Appeals stretch 4 decades for a prisoner convicted on little police evidence

Associated Press

NEW KENSINGTON, Pa. (AP) — The four men who put Steve Szarewicz away for murder all changed their stories at one time or another, yet Szarewicz still sits behind bars. That’s where he has been for almost 43 years.

A jury convicted him of killing Billy Merriwether, 25, who was shot twice in the back of the head and once in the chest, his body left facedown off a country road in western Pennsylvania on a rainy February morning in 1981.

There were no fingerprints, no eyewitness testimony and no DNA evidence linking Szarewicz to the scene. Investigators never found the murder weapons. Instead, the case rested on the words of four jailhouse informants who all testified that Szarewicz confessed to them.

Three of the four recanted: one in an interview with a famed newspaper reporter; one in a written statement to defense investigators; and another to Szarewicz’s lawyer, who signed an affidavit recounting the exchange. Another inmate told the court the fourth witness against Szarewicz fabricated his story to settle a score.

Nevertheless, a Pittsburgh jury in 1983 found the informants’ testimony believable enough to convict Szarewicz, despite qualms they voiced to the judge about the lack of physical evidence.

Today the conviction is still on appeal, with Szarewicz asking the state Superior Court to reduce his life sentence to 10 to 20 years, effectively setting him free.

The Pennsylvania Innocence Project has taken a keen interest in the case, particularly because of how heavily prosecutors leaned on the jailhouse informants’ testimony. A national database of more than 3,400 exonerations since 1989 includes more than 200 in which jailhouse informants played a role in the wrongful convictions.

‘On the altar of a jury’

Prosecutors’ use of informants has undergone “some sea changes in the last 40 years,” driven by concerns about their reliability, said Marissa Boyers Bluestine with the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school.

“If you have a strong enough case by the prosecutor, they don’t want to use an informant, that’s not their ‘go-to’ evidence,” she said.

Complicating matters for Szarewicz, Pennsylvania has one of the nation’s strictest frameworks for criminal appeals and post-conviction procedures, said Liz DeLosa, a lawyer with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project who has spent years investigating Szarewicz’s case.

For instance, the state has no way to waive procedural issues, even in the face of “compelling evidence of actual innocence,” she said. Her organization believes there are reasons to question the integrity of the conviction and is considering whether to formally represent Szarewicz.

When courts do reverse convictions based on informant testimony, it’s usually because prosecutors made some agreement with the witness and didn’t reveal it, said professor Bruce Antkowiak, a lawyer at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and a former defense attorney and prosecutor.

“Our court system places the issue of credibility on the altar of a jury,” Antkowiak said. “And if a jury heard these witnesses and made the determination that they were truthful, appellate courts are loathe to make any change at all.”

A dead man’s final days: nervous and broke

Merriwether’s troubles were piling up when he was killed. Unemployed and living on public assistance, he was known as someone who “would fight at the drop of a hat,” an acquaintance told detectives at the time.

Three weeks before, a man who said Merriwether had bullied him stabbed Merriwether several times in a bar fight, landing him in the hospital. Merriwether himself was charged with beating a woman during a convenience store robbery. And there were reports that some guys in his New Kensington neighborhood with ties to organized crime were after him because they thought he had stolen from them. He was worried enough to spend part of his last days at target practice with a handgun.

Merriwether had trouble in his romantic life, too. Both he and his girlfriend were married to other people. And his girlfriend’s father — a now deceased local mobster named Mitch Roditis — was ticked off that Merriwether, who was Black, was dating his white daughter.

The day Merriwether was killed, a friend told police, he came to her house before dawn, nervous, broke and saying he needed $1,500 by 9 a.m.

Around 7 that morning, a dog walker about 23 miles (37 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh reported hearing a single blast that sounded like a gunshot. Moments later, three more rang out. A nearby road crew saw a car speed by with two men in it. They pulled off, then drove away, leaving Merriwether’s dead body behind.

A clean polygraph and a jury with questions

Prosecutors laid out a simple theory of the crime: it had been a $5,000 murder-for-hire mob hit. They argued Roditis, who was never charged, got Szarewicz and two other men to kill Merriwether over him dating Roditis’ daughter.

Szarewicz, who knew Merriwether from the neighborhood where they grew up, experienced a turbulent childhood after his father had died while he was in grade school. By the time he was accused of the killing at age 23, Szarewicz had an arrest record that included armed robbery, receiving stolen property, gun charges and drug offenses.

The murder case “was no prize,” the prosecutor, former Allegheny County Assistant District Attorney Chris Conrad, recalled in an interview this spring. “It wasn’t one where you walk in and you get confessions and fingerprints and just great physical evidence. There was no physical evidence. You had to fight to find a motive.”

A polygraph examiner concluded Szarewicz told the truth when he said he wasn’t involved in the murder, but polygraphs aren’t admissible in court. Still, Szarewicz says he would take another one today.

In court, he testified that he was staying with one of his sisters and her boyfriend just outside Greensburg, Pennsylvania, some 30 miles (48 kilometers) away when Merriwether was killed. The couple backed him up.

But retired steelworker Vince Rattay, a former member of the jury who is now in his mid-90s, recalled that Szarewicz’s attitude on the stand hurt his defense. “Maybe it would have been better if they didn’t have him as a witness,” Rattay said in a phone interview in May. “He was cocky.”

And jurors had another qualm about the case: they asked the trial judge if they could convict someone without physical evidence. He said they would have to be more specific.

