A retired state police forensic investigator's testimony Wednesday in the trial of a former pastor accused of murdering his wife could prove damning for its rebuttal of the 64-year-old man's claim that his wife died in a car crash in 2008.
Earlier in the day, however, Arthur Burton Schirmer's attorney, Brandon Reish, called into question the methods of another state police forensic investigator, who photographed latent blood stains in the parsonage garage at Reeders United Methodist Church. Investigators have put forth as proof that Betty Jean Schirmer suffered her fatal head injuries in her and her husband's home before entering their PT Cruiser just before 2 a.m. on July 15, 2008.
Mr. Schirmer, who served as pastor at the Reeders church in Jackson Twp. at the time of his second wife's death, is accused of bludgeoning the woman to death with an unknown metal object before putting her in the vehicle and staging the crash on Route 715 as part of a cover story to explain her death.
Mr. Schirmer is also awaiting trial in Lebanon County for the 1999 murder of his first wife, Jewel Schirmer. The charges in that case arose out of the Monroe County investigation and claim that Mr. Schirmer misled authorities to believe Jewel Schirmer died in a fall down stairs in the parsonage of Bethany United Methodist Church in Lebanon, where he served as pastor at the time.
Monroe County First Assistant District Attorney Michael Mancuso focused his questioning of the eighth witness in the trial, retired state Trooper Phillip Barletto, a 14-year veteran of the Troop N forensic services unit, on the blood stains in the PT Cruiser, which Pocono Twp. police photographed the night of the crash.
The "most important photograph within the vehicle," as Mr. Barletto described it, depicted various blood stains on the passenger seat.
What made the photo so crucial were the blood stains on the seat cushion, which were "passive stains," meaning they fell from an active blood source - the wound on Mrs. Schirmer's head - spurred only by gravity.
"If she's seated in the seat, how do you get blood on the seat?" Mr. Barletto said. "To me, this is obvious as can be - the blood source was above the seat, it dripped onto the seat and she sat down in it. ... There's no other explanation for it."
The stains on the seat cushion also appeared faded, which indicated to Mr. Barletto that some kind of pressure had been applied to them, like the weight of a person sitting on them, to force rapid absorption either into the person's clothing or the seat cushion itself.
"Something came into contact with those stains after they were deposited on the surface," he said.
Monroe County President Judge Margherita Patti Worthington called a recess in the trial shortly after 5 p.m. and Mr. Mancuso indicated his direct examination of Mr. Barletto would resume this morning.
Earlier in the day, Trooper John Corrigan, an active Troop N forensics investigator, explained to Mr. Mancuso his methods in photographing the latent blood stains in the Schirmers' garage.
State police forensic investigators also documented visible blood stains in the garage during a search in December 2008, but Trooper Corrigan handled those stains invisible to the naked eye.
The charges against Mr. Schirmer include tampering with or fabricating physical evidence, which accuses the former pastor in part of attempting to clean up blood left in the garage, which tests later found 20 trillion times more likely to have belonged to Mrs. Schirmer than someone unrelated to her.
Though someone may clean up a blood stain, residue left behind can be illuminated by applying a chemical solution called Luminol, which reacts with elements in the blood to produce a bluish glow if performed in a darkened room.
To photograph that glow and document proof of the invisible stain's existence, Trooper Corrigan fixed his camera to a tripod, darkened the garage and set the camera to a 30-second exposure to allow the glow of the Luminol-treated stains to reach the camera's sensor.
But the resulting images show nothing more than blue spots on a black field, so Trooper Corrigan - as he is trained to - would take a second, identical photo of the frame in standard lighting at a normal shutter speed with the camera's flash activated.
Later, Trooper Corrigan would take the two images and layer the Luminol photo over the control photo using Adobe Photoshop. He then would make the Luminol photo slightly transparent so that the blue spots indicating latent blood stains were visible as well as a dimmed version of the control photograph in order to provide context for the stains.
But during cross-examination, Mr. Reish pointed out that the focal points and depth of field in Trooper Corrigan's Luminol photos were different than those of the control photos.
The result, Mr. Reish contended, was that the out-of-focus Luminol photos portrayed an inaccurate, oversized representation of the stains' glow.
"That's the only way I can do it, sir," Trooper Corrigan said at one point, citing his training on the method.
The trial is scheduled to resume at 9 a.m. today with the remainder of Mr. Barletto's testimony.
Contact the writer: domalley@timesshamrock.com, @domalleytt on Twitter