by David DeKok
Rick’s father, George P. Haefner Sr., testified that the accusations by Kevin Burkey were retaliation for things he had told police about Kevin’s older brother. He abruptly stopped the proceedings at one point, claiming to be having chest pains and making groaning noises. He was taken out of the courtroom for medical treatment, but it turned out he was not having a heart attack, and he returned in subsequent days. Peters thought both Haefner parents seemed old. He wondered if they had raised Rick as a spoiled brat. They seemed totally devoted to their son, no matter what he was accused of doing.11
Rick followed the proceedings closely, consulting a stack of note cards and a notebook from time to time. The defense sought to make Kevin Burkey out to be a bad street kid who had been into all sorts of trouble. To prove this, Heinly called as a witness a teacher from the boy’s school, asking him to describe how Kevin had made fun of his name, turning it into a sexual reference. Judge Appel soon put a stop to the humiliating questioning. “But it was things like that—they were [grasping] at straws continually to present that this guy was innocent, and the kid was lying; this is a great man, and he shouldn’t be persecuted,” Peters said.12
The defense called a long list of character witnesses who testified that Rick had an excellent reputation and was known to be “a peaceful, honest, and law-abiding citizen.” They included Orville Snoke, a retired teacher, who said Rick had been a day camp counselor for him for eight summers at Camp Optimist—the job where he had met the two boys he molested in Ocean City—and three other prominent former Lancaster educators, Edward C. Kraft, retired assistant principal at McCaskey High School; Harry E. Langford, retired principal of Reynolds Junior High School; and Tomkins B. Smith, retired assistant superintendent. Also taking the stand were John W. Price Sr., curator emeritus at the North Museum at Franklin & Marshall College, and a longtime friend and mentor of Rick’s; Harold Banks Jr., an F&M classmate who was now a geologist for the Smithsonian Institution; and Alexander James Barton, a scientist with the National Science Foundation. If nothing else, the parade of character witnesses showed how good Haefner had been at deceiving those around him. He truly led a dual life.13
The first unusual incident during the trial occurred on Friday, January 30, when Steve Groff, one of Rick’s young friends, was called to the stand. Groff testified that Kevin Burkey had made incriminating statements—statements that supposedly indicated he had fabricated the charges against Rick—during long car rides with himself and others. When he mentioned that he had secretly recorded these conversations using the tape recorder Rick had installed, Judge Appel stopped the trial and threatened Groff with arrest for violating the state’s wiretapping statute. The following Monday, he informed the jury that all of Groff’s testimony had been stricken from the record, and that they should likewise “erase the testimony of Steve Groff from their minds” and not consider it during deliberations.14
On Monday, February 2, Rick Haefner testified in his own defense. He denied having told Detective Jerry P. Crump that he had “massaged” Kevin (denying it was a sexual act). He accused Crump of having concocted the statement, then fell back on religion. “My religion does not condone things like he was talking about, namely homosexual activities,” said Haefner, a Catholic who rarely—if ever—went to church. He testified that he could account for every minute of the time Kevin Burkey worked for him between June 30 and July 3, 1975, claiming that all the boys were eating hamburgers in his mother’s kitchen at the time the molestation supposedly occurred. Haefner said he had fired both boys for their attitude on July 3, but then implied in further testimony that he might have had other, more pressing reasons for getting rid of them.15
Rick said that at the close of work on Wednesday, July 2, 1975, he took the boys to Good’s Ice Cream Barn for ice-cream cones and some air-conditioning. While there, he overheard Kevin tell the other boys that he and his brother “were approached by a queer at the railroad station,” meaning the Amtrak passenger terminal in Lancaster. Did this mean that Kevin would also talk about Rick when out of earshot? Haefner testified that he was disturbed by the comment and tried to change the subject. He and his parents decided that evening that Kevin had to go because his behavior supposedly “was not very good. He never smiled . . . he fought with the other kids . . . he always did things contrary to what you wanted him to do [and] he had a short attention span.” Rick says he phoned Kevin’s mother and told her his job would end the following day.16
