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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Decades After Shooting Accident Authorities Rule Death A Homicide Doctor Accused Of Murdering Previous Husband Of His Wife

New York Times

Twenty years ago Martin T. Dillon, 30, a lawyer and father of two, was shot to death while skeet shooting near here with a friend.

The friend, Dr. Stephen B. Scher, told the police that Dillon had fallen, causing the shotgun he was carrying to fire into his chest.

The death, on June 2, 1976, was ruled an accident. Scher married a woman with two children two years later and eventually moved to Lincolnton, N.C., where he has been a successful family practitioner.

But now, in a case challenging the reputation of a respected doctor, the loyalties of a family and the abilities of forensic science, Stephen Scher, 56, has been charged with murdering Martin Dillon.

That this has happened, two decades after the death of Dillon, is due largely to the efforts of his father, Lawrence Dillon, 76, who prodded the authorities to exhume his son’s body and reexamine the evidence in the case. Scher was arrested on June 20 and is in Susquehanna County Prison in lieu of $750,000 bail.

Scher says his arrest is a result of Lawrence Dillon’s bitterness. And Lawrence Dillon, the mayor of Montrose at the time of the killing, had long been suspicious of Scher and doubted the doctor’s account of his son’s death.

For the woman Scher married was Dillon’s widow, Patricia, and while the Schers say their romance began in the year after the shooting, many town residents said otherwise. In fact, Scher told the police that while he and Dillon were skeet shooting, they had been discussing rumors of an affair between Patricia Dillon and Scher, who had recently filed for divorce.

Susquehanna County Judge Donald O’Malley, who had been a neighbor of the Dillons, said that before the shooting, he had often seen Scher visiting Patricia Dillon when her husband was not at home.

Scher’s former wife, E. Ann Vitale, has told detectives that before the shooting, Scher admitted being in love with Patricia Dillon.

But while suspicions about Scher made Lawrence Dillon pursue the case, re-examinations of the evidence led to the arrest. Those examinations concluded that Dillon was too far from the gun and Scher too close to Dillon for the death to have occurred as Scher described it.

Scher and Martin Dillon had been trap shooting on rural property owned by the Dillon family called “Gunsmoke.” Scher told the police that Dillon had seen a porcupine, grabbed Scher’s gun and had given chase. He said Dillon was about 250 feet away from him when the accident happened. He said he ran to Dillon, but saw that the blast had torn apart his heart. In anger and frustration, he said, he smashed the gun against a tree.

The next day a local doctor performed an autopsy and the Susquehanna County coroner, John Conarton, ruled the death an accident.

After many years, Lawrence Dillon began to work on his suspicions, asking local officials to look into the case. In 1989, he hired Stewart Bennett, an expert in crime scene reconstruction, to review the evidence. In January 1991, Bennett concluded that Dillon’s death could not have been an accident. Lawrence Dillon then turned over Bennett’s report to the state police.

In 1992, the state police sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation the boots that had been taken from Scher two days after the shooting. FBI analysts said the boots were spattered with blood, indicating that Scher had been close to Dillon when he was shot.

Finally, Lawrence Dillon asked a judge to allow him to have his son exhumed for another autopsy.

On April 29, 1995, the body, which the authorities have said is well preserved, was exhumed and Dr. Isadore Mihalakis, a pathologist from Allentown, Pa., examined it. Mihalakis said that because of the shape and angle of the wound and because there was no evidence of burning that is associated with a gunshot from close range, Dillon could not have shot himself accidentally. He also said it appeared that Dillon was shot while sitting, as he would have been doing while throwing skeet, rather than running.

Mihalakis concluded that the death was a homicide. Based on that report, the county coroner, Robert Bartron, officially declared the death a homicide on June 26, 1995. That day, the state police named Scher as their main suspect.

The next day, the Schers returned to Pennsylvania and, at a news conference in Scranton, Scher challenged the police to charge him.

“Arrest me,” he said, “and let’s get on with this trial so I can forget about the last 19 years.”

It took so long for the case to be reopened largely because Dillon waited to pursue it. He said he wanted his grandchildren to be old enough to understand what he was doing.

But after their stepfather was arrested last month in the murder of their father, Suzanne Dillon, 23, and her brother, Michael, 25, became set against their grandfather. Suzanne Dillon testified on her stepfather’s behalf at his bail hearing and said she was contributing $65,000 she had received from her father’s life insurance to help pay for the defense.

Working on her husband’s defense even before his arrest, Patricia Scher, with the permission of a state court, had her former husband’s body exhumed in May. Then the Schers’ pathologist re-examined the body and found that state authorities had taken part of the chest around the wound as evidence.

Later, having been given custody of the remains by the court, Patricia Scher reburied her former husband in a new, unmarked grave.