LANCASTER - More than seven hours after police began questioning a man suspected of killing six family members last year, he suddenly confessed, a detective testified yesterday.
Detective Joseph Edgell of the East Lampeter Township Police Department said he and a state trooper had been interrogating Jesse D. "Jay" Wise, 22, off and on when the suspect abruptly changed his uncooperative tone.
"He put his head down on his folded arms on the table," Edgell said on the first day of a hearing into a request by Wise's lawyer to have the alleged confession thrown out.
Over the next 45 minutes, the detective said, Wise admitted killing all six victims inside their Leola home - his grandmother, two aunts, two cousins and an uncle - and described in a soft monotone how he did it.
Afterward, Edgell said, he asked the suspect if confessing had been a relief.
"Some relief. It's not really going to kick in until later on," Edgell recalled Wise saying.
The details of the confession, which could provide a motive for the grisly slayings over the Palm Sunday weekend in 2006, were not released yesterday. Lancaster County Judge David Ashworth said he would rule later on whether to make the contents public.
Wise's lawyer, John A. Kenneff, is arguing that police lacked probable cause to arrest Wise when they stopped the vehicle he was driving minutes after he left the scene of the slayings. Wise was initially detained on a bench warrant from a neighboring county.
Kenneff also contends that the interrogation lasted so long - beginning on the afternoon of the day the bodies were found and lasting through the night and into the next morning - that any confession was not "knowing and voluntary."
Police said Wise was given several breaks in the questioning and provided with water, food and cigarettes. He spent about three hours in a holding cell before returning to the windowless interview room at about 7 a.m. the next day for additional interrogation and was arraigned on homicide charges that afternoon.
The victims were found April 12 in the basement of the home Wise shared with them on Main Street in a tiny Pennsylvania Dutch farm country village. The defendant's teenage girlfriend testified at a preliminary hearing in May that Wise confessed to her.
Wise also is charged with the attempted homicide of his grandfather, Jessie L. Wise, who was in New York at the time of the slayings. Authorities contend that the defendant was on his way to kill the older man when his vehicle broke down along the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Jessie L. Wise, 66, said that 10 months after the slayings, he is no closer to understanding how they could have happened, much less that someone he raised from infancy might have done it.
"I'm just trying to keep myself busy. I'm on the job every day," he told the Associated Press. "That helps me, keeping myself busy. My hardest moment's when I stop."
Jessie Wise said he has never returned to his Leola home and plans to sell it. He also said he has not had any contact with his grandson since his arrest, but he is opposed to the defendant being sentenced to death if he is convicted.
"There's been too much bloodshed," he said. "I don't want to see that."
Assistant District Attorney Craig Stedman declined to comment on the grandfather's opposition to a possible death penalty. The hearing was scheduled to resume today, and Stedman said it could be several weeks before the judge rules.
Jesse D. Wise quit a supermarket job shortly before the killings and had recently been arrested for burglary, assault and other charges. Police said he took his victims' cash, checks or credit cards and went shopping for clothes after the killings.
"He was just a real respectful kid - anything his grandma told him to do, he would do it, no back talk or nothing," Jessie L. Wise said. "We never heard a cuss word."
The victims were the suspect's grandmother, Emily Wise, 64, Jessie L. Wise's wife; aunts Wanda Wise, 45, and Agnes A. Wise, 43; cousins Skyler Wise, 19, and Chance Wise, 5; and an uncle, Jessie James Wise, 17.
Police found the bodies, wrapped in sheets and blankets, on the basement floor. Elsewhere in the house, they found evidence of the brutality of the deaths - blood on walls and ceilings, bone fragments, and a bloody, makeshift metal club.
They were buried in Danville, Va., and also had roots in New York, where Jessie L. Wise operates an excavating business and is active with the Federation of Black Cowboys, a club of urban horse enthusiasts. *