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Court upholds Indiana man's death sentence
Saturday, July 28, 2001 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The only person that an Indiana County jury has placed among the 243 convicted killers on Pennsylvania's Death Row is going to stay there.
Ronald Lee Weiss, 53 -- found guilty of clubbing a teen-age girl to death 21 years ago, then hiding the body so well that it went undiscovered for five months -- was fairly convicted and justly sentenced to death, the state Supreme Court says.
The decision, filed Tuesday, the day after Weiss' birthday, is the answer to arguments presented to justices almost three years ago -- arguments in which Weiss' attorneys insisted that there wasn't enough evidence to back the conviction, a change of venue should have been granted, a pair of witnesses should have been barred and the prosecutor's closing argument went outside the rules in swaying jurors.
Yesterday, victim Barbara Bruzda's mother, Saltsburg-area resident Roxie Bruzda, was low-key about the court's decision. Weiss deserved to die, she said. "But I would've accepted whatever the decision was," she said.
Barbara Bruzda, a 16-year-old junior at Saltsburg High School, disappeared in October 1978, the night she was seen playing pool with Weiss inside Joe's Place, the Bruzda family's bar in Tunnelton, a village in Indiana County, 35 miles east of Pittsburgh.
A hiker found her body along a back road, badly decomposed and wrapped in a quilt.
Police -- with no witnesses, no weapon and no fingerprints -- charged Weiss in 1985. But their case folded before trial when an Indiana County judge ruled that prosecutors couldn't use key evidence provided by Weiss' common-law wife that the quilt came from his car and that the inside of the vehicle was spattered with blood.
By 1997, though, the law on spousal testimony was loosened, leaving the state attorney general's office free to use the testimony, which was bolstered by claims from jailhouse snitches that Weiss confessed to them while doing time in state prison.
Former inmate Samuel Tribuiani told a preliminary hearing that Weiss said Barbara Bruzda threatened to go to her parents "and tell the parents about sex parties and supposedly dope. ..." According to Tribuiani, Weiss claimed he "whacked her with a bar."
Weiss, who tried to implicate two brothers-in-law, had one leg and often walked with a crutch. He testified at trial that he'd never stage that kind of attack -- and suggested he was physically incapable.
But under cross-examination, Weiss told Deputy Attorney General J. Scott Robinette that he was doing time for bludgeoning a man with a tire iron.
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