Torres was convicted of first-degree murder in 2010. Every member of the jury that convicted him was a parent, and many had trouble sleeping during and after the trial because the testimony was so disturbing to them, the Express-Times later reported. However, when it came time to sentence Torres, they deadlocked once again on the death penalty. Two of the twelve jurors could not bring themselves to impose it, so Torres received life as well.
After that verdict, the Express-Times ran a story about the difficulty prosecutors faced in securing capital punishment verdicts in Northampton County, leading off with the question on the minds of many following the Torres trial: “If a man convicted of killing a three-year-old boy can’t get the death penalty, who will?”
In part due to the difficulties in securing a capital punishment ruling, Morganelli would often use the death penalty as a plea bargaining tool, offering to take it off the table for murderers if they accepted life imprisonment without the possibility of parole and agreed to waive their appellate rights, thus ensuring that no lengthy appeals process would drag through the court system for several subsequent years.
Morganelli had previously offered deals like that to several murderers. There was Douglas Crist, the twenty-two-year-old Allentown man who admitted he beat a Bethlehem woman to death with a hammer in 2001, then set fire to her home. And Russell Buskirk, who shot his friend in the head execution-style and robbed him during a botched drug deal. And Robert White, who was arrested in 2008 for the cold-case murder of a twenty-one-year-old woman in her Easton apartment in 1978.
As a rule, Morganelli almost never pursued the death penalty when a murder suspect was willing to accept such a plea deal.
Any DA that would try it would be crazy to do that, really, because you’re risking a potential not guilty or something else when you’re getting a guaranteed result here and the appeal process ends, Morganelli believed.
But Morganelli broke his own rule with Michael Ballard. The brutality of the crime, the number of the victims, the fact that Ballard had killed once before: All of those factors meant Morganelli couldn’t bring himself to consider any other sentence but the death penalty.
Nevertheless, that spotty track record in both Northampton County and Pennsylvania couldn’t help but make the district attorney nervous about his chances.
“I think there is a chance if this guy gets life I may well say to my staff, ‘You know what, until I’m done, we’re not going to be pursuing these cases anymore because I don’t see the point of it,’” Morganelli said. “If we have jurors who can’t give this guy the death sentence, who are they going to give one to?”
* * *
Less than forty-eight hours had passed since her daughter’s killing, but Geraldine Dorwart had business to attend to first thing the morning of Monday, June 28. She had to ensure that Trystan and Annikah would stay in her care so she could help her grandchildren through this tragic period of their lives.
Dorwart filed a handwritten petition for emergency custody that morning. Northampton County Judge Paula Roscioli said it was very rare to receive a handwritten petition. Since it was an emergency petition, the process was expedited and a hearing was held that same day, during which Roscioli announced that Trystan and Annikah’s father, Jean-Michael Merhi, had also planned to seek custody.
Geraldine’s attorney, Kerry Freidl, argued that Jean-Michael had only seen his children once a year for the past six or seven years, which constituted an absence of any meaningful contact. Geraldine also testified to Jean-Michael’s infrequent visits with his children, as opposed to her own regular contact with them, including a period of four years that they had lived with her. Roscioli also noted that a bench warrant had been issued against Jean-Michael due to non-payment of child support, but that it might be vacated in light of the circumstances.
The division had attempted to get in touch with Jean-Michael, but efforts to serve him with paperwork at his home in Puerto Rico were unsuccessful, according to Valerie Camerini, an employee with the Northampton County Children, Youth and Families Division. She testified that Geraldine was the one “in the best position to provide care.”
Judge Roscioli agreed. She noted that Jean-Michael chose not to be a part of his children’s life before. If and when he requested a custody hearing, Roscioli said she would grant one, but in the meantime a decision had to be made that very day about Trystan and Annikah’s care.
Geraldine said she didn’t object to Jean-Michael seeing the children.
“You have an order that precludes him from taking them,” the judge told her. “Now you don’t have to be afraid of him coming and wanting to pay his respects.”
Jean-Michael Merhi did indeed request a custody hearing, and just three days later they were all back in court.
He told Judge Roscioli he’d found out about Denise’s death on Sunday and immediately bought a plane ticket Monday to fly from Guadeloupe, the French Caribbean island where his family had lived for fifty years, to come to the Lehigh Valley, where he was born. Jean-Michael claimed he arrived Tuesday and was denied the opportunity to see his children, and he spent all day Wednesday working on his effort to seek their custody.
The hearing was the day of Denise, Dennis, and Alvin’s funeral, so Geraldine wasn’t in court. Her attorney told Roscioli that Geraldine didn’t want Jean-Michael approaching his children at the funeral. The judge told Jean-Michael he could go if he paid his respects quietly.
Jean-Michael explained he had not kept up on his child support payments because he had been working for a company that went bankrupt. He had since worked odd jobs and made a child support payment of two thousand dollars earlier that year.
“When he had enough money, he sent enough money,” said Ronald Clever, Jean-Michael’s attorney.
Jean-Michael said he had recently moved from Puerto Rico back to his family’s home in Guadeloupe. He had started working in a family-related business but had yet to be paid.
