The The Girl on Church Hill: Part Four

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 three of Matt and Laurie's story, which you can also read over at Phillyburbs.com. It ran Wednesday, June 27, 2012.

Among the pieces of evidence police have preserved is the “Love” ring Shaun Ritterson wore, but investigators have no idea who gave it to her. A jeweler said it was a “promise” ring that a boy would give a girl.

The Girl on Church Hill: 'Person of interest very much alive'
By Laurie Mason Schroeder
and Matt Coughlin

Detectives weren’t the only ones who suspected Harry Ritterson gutted his niece and dumped her on a hillside in Buckingham.

Nancy Ritterson was reluctant to talk about her daughter Shaun’s murder. Even after all these years, she said, the pain is raw. She can’t and won’t find the words to talk about what was done to the 20-year-old during a summer weekend in 1977.

But when told her brother-in-law, Harry, has been interviewed about the killing and denied any involvement, she found the words.

“Oh, he did?” Nancy Ritterson said.

For 35 years, Harry Ritterson has been the prime suspect in Shaun Ritterson’s murder. Shaun’s body, slit open and cleaned like a deer, was found dumped on Buckingham Mountain, or Church Hill, as some call it, on June 12, 1977. Police tracked thousands of tips and interviewed hundreds of suspects. Within a week, Harry Ritterson, Shaun’s uncle, with whom she sometimes stayed, was a suspect and by the end of that summer, he was the main suspect, according to records kept in the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office.

A close family

The Rittersons, Nancy said, were close. Often, Francis and Harry Ritterson worked the same jobs — both were laborers and worked in excavation. If Francis had a job he couldn’t do, but Harry could, he’d bring his brother in and vice versa. Nancy said she and Harry’s wife, Sandra, were close even after she and Harry divorced.

But that changed the summer of Shaun’s murder.


“I was shocked,” she said about realizing Harry was a suspect. Harry Ritterson has never been charged in connection with the murder.

She said she started to think it was Harry because detectives were so sure. She started believing he was involved when police said he failed a lie detector test.

She said he was always around Shaun, if she was at a bar or a club, he’d show up there sometimes. And she didn’t know until after the murder that sometimes Shaun would stay at his home.

And, of course, there was the fact that Harry knew the area where the body was found, she said. He’d been there before. He’d taken the kids there before — Shaun and her brothers and his daughter, Elizabeth.

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. 

After the killing, she said she didn’t want Harry to be around her children.

Francis Ritterson, Shaun’s father, passed away in 1997. Nancy said the murder ate away at him. More than anything, Francis Ritterson wanted to see his daughter’s murder solved.

“That poor man, he always thought it would be solved,” Nancy said. “I’d be happy in a way that, you know, it’s over. Nothing’s going to bring Shaun back, but it would finally be a closure for us, for my kids. It bothers them still, not knowing. My husband … I may start crying right now.”

Still an open case

Nancy doesn’t want to talk about the horrific details of Shaun’s slaying, but prosecutor Matthew Weintraub does.

Weintraub, chief of prosecution at the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office, is heading a countywide task force formed this year to investigate Shaun’s slaying. He said when he first learned of the killing last year, via an email from reporters for Calkins Media — owner of the Courier Times and The Intelligencer — he was stunned by the details of the long-forgotten case.

“It really galled me,” he said. “The depravity and heinousness of the act really resonated with me as a prosecutor.”

Detectives who worked on the case in 1977 saved all the evidence. Boxes and bags of hair and tissue samples, cloth cuttings and objects gathered from Church Hill in Buckingham, where Shaun’s mutilated body was dumped, were pulled out of storage. Under Weintraub’s direction, much of it has been sent to a lab to be scanned for DNA, a test that wasn’t available in 1977.

“We have a unique opportunity here, to use modern forensic techniques. Obviously, you’re at the mercy of how well the evidence was preserved, but we’ve got a lot to work with and we’re hopeful.”

While he would confirm that DNA testing and other “investigative tools” are being employed, Weintraub refused to talk about results.

He said there is “a person of interest who is very much alive,” but declined to name any suspects.

“To maintain the integrity of the investigation, which ultimately will not be closed until this murder is solved, I can’t say more at this time,” he said.

An offer withdrawn

Harry Ritterson’s offer to provide a DNA sample seemed like a prime opportunity to close his chapter of the case, to clear his name once and for all, as he has told a Calkins Media reporter he wants to do.

But after telling a reporter in May he would cooperate with investigators and make himself available for tests, he apparently changed his mind. Citing health concerns, Harry declined follow-up interviews about the case and rejected an invitation to come to the county courthouse in Doylestown with the reporter to meet detectives.

Harry’s girlfriend, Karen Koplin, sent the reporter an email on his behalf this month, asking that he be left alone so he could concentrate on recuperating from a recent bout with cancer.

“Harry at this time doesn’t really want to be involved in the investigation. He has been through too much already. Harry has total faith in the county detectives. They will get the job done,” Koplin wrote.

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.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.

No time limit on murder

Murder is a unique crime. Unlike other criminal offenses, there’s no statute of limitations. Murderers can be brought to justice years, even decades, after the crime. There’s good reason for that, Weintraub said.

“There are crimes considered so heinous and depraved that society in general deems it necessary to not impose limits on when they can be solved,” he said.

There is some precedent in Bucks County for putting long unsolved murders to rest. In 1999, police arrested Warminster resident Scott Keefe and charged him with the 1984 slaying of his fiancee, Terri Lynn Brooks.

Brooks, 25, was the night manager of a Roy Rogers restaurant in Falls. She was found beaten, stabbed and strangled on the restaurant floor on Feb. 4, 1984. A plastic bag was wrapped around her head and a knife was stuck in her chest. Police thought it was a robbery.

But following on a tip received in the late 1990s, then-DA Diane Gibbons, now a county judge, ordered the case reopened. Detectives gathered DNA from the knife used to kill Brooks. Using testing methods not available in 1984, forensic experts matched it to Keefe’s DNA, which detectives collected from cigarettes discarded outside his home.

Confronted with the new evidence, Keefe confessed. He’s now serving life in prison.

Weintraub said bringing closure to Shaun’s family is important, but that’s not what’s ultimately driving the unusual investigation.

“Even in a case where there’s no family, you’re really working to avenge the victim and bring the killer to justice. We will not rest until that’s done.”

Weintraub hopes the new media attention on Shaun’s murder will compel the killer to do the right thing.

“We would love to talk to that person and have them explain to us why they did it.”

The monument

There is a tiny monument, raw and natural, to the body found on Church Hill.

It is a stack of four rough, cube-shaped rocks stacked and capped by a triangular stone; an obelisk to a dead woman hidden among the leaves and trees on the side of the hill that is officially known as Buckingham Mountain. There are beer cans and rubbish among the other rocks lying near its base.

The 3-foot stack is about 10 feet below the edge of Holicong Road, on the north face of the hill after a bend down and away from the Mt. Gilead African Methodist Episcopal Church and cemetery.

Police don’t know who built the monument or when, but at some point in the past 34 years, someone who knew exactly where Shaun’s body was dumped stacked those rocks in her memory.