But during much of his time on the stand, Haefner took the jury on a rambling tour of his victimhood, how the police had persecuted him for no reason at all. Juror Peters says Rick was not likable and seemed full of himself. He went on and on about his eight hours of interrogation in the police station, as if no one else suspected of a serious crime had ever been questioned for so long a time. At one point, Haefner said, “I digress,” and Judge Appel interjected, “Yes, you do.” Rick risked being convicted of annoying the court if nothing else.17
Before the trial, Haefner and his lawyer, James F. Heinly, had discussed many times how they wanted to somehow introduce the results of his polygraph examination in the Lancaster police station at trial, believing it would help the case. At the beginning of the trial, however, Judge Appel had warned them not to mention it in any way, a standard warning, since the results of polygraphs, or whether they were taken or not taken, may not typically be introduced in court. Surprisingly, prosecutor Kenneff was open to the idea of discussing the polygraph exam in open court. Whether he planned to lay some sort of trap is unknown. But Judge Appel would have none of it. During cross-examination, Kenneff asked Haefner to discuss his appearance before the district magistrate on the night of August 15, 1975. He specifically wanted Haefner to say whether he had made any complaint to the magistrate, and, if so, about what. Kenneff was asking Haefner to violate the judge’s order, and he walked right into it. “I complained . . . that I had agreed to take a lie detector test from Detective Jan Walters, and Detective Walters told me I passed the test,” Rick testified. “We had an agreement that if I passed that test, they would not bring any charges, and they brought them anyway.” Haefner argued in court that he had no choice but to answer Kenneff’s questions.18
Judge Appel didn’t agree and sent the jury out of the courtroom. “I remember everything stopped,” Peters said. There was discussion among Judge Appel and the two lawyers about allowing more questioning about the polygraph exam now that the subject had been broached, but the judge refused. He recalled the jury, ordered the testimony stricken from the record, and directed them, just as in the Groff testimony about the surreptitious taping of Kevin Burkey, to disregard what they had heard. After his final comments to the jury the following morning, Judge Appel cited Haefner for contempt of court and scheduled a hearing on the penalty for two days hence. At 11:52 a.m. on February 3, the jury retired to begin its deliberations on a verdict after hearing the final words of defense counsel Heinly that Kevin Burkey was “a proven malicious boy who can’t tell the truth.”19
Most of the jurors weren’t buying it. Kenneff had said in his own closing remarks, “You believe one side, or you believe the other.” Most of the jurors believed Kevin Burkey. At the beginning of their deliberations, Peters recalls, the jurors were split about evenly on Haefner’s guilt or innocence. No one firmly believed him guilty, although many were leaning that way. Most of the jury believed Doctor Richard Haefner to be incredibly annoying.
“I remember the foreman said, ‘Please—we cannot allow his personality to get in the way of justice,’ ” Peters said. “ ‘We need to look at all the facts.’ And we did. I think everyone tried to give him a fair assessment.” As they reviewed the testimony in the trial, doubts began to fall away. “The thing that came down in my mind, what made me realize he was guilty, was the boy’s testimony,” Peters said. Before too long, the jury was eleven to one for conviction. The holdout was a man who found Haefner’s story of police persecution to be credible.
This juror said he had once been arrested by the Lancaster police for speeding and had been ill treated in the process. “He was very much prejudiced. You could tell,” recalled Peters, who thought the juror was a nice guy nonetheless. “It very much upset the rest of us. . . . We talked about all the evidence. And this guy was not budging.”20
At 5:10 p.m., the jurors returned to the courtroom and informed Judge Appel they had not been able to reach a decision, and might not be able to. He sent them back to continue deliberating. At 6:35 p.m., the jury sent out a written question asking to be read the testimony of two police officers about events during the questioning of Haefner at the police station. Appel told them to rely on their recollections. At 9:15 p.m., Judge Appel called them back to the courtroom, only to be informed that they were still deadlocked. The foreman thought they could still reach a unanimous decision, but such was not the case. Shortly after 10:00 p.m. on February 3, the jury came back and reported that it was hopelessly deadlocked. Judge Appel declared a mistrial, thanked them for their service, and sent the jurors home. Everyone believed there would be another trial, but declaring a mistrial so soon would prove to be a critical legal misstep by Appel.21
On February 5, Judge Appel dismissed Haefner’s arguments in defense of disclosing the polygraph test and sentenced him to a $500 fine and thirty days in the county jail for contempt, sentence to begin immediately.