The judge told him if he paid four thousand dollars of the twelve thousand he owed in child support, she would vacate the bench warrant out on him. Jean-Michael asked if the amount could be one thousand, but Roscioli flatly rejected the request. She pointed out he could afford the plane fare to fly from Guadeloupe to the Lehigh Valley, so he should be able to come up with this amount of money.
Ultimately, both Trystan and Annikah remained in their grandmother’s care. Their father filed another custody petition on August 13, arguing that Geraldine had no standing in the matter as a grandparent considering that the children’s biological father was still alive.
Jean-Michael also argued that Geraldine’s emergency custody order had been awarded under false pretenses. Geraldine’s original petition for custody said that she didn’t know the whereabouts of Jean-Michael and that Trystan and Annikah were orphans. Jean-Michael’s petition stated that he and Geraldine had spoken on the telephone the day before her petition was filed and that he told her he was at his family’s home in Guadeloupe, a home Geraldine herself had visited.
Jean-Michael said he was permitted to see his children four times over his ten-day visit to the Lehigh Valley in July, but he had since been deprived of contact with them. He had been given their cell phone numbers but most or all of his calls to them had gone unanswered. He also pointed out that Denise, Trystan, and Annikah had lived with him previously in both Guadeloupe and Puerto Rico.
The matter would not be formally resolved for more than a month. On September 30, Roscioli filed the final order in the case of Geraldine Dorwart vs. Jean-Michael Merhi, which found that Geraldine did have standing as the children’s grandmother. Trystan and Annikah were to stay in her custody.
* * *
Local forensic pathologist Dr. Samuel Land was tasked with performing autopsies on all four of Ballard’s victims. Given multiple victims and their considerable number of stab wounds, it would prove to be a two-day process.
Land started off at eight o’clock the morning of June 28 with Steven Zernhelt. His
most obvious injuries were on his neck and chest, where he had been stabbed multiple times, causing extensive damage. He also was cut several times on his face and head, including one long gash that stretched from his left cheek, down his jaw and neck, and into his chest.
Steve’s arms and hands also bore cuts, which Land believed were mainly defensive wounds as he attempted to fend off the vicious knife strokes. The tip of his left thumb had been sheared off entirely. He probably raised that hand in an effort to ward off a blow, Land surmised.
The knife slashes had sliced three of his arteries and punctured his right lung. In all, Land observed more than twenty stab wounds.
Denise was up next, and her autopsy would be even more involved and even more horrid. If the police were correct, Denise was the object of Ballard’s rage in this murder, and the severity of her injuries seemed to reflect that.
Land would determine that Denise had been stabbed forty-three times—more than twice as much as any of the other victims. In fact, it was almost the same number of stab wounds as was found on all of the other victims combined.
Denise had been stabbed on just about every part of her upper body: the top of her head, the back of her head, her left cheek, her left front chin, her neck, both sides of her upper back, her right shoulder. There were between four and five stab wounds in her chest cavity, several of which pierced her lungs. Her many stab wounds severed several arteries and veins, Land determined.
Her skull had been fractured due to the many knife cuts into the bone there. Her lungs, esophagus, and stomach were all filled with blood.
“She was basically breathing in blood while she was dying,” Land would later testify. “[She] was alive when all of these wounds were inflicted.”
The next day, Land conducted the autopsies of Alvin Marsh Jr. and his son Dennis.
The eighty-seven-year-old Alvin had been stabbed eight times, primarily on and around his neck and chest. Like his granddaughter, he, too, had breathed in a lot of blood, Land determined. Like Denise, his voice box had been severely damaged.
Alvin also had multiple wounds to both hands consistent with defensive wounds, Land found. On his right hand, the tip of his left finger had been sliced off. His left hand was wounded in a way indicating that Alvin had tried to grab the knife with it to keep it from striking the rest of his body.
Dennis Marsh had almost twice as many stab wounds as his father—Land would note fifteen in his report.
Dennis suffered stab wounds to his back, chest, neck, and collarbone. As with his father and daughter, his voice box had been slashed and there was blood in his lungs, indicating that he, too, was alive during most of his injuries and had begun breathing in blood. Dennis had actually been stabbed twice through the bone: in one of his ribs and in one of the bones shielding his spinal cord.
After adding up the number of stab wounds—a total of eighty-eight, Land would determine—he was finished with two days of tiresome and gruesome work.
“I would think there was a lot of pain involved with these injuries,” he would later conclude. “Any time there’s a defect of the skin, muscle, it causes great pain. We all have cut ourselves … even paper cuts are very painful. So this would have been a very painful process.”
CHAPTER 10
Investigators, reporters, and members of the general public alike quickly began asking questions about Michael Ballard’s past. What kind of upbringing, many wondered, would lead a man to commit such a horrific crime?
Ballard had only been living in the Allentown area for a short time before he killed Donald Richard in 1991. His formative years were spent in rural Arkansas. He was born on August 14, 1973, the first and only biological child of Wilhart “Mickey” Ballard and Wauneita “Nita” Mae Ballard, although Nita had a ten-year-old daughter from a relationship before Ballard was born. Ballard’s father was an accountant and bookkeeper for the city of Fayetteville, while Nita was a licensed practical nurse who worked at various hospitals and nursing homes during Ballard’s upbringing.
