Commonwealth v. Ritter
| Citation | 13 Pa. D. & C. 285 |
| Decision Date | 27 March 1930 |
| Docket Number | 129 |
| Parties | Commonwealth v. Ritter |
| Court | Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania |
Murder: determining degree and fixing penalty on plea of guilty.
Vincent A. Carroll, Assistant District Attorney, for Commonwealth.
Louis F. McCabe and Edward A. Kelly, for defendant.
The defendant, Willard A. Ritter, pleaded guilty to an indictment charging murder. The case is before the court to determine the degree of the crime, and, under the provisions of the Act of May 14, 1925, P. L. 759, to fix the penalty if it should appear that the defendant committed murder of the first degree.
The hearing of the testimony revealed, briefly, the following facts:
The defendant, Willard A. Ritter, is thirty-eight years old. He lived in Norwood, Delaware County, Pennsylvania, was a painter by trade, and for a time was in the real estate business; subsequently, he conducted a hotel or apartment-house, known as the White Horse Hotel, on the Chester Pike. He was married twenty-two years ago and has five children, the oldest twenty and the youngest nine years of age, the two oldest children being married. His wife is living and testified on his behalf at the hearing.
Except for the fact that he would occasionally indulge in drink, he seems to have lived on reasonably happy terms with his wife and family until the year 1924. At that time he and his wife became socially intimate with Mr. and Mrs. Thomas J. C. Kennard, the two men having become interested together in some real estate transactions. The two couples saw each other very frequently, sometimes daily, playing cards, dancing and going on trips together. Gradually there developed a growing intimacy between the defendant and Mrs. Kennard, and while the testimony does not indicate exactly when meretricious relations between them began, it would appear that they started about four years ago. Mrs. Ritter expostulated with Mrs. Kennard concerning the matter, but to no avail, and on two occasions there were altercations between Mr. Kennard and the defendant, in which the defendant was beaten. The defendant quarreled with the brother and mother of Mrs. Kennard, and would alternately threaten to do away with the whole family and then apologize for his attitude.
Mr. and Mrs. Kennard were separated two or three times for short periods, and from 1927 on Mr. Kennard and his wife practically ceased living with one another. In 1928, Mrs. Ritter obtained a divorce from the defendant on the ground of cruel and barbarous treatment, arising, apparently, out of drunken spells on his part. It is intimated that Mrs. Kennard and the defendant actually lived together at one time during this period, and he seems to have taken more and more to drinking; indeed, to such an extent that he went to a sanitarium or hospital for the treatment of nervous and mental diseases in November, 1927, and stayed there for a period of two weeks, and went again to the same institution in December, 1928, for a period of one week, his condition in both instances being diagnosed as one of alcoholism, The doctor who treated him at this hospital testified that while defendant was a patient there he was emotional to the point of hysteria, that he was extremely excitable, and would break down and cry " over apparently nothing." During this same period of the last four years he was also arrested several times for charges growing out of drunkenness. In the divorce pro seedings, Mrs. Ritter testified that he was sober on an average of only two days a week, that he " got very mean" when drinking, and that later on he was drunk every day.
Nellie A. Kennard, the wife of Thomas J. C. Kennard, was a woman thirty-seven years of age. She had been married for a period of sixteen years, and was the mother of three children, aged, respectively, fourteen, nine and two years.
On Dec. 7, 1929, the defendant rented an apartment at the home of Mr. and Mrs. George L. Patchel, at No. 412 South 16th Street, Philadelphia, and Mrs. Kennard visited him and spent the week-ends there with him, bringing there her two-year-old child. On Sunday afternoon, Dec. 29, 1929, the defendant and Mrs. Kennard had a violent quarrel, the exact origin of which is not disclosed, but the result of which was that Mrs. Kennard took a framed photograph of herself, which was in the defendant's apartment, and broke it violently upon a chair, whereupon the defendant struck her in the face. Mr. and Mrs. Patchel insisted that she leave the apartment. She told them, by way of apology for the quarrel, that the defendant was all right except when he was drinking. The Patchels testified that the defendant showed considerable agitation and excitement. Mr. Patchel stated that after the quarrel the defendant looked like a man completely deranged, and Mrs. Patchel said that he looked like a man who had suddenly lost his reason. He told Mr. Patchel that he loved Mrs. Kennard better than his life, that he could not live without her, that he was no good, and that he " might as well finish it; " he also kept saying that he would kill her. He refused to dine with the Patchels that evening, telling them that he could not eat and that his nerves were all gone, and that as a matter of fact he had not eaten for four days.
