Sunday, December 28, 2003

By Dennis B. Roddy, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

MEADVILLE - Shackles in place, Roger Proctor clanked into the courtroom, sat at the defense table and waited for a mildly astonished judge to change a death sentence to life in prison.

	John Beale, Post-Gazette Gene Phillips stands in the Tiffin, Ohio, mausoleum where his murdered uncle, Gerald Gase, is interred. Gase's family members have opposed the execution of the man who killed him.

Merre Phillips and Margaret Weber, cousins who had driven from out of state to witness the moment, took turns sitting beside him.

"Thank you for coming," Proctor whispered.

"How are you doing?" Phillips asked.

"Happy. Nervous," Proctor said.

"Well, there are going to be a lot of changes for you," Phillips replied.

There would be. No more 23-hour-a-day lockdowns. No more visits by guards with execution warrants. After 17 years, Roger Proctor was off death row.

Back home in Detroit, Weber began an e-mail to tell friends about her day.

"Yesterday," she wrote, "I and a cousin met the man who helped murder our uncle."

What happened in a Crawford County courtroom earlier this year seemed less the end of a murder case than a strange adoption proceeding. Roger Proctor stabbed Gerald Gase, 84, in a robbery at the old man's home Oct. 18, 1985. Within 10 days, Proctor and his companion, Dierdre Owens, were under arrest and had confessed. Proctor told police where to find the scissors he'd used. Proctor got the death penalty. Owens got life in prison.

Both were forgotten as they disappeared into Pennsylvania's prison system, their names occasionally surfacing on the appeals that follow conviction. To Gase's family, they became abstractions, no more real than a bad memory.

Then came Proctor's death warrant. Gase's relatives were invited to the execution, to which they recoiled so forcefully that they adopted Proctor's cause. Forgiveness gave way to an odd embrace.

Proctor and Gase's relatives now exchange Christmas and Easter cards, letters, notes.

"I write them every week," Proctor said. "It's strange. It's emotional, too."

They write back. Rozanne Phillips, Merre's aunt, fills Proctor in on Notre Dame football scores. Other family members drop lines around the holidays.

The Phillips family -- their matriarch, Agnes Gase Phillips, was Gerald Gase's sister -- are Roman Catholic, and hew to the church's opposition to the death penalty.

"No more eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth," said Merre Phillips' mother, Mary Catharine Phillips. "For me, it's Scripture."

Along with Scripture, Proctor was saved, too, by law. Except for a prosecutor accidentally handing over material that should have been provided 17 years earlier, Proctor's lawyers would not have discovered evidence that might have kept him off death row.

The large number of stab wounds on Gase's body -- 57 by the coroner's count -- helped the jury conclude that Proctor had, in essence, tortured the victim to death, a major factor in its decision to give him the death penalty.

Among other things, the newly acquired evidence suggested the weapon Proctor admitted using accounted for only three or four of the wounds and that the others came from something else.

That led a judge to rule that Proctor, at the least, deserved a new sentencing hearing.

It was then that prosecutors asked Gase's family if they were sure they wanted the killer of their uncle, cousin and brother, to live out his life.

To a one, they answered yes.

A hale fellow
Gerald Gase was one of those uncles who move away and visit occasionally, carrying a single suitcase and an outsize personality.

	Gerald Gase

"It always seemed that Uncle Gerald had a new car -- a Cadillac -- every time he came to visit," remembered Martin Phillips, his grandnephew.

Gase hailed from Tiffin, Ohio, a city of 18,000, one-third of the population of Seneca County, Ohio. Midwestern farmland stretches beyond it and the Sundusky River cuts through its center.

Gase left town during World War II to drive a truck at the Keystone Ordnance Plant south of Meadville. His brother, Gene Gase, joined him a year later and they started a roofing business. Gene Gase had the head for business and Gerald Gase had the heart for customers.

"He was a hale-fellow-well-met," said his niece, Mary Catharine Phillips. After two decades in business, Gene Gase moved West and left his brother to finish out the business, put aside some savings and live out a bachelor's life in his adopted town. Family would sometimes visit and Gase would march them down to Meadville's farmer's market, where he held the title "market master," running the operation.

Gase's visits to Tiffin were primarily holiday affairs. On occasion, he would arrive with his "lady friend," Marian Humes.

