The way Mardell Eames told the story, not long after the troopers left, she and Heineman decided that they would heed the officers' advice. Stewart, she said, had left the kitchen and gone into the living room, where he sprawled out sullenly on the pull out couch.

It was, she said, no secret that Stewart kept more than one gun in his makeshift bedroom. He had claimed that a recent burglary in the area had kindled his desire to be prepared, and that's why he had the guns, among them a Smith & Wesson .357 that he kept, fully loaded, on the end table beside his bed.

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According to Eames, she and Heineman rounded up the family dog, Punky, and were preparing to leave. "I was going to my mother's house in Berwick, and I guess Leo was going back to Ashland," she said. But according to her testimony, Heineman, who was scheduled to go on vacation the next day, wanted to make one last gesture to Stewart. "Leo wanted to say goodbye," Eames said. "I told Father Leo to leave him alone." "He has guns in there."

The priest ignored her warnings, she said, and walked into the living room, extending his hand in a gesture of friendship. A moment later, according to her account, David Stewart, lying propped up against the back of the sleeper sofa, ripped off the covers, pulled out his pistol, leveled it against Heineman's chest, and fired a single round. Heineman collapsed to the floor.

Eames said she rushed to the wounded priest, then rose and began pounding on her husband's chest. "I told him, 'You killed him, you son of a bitch.'"

Dazed, Eames said she stumbled back to the kitchen, where she called police to report the homicide and tried to call her mother, but her husband followed her, now pointing the gun at her. "You and Punky are next," Eames recalled her husband saying. Then he added, "Then I'm going to do myself in."

Before the police could make the 20-mile return trip from their barracks, a neighbor, Ray Karchner, who had heard the call over his police radio, rushed to the Stewart house and disarmed the frail killer, according to an account of his testimony in The Morning Call. He said when he entered the living room, Stewart was standing there with the gun in his hand, his right index finger on the trigger, his left hand still on the hot barrel.

"I grabbed the gun," The Morning Call quoted Karchner as saying. "I think we wrestled back and forth for a while." Finally, Karchner pried the weapon from Stewart's hand. According to The Morning Call, Stewart twice asked Karchner to return the gun to him before police arrived. There was no doubt in Karchner's mind why the old man wanted the gun. "He wanted to kill himself," Karchner said.

The scenario, as laid out by Eames along with Karchner's statements, seemed to support the prosecution's contention that Stewart had gunned down the priest in cold blood. Though the state decided not to seek the death penalty in the case, Assistant District Attorney Richard Knecht told The Morning Call at the time, "We are comfortable pursuing premeditated murder." They filed a raft of charges against Stewart, including first-degree murder, third degree murder, voluntary manslaughter and criminal homicide.

It seemed as if it might be an open-and-shut case, but Stewart told a far different story about the events leading up to the killing.

It would take nearly seven years before a jury heard that story.