The Girl on Church Hill: Part Five

For the past year Intelligencer reporters Matt Coughlin and Laurie Mason Schroeder have been researching the unsolved 1977 murder of Shaun Eileen Ritterson. I helped with the research and scanned photos and basically tagged along like a fangirl. Here's part five of Matt and Laurie's story, which you can also read over at Phillyburbs.com. It ran Thursday, June 28, 2012.

Shaun Eileen Ritterson

The Girl on Church Hill: 'Leave no stone unturned'
by Matt Coughlin
and Laurie Mason Schroeder

Nancy Ritterson was recalling tips, theories and things overheard in bars over the years about her daughter's murder.

She was sitting in her living room in West Bristol last week talking to two reporters. Throughout the room were photographs of her family: six children and two dozen grandkids and great grandchildren. Among the pictures were a handful of her third child, Shaun Eileen Ritterson, the victim of a 35-year-old murder mystery.

As the matriarch talked about the things she's heard about Shaun's death, she recalled them by milestones, not dates.

And there have been many happy milestones since Shaun was stabbed, eviscerated and dumped on a Buckingham hillside in June 1977.

One rumor was that one of Shaun's friends was the murderer.

“I heard that, it must have been right about the time my grandson was born and before Hazel was married,'' she said.

Another rumor, about another possible suspect, she heard in the mid-1980s because that's when another grandchild was christened, she added.

Last weekend, as the first of a four-part series about Shaun's murder hit the front pages of the Courier Times and Intelligencer — newspapers owned by Calkins Media — the family talked about the theories and tips with one another. By Sunday night, they were leaving messages at the District Attorney’s Office about things they remembered and had heard over the years.

Matt Weintraub, chief of trials and prosecution for the DA's office, said he had several calls, including some from the Rittersons, when he got into his office Monday morning.

“We received a number of calls immediately after the first part of the series,” Weintraub said. “Now we have the momentum.”

Weintraub and a team of Bucks County detectives are actively investigating the murder after the reporters reviewed the case files and put together a synopsis for them. And while the stories brought back all the painful memories of Shaun's death, they have also renewed the Rittersons' hope that there may be justice for Shaun.

“It's like being brought back to it all over again,” Fran Ritterson said during a phone call to a reporter Wednesday morning. "It's like we're back there again."

Fran was 15 at the time his sister's body was found on June 12, 1977.

Shaun Eileen Ritterson, with her brothers, David (left) and Floyd (right) Ritterson. Shaun was the maid-of-honor at 17 when her friends Donna Stevenson and Richard Wheeler married.

He was close to 20-year-old Shaun. They were all close, Fran Ritterson said. Shaun would take him swimming at her friends' houses. But she wouldn't let them give him beer.

He remembers going to the Church Hill area with their uncle, Harry Ritterson, years before Shaun was killed. He remembers their uncle taking them camping.

Shaun’s death ripped out their hearts, Fran Ritterson said. He recalled that in school the year after her death he would hear his classmates talking about it. Everybody knew about it, he said. His parents had tried to isolate the kids from the details, but he had nightmares. And while everyone has nightmares, he said, his nightmares were about getting revenge on his sister’s killer. He couldn't sleep. He was scared.

“I knew something happened that was bad, something that wasn’t normal, something that shouldn’t have happened to anyone,” Fran Ritterson said. “Shaunie didn’t deserve to have that happen to her. Nobody deserves to have that happen to them.”

Her murder devastated his parents, he said. Before that, he’d never seen his father with that kind of anger in his eyes. Francis Ritterson Sr. died in 1997. He went to the grave thinking he knew the killer but couldn't prove it, Fran Ritterson said.

“I hope they solve it. And if they don’t solve it, I’ll go to my grave knowing it was him,” Fran said, alluding to a person the family believes killed Shaun.

Fran said he and his siblings have been calling the DA's office with information they remember. They hope others will too.

Weintraub said any tips help.

“There were a lot of calls connecting some of the dots for us that we would need connected to put together a successful prosecution and I was encouraged by that,” Weintraub said Wednesday. “When you have a case that’s this old and unsolved, you are naturally going to have some gaps and the nature of those tip calls are filling in some of those gaps for us.”

After detectives from what was then called the District Attorney’s Atrocious Crimes Unit tracked down thousands of tips in the late 1970s, the case slowly came to a standstill. Detectives John Rice, Richard Batezel and Robert Gergal led a team of police who interviewed neighbors, took random calls and even bought books on the occult thinking it could give them some insight into the gruesome killing. Harry Ritterson, Shaun's uncle, donated $1,000 in reward money for the killer's identity. But nearly a year later, with the murder still unsolved, he took back the reward money with help from an attorney, according to police records.

Nancy Ritterson said she remembered Rice coming to the house to ask her questions during the investigation of her daughter's death. They had grown up in the same neighborhood.

Rice rose to chief of Bucks County detectives before he died of cancer in 1984 at age 55. He, Batezel and Gergal were involved in nearly every major interview in the case.

While the case slowed, something occasionally came in.

In 1986, a New Jersey woman called police and said she thought her estranged husband killed Shaun. That lead didn't go anywhere. Neither did one from a prisoner in Florida. Gergal flew there in 1993 to interview the former Bucks resident who said Shaun’s friends cut her open because they thought she’d swallowed some drugs.

Investigators have viewed and in some cases re-processed some of the evidence in the unsolved Shaun Ritterson murder that's been maintained for 35 years.

Witnesses started dying. So did the detectives who worked the case.

In 2000, Batezel died. Gergal, who had been the case's primary investigator in many ways, passed 10 years later.

But investigators said the deceased detectives left them with the core of the case, including boxes of evidence, and they now are trying to connect the old leads with tips from the newspapers' readers.

Last week, Weintraub confirmed that DNA testing and other modern investigative tools are being employed.

“DNA testing can take a couple of months or more, and maybe longer,” Weintraub said. “This is true if additional samples are sent to the lab for analysis, including new control samples from people of interest to us in the case.”

Weintraub declined to provide specifics about any recent tips. But he said keep them coming. He wants to hear from anyone who remembers anything about the case, even if it doesn't seem important, or is gossip or innuendo, he said.

He said sometimes a witness might assume someone else reported something, so they don’t call. But no one should assume someone else will talk, he said. Two witnesses are better than one.

“We want to leave no stone unturned,” Weintraub said.

Anyone with information can reach the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office at 215-348-6354.