When the guilty verdict came down, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, Szarewicz said: “God in heaven knows I am innocent.”

A long trail of appeals going nowhere

Szarewicz has steadfastly maintained his innocence, launching one appeal after another, sometimes handled by lawyers but often representing himself. He has hit dead ends over and over, losing a string of lower court decisions and being turned away by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Much of Szarewicz’s focus has been on the jailhouse informants, who detectives housed together for a time shortly before Szarewicz was charged. Three of those four witnesses were related to one another.

In September of 1982, witness Dave Cannon wrote a letter saying it wouldn’t be right for Szarewicz to go to prison and that Cannon had been willing to testify only because he thought it could help him get out of jail. Three days later, Cannon met with a defense investigator and said Szarewicz never told him anything about being involved with Merriwether’s murder.

At trial, Cannon changed his story again, testifying that he wrote the letter because he was afraid of Szarewicz. Contacted by The Associated Press by phone in March, Cannon stood by his statement that Szarewicz confessed to him inside the Allegheny County Jail.

“The bottom line is he did it,” Cannon said. “He thought it made him look (like) a big wheel. I thought he was a punk.”

And if he were asked to testify again? “I won’t cooperate at all,” Cannon said. “It’s been too long. I now have memory problems.”

Key witnesses recant their stories

Eight months after Szarewicz’s conviction, another one of the informants who testified against him, Ernie Bevilacqua, wrote in an affidavit: “I lied about everything I said about Steve and I would go to court to help him and to say what really happened.” He later reiterated the sentiment in an interview with investigative reporter Bill Moushey in the visiting room of Western State Penitentiary. Moushey’s notes say Bevilacqua told him “it was all a big set up from the start.”

Years later, when a court-appointed investigator asked Bevilacqua about the exchange, Bevilacqua changed his story again. Like Cannon, he said he recanted only because he was afraid of Szarewicz, his friends and fellow prisoners.

Approached by an AP reporter at his home in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in April, Bevilacqua said he also has memory problems and ordered the reporter away. He tore up a letter seeking comment and called police to complain.

The third informant who flip-flopped in Szarewicz’s case was Rick Bowen.

About six months after Szarewicz was convicted, Bowen approached defense attorney Pat Thomassey in the Westmoreland County courthouse. Thomassey later signed an affidavit saying Bowen “indicated to me that, in fact, he had lied in the case against Steven Szarewicz in order to make a deal for himself and to avoid being prosecuted for various crimes.” Bowen, who died in Missouri in 1997, later denied the exchange.

The fourth informant to testify against Szarewicz, Kenny Knight, did not respond to multiple messages left with family members or to a note left at his home in April. When police first interviewed him about Merriwether’s murder, he didn’t implicate Szarewicz, even when asked. He said later he feared Szarewicz and that he withheld information because he did not want to get involved.

At a post-trial hearing, Knight invoked his Fifth Amendment constitutional right to avoid self-incrimination and refused to testify.

Witness credibility was ‘low as a snake’s belly’

Thomas Fitzgerald, the lead detective in Merriwether’s murder, said in April he is convinced the informants told the truth when they implicated Szarewicz.

“It’s the jury’s decision,” Fitzgerald said. “Bring back the same jury and ask them again.”

But in a 1992 court proceeding — some nine years after Szarewicz’s conviction — a judge declared the witnesses’ credibility “about as low as a snake’s belly.” Prosecutor Maria Copetas did not defend them.

“There is an extraordinary amount of evidence on the record which indicates that in fact (they) have recanted at some point, and then recanted their recantations, and then refused to testify in court,” Copetas told the judge.

That was around the time, Szarewicz said, that his defense lawyer offered a guilty plea to third-degree murder, even though Szarewicz still maintained his innocence.

“At least I would have had a life,” he later wrote to the AP. But he says the district attorney declined.

Prosecutors and the courts stand firm

Allegheny County prosecutors have long fought to uphold Szarewicz’s conviction, and the courts have agreed.

In the most recent rulings, Allegheny County Judge Kevin Sasinoski said Szarewicz’s most recent claims weren’t sufficient to win a post-trial appeal. Szarewicz said he had discovered post-trial evidence that Bowen got a deal from prosecutors in exchange for his testimony and that Bevilacqua had changed his story to a court-appointed investigator.

Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala’s office subsequently told an appeals court that “recantation evidence is ‘notoriously unreliable’, and if it involves an admission of perjury, ‘it is the least reliable source of proof.’”

Szarewicz also recently filed his first clemency petition, but even he acknowledges his claim of actual innocence may be a problem. The Pardons Board likes to see contrition.

The Innocence Project wrote Zappala a 14-page letter in September 2021 that outlined their concerns and asked if prosecutors would review the case and open their files. The office’s response was that the matter would be reviewed.

Zappala and his team declined multiple requests for comment from the AP.

Szarewicz’s sister, Suzy Patton, says she would welcome him to live in her Pittsburgh area home if he ever gets released. She believes he is innocent and thinks he would not be in prison if the family had money.

These days Szarewicz spends time working on his own case and sometimes helping other inmates with theirs. He has a janitorial job that pays about $75 a month, walks regularly and participates in Bible study.

And from his shared cell at the State Correctional Institution-Houtzdale, he hopes for a break.

“If I did not have my faith, I am sure I would most likely not be alive to fight another day,” Szarewicz wrote a few years ago. “Is there anybody out there who is appalled by this clear abuse of the system? If so, help, please?”