Home >  Local News

Saturday, April 06, 2002

By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

A coroner's jury will decide whether charges are warranted in the death of a father of four whose body was found at a remote Centre County hunting camp where he had stayed with his cousin, a retired Arnold schoolteacher.

As Centre County Coroner Scott Sayers prepares for the one-day inquest May 15, though, the case remains a mystery without any publicly identified suspects. But the names of possible suspects are expected to trickle out at the hearing.

But, with the inquest as a last-ditch effort to jump start the case barring discovery of new evidence, officials won't say if they have uncovered anything in searches and interviews that will make the case viable when District Attorney Ray Gricar presents it to jurors.

"One thing to be considered is who may be responsible," Sayers said this week. "There is circumstantial evidence. The jury would decide whether there is enough for charges."

In October 2000, 45-year-old Clearfield-area resident David Williams was found shot through the neck, lying naked and buried under brush and firewood 35 yards from the smallish cabin where he and Joseph Williams, 53, spent the previous weekend.

Police suspect that David Williams was dead for most of the week before his body was discovered. The death was ruled a homicide.

For 19 months, the slaying has gone unsolved, yielding one arrest -- an unrelated, spinoff case in which Joseph Williams, then a visual communications teacher in the Deer Lakes School District, was convicted and served 100 hours of community service for burglarizing a nearby property.

The burglary charges were brought a month after the slaying, when investigators searched the single-story, Insulbrick-covered cabin for homicide clues and instead found outdoors gear stolen from a nearby home.

In the wake of the charges, Deer Lakes suspended Joseph Williams. Williams, a teacher with 30 years' experience, subsequently retired eight months ago, seven weeks before he was sentenced.

He told police he last saw his cousin the week before the body was found, as he prepared to go home to Arnold while his cousin remained alone at the camp. Joseph Williams, in turn, called police when he said he returned to the cabin the following weekend, found his cousin's van still parked at the cabin and discovered his belongings inside -- but couldn't find his cousin.

Joseph Williams could not be reached for comment yesterday but said previously that police cleared him as a suspect.

"Police have spoken with him at length and they didn't have really enough that they feel they had reason to charge him," Sayers said.

One still-knotted twist in the case came from Joseph Williams' brother-in-law, Joseph Caldana, a neighbor about a half-mile down little-traveled East Mountain Road from the camp.

Police affidavits say he strolled by the camp a week before David Williams' body was discovered and saw him sitting outside the cabin, slumped in a lawn chair, arms dangling at his sides, head tilted back while Joseph Williams stood about 20 yards away, near the front steps of the cabin.

After first saying he thought David Williams was dozing, the affidavits say, Caldana later suggested "that [David] Williams may have been dead when he saw him in the chair."