Mickey’s family owned a good deal of farmland near West Fork, Arkansas, which is outside Fayetteville. Although Fayetteville is the state’s third-largest city and home to the University of Arkansas, the city of West Fork—located about ten miles to the south—was a completely different world. It had a population of about one thousand residents when Ballard was born in 1973 and hasn’t grown much since—the city had an estimated 2,317 residents in 2010.
West Fork has always been small, with most of its residents being descendants of the original settlers. Most of the residents worked in the Fayetteville area, as West Fork itself had very little industry. The school district in 2005 served 1,158 students spread over a 131-square-mile area. The region’s significant backcountry lands included the area where Ballard grew up—about eight miles outside West Fork off Route 170. Even today, the area remains very rural.
When Ballard was growing up, everybody referred to him by his middle name, Eric. His paternal grandmother, Hilma Ballard, lived just down the road from his father’s house, also on farmland owned by the Ballard family. Years ago, the family had raised crops, but by 1973 the land had been split up and the family no longer performed any commercial farming other than hay baling for themselves and a select few others.
The family still kept farm animals, which they relied on as their main source of food. They also canned fruits and vegetables and went to the grocery store only for a few items.
Although both of Ballard’s parents had respectable jobs, the family lived in circumstances akin to poverty. Ballard’s childhood home had no electricity or running water. The family went to the bathroom in a bucket and, on one occasion, went to a local state park to bathe. The family reportedly never visited a doctor, even when Ballard was run over by a car at age five and feared dead. He owned only one pair of jeans as a youth.
“Life was pretty sparse,” a court sentencing specialist would later say after interviewing Ballard’s family and friends for his death penalty trial.
It was not a happy life for the Ballard family. When Ballard was about a year and a half old, Mickey came home from work to find his wife in a pickup truck with another man. Convinced they were having an affair, Mickey threw Ballard’s mother off the property and later filed for divorce. His suspicions seemed to be confirmed when, shortly after the divorce, Nita moved to Hawaii with the man she had been caught with, and the two got married.
Mickey Ballard filed for sole custody of his son and, in his court testimony, said his wife didn’t take good care of Eric. Mickey claimed he would often find his son unbathed and wearing dirty diapers that she had not changed for hours. The Chancery Court of Washington County, Arkansas, ultimately agreed with Mickey and found that Ballard’s mother failed to provide proper care for her son. Temporary custody was awarded to Mickey in February 1975, and he received permanent custody when the divorce was finalized four months later.
But Mickey Ballard didn’t really want full responsibility for his young son, according to court documents. Harboring a great deal of bitterness and resentment over his ex-wife’s infidelity, Mickey considered his son a reminder of that pain, so he sent him to live with his own mother. Shortly after his custody hearing, Mickey brought Eric directly to Hilma’s house and said, “Here, I guess you see what your job is now.”
Mickey visited his son occasionally, but the relationship was strained because he continued to harbor ill feelings toward Nita for years. One day, when Eric was about three years old, Eric was singing the popular children’s tune “Baby Bumblebee.” But when he sang the lyrics “won’t my mommy be so proud of me,” Mickey screamed at his son and told him never to mention his mother in his house again. The incident greatly frightened young Eric.
Eric also had mixed feelings about his grandmother, who could be kind to him, but was also nasty toward him on a regular basis. Still, as with his father, their time together did not last very long. Already quite elderly when Eric came to live with her, Hilma Ballard had also
long before lost one of her legs to illness. Taking care of an active toddler proved overwhelming for the old woman.
When Eric was four, he went to live with his grandmother’s aide, Lavern Cook, who lived in town in West Fork. Psychological experts would later say being constantly displaced and moved around created major abandonment issues for Ballard, particularly when it came to female figures in his life.
Nevertheless, his time living with Cook may have been the happiest years of his youth. With two sons of her own about Eric’s age, named Jonathan and Justin, Lavern provided a type of care the often-neglected boy was not accustomed to, and he genuinely enjoyed living with her.
One day, when they were watching television together, Eric leaned in close to Lavern and asked whether he could ask her a question.
“Honey, you can ask me anything you want to and I will answer you honestly,” she said.
“Well, Jonathan and Justin have you for a momma and I don’t have one. Can I call you momma?” Eric asked her.
“You sure can,” replied Lavern, who said Ballard continued to call her momma many decades later.
Eric’s mother was living in Hawaii at the time. His father, while still in the area, may as well have lived across the country based on how little he appears to have been involved in his son’s life.
Lavern later testified that when Eric contracted the measles, she immediately called Mickey Ballard, who disregarded the news as unimportant. And Mickey would regularly fail to show up after making plans to visit Eric, even during holidays and the child’s birthday. On those occasions, Eric would wait for hours at the front window.
Lavern later recalled one specific day when, after waiting at the window for a father who was not coming, Eric sighed and said, “Well, I know he’s not coming, so I’m going to quit watching.”
Fatal Jealousy: The True Story of a Doomed Romance, a Singular Obsession, and a Quadruple Murder Page 9
