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| Shaun Eileen Ritterson |
The Girl on Church Hill: Retracing Shaun's movements to find her killer
By Matt Coughlin
and Laurie Mason Schroeder
Shaun Eileen Ritterson was lonely, high and would soon be dead.
It was Friday, June 10, 1977, and she was standing alone by the bowling machine, a drink in her hand and drugs in her veins, according to friends. The Capri on Emilie Road in Bristol Township was packed with young people drinking and smoking and flirting. Rasputin, a local cover band, was rocking out on stage.
Several of Shaun’s friends were there. When questioned by police later, most said they saw her standing by herself, looking depressed. They meant to walk over and check on her, they said, but the bar was too packed and the music too loud.
In the wrong mood, Shaun could be tough to get along with, friends said. Those who were with her at the bar that night told police that they saw her talk briefly to a few people. They surmised that she was looking for drugs.
The runaway
Shaun wasn’t missed until hours, maybe days, after she was found dead on a desolate hill in Buckingham. Her friends thought nothing of Shaun not coming home that weekend.
“We often stayed out all night together,” Donna Wheeler later told a newspaper reporter writing about the grisly murder.
Friends said Shaun’s absence could have meant that she’d hitchhiked to the Shore, met someone at a bar, or stayed at a friend’s home. She was a free spirit who came and went as she pleased.
Shaun’s family didn’t immediately miss her either. She had chosen to stay home while her parents and siblings went camping in northeast Pennsylvania that weekend.
That Monday night, after they were brought to the morgue to identify Shaun’s body, the Rittersons and Shaun’s uncle, Harry Ritterson, sat with detectives, telling them what they could.
Shaun grew up on Mile Street in the West Bristol section of Bristol Township and had gone to Del Haas High School. She’d been raised Catholic and had dropped out of high school in 10th grade. She was unemployed. She collected rock albums.
When police brought up the theory that maybe an occult group was behind the slaying, Francis Ritterson, her father, said he didn’t believe she was involved with anyone who was playing with witchcraft. While his daughter didn’t go to Mass regularly, she respected her Catholic faith and her parents saw no signs of occult activity.
Harry Ritterson told police that his niece didn’t drive and didn’t have a car or driver’s license. He described her roommate as a tall, thin, “cruddy looking” guy in his 20s.
Shaun had moved out of the family house and into 927 Spring St. in Bristol about three weeks before she disappeared. It was by mutual agreement that his daughter got her own apartment, Francis Ritterson pointed out.
The interview ended and police began digging into the victim’s life, hoping to find her killer.
What they learned was that Shaun, at other times, hadn’t always left by “mutual agreement.”
In March 1973, police learned, the 16-year-old ran away from home and dropped out of school. She and three friends — including Donna Wheeler (neé Stevenson) — made grand plans to start life over in Florida, but never left Bucks County. Police found the trio living with a 45-year-old man in Bristol Township.
Hauled into Juvenile Court after the runaway attempt, Shaun told a judge that she didn’t like her parents’ curfew and that her sister picked on her.
She ran away again twice more that year. Each time, she was found living with Donna and Donna’s fiance, Richard Wheeler.
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| (file photo) This picture of Shaun Ritterson ran in papers in 1977 when police were hoping someone knew something about her last hours alive. |
For a while, Shaun lived with a woman in the Bristol Gardens Apartments in exchange for baby-sitting the woman’s children. That arrangement ended abruptly when the woman came home one day to find Shaun and another teenage girl rifling through her jewelry while two young men hid in a closet.
Shaun had trouble keeping a job, bouncing from waiting tables to warehouse work to factory jobs. Most of her employment records noted that she was “terminated for refusing to work.” The Wing Wah restaurant even hired her twice and she never showed up for a day of work either time.
Detectives searched Shaun’s apartment, looking for clues. They took her pictures, some of her clothes, a man’s dress shirt, several books on female sexuality, notes, letters and a calendar on her wall that was marked with initials on different dates.
At the bottom of a trash can in Shaun’s room, they found $60 cash. They took swabs from a nightgown and from a bed sheet, both with brown stains on them. They also found a man’s shirt with a Warminster Heights Development Corp. patch, but could not find any significance to the emblem.
