver County Times. A 12-gauge shotgun blast ripped through his chest/abdomen area. He staggered to the kitchen, past his wife who was in a bathroom off the hallway, and died in a pool of blood on the linoleum floor of the kitchen. Donna, a beautician who had a shop in her home…
Sunday, February 10, 2013
The man's death was ruled a homicide.
An Avella resident was hitchhiking on Old Route 40 in Donegal Township, Washington County, about 9:20 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 18, 1972 when he spotted the badly decomposed body of a man. The man was down an embankment, about 65 feet south of the roadway. His skeletal remains were found in a briar thicket, near a small trash dump, about two miles west of Claysville. It was estimated that he had been there for about 8 to 10 weeks. The man's death was ruled a homicide, according to the Pennsylvania Missing Persons website. The man had gunshot wounds in his left torso, possibly from a .22-caliber weapon. While details about the man's appearance and clothing are many, there are no clues as to who he was, where he came from or why he died. The man …
Sunday, November 25, 2012
These cases in the Pittsburgh area did not have a happy ending but finding those missing persons might have brought closure to families.
As early as this July, people in the law enforcement community knew that the remains of Amanda Sue Myers of Pittsburgh had been identified through DNA comparison. However, it was only last week when Pittsburgh police finally released the news. In July, two separate sources told Patch that Amanda had been identified but that police wanted to hold off on releasing information until some interviews had been conducted. Amanda, who was 22 at the time of her death, was last seen in Pittsburgh at the end of 1999 but may have been in Florida and Tennessee as late as April 2000. She was not reported missing until 2007, according to the Pennsylvania Missing Persons website. Known unofficially as Homestead Jane Doe, Amanda was found deceased on Oct…
Sunday, November 18, 2012
The murder of the 30-year-old secretary from Penn Hills has never been solved.
Long Road in Penn Hills gets a fair amount of morning rush hour traffic—school and Port Authority buses, along with commuters leaving their homes and heading for their jobs in Pittsburgh. Weekday mornings, at the end of Long Road, cars often form a line waiting to make a left hand turn at the Churchill Valley Country Club onto Beulah Road. As they drive up the hill, they pass the Blackridge Civic Association clubhouse and then, at the top of the hill, intersect with the Parkway East or Penn Avenue toward Wilkinsburg. When Barbara Jean Lewis graduated from Penn Hills High School in 1964, she had her eye on a secretarial career. Her dream to enter the business world came true. She was a secretary at the downtown Pittsburgh offices of …
Sunday, September 30, 2012
The 22-year-old Dormont woman was killed in 1989 on her way home from a party in Mt. Lebanon—her mutilated body found in the backyard of a house on Voelkel Avenue near the light rail transit tracks.
Today, 23 years after her death, people in Dormont are still talking about what happened to Catherine Corkery. The 22-year-old left a party in Mt. Lebanon at the Academy Avenue home of Sam Amado on July 22, 1989 and headed home to the apartment she shared with a boyfriend, Tim Rooney, on Ordinance Avenue. But she never made it. Somewhere along the light-rail transit tracks where the "T" runs, Corkery met her attacker. She was just 5 feet 1 inch tall and weighed just 100 pounds. That person twisted a rope-like restraint around her throat and pulled her to the tracks, splitting her head open when it struck a rail, the Tribune-Review reported. In a 1997 story, the newspaper quoted Allegheny County Homicide Sgt. Nicholas Bruich, the lead case…
Sunday, September 9, 2012
The Seneca Valley teacher was found shot to death in his home along Perry Highway in Lancaster Township on Nov. 24, 2010.
Steven Russo, 48, was a popular statistics and calculus teacher at Seneca Valley High School in Jackson Township, Butler County. Students liked his style, including that he used March Madness brackets to teach the statistical probability of winning. His students had even created a page called "I Love Mr. Russo and His Russo-isms" on Facebook. That Facebook page turned into a place where students poured out their sympathies and memories after Russo was found shot to death in his home along Perry Highway (Route 19) in Lancaster Township on Nov. 24, 2010. A neighbor told the Post-Gazette that Russo had returned from school for lunch the day before and discovered an intruder in the home. The person just ran out of the house, the neighbor said…
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Jordan Clemons was held on homicide and other charges related to the death of Karissa Kunco.
Family and friends of Karissa Kunco—clad in T-shirts bearing her name and the phrase ‘Forever Young, Young Forever'—burst into applause Wednesday afternoon when a judge declared that her ex-boyfriend, Jordan Clemons, would stand trial for her homicide and related charges. Kunco's father called Clemons, 22, of Canonsburg, “scum” after the hearing—and called the preliminary hearing a first step to justice. During the more than two-hour hearing before Judge Joshua Kanalis, one of Clemons’ friends, Randy Taylor, said that the defendant had been staying with him and his girlfriend in Carrick on Jan. 11, when he took the man’s cell phone and took off with it. It was early the next day when Taylor testified that he was able to get in contact with…
Monday, January 23, 2012
Online records show Clemons was charged with homicide and other offenses Monday.
State police in Washington charged a Canonsburg man with homicide Monday, online court records show. Jordan Clemons, 22, was charged Monday with criminal homicide, aggravated assault, abuse of a corpse, tampering with evidence, access device fraud and other offenses. Clemons' attorney, Peter Marcoline III, confirmed to the Post-Gazette that the charges stem from the death of Karissa Kunco—a Baldwin woman who was reported missing Jan. 11. Kunco, who grew up in Brookline, was found stabbed to death in a wooded area near Westland Jan. 12. Her death was ruled a homicide, and Clemons was sought as a person of interest in the case. Clemons turned himself in Jan. 13 and was jailed on robbery and burglary charges filed by Canonsbug police stemming…
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10:12 pm on Sunday, April 14, 2013
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