Haefner was handcuffed and taken into custody by the county sheriff and processed into Lancaster County Prison at 6:30 p.m. that evening. For most people with no prior exposure to the criminal justice system, entering prison is a slap in the face, a quick and brutal confirmation of how low they have fallen. Haefner was no exception. Rick told the intake officer that he was an unemployed geologist but refused to say what his religious preference was. The officer typed “None” on the intake form. Asked for the names and addresses of his parents and brother, Rick again refused, saying it was unnecessary information. As all prisoners were, he was ordered to strip naked and surrender his clothing, including a pair of brown pants, a brown belt, a yellow shirt, a tie clip (but apparently no tie), brown loafers, a houndstooth sport jacket, and a brown overcoat. The items in his pockets, also surrendered to the prison, included his wallet and $6.30 in cash, five plastic cards in the wallet that apparently were organizational membership cards, four keys, two felt pens, and a book of stamps. Haefner was given a prison jumpsuit to wear, which he complained was too small.22
According to prison records, Rick was then placed in medical quarantine for forty-eight hours, another standard procedure. At the time, the prison was dealing with a scabies and a body lice outbreak that it believed it had under control, and was trying to forestall a flu epidemic. Haefner, in his overly dramatic, self-pitying tone, says he was marched to “the hole,” meaning solitary confinement, a small, windowless cell containing only a toilet and no bed or chair. He claimed that one of the guards deliberately made the toilet overflow, flooding the floor with water, then shut the door, turning off the light from the outside. The guard allegedly told Haefner that he would be kept there for the entire thirty days, and when his sentence was up, they would find a way to keep him there longer. If any of this was true, it was likely a rough attempt to make him cooperate with the guards.23
“I was in total darkness, except for a crack of light at the bottom of the door,” Haefner told a reporter for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. “I couldn’t find a dry spot to sit down. I thought I was suffocating. I was down on my hands and knees. I was crying, trying to gasp for air at the crack at the bottom of the door.” At that very moment, if Rick is to be believed, Doctor Richard Haefner was supposed to be lecturing at Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. “They had a Chinese dinner planned and all,” he told the Bulletin. “You know how they treat guest lecturers.” After several hours, according to Rick, the guard let him out and took him back to the intake room, where he now provided the names and addresses of his parents and brother and answered any other question they posed to him.24
Haefner was then taken to a regular cell, which he had to himself. He contends he was kept locked up for the next five days, fed his meals in his cell, and allowed no visitors. His new home had a toilet, a mattress and a blanket, but no washcloth, soap, or towel—or shower. What Haefner never knew was that one of his former Boy Scouts from Troop 24 at Sacred Heart Catholic Church, one who knew about the sex accusations that got Rick removed as an assistant scoutmaster of the troop ten years earlier, was working as a guard at the prison. Michael D. Witmer was in his first job after leaving the military and thought it strange to encounter Rick in this setting. “I don’t think I ever talked to him,” he recalled. “I knew what he was in for, and thought about bringing something up.” But Witmer thought better of the idea and remained silent, probably saving Rick from the violence prison inmates are said to dole out to those who molest children.25
During his second week in prison, he was allowed visitors and received seven of them, including his parents, John W. Price Sr., who was the former curator of the North Museum and one of Rick’s character witnesses, and Bob Freiler of Lancaster. Another visitor, not recorded on the log, was his lawyer, James F. Heinly. He told Rick that he would have to provide a retainer of $2,500, the equivalent of more than $10,000 today, before he would file an appeal of his contempt sentence. Apparently, the Haefner family did pay. Under Pennsylvania law, such an appeal went directly to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, bypassing the state Superior Court, the intermediate appellate court for criminal cases. Justice Robert N. C. Nix Jr. held a bail hearing on February 17 and ordered Rick freed while the appeal of his contempt sentence was determined. Bail was set at $1,000, and he was let out of prison immediately.26
He had lost fifteen pounds and contracted body lice. He had also caught the flu, and there was worse to come in his personal life. But for now, Dr. Richard Haefner was a free man.