Humes and her daughter, Brenda McMaster, had become a second family of sorts for him in Meadville. He'd visit Brenda and Richard McMasters' farm in the Crawford County town of Cochranton to shuck corn and make hay.

"He was like a grandfather to my boys," Brenda McMaster said. "He spent holidays with us, he went to weddings. He was more like a member of this family than he was of theirs."

After his visits, Gase always returned to his small house at 743 Garden St. in Meadville, where, according to court testimony, he occasionally lent money to a family who lived on Walide Court, a street that ran behind his house. The daughter of that family had occasionally stolen from him before she moved away to Cincinnati in 1985. Her name was Dierdre Owens.

Moving on to Plan B
Proctor and Owens arrived in Meadville on Oct. 16, 1985, with no money, no place to stay, a thirst for alcohol and Owens' baby waiting back in Cincinnati.

	Roger Proctor

Owens and Proctor had met five months earlier. She was 18, an unwed mother who'd grown up in Meadville and now lived on welfare in Cincinnati. He was 33.

They decided to rob Gerald Gase shortly after the welfare office in Meadville said they'd have to wait a week before they could get any money. Owens had stopped in, given a friend's address as her home, informed the intake officer she had a hungry baby at home, and asked for public assistance. She did not mention that she had a welfare check waiting at her real address in Cincinnati.

Linda Faye Moss, the friend whose address Owens "borrowed," later testified about Owens' remarks as she left the officer.

"I heard Dierdre was telling Roger plan A didn't work, so they was going to do plan B," she said. "But I don't know what that was supposed to be."

Plan B, as it turned out, was to get money from an old neighbor who was known as the neighborhood soft touch. Owens also told Proctor, and later testified at her own trial, that she sometimes got money from Gase in return for sexual favors. The truth of that assertion has never been proven.

One of Gase's acquaintances, James Duncan, later filed an affidavit saying Owens and her family had squeezed money out of Gase and that, on one occasion, Owens took the old man's car.

"He told me that he had had to have the locks replaced. She actually robbed him of $300 on another occasion," Duncan said.

Owens and Proctor found Gase raking leaves. Proctor spoke with him as Owens tried the front door. It was locked. The pair walked to Danny's Bar and drank. Later, they went back to Gase's house and, this time, he let them in.

Proctor said Owens told him she would have sex with Gase in return for $88 in bus fare back to Cincinnati. But Proctor also said Owens had told him enough lies in her life that he couldn't be sure just what was going on.

The plan, according to Proctor's confession and testimony in the trials, was that, at some point, Proctor would "knock" Gase out, they would rob the house, and leave town.

The trio ended up watching television. The evening wore on awkwardly. Gase got up twice to answer the telephone in the kitchen.

"From what I understood from her, he wanted me to leave so they could take care of business," Proctor said. "I didn't want to leave. I really didn't know where to go. I didn't have any money in my pocket and I didn't want to be roaming around the street."

The last phone call Gase took was from Humes. She was in the hospital for minor surgery and would be getting out in a day. Proctor went into the kitchen, got a drink of water, picked up a pair of sewing scissors from the table and tucked them into his belt. Gase walked back into the room after his phone call and, according to Proctor, Owens shouted out, "Now!"

"I stabbed him once and, ah, she got to hollering to me, hurry up, and I just lost control of myself, 'cause I was scared, and I stabbed him again," Proctor later told police.

Proctor reached into Gase's back pocket and pulled out his wallet and gave it to Owens. He went to the bathroom to wash up and said he could hear Owens going through the drawers and closets in the room in search of money.

"I had never really hurt no one like that," Proctor said. "I came back and she was standing overtop of him." Then they left.

John Dawson, at that time the district attorney in Crawford County, was called to the scene after Richard McMaster and his son found Gase's body the next day.

"The poor guy was laying on his living room floor in a fetal position, stab wounds all over his face," Dawson said. "If you'd asked me the day before this case, 'John, do you think you could ever seek the death penalty,' I don't know that I could have."

After the coroner counted 57 stab wounds, Dawson knew the penalty he was going to seek.

A sister mourns
As the Phillips family recalls it, the hardest part was telling Agnes Phillips, Gase's 87-year-old sister, what had happened. That they had to keep telling her, as the details accumulated with each call from the police, only made it harder.

"She was just sitting there, shaking her head," said Merre Phillips, whose sister, Therese, drove to Tiffin from Columbus to sit with her grandmother.

