HARRISBURG -- House lawmakers heard testimony yesterday on a bill that would require hotels and other lodging establishments to perform background checks on job applicants who, if hired, would have access to room keys.

The bill is spurred by a Mt. Lebanon couple whose grown daughter was murdered in her suburban Chicago hotel room by a hotel handyman in 1996.

The couple, Sol and Lin Toder, said that they'll try to get each state to pass a law as a way to protect other people from the same fate as their daughter, 33-year-old Nan Toder.

"What else can we do?" Lin Toder, 70, said after the hearing in front of the House Tourism and Recreational Development Committee.

The bill would require lodging establishments to consider the results of a background check in its hiring decision, but would not establish criteria for how to employ the data.

Lawmakers wondered whether such a law would unfairly stigmatize someone who was arrested for theft 30 years before but had been clean since. And they asked what kinds of benchmarks could be used to keep certain past offenders from being hired.

"There is no right or wrong answer," replied Kendra Ruhl, who chairs the Pennsylvania Tourism and Lodging Association's human resources committee.

Ruhl, a personnel director for Hershey Entertainment & Resorts Co., testified against the bill, saying that her company performs such searches anyway. But such a law would unfairly burden Pennsylvania establishments by forcing them into an expensive, state-by-state search through criminal records that are sometimes incomplete, or kept only at the county level, she said.

A better strategy would be promoting traveler safety or encouraging Congress to adopt a federal law, she said.

Jason B. Morris, president of Background Information Services Inc., of Cleveland, testified yesterday that a background check on Christopher Richee, Toder's killer, would have revealed that the charges against him included stalking and harassing a witness.

Checking criminal records in the county where a subject lived, worked and went to school is likely to turn up evidence of a criminal history if one exists, and Credit Bureau records can weed out false Social Security numbers, Morris said.

Toder, of North Miami Beach, Fla., was in the Chicago area training to be a floral company salesperson. Richee, who was convicted of her murder in 2002, is serving a life sentence.