Accused Bucks County cold-case murderer waives hearing

A Bucks County man charged with his wife’s murder nearly four decades after her disappearance waived his right to a preliminary hearing Wednesday and is poised to face trial.

William Korzon, 76, is accused of killing his wife, Gloria, in 1981, a homicide that had confounded investigators in Warrington Township for years. His attorney, Keith Williams, said Korzon’s choice to skip the hearing at District Court was a “wise decision.”

“We wouldn’t have learned much more from testimony than what was in the criminal complaint,” Williams said Wednesday outside the courthouse in Jamison. “He did not admit guilt today; he only made a tactical decision.”

Williams said Korzon’s case is unusual for the dearth of information available to him about the investigation being built by prosecutors. As a condition of the waiver, Williams requested that the District Attorney’s Office expedite turning over its evidence to him by Thursday, including transcripts from the investigative grand jury that helped charge Korzon.

Those transcripts, which would provide extensive context to the charges filed by the District Attorney’s Office, remained under seal on Wednesday, but may be made public in coming days.

“The more information we have, the better decision we can make for Mr. Korzon in the future,” Williams said.

The case was reopened in 2018, when detectives from Warrington brought the evidence they had been compiling for nearly 40 years to District Attorney Matthew Weintraub.

Korzon was taken into custody last month at his home in Central Pennsylvania. As he was led into his arraignment, he insisted to reporters that Gloria Korzon had moved to Florida in the 1980s and that he had done nothing to harm her.

But investigators, in court filings, paint a much darker picture.

Gloria Korzon was declared legally dead by a Bucks County judge in 1997. She was 38 when she left the home she shared with her husband for the last time, according to the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest. Her body was never recovered.

In interviews with prosecutors this year, William Korzon admitted to “having battered Gloria" throughout their 13-year marriage, during which he was the subject of multiple domestic-violence investigations and a short-lived protection from abuse order, the arrest affidavit said.

He also admitted to forging her signature on two checks, and to filing their joint income tax return after her disappearance, the affidavit said. Korzon did this, he told prosecutors, to access her money.

During testimony in front of the grand jury, Korzon asked a prosecutor whether investigators had “found the body.” It proved to be a fateful question, helping to form the foundation of the charges he faces.

Korzon is tentatively scheduled to be arraigned in Doylestown on June 21.