In the late evening of 29 March 1977, the widow Jennie E. Barr was found dead in the first floor den of her home by a neighbor. She had been brutally murdered by being beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled.
The community of Tremont, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, was thrown into a panic. The murder had taken place in a quiet neighborhood, less than a block from the main highway, Route 209, that to the west, went through Tower City, Lykens, Elizabethville, to the Susquehanna River at Millersburg. To the east, via the same route, is Pottsville. Route 209 is represented on the map above by “Main Street” and Crescent Street is marked as “N Cres St.”
The District Attorney, who was running for a third term, promised an arrest and conviction. But, for four years, no one was charged with the crime. As happened later (up through 1979), three additional widowed women in the Lykens valley area were found murdered under similar conditions. None of those murders were solved.
Then in 1981, with the District Attorney’s re-election in question, a suspect was arrested and put on trial. But like the murder that took place in Gratz in 1979, the man who was charged was acquitted.
What follows here is a “Table of Contents” for 12 posts chronicling the story of the murder and the trial as reported in some area newspapers.
In this case, he trial of the individual charged will not be included in this series, but will be presented tomorrow as a summary post on that event.
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Police Probe Homicide in Tremont Area
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Tremont Woman Found Murdered
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Funeral Notice for Jennie E. Barr
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Woman’s Murder Termed ‘Maniacal”
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Services for Woman Who Was Strangled, Assaulted
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Burglary Ruled Out in Slaying
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District Attorney Assures Residents Perpetrator Will Be Found
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Obituary of Jennie E. Barr
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D. A. Says Motive Not Burglary in Murder
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Tremont in State of Shock
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Citizens Patrol Tremont Streets
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Estate of Jennie E. Barr
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Jennie E. Barr was 78 when she was murdered.
News clippings are from Newspapers.com. Map cut from GoogleMaps.com.
Corrections and additional information should be added as comments to this post.