"She said to me, 'I will never, ever understand how these people could do what they did. The only thing we can do is to pray for them,' " Therese said.

As the family mourned, then consigned Gase to the crypt at the town cemetery, Proctor and Owens were driving a rented car back to Cincinnati. They were going to the house where Owens kept an address on file with the Ohio welfare department. She would have a check waiting.

The police followed them for four blocks before pulling them over, then hustling everyone out of the car.

As Proctor made his confession, detailing almost every move he and Owens made those three days in Meadville, he did not know that Owens was in the next room telling the police he had acted on his own. The police didn't believe this, in part, because Owens had done this sort of thing before. She was already on probation after taking some friends to an old man's house, telling them she had been having sex with him, then attacking and robbing him.

Proctor was assigned a public defender, Bruce Barrett, who immediately began working on the case from the standpoint of either getting Proctor's homicide charges reduced from first degree or attempting to keep him from getting the death penalty.

Barrett sent out the standard letter demanding any evidence the prosecution might have that would help his client's case. Such material is called "discovery," and is required under state law.

Dawson's office sent back some laboratory reports, the autopsy record and a letter that opened with this line: "The Commonwealth possesses no evidence favorable to the accused."

It seemed unsurprising. Proctor had confessed to the stabbing. He had a rap sheet for theft and minor assaults in his youth. He had even told detectives where to find the scissors he used to kill Gase. But he took the stand in his trial and swore he stabbed Gase only three or four times, in the chest and side, not the 57 times for which he was accused. That number became the prosecution's mantra.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the defendant's actions in this case are screaming the truth much, much louder than his testimony here today. Those 57 wounds that Mr. Gase suffered are telling us what the truth is in this case," Dawson told the jury.

The jury took three hours and eight minutes to convict Proctor of first degree murder. Then came the sentencing phase of the trial. Barrett had only one witness to present: Proctor, who spoke in sparse detail about a deprived childhood. Dawson referred jurors to the photos of Gase's body.

"These photographs depict in graphic fashion the manner in which Mr. Gase was killed, the manner in which he suffered, the manner in which he died," Dawson told the jury. They took one hour and 40 minutes to sentence Proctor to death.

Owens got a separate trial and a life sentence.

An unwanted invitation
Gerald Gase's sister, Agnes Phillips, was dead six years to the day when the commonwealth of Pennsylvania sent her this letter:

"This is to inform you that Governor Tom Ridge has signed the death warrant for inmate Roger Proctor. The Department of Corrections has set the execution date for 7 p.m. June 1, 2000, at the State Correctional Institution in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania."

As many as four members of the family could attend. Rozanne Phillips, who read the letter, examined the enclosed brochure. It included directions to Bellefonte, phone numbers for eight motels near the prison, and a short Q&A with headings such as "What Can I Bring?" and "What Should I Wear?"

The Phillips family met for Easter nine days later. After dinner, spaghetti and meatballs, they sat down to discuss the letter.

"I remember thinking it was so impersonal, sterile, so cold," Merre Phillips said. They consulted Gerald Gase's other sister, Sister Mary Geraldine, an Ursuline nun now living at a convent in Toledo.

Margaret Weber went home to Detroit and wrote a letter to Proctor:

"I write to express that I hold no grudge or revenge against you. Your execution would bring no benefit to society or to your family and thus I oppose it. I am willing to express the same to your attorney," she wrote.

Faith and law
A storm of Old Testament proportions had just scraped across the Ohio flatlands when Ellen Berkowitz and Marcia White arrived in Tiffin two months later. Berkowitz was a lawyer with the Federal Defender's office in Philadelphia. Her job was to defend the indefensible: murderers on death row. White was her legal assistant.

John Beale, Post-Gazette Members of the Gase and Phillips families laugh while looking at family photographs at the home of Gene Phillips, right, in Tiffin, Ohio. From left are Judy Gase Kolasny of Milwaukee, Margaret Gase Weber of Detroit, and Merre Phillips. The family members fought to keep Roger Proctor, the man who murdered Gene Phillips' uncle, Gerald Gase, from being executed for his crime.

In years past, Berkowitz had found family members who opposed the death penalty. This was the first time she opened a door to meet an entire family in agreement.

"I actually made them draw a family tree. The family is so enormous, so many generations. I could not follow it," Berkowitz said.

