Board weighing life term

HARRISBURG Pennsylvania's Board of Pardons opted Friday to make no immediate decision in the case of an 88-year-old woman who has been jailed for nearly half her life for masterminding the killing of a doctor four decades ago.

The four-member board took Lois Farquharson's request "under advisement," essentially giving it more time to review interviews, testimony, and arguments presented in the case, PennLive reported.

Farquharson, a psychiatrist, was sentenced to life without parole in 1974 for masterminding the shooting death of Leon Weingrad, a colleague at the old Philadelphia State Hospital, known as Byberry.

Farquharson's then-lover, Gloria Burnette, who admitted fatally shooting Weingrad in a parking area outside Society Hill Towers in Philadelphia on Aug. 29, 1971, served 20 years and was released.

Former District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham, who prosecuted the case in 1974 as an assistant district attorney, told PennLive recently that Farquharson had never admitted guilt.

In 1989, The Inquirer reported that Farquharson acknowledged a share of responsibility for the Weingrad killing. She insisted that she did not instigate it, but that she failed to intervene when Burnette showed her a gun and vowed to shoot Weingrad.

Weingrad, a staff doctor at Byberry, disapproved of the relationship between Farquharson and Burnette, and considered Farquharson professionally incompetent. He made his views known to the women and at the hospital.

Farquharson and Burnette were sharing an apartment at Society Hill Towers, and Weingrad and his family lived in the complex as well.