What connection does the Helen Horn murder in 1979 in Gratz, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, have to famed, true-crime writer Joseph Wambaugh?
Helen E. Horn was murdered at her home in Gratz. To this day, the crime remains unsolved. Previously on this blog, a series of posts described the murder and a trial that followed in which the accused was acquitted.
See:
The Murder of Helen Horn in Gratz – An Unsolved Crime from 1979
The chief investigator in the Horn murder case was Sgt. Joseph VanNort of the Pennsylvania State Police. Following his acquittal, Gary Rank sued the State Police for planting evidence, and won a judgment of the court against VanNort’s estate and two other officers of the State Police.
Joseph Wambaugh‘s book, Echoes in the Darkness, was about the murder of school teacher Susan Reinert, of Upper Merion, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and the disappearance and presumed murder of her two children. While it is not known where the murder(s) took place, Susan Reinert‘s body was found in a car in Dauphin County. Because of where the body was discovered, Sgt. Joseph VanNort was put in charge of the investigation.
Wambaugh’s book paints an interesting picture of the transition from the old gumshoe methods of crime investigation to more forensic/scientific methods. VanNort, who died during the Reinert investigation, was a proponent of the older ways of crime-solving.
An autopsy of Susan Reinert was performed, but that autopsy left many unanswered questions. When an second autopsy was ordered, it was discovered that her remains had been released to a funeral home for cremation – without a hold placed on those remains by VanNort or others at the State Police. Thus valuable evidence was destroyed because of someone’s incompetence.
In 1992, the Horn case and the Reinert case were connected by the Harrisburg Patriot-News who reported that the key investigators in the Horn case were found responsible for “falsifying evidence” in that case – and that the same persons had investigated the Reinert case.
From the Allentown Morning Call, 21 April 1992:
Controversy clouds Reinert murder case
HARRISBURG (AP) – Key investigators in the Susan Reinert murder investigation were accused of falsifying evidence at an unrelated murder scene just months before the Reinert case began, published reports said yesterday.
The Patriot-News newspapers of Harrisburg reported that the investigators were accused of planting the fingerprints of Gary Rank at the murder scene of Helen Elizabeth Horn. Horn was found strangled and beaten to death in her Dauphin County home March 22, 1979.
In 1982, a jury ordered retired Police Cpl. John Balshy, Trooper Dean Ship and the state of the late Sgt. Joseph VanNort to pay $55,000 in damages to Rank, the published reports said. The U.S. Middle District Court also ordered the trio to pay almost $97,000 to Rank’s lawyers.
Rank was acquitted in the murder.
The newspaper reported earlier this month that in 1981 VanNort was offered $50,00 by author Joseph Wambaugh for information on the Reinert murder case for his book “Echoes in the Darkness.”
Jay Smith, a former suburban Philadelphia high school principal, was convicted in the murders of Reinert, a school teacher, and her two children.
William Bradfield, Smith’s co-conspirator and a teacher at his school, was convicted in a separate trial and is serving a life sentence.
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The Helen E. Horn murder case remains unsolved to this day! That murder may also be connected to three other unsolved murders of elderly widows occurring about the same time in the Lykens Valley area – one in Tremont, one in Millersburg, and one in Lykens. It might be time to re-open all four cases or at the very least to catalog what evidence remains from those investigations and see if DNA can be used to find the perpetrator(s).
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News article from Newspapers.com.
Corrections and additional information should be added as comments to this post.