As White took notes, Berkowitz went around the room, asking each person to tell stories of Gerald Gase, to explain why they wanted his killer spared. Invariably, they said it was a matter of religious faith.

As Berkowitz and White were driving back to the airport, two colleagues, Jim McHugh and Joe Thornton, were heading to Meadville to study the case record.

In the courthouse basement, they looked through the defense files and the court transcript. McHugh couldn't believe how little information the defense had to work with. Thornton went to the police station to see if anyone there would talk to him.

By now, Crawford County had a new district attorney, Francis Schultz. The year Proctor was sent to death row, Schultz was graduating from high school in Beaver County. He knew Proctor had an appeal pending. The courts had granted a temporary stay of execution. Schultz was expecting someone from the Pennsylvania attorney general's office to stop in and handle the county's side of the appeal.

Told there was a lawyer downstairs asking to see a piece of bloody carpet that had been introduced as evidence, Schultz sent it and a thick binder along.

A few minutes later, a clerk handed McHugh the remnant and a 285-page book labeled "Commonwealth Trial Binder."

"So here it is," McHugh said to himself. The binder mentioned a knife, which tested positive for blood, found outside Gase's home after the murder. It included a preliminary report by Coroner G. Arden Hughes saying "the weapon may be a knife with an approximate one-half inch blade ... there may have been a second weapon."

From a bloody footprint near Gase too small to be Proctor's to a suspect list that suggested a troubled young neighbor was seen near the house the night of the murder, the binder held leads to a potential second stabber that were never handed over to Proctor's defense.

McHugh's eyes locked on a collection of reports never passed along during discovery.

One witness, Angela Tate, a Pittsburgh woman at whose house Proctor and Owens stayed after the murder, told detectives that Owens had told her she had killed a man "but Roger didn't know." Given that Proctor had told police he thought Gase was still alive when he left the house, Tate's testimony, in McHugh's mind, lent new credence to his argument that someone else delivered the additional 53 stabs.

McHugh rushed to get to a photocopier, worried that Schultz would realize his mistake.

Thornton arrived with word that the police would not turn over their own files without a court order. Together, McHugh and Thornton went up to Schultz's office. They introduced themselves, thanked Schultz for the folder and asked about the case file on Dierdre Owens.

"At that point, his face went pale. He said, 'Who are you guys?' I said we're with the defender' and he said, 'Oh. I thought you were someone else.'"

Within months, Proctor was back before the courts. U.S. District Judge Donald E. Ziegler took the rare step of ordering the state to reopen the presumably closed case of Commonwealth vs. Proctor.

Proctor won a split decision. The Crawford County court ruled Proctor's conviction would not likely be overturned with the new evidence, but that he should have been given the evidence that pointed to a possible second stabber.

Last January, Mary Catherine and Eugene Phillips sent out a family-wide e-mail:

"Ellen Berkowitz just called: she said Roger's death sentence has been reversed."

Moving day
The State Correctional Facility at Greene County is a modern, shining place in which, for the most part, middle-aged white men guard young black men.

Roger Proctor's conduct on death row there was so exemplary that he was one of the few in the state system allowed to work outside his cell. He would sweep the floors along the row, do odd errands for the guards, all for 40 cents an hour.

Proctor was doing his chores when word arrived that the DA had decided not to appeal further. Proctor would leave Death Row.

For tactical reasons, his attorneys had sought to have the murder conviction overturned as well, but Proctor wanted none of it.

"I am guilty," Proctor said. "Sure, I would enjoy freedom. But I would not be satisfied with the verdict."

Eugene and Mary Catharine Phillips sat at a lunch table with other family members and sorted out the meaning of what they had done. At times, they spoke of Proctor as if he might at any moment walk through the door and be welcome.

The family's decision came with some pain. They are still awkward about whether and how to reach out to the McMaster family. Brenda McMaster, who came to court the day of Proctor's resentencing, is still bitter at the way things turned out and feels as if distant relatives who knew Gase less well than she were given voice when she was not.

There was another difficult interlude. Attending the resentencing, Merre Phillips, for the first time, learned about the allegations of a sexual liaison between Dierdre Owens and her uncle.

In a letter to Berkowitz, she explained it all this way: "Granted, he lived his life so far from Tiffin and the rest of his family, and so naturally there are parts of him we will never know. I guess being family means that even when we make mistakes and fail in ways both big and small, unconditional acceptance and love still applies. At the end of the day, we're all human."

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