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| Eric Eberhardt / Staff Photographer (Intelligencer file photo) Buckingham Township police officers Elwood Barnhard and Phil Simons along with a Midway Fire Co. and CB Ambulance member rope of scene where Shaun Ritterson's body was found in June of 1977. The murder is still unsolved. Body is in lower left corner of picture, but not recogizeable. |
The Girl on Church Hill: A Murder Mystery
By Matt Coughlin
and Laurie Mason Schroeder
The killer mutilated her body in unimaginable ways and dumped her on a wooded hillside, leaving her partially hidden from the road that wound down from a church and cemetery at the top.
She lay, naked and face down, on a bed of dead leaves; crumbled bits of tanned vegetation tangled in her frizzy brown hair. There were two empty beer cans and a sunflower seed pouch ditched nearby; trash from another day. Her last day on the hillside was Sunday, June 12, 1977. It was a warm and clear day, with temperatures in the high 70s and a slight breeze blowing through the woods as the birds, squirrels and ants picked away at the world.
No one knew how long she lay there beneath the trees, her arms tucked against her body. It could have been just an hour, or 12 or even 36 hours before she was found.
It looked like a body
The first time George Childs drove past, he was looking for a stream running to the base of the large, steep rise that locals called Buckingham Mountain, or Church Hill. It was about 1:15 p.m. He glanced out the driver’s side window as his pickup chugged around a bend on the northern slope on Holicong Road in Buckingham Township.
He didn’t find the stream, but something in the tangle of dead leaves and underbrush caught his eye. The first time he saw it, it looked like a naked body, he later told police.
His son Mark, a Temple University student, was with him. They were running errands before heading back to the city.
Childs wanted another look, so he drove across the railroad tracks near Upper Mountain Road, turned around and headed back up the hill a second time.
They backed up a bit to get a clear look — and they were sure. About 10 feet down a steep slope from the road on the northern face of the hill was the naked body of a woman. The horrified father and son continued up the hill to the next home and asked the resident to call police. There was a body on the side of the mountain.
Officer Ellwood Barnhardt arrived about 15 minutes later. He checked the body for vital signs and confirmed the woman was dead.
Soon, the area was crawling with officers. Buckingham police Detective Stephen Daniels — who later became chief of police — joined the coroner, county detectives and rescue personnel on the hillside.
Detectives said that they knew from the beginning that whoever she was, she hadn’t been killed where they found her. At the time, Daniels hadn’t been a detective for long. It was his first murder case. County Detectives Richard Batezel and Robert Gergal took the lead.
The officers began knocking on doors at the handful of homes along Holicong Road on the hill. There were fewer homes there in the 1970s; the northern slope was once two larger properties that were later divided into smaller lots and sold off in the decades since.
The officers asked residents if anyone was missing, if anyone had heard anything suspicious. No one had. Daniels said residents were shocked and scared. There just weren’t murders in Buckingham, which at the time was made up of largely farmland, an abandoned quarry, scattered homes and open woodland.
Police roped off the area near the body and collected everything that could be evidence; even the beer cans and sunflower seed pouch. They rummaged through the leaves and the rocks on the hillside, hoping for a cutting weapon, the victim’s clothing or her identification. Later, they would collect several clumps of hair and chunks of the forest floor from beneath her body. They took pictures and examined the body before moving her.
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(file photo) Mt. Gilead African Methodist Episcopal Church at the top of Church Hill, or Buckingham Mountain as its come to be known, is a historic site on the underground railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a teen hangout.
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One detective guessed in his notes that the woman was about 20; another said 30. She was about 5 feet 5 inches tall, about 130 pounds. Her ears were pierced and her fingernails were polished silver. She had distinct frizzy, brown hair, which fell to about shoulder length on her short-necked body. The only thing she was wearing was a little 10-carat, yellow-gold ring carved with the word “Love,” in fat block letters with a diamond chip in the “o.”
After police took one last picture of her body on the ground, a stretcher was brought down the steep embankment. A team of cops and paramedics rolled her over.
As she flopped from face down to face up, they saw what had been done to her. This was more than a murder; this was a gutting.
Postmortem
Experienced homicide detectives say that they can think of only a few reasons why a killer would gut a victim: as a ritual murder; to cut drugs from a smuggler; or tear out a pregnancy.
On that sunny, peaceful Sunday on Church Hill, as a vision born in hell lay at their feet, investigators opened their minds to the idea that this murder might be the work of Satanists, or others dabbling in the occult or black magic.
Still, there was no crime scene, no weapon, and no clue to who the victim was. And as day slipped into night, the detectives turned their hopes from knocking on doors around the hill and countryside below to an autopsy by medical examiner Hal Fillinger and coroner Dr. Stanley Goodwin, who examined the unknown woman’s body in the ground floor morgue of Doylestown Hospital.
Fillinger’s notes, which detectives have preserved all these years, detailed the autopsy:
“The body is viewed in the Doylestown Hospital Morgue at 10:35 p.m. on June 12, 1977. The body is that of a fairly well-developed, well-nourished white female whose age appears somewhat older than 21 to perhaps 25 years of age. The body is viewed unclothed. The head is grossly normocephalic (normal) and the scalp is covered with a considerable quantity of rather long, thick, kinky, shoulder-length brown hair. The irides (eyes) are brown. …”
The doctors found tiny ant bites covering her body, and marks on her buttocks indicating she had been dragged along the ground. Fillinger noted hemorrhages on her cheeks and around her eyes, as well as a line of discoloration across her upper chest. He noted that she was eviscerated, and that the wound was made with “deer-cutting precision.” She’d also suffered multiple stab wounds to her chest.
Fillinger told investigators that the woman’s body had been washed out and nearly all the lower organs had been removed. A towel, which the doctor described as tan or “Turkish,” was removed from the body cavity.
Technicians swabbed the body looking for evidence. (DNA testing wasn’t available in 1977.) Toxicology tests would later show a small amount of alcohol in the woman’s system, enough that she was mildly intoxicated.
Fillinger saved his most horrifying revelation of the autopsy for the end of his report: The victim may have been alive when she was eviscerated.
He said there were small cuts on her right thumb and left pinkie that could be defensive wounds. And there were bruising and hemorrhaging at the back of her scalp, suggesting she’d been struck in the back of the head, but not hard enough to crack or break her skull.
Fillinger surmised that she was struck three times in the back of the head. Perhaps she’d been dazed and was weakly defending herself as she was gutted, he told detectives.
The experts ruled she’d been killed at some point between 1:30 p.m. Friday, June 10, and 1:30 a.m. Sunday, June 12, 1977; anywhere from 48 to just 12 hours before she’d been found.
While the examination provided some useful information, detectives still had no idea of their victim’s identity. There were no reports of missing persons matching her description and no one along Holicong, Lower Mountain or Upper Mountain roads recognized her. Copies of her fingerprints were sent to state police. Dental impressions were also taken in the hopes they might match up with a missing person report.
As Sunday turned to Monday, there were no leads. As they often do, police turned to the media for help. They gave reporters the woman’s photo. Someone must know her and someone must miss her, they thought.
A picture in the paper
That Monday’s newspapers ran a photo of the dead woman on their inside pages.
“The District Attorney’s office has asked that this picture be printed in hopes someone may identify this woman whose body was found in Buckingham Township yesterday,” the Courier Times caption read.
The picture was taken from a slight angle; a shot of the woman’s head resting on a morgue gurney. Her eyes were closed and her wild hair fanned out on the pillow with bits of leaf still tangled in it. She could have been sleeping.
The papers also ran a description: white, about 30, 5 feet 5 inches tall, about 130 pounds, with brown, frizzy, shoulder-length hair. Reporters wrote about the “Love” ring, too.
The coroner, Goodwin, told the reporters she’d been left on the hill for seven or eight hours, but hadn’t died there. Police said she’d been stabbed to death, but left out the grislier details that first day.
There was a phone number for tips, and a message imploring readers to call police if they knew anything about the victim, or the crime.
The first calls that came in were strange; a police officer thought a witch who lived in Yardley might be involved. She ran a palm reading business with her husband, a former member of the Breed motorcycle gang.
Another tipster called to report she’d seen Temple University students practicing witchcraft at the top of Church Hill months earlier.
The church at the top, Mt. Gilead African Episcopal Methodist Church, was a historic landmark. It was built by runaway slaves in 1830 and had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. But years had taken their toll, and the historic cemetery had become a place where teens and adults got wasted and high. Buckingham police had been called more than once to chase away the noisy partiers.
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| (file photo) In 1977, the body of a 20-year-old woman was found lying face down and naked about a quarter-mile downhill from the cemetery at the top of Church Hill in Buckingham. |
But most of the callers thought they knew who the victim was. One caller said she looked like a Bensalem woman who had bought her dog four years earlier. Another said she looked like a girl who went to the same doctor she did — at least until the doctor was busted for dealing speed.
Others said she was a neighbor, or a customer. A Philadelphia woman worried that the dead woman was her missing sister. A man called saying he hadn’t heard from his wife, a Montgomery County detective. Then he called back to say the wife had checked in.
More calls poured in. She was a hitchhiker, a babysitter, a customer who also had a “Love” ring. A neighbor with false teeth. The wife of a Richland arsonist. A friend who was shorter than the description but looked just like that.
One man even called to report that she looked like a one-night stand he’d had in Baltimore eight months earlier.
Yet, while all those calls were coming in to police, at least one person had the sick feeling that he knew who the body on Church Hill was.
On the afternoon of June 13, 1977, a 49-year-old Bristol Township man made his way down Route 13 to 927 Spring St. in Bristol, where his daughter lived. He pulled up and got out just as two young men and a young woman were heading into his daughter’s apartment building.
He stopped them a moment.
“Have any of you seen my daughter lately?” he asked. None had, but they thought maybe she’d just gone to the Shore, as she had in the past, without telling anyone.
The father warily stretched out his hand, holding a copy of the newspaper, folded to show the picture of a the woman lying on a gurney with her eyes closed.
Did they think it’s her?
The young woman, Cathy East, was the first to call police. She said the victim’s father still wanted to wait a few more days to see if he heard from his daughter. She said he still hoped the picture lied. About that same time, the man who’d been walking around with the newspapers worked up the courage to call the District Attorney’s Office.
At 7:25 p.m. Monday night, Francis Ritterson, his wife, Nancy, and Francis’ younger brother, Harry, walked into the county courthouse in Doylestown looking for county detectives. And 25 minutes later, they were being ushered into Doylestown Hospital’s morgue.
“Yes,” they said, after viewing the body. It was their 20-year-old daughter, Shaun Eileen Ritterson.
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