At Scher retrial, focus is on affair
Prosecutor says doctor murdered his friend in 1976 to marry his wife.
MONTROSE, Pa. - It seemed that everyone at Montrose General Hospital knew about the affair between the doctor and the nurse.
Not that Stephen Scher and Patricia Dillon took any steps to conceal it, witnesses testified yesterday. In fact, the jury was told, they seemed to flaunt it.
Scher wanted to marry Patricia, but she was already wed - to his best friend. So Scher, desperate to break up the marriage, pointed the muzzle of his 16-gauge shotgun at Martin Dillon "and blew away half his heart," a prosecutor told the Susquehanna County Court jury.
Scher, now 67, is charged with killing Dillon, a 30-year-old lawyer, while the two were skeet shooting in rural northeastern Pennsylvania on June 2, 1976. Scher maintains that Dillon confronted him about the affair and was shot accidentally as the pair struggled over a shotgun.
Scher was convicted in 1997 of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. An appeals court ordered a new trial in 2004.
Though Scher and Patricia Dillon were already carrying on "an open and notorious affair," Scher wanted more, Senior Deputy Attorney General Patrick Blessington told jurors at the opening of the retrial.
"He wanted to replace Marty Dillon," Blessington said.
The prosecutor called numerous witnesses to testify about the romantic entanglement between Scher and Patricia Dillon, many of them nurses who worked with the couple at Montrose General Hospital.
"They whispered, they made googly eyes, they just acted very inappropriately in a work setting and it made me extremely embarrassed," said Ann Hart, a nurse.
Defense attorney Joshua Lock agreed with Blessington that the affair was known to everyone - and suggested that gave Dillon just as much motive for wanting to harm Scher as the other way around.
Dillon's death "was an accident occasioned by a struggle over the weapon," Lock said.
Police initially ruled the shooting an accident, but reopened the case in the early 1990s under pressure from Dillon's family. After a second autopsy, Scher was charged with murder.
Scher, who married Patricia Dillon in 1978 and later moved to North Carolina, claimed for more than 20 years that Dillon tripped and accidentally shot himself while chasing a porcupine.
Lock said yesterday that if Scher had really plotted to murder Dillon, he would have come up with a better plan and a more believable cover story - and would have been far more discreet about his relationship with Patricia.
Prosecutors contend that Scher was jealous of Dillon and would do whatever it took to get him out of the way.
Scher and Patricia Dillon now are divorced.