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09-22-2008, 05:57 PM
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THE DETAILS:
25-year-old murder mystery re-emerges
Who killed Tillie Schilling in her Bethel Park home?
Monday, September 22, 2008
By Milan Simonich, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Twenty-five years ago someone beat and choked Tillie Schilling to death in her Bethel Park living room.Twenty-five years after somebody beat and choked Tillie Schilling to death in her Bethel Park living room, three things are certain.
Her husband, Leo, was in Florida when the killing happened, keeping company with another woman.
Nothing was stolen from Mrs. Schilling's home and it appeared unlikely that the killer broke in. Her attacker left behind jewelry and other valuables that were in plain view.
Finally, the assailant was merciless. He attacked Mrs. Schilling, a small, slim woman of 73, with savage ferocity. Six of her ribs were broken, but the fatal wounds were to her neck. The killer fractured her larynx, her left thyroid cartilage and her hyoid, the horseshoe-shaped bone at the base of the mouth.
Mrs. Schilling's death remains a murder mystery, as the investigation was dormant for nearly 20 years. But now the case has been reopened because of the persistence of Eileen Hudson-Hruby, her niece.
Just 23 when the murder occurred, Ms. Hruby said the case gnawed at her until it became an obsession. She keeps a notebook filled with minute details about her aunt's life, especially her last days. Ms. Hruby's hope is that the case, if given proper attention, can still be cracked.
"I think it can be solved. I want to see if we can bring someone out of the woodwork," she said.
Allegheny County Detective Gary Hall recently met with Ms. Hruby as the start of his cold-case investigation. Mrs. Schilling's body was discovered by one of her sisters on Aug. 15, 1983. Ms. Hruby, though, said she is certain the killer struck five days earlier. Mrs. Schilling last picked up her mail on Aug. 10.
The two detectives who originally investigated her killing are gone, one retired, the other dead. The files they left behind are a start for Detective Hall, but they point in no clear direction.
"It's a whodunit, and we don't get too many whodunits," he said.
There is a bigger problem for Detective Hall. Scientific advances that solve many cold cases are not available in this one. All the physical evidence collected from Mrs. Schilling's home is gone, washed away in a flood that swept through an evidence room.
Even with no blood, hair or fingernail scrapings to be checked for DNA, at least one old suspect remains alive, and police know right where to find him.
Sean McHugh, 49, has been in prison for 20 years for the murder of another Bethel Park woman. He lived just one-tenth of a mile from Mrs. Schilling's house on Short Street.
Mr. McHugh even told police he knew Mrs. Schilling and did yard work for her. Leo Schilling, though, said his claim was untrue.
Not in dispute is that Mr. McHugh followed Lois J. Klaes, 63, after she left a restaurant in Bethel Park on Aug. 9, 1985. Her body was found the next morning under a pile of blocks in her back yard, not far from the restaurant.
She had been raped and beaten into a coma. Mrs. Klaes, who never regained consciousness, died in 1991.
Originally sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison for her rape and beating, Mr. McHugh pleaded guilty to third-degree murder after she died. With that admission, his sentence was increased to 25 to 50 years. He is doing his time in a medium-security prison in Houtzdale, Clearfield County.
Could Mr. McHugh have made up a story about working for the Schillings because he was involved in Tillie's murder and he feared his prints might be found in the home? Detective Hall said that was possible. Mr. McHugh, he said, knew details about the Schilling house that an outsider should not have known.
Still, parts of the Schilling case do not seem to fit Mr. McHugh. Sexual assault motivated him to follow the woman in the restaurant. Her pants were found tied around her neck, and detectives said bite marks on her chest were the doing of Mr. McHugh.
Police say Mrs. Schilling was not raped by her assailant, though she was naked from the waist down.
Her electric keyboard, which she loved to play, was still on. That means she probably was fully clothed and at the keyboard when the killer entered her home.
Could the assailant have removed some of her clothing to stage the scene so it would appear to be a rape?
Dr. Bennet Omalu, a neuropathologist and forensic pathologist, reviewed the 1983 autopsy report on Mrs. Schilling at the request of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He said the viciousness of the attack seemed like "intimate partner homicide," not a killing by a burglar or would-be rapist.
"Usually crimes carried out like this are not perpetrated by a stranger," said Dr. Omalu, formerly of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and now a medical examiner in central California.
Dr. Omalu said her "well-patterned" injuries indicate that she was strangled. He said the attacker probably jammed a hard object, like a metal bar, across Mrs. Schilling's throat and choked her.
A broken dining chair in the Schilling home could have been used to strike her in the head and face before she was choked. A piece broken from the chair matched the kind of hard object or "bar" that Dr. Omalu said figured into the strangulation.
