STROUDSBURG - When state police Sgt. Douglas Shook looked at the photos taken after the July 2008 crash in Pocono Twp. that supposedly killed Betty Jean Schirmer, the image of loose change sitting in a cupholder "jumped out" at him.
"If the vehicle crashed into the guard rail at a high rate of speed, coins aren't going to stay in that area," he testified in the Monroe County murder trial of the victim's husband, Arthur Burton Schirmer, 64, on Thursday. "This reinforces that it was a low-speed impact."
But Mr. Schirmer, the former pastor of Reeders United Methodist Church, claimed he hit a guard rail on Route 715 at between 45 and 55 mph. He is accused of leading authorities to believe the impact caused the severe head trauma to his wife that would kill her within 24 hours of the early morning crash on July 15, 2008.
Mr. Schirmer was arrested in September 2010 on charges of criminal homicide and tampering with or fabricating physical evidence and accused of beating his wife to death with an unknown metal object, loading her into their PT Cruiser and staging the crash on Route 715.
He is also awaiting trial in Lebanon County for the 1999 murder of his first wife, Jewel Schirmer. Investigators hold that Mr. Schirmer killed her as well and made her death appear like an accidental fall down a flight of stairs.
After he reviewed photos of the Schirmers' PT Cruiser taken after the crash, Sgt. Shook, who has spent the last eight of his nearly 20-year career with state police in its collision analysis and reconstruction unit, found the damage consistent with an "extremely low-speed impact."
"When you look at the damage sustained to this car, everyone should be OK within the passenger compartment," he said, adding later that "this is by far the least-damaged vehicle I have ever been involved in due to a fatality."
Sgt. Shook said he has investigated crashes between cars and pedestrians that left the vehicles with more severe damage than that of the Schirmers' PT Cruiser.
Mr. Schirmer claimed the crash occurred after he swerved out of the way of a deer.
But the maneuver did not leave any yaw marks, caused when a turn is taken at too high a speed and a vehicle's wheels slide, in the PT Cruiser's wake.
Nor did the car disturb the grass it drove over between the road and guard rail, Sgt. Shook said.
Finally, Sgt. Shook said if the PT Cruiser hit the guard rail at the speed Mr. Schirmer quoted, the car would have driven entirely over the impediment.
It only displaced one of the beams supporting the rail about one foot, authorities said.
Sgt. Shook's analysis of the crash ultimately concluded the vehicle could not have been driving faster than 25 mph.
In his analysis of the vehicle photos, retired State Police Trooper Phillip Barletto said that a small spiderweb crack in the vehicle's windshield could not have been caused by the supposed impact of Mrs. Schirmer's head.
"Simply put, this crash is so minor I'm not grasping the whole thing of the injury, how it occurs to begin with. ... It doesn't make any sense," he said.
The bulk of Mr. Barletto's testimony, which spanned two days, focused on the former forensic investigator's main area of expertise - blood stain analysis.
At the time of Mrs. Schirmer's death, she and her husband lived in the parsonage at the Reeders church, where Mr. Schirmer served as pastor at the time.
Mr. Barletto reviewed photos and pointed out a trail of blood - some visible, some illuminated with a chemical solution called Luminol - that began near the rear corner of the parsonage's garage near an exterior door and the top of a flight of stairs leading into the home's basement.
The trail led around the area where the PT Cruiser would have been parked and ended near the area where its passenger side door would have been.
"It all appears to line up right to it," Mr. Barletto said.
Blood pooled in the rear passenger-side floor of the car - over which Mrs. Schirmer's head would have rested in her reclined front seat - indicated to Mr. Barletto that she was in the car for an extended period of time after suffering her injury.
That and a series of blood stains in the front passenger compartment that were inconsistent with his analysis of the crash led Mr. Barletto "to only one conclusion: that the bleeding event took place before the crash and she was entered into the vehicle," he testified.
It was not clear to investigators where the trail of blood leading to the car began, as the basement stairs did not hold any blood evidence and testing was not possible outside the garage's rear door due to the roughly four months that passed between her death and a December 2008 search of the church property.
What was clear to the blood-stain expert was that some of the blood had been cleaned up, which required state police to use Luminol to discern the latent stains.
"You can almost see where it has the wipe marks in it. ... It's evidence of clean-up," Mr. Barletto said.
The trial is scheduled to resume at 9 a.m. today with a possible cross-examination of Sgt. Shook by Mr. Schirmer's attorney, Brandon Reish.
Contact the writer: domalley@timesshamrock.com, @domalleytt on Twitter