Chapter 29
The Philadelphia Lawyer
Within a day of his release on bail, Lancaster police and the county prosecutor were making plans to retry him. Ominously for Rick, they served a subpoena on Philip Bomberger III, executive director of the Lancaster Recreation Commission, who had tried to sort out Rick’s Ocean City molestation crimes in 1965. The subpoena asked for Rick’s employment, counseling, and investigative records, which would surely give Detective Jerry P. Crump more ammunition than any police officer needed to destroy the credibility of a suspect who proclaimed himself innocent of molesting Kevin Burkey, and who had testified that his Catholic beliefs would have prevented him from committing such a crime.
After springing Rick from jail at least temporarily on the contempt charge, James F. Heinly resigned as his lawyer. Whether he thought Haefner needed a different lawyer for the appeals or was fed up with his client’s behavior is unknown. Rick set out to find a new champion. He went to Philadelphia early in the spring, possibly to look up Arlen Specter. If so, he was disappointed. Specter had been back in private practice for three years since losing his bid for a third term as district attorney, but during the late winter and spring of 1976 was in the throes of running for the Republican nomination for US Senate in the May primary.
Nevertheless, Rick found the tough guy he wanted, eventually hiring one of the best criminal prosecutors in Philadelphia to mount his defense. Richard A. Sprague had won fame for convicting the men who plotted and carried out the 1969 murders of United Mine Workers reform candidate Joseph Yablonski and his wife and daughter. During Sprague’s fifteen years in the Philadelphia DA’s office, he tried sixty-six people accused of homicide, and all but one was convicted of first-degree murder. Senator Arlen Specter, in his memoirs, called him “a courtroom master.” When Rick Haefner went looking for representation, Sprague was in private practice with the David Berger law firm in downtown Philadelphia.1
Sprague’s switch to criminal defense work had been notable enough to command a st
ory in Time magazine the week of May 17, 1976. He told the magazine that he was able to make the switch mentally by seeking out defense cases, often appeals, that stirred his blood because of the alleged unfairness shown by a prosecutor to the defendant. He loved the role of activist lawyer defending the downtrodden. “Each side has a right to have its interests vigorously defended,” he told the magazine. Sprague mentioned several cases he was handling at the time; one of them was the Rick Haefner case. Rick was described by Time as “a geology professor in Lancaster County’s Mennonite community who is accused of sodomizing two boys.” Rick was no more a Mennonite than he was Chinese, but the description in the magazine reflected the popular perception in much of the country that Lancaster County was populated mainly by Amish and Mennonites.2
At their first meeting on April 13, 1976, Haefner told Sprague that he was “fighting for his life,” and that going to prison terrified him. Sprague later told the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin that when Haefner first appeared in his office and told his story, he was dubious. His inner warning system told him that things just didn’t happen that way. As much as Sprague liked fighting for the little guy, he had to have known that most claims of police conspiracies are hogwash. But after looking into it more, Sprague agreed to take Rick’s case. “This man was fighting the establishment, and everyone decided to stand together against the upstart,” Sprague told reporter David Runkel. “It was really unbelievable.” He should have listened to that inner warning.3
Sprague told the Philadelphia Inquirer that Haefner’s case met all his tests for criminal defense work, namely “fundamental issues worth fighting for” and “a heavy presumption that his client is innocent.” The reporter, Mike Leary, included the remarks in a longer story about Rick’s case that included a brief mention of how Rick had been about to start a prestigious position at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History before his arrest wrecked everything.