"There was a significant struggle. She fought very hard for her life," he said.
All the way back in 1983, detectives knew that Mrs. Schilling was a proud woman in a loveless marriage.
Born in 1910, she was the oldest girl in a family of 14 children. Her birth name was Elizabeth Troth but most everybody called her Tillie. Pretty and vain, she sold cosmetics and sundries at Kaufmann's department store in Downtown Pittsburgh. She also regularly lied about her age, even on official documents.
She married Leo Schilling in 1948. On the license, she listed her birth year as 1915, the same as his. They were married for 35 years, but it was not until her murder that Leo learned she was five years older than he was, Detective Hall said.
Mrs. Schilling had been married once before. She divorced her first husband in 1945. In court papers, she alleged adultery. Her marriage to Leo Schilling would have the same problem.
After the murder, he told detectives that he and his wife lived in the same house, but that their marriage was broken. Yes, he said, he saw other women. Tillie knew of his straying and tolerated it.
Leo Schilling set out for Florida by car with another woman on Aug. 4, 1983, about six days before the murder. He told police that Tillie was home alone, as far as he knew.
He accounted for his whereabouts on the trip sufficiently enough that police did not believe he could have committed the murder himself, Detective Hall said. But Mr. Schilling was a suspect. He could have hired someone to kill his wife, the detective said.
Mr. Schilling, 68 at the time, took and passed a polygraph test. Even so, detectives continued to question him.
Polygraphs also were administered to most of the men he drank coffee with at an Eat'n Park restaurant. Only one was uncooperative with detectives. Police looked at him especially hard, but found no evidence connecting him to Mrs. Schilling, Detective Hall said. Everybody else passed his lie-detector test.
Tillie Schilling took cabs everywhere she went, so taxi drivers also were a focus of the investigation. None turned into a solid suspect.
Short Street, where she and Leo lived, contains only four houses, all on the same side of the roadway. The Schillings' house abutted a small hillside leading to railroad tracks. The light-rail commuter train to and from Pittsburgh travels those tracks. The area is not a gathering place for transients, but Detective Hall said other crimes have occurred along railroad lines, so the potential importance of the tracks also was on detectives' minds during the initial investigation.
Leo Schilling, who sold insurance, had just $2,000 in coverage on his wife's life. He sold the house that he and Tillie had shared, but otherwise did not seem to gain monetarily from his wife's death.
Soon after the murder, Mr. Schilling professed his innocence to his wife's family.
"He told me, 'I had nothing to do with Betty's killing.' He was the only one who called her Betty," said Mrs. Schilling's sister, Mary.
Leo Schilling died in 1993. By that time, Mr. McHugh was in prison and Tillie's murder was on the back burner. Police had moved on to newer cases.
But Ms. Hruby said she cannot move on. She remembered her aunt as kind, fastidious and proper -- a woman seemingly without enemies.
Ms. Hruby said the idea that somebody got away with murder motivates her to keep pushing for answers. She hopes Detective Hall's reinvestigation is a first step toward getting them.
First published on September 22, 2008 at 12:00 am
THE DETAILS:
25-year-old murder mystery re-emerges
Who killed Tillie Schilling in her Bethel Park home?
Monday, September 22, 2008
By Milan Simonich, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Twenty-five years ago someone beat and choked Tillie Schilling to death in her Bethel Park living room.Twenty-five years after somebody beat and choked Tillie Schilling to death in her Bethel Park living room, three things are certain.
Her husband, Leo, was in Florida when the killing happened, keeping company with another woman.
Nothing was stolen from Mrs. Schilling's home and it appeared unlikely that the killer broke in. Her attacker left behind jewelry and other valuables that were in plain view.
Finally, the assailant was merciless. He attacked Mrs. Schilling, a small, slim woman of 73, with savage ferocity. Six of her ribs were broken, but the fatal wounds were to her neck. The killer fractured her larynx, her left thyroid cartilage and her hyoid, the horseshoe-shaped bone at the base of the mouth.
Mrs. Schilling's death remains a murder mystery, as the investigation was dormant for nearly 20 years. But now the case has been reopened because of the persistence of Eileen Hudson-Hruby, her niece.
Just 23 when the murder occurred, Ms. Hruby said the case gnawed at her until it became an obsession. She keeps a notebook filled with minute details about her aunt's life, especially her last days. Ms. Hruby's hope is that the case, if given proper attention, can still be cracked.
"I think it can be solved. I want to see if we can bring someone out of the woodwork," she said.
Allegheny County Detective Gary Hall recently met with Ms. Hruby as the start of his cold-case investigation. Mrs. Schilling's body was