 
|
|||||||||||||
              
|
Man hopes billboard offering reward helps solve wife's murder
Thursday, February 17, 2000 By Lawrence Walsh, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
John Ryan hopes the billboard at Second and Greenfield avenues will answer the "why" questions that have troubled him and his family since he found his wife's lifeless body in the kitchen of their Lincoln Place home.
"I thought she had passed out or fell and struck her head," he said yesterday as he looked at his wife's photograph on the left side of the billboard perched on a hillside above the busy intersection. He said he didn't discover the knife-inflicted puncture wound of her chest until she didn't respond to his pleas to "wake up."
Heather Ryan, 22, a former hairdresser and Sandcastle lifeguard, was killed on Dec. 8, 1998, in what Ryan believes was "a robbery that went bad." The couple's daughter, Summer, then 16 months old, was found playing nearby. She wasn't harmed.
"Heather fought with her attacker," Ryan said. "There were signs of a struggle. You could tell by how out of order things were. You also could tell by her fingernails that she had been scratching someone. There also were knife marks on her hand.
"I truly believe someone [other than the killer] knows something about what happened to my wife," Ryan said. "If they don't have the guts to come forward, they're just as bad as the person who did this -- no good."
The bold black and red type on the yellow background of the billboard promises a $10,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for the death of Heather Ryan. Printed below it are the phone numbers for Pittsburgh Crime Stoppers (255-TIPS) and city homicide detectives (665-4050).
Ryan, 28, who operates Enocenti's Pizzeria at 5009 Second Avenue, said he cleared the idea of the ad with Pittsburgh homicide detectives before contacting Lamar Advertising Co.
"It's fine with us," Sgt. Keith Andrews of the homicide unit said yesterday afternoon. "It's still an open case and it might generate some leads for us to pursue. We haven't had any calls yet"
Ryan said he had withdrawn his "life savings" from a bank and placed it in the freezer of his refrigerator for safe-keeping until he could use it for "investment purposes," the details of which he declined to divulge.
He said he didn't realize the money in the freezer had been stolen along with "some rare and very valuable jewelry" from a third-floor room until he calmed down after finding his wife's body.
Ryan, who has been hard of hearing since birth, speaks loudly and wondered if someone might have overheard him talking about the investment he was planning to make. He said he now keeps all of his money in a bank.
The media reacted quickly to the billboard advertisement, which went up Tuesday, and to an ad he placed in yesterday's Post-Gazette that contained a different photo of his wife.
"The billboard photo is the one I carry around in my wallet," he said. "She posed for it at one of those glamour photography studios when she was 20 or 21. The other photo was taken after our daughter was born."
Ryan said he and his wife met at an Oakland hot dog shop when they were in their teens. They dated for several years and married in mid-1997.
"She quit her jobs so she could be a full-time mom," he said. "We both thought that was the best thing for her to do."
Ryan said his daughter knows her mother is dead.
"When I ask where her mommy is, she points to the sky and says 'heaven.' She looks more like her mother everyday. She loves to dance, just like her mother did. Sometimes she picks up the phone and pretends she's talking to her mother, and that's really hard on me.
"But it gives me the energy to do what I'm doing right now," he said.
Ryan, whose pizzeria is open seven days a week, said his mother, Barbara Ann Ryan, with whom he lives, and his in-laws, Jean and Charles Grimm of Hopewell, help him care for his daughter.
"I'm doing the best I can, but a child needs its mother," he said with tears in his eyes. "If someone had to die, I wish it had been me."
|
||||||||||||