Technicians gathered samples of various stains and dried red matter, all of which later tested negative for blood. They took two pieces of tissue out of the sink. It was some kind of food, a meat. Not human.
During that first interview after viewing her daughter’s body, Nancy Ritterson also told detectives that Shaun frequented two Bristol Township bars, The Suburban and The Capri.
She confirmed that Shaun’s closest friend was Donna Stevenson, a girl she had run away with more than once. But when detectives spoke with Donna, she said she was “not a close friend (of Shaun’s), just a friend,” according to police notes.
The more they talked to people, the more police found that nobody wanted to be known as “close” to a dead girl.
Bones
Richard “Bones” Gittens, Shaun’s “cruddy looking” roommate, became a suspect the moment police laid eyes on him. When detectives tracked down the 20-year-old man at his mother’s apartment on Ford Road three days after Shaun’s body was found, one of his eyes was black and his face was badly scratched.
Gittens had a violent past, personal knowledge of the victim and suspicious physical injuries, the case file showed. But was he a killer?
Gittens and Shaun had been friends since high school. In 1973, Shaun, then 17, lived with him and his girlfriend in a home on Mile Street in West Bristol, not far from Shaun’s parents’ home. The arrangement lasted just a year, because Gittens got into a brawl that ended with another teen being stabbed, police records show, and he was shipped off to a youth camp.
Gittens told detectives he’d run into Shaun about two weeks before the murder. At the time, he was living in his car and collecting welfare. Shaun wasn’t working and needed cash to keep her apartment. Gittens offered to split the rent, and she accepted.
Shaun’s family didn’t like her living arrangement, Gittens told police. He recalled an incident during which her Uncle Harry came to the apartment and talked with her outside, out of Gittens’ earshot. She later told him that her uncle had said that he didn’t like her having a male roommate.
Gittens said he and Shaun didn’t sleep together. He stayed on the couch, unless she wasn’t home. Then, he’d sleep in the apartment’s lone bed.
Like all her other friends, Gittens told police that he last saw Shaun that Friday. He said Shaun slept in most of the day. He woke her that evening when he left to go meet a group of guys at the Suburban Lounge.
He said he and his friends had a few beers and decided they wanted to get some “THC” or heroin. Gittens suggested that his roommate might know where they could score.
The men drove to the Spring Street apartment, and Shaun and Donna joined them. The girls made a call and the group was soon headed to a spot near Delaware Valley Hospital, which was then in Bristol. Donna bought a couple of dime bags from someone there, Gittens said.
The group drove back to the apartment and split the drugs into six portions, one for each of them and the sixth for a friend who was waiting back at the Suburban Lounge. One of the guys took out a set of “works” and “booted,” using a syringe to shoot the THC straight into his veins. The rest of the group just snorted the powder.
They got back to the Suburban bar about 8:30 p.m., and Shaun and Donna talked to a couple guys outside. Later, the three men left to pick up a girl at the Oxford Valley Mall. When they returned about 10 or 10:30 p.m., Shaun and Donna were still there, Gittens told police.
He said the last time he saw Shaun that night was before he left the bar at about 11:30 p.m. He had walked down to a nearby parking lot and briefly chatted with some friends. When he went back into the bar, she was gone.
Gittens told detectives that when he got home, Shaun wasn’t there. He said he went back out to the “train station bar,” and continued drinking until he passed out. He remembered another man helping him home about 2 a.m. At one point, he fell down and smashed his face on the sidewalk, he told the cops. That’s how he got the bruises.
Shaun still wasn’t home when he woke the next morning about 11 a.m. He said he walked to a doctor’s office to have his eye checked because it was swollen, discolored and scratched.
Gittens said he got home about 2:45 p.m. A short time later, Shaun’s best friend, Donna, was at the apartment looking for her. Gittens told police that he spent much of the next several days hanging out with friends and getting “polluted” at area bars until learning of Shaun’s death Monday night.
Police tracked down a handful of people who confirmed Gittens’ story, and in less than a day, Gittens was no longer a prime suspect.
Other leads
Gittens gave the investigators some other leads to chase. Detectives investigated a fight that occurred at an apartment near Shaun’s, and questioned an alleged drug dealer who might have believed that Shaun stole $60 from her.