That night the defendant tried repeatedly to reach Mrs. Kennard on the telephone, but without success. He spent the evening at the home of his wife; although, as above stated, she had divorced him, he seems to have continued to some extent friendly relations with her, and they were then living in the same house. Mrs. Ritter testified that he was very much upset, and at his request she gave him veronal tablets in order that he might sleep. On Monday evening, Dec. 30th, the defendant again tried to get Mrs. Kennard on the telephone at her home, and he seems to have prowled around there on the porch. On Tuesday, Dec. 31st, he sought Mrs. Kennard at her place of employment, a department store at 8th and Market Streets, and also kept telephoning to her during the day. That afternoon he told Mrs. Patchel that he loved Mrs. Kennard better than his life, but that he thought she had somebody else. Mrs. Patchel says that when the conversation turned on the subject of Mrs. Kennard, he seemed to go into a frenzy. Meanwhile, at about half-past 2 o'clock in the afternoon, he visited a pawnshop, where he had pawned a revolver some three months before, and obtained it out of pawn by pledging in its stead his overcoat and a ring. He then bought some bullets at another store, which bullets did not exactly fit the revolver, but, unfortunately, as the sequel shows, were sufficient for the purpose intended. He came to the department store in the late afternoon and had a verbal quarrel with Mrs. Kennard. He was overheard to say that he would give her five minutes to make up her mind. She started to call one of the store authorities, whereupon the defendant shot her, the first shot apparently striking her in the back. She then ran away from him, down some steps to a mezzanine floor, and he followed her. She fell and he leaned over her and fired two more shots into her body. As the store employees, who were attracted by the occurrence, began closing in on him, and one of them held him from the rear, he fired two shots into his own body, one into the chest, which was later extracted from in back of his arm; the other bullet entered below the lowest rib, tore four holes in his liver, struck a rib, by which it was deflected, and was later extracted from the right side of his body. While, during the struggle and immediately thereafter, he made some apparent threats against the store employees who were trying to apprehend him, and desired to make a charge against one of them who had struck him, these expressions seem to have amounted to nothing more than incoherent and wild remarks on his part.
The employees of the department store who noticed the defendant immediately prior to the shooting said, in effect, that he was agitated and excited, that he looked desperate, and that his eyes were glaring. To one of them, who helped to take him to the hospital, he said that if he did not kill Mrs. Kennard, he " did not make a good job of it," and further stated that " she was a good girl and I am no damn good, but she deserved it."
That evening at the hospital the defendant said to the detectives that he had spent about $ 55,000 on Mrs. Kennard, that she had broken up his home and broken him, and that now his money was gone she did not want to have anything more to do with him. He further stated that she had made an appointment to meet him that day for lunch, but had failed to keep it. He was eager to know what had become of the picture of Mrs. Kennard which she had broken, because, he said, he wanted good care taken of it, as he " thought a whole lot" of it. He said to one of the detectives: " Now that she is gone I don't care, I am not worried about the electric chair, but I don't want her life and my life exposed, since we have been going together for the past seven years."
These are the essential facts, and from a consideration of them the court has no hesitation in arriving at the conclusion, as it does, that the murder of Mrs. Kennard by the defendant was willful, deliberate and premeditated and constitutes murder of the first degree.
The real question for the determination of the court is as to the penalty to be inflicted. The Act of May 14, 1925, P. L. 759 provides: ...
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