Brother of woman accused in church death testifies

Four days before her arrest on murder charges, Mary Jane Fonder went for a drive.

She did not take her own car that Friday in late March. Police investigators had towed it two days earlier.

So Fonder turned to her brother, Edward, for his green Honda Civic. Thirty-three miles later, without saying where she had been, she returned to the home they shared in Kintnersville, Edward Fonder testified yesterday in Bucks County Court.

Prosecutors say Mary Jane Fonder's mission was obvious: Knowing police were closing in on her for a murder at her rural church, she had gone to fling the weapon into Lake Nockamixon.

Fonder, 66, was arrested April 1, charged with first-degree murder in the Jan. 23 slaying of Rhonda Smith. Smith, 42, was fatally shot in the head while answering phones at Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Springfield Township, where both women were members.

Authorities say Fonder was jealous of the financial support and attention her congregation was giving Smith, who struggled with mental illness.

The arrest came three days after a young boy fishing with his father found Fonder's .38-caliber revolver in shallow water along the Lake Nockamixon bank. That discovery came one day after Fonder's drive in the Honda.

Fonder was charged after police ballistics tests tied the bullet that killed Smith to Fonder's gun.

But just how the gun got into the lake and how long it had been there is disputed. Mary Jane Fonder has told authorities that she ditched the gun in the lake many years earlier.

Yesterday, an analytical chemist testified that the gun probably had been submerged for no longer than two months - and certainly no longer than two years - based on the rusting found.

Buttressing that testimony was Edward Fonder's account of the find he made a week after his sister's arrest. He was about to get his car's oil changed when something by the floor mat caught his eye.

"I saw a gleam of sunlight on metal," he testified. "It looked like a bullet fragment."

It was, and ballistics tests have since linked that fragment to Mary Jane Fonder's gun. Edward Fonder, 70, said his sister had never before borrowed his car.

His testimony came on a dramatic afternoon in which the loved ones of victim and suspect followed one another to the witness stand.

Rhonda Smith's father, Francis, said he never had met Mary Jane Fonder before the slaying; he didn't go to church with his wife and daughter.

But the retired railroad worker testified that Fonder all but forced herself on the grieving parents. It started with her sympathy card, sent Jan. 31.

"That should have been me in the ground instead of Rhonda," Fonder wrote in the card. ". . . This never should have happened. Anyone could have been there that day."

After the shooting, Francis Smith said, he began going to church with his wife. Fonder sat at their table at church meals, he said.

After one service, Smith said, Fonder gripped his hand, looked him in the eye and said, "I still see her face in front of me."

By March 12, police had already told Fonder she was a suspect when she called the Smiths, insisting on bringing them an apple pie. Noticing her shabby shoes, Smith said, his wife gave Fonder two pairs of their daughter's.

Fonder wore a pair of those shoes to her formal arraignment. Standing in her alleged victim's white sneakers, she pleaded not guilty.