They learned from Patricia Dahms, an acquaintance of Shaun’s, that she had visited Church Hill in the past, one of many Lower Bucks teens who swam in the nearby quarry or got high in the cemetery near where her body was found.
Dahms recounted an urban legend that said you could “race the devil” by sprinting across the cemetery. According to the legend, if you felt the wind at your back, the devil beat you and you were going to die. Locals also called the rise Gravity Hill, due to an optical illusion that made it look like cars rolled uphill.
Police divers checked the quarry and some nearby ponds. Investigators searched the area along the New Hope-Ivyland Railroad tracks, which cross Holicong Road at the base of the hill. No new evidence turned up, just some clothes and a quilt that they believe had nothing to do with Shaun’s murder.
The mystery man
Detectives continued to piece together Shaun’s last day from a series of interviews. They learned that Shaun had purchased another bag of heroin in addition to the drugs she shared with her friends.
They learned that she, Donna and a third woman had hitchhiked to the bar that night and that most of the people who saw her described her as being high or “in a stupor.”
Shaun’s 22-year-old cousin, John “Jack” Lister, was working as a doorman at The Capri that night.
Lister told police he saw her with Donna and other friends, hanging out by the jukebox. “Soul City Walk” by Archie Bell and the Drells was playing.
Lister said Shaun seemed depressed. Sometime between midnight and 1 a.m., Lister said, he saw Shaun leave with a man he didn’t know. He told the man to be careful with his cousin and the man gave him a dirty look before the pair slipped out the barroom door.
Lister described the man to a New Jersey State Police sketch artist as a white male about 5 feet 8 inches tall, 140 pounds, thin, with the start of a mustache and long, shoulder-length, dark brown hair. At detectives’ direction, he combed through yearbooks looking for a glimpse of the stranger.
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| (file photo) Police put together this sketch of a possible suspect in the Shaun Ritterson murder in Buckingham in 1977 based on a description by Shaun's cousin of a man she left with from a Lower Bucks bar. |
Weeks later, detectives had Lister hypnotized, hoping to get more details.
“(Shaun) looks like she’s lost,” her cousin said, according to decades-old police notes. “Shaun looks like she wants to talk; (there is) an urgency in her eyes.”
As thousands of tips about the man in the sketch poured in, the investigation widened. Detectives culled names from lists of state prisoners who’d been on furlough the weekend Shaun’s body was found. Nothing.
They checked out the alibis of murderous parolees. James Thomas McCann had been released from prison in New Jersey on June 7, 1977, after serving nearly 17 years for the brutal murder of a Trenton woman in 1960. McCann had met a girl at a club who resisted his advances, so he killed her, disemboweled her and cut off her head.
Bucks County detectives drove to Trenton on June 15 to talk to McCann at the parole office in Trenton. But they soured on him as a suspect: he had been signed in overnight at a halfway house for former inmates; he didn’t know his way around Bucks; and his mental state didn’t suit committing another murder.
They also talked to John Allen Campbell, a parolee from a Massachusetts prison who had moved to the Neshaminy Woods complex in Lower Southampton. At 17, Campbell had raped and then killed a woman on the railroad tracks in Holyoke, Mass. But when detectives interviewed Campbell, they believed he was adjusting well and his prior crime didn’t match Shaun’s horrendous murder.
A Tuesday, Wednesday girl
Detectives clung to the theory that Shaun might have been pregnant, and the killer gutted her to remove the fetus. They interviewed every man with whom they thought she might have been intimately involved, including a married man she was dating. His alibi checked out.
Another beau called Shaun his “Tuesday, Wednesday” girl, because he’d only date her on weekdays. He had a girlfriend on the weekend. He was also ruled out.
Shaun’s friends told police that she often talked about a man she planned to marry, although she would not name him. No one knew where she got the “Love” ring. A canvass of local jewelry stores turned up no useful information.
The investigation seemed to be moving in several different directions, with no clear lead on the killer. Which is why everyone in the Ritterson family was surprised when police started treating one man like a suspect:
Her uncle, Harry Ritterson.
are there any other murders that have taken place in the area of holicong rd in buckingham twsp in the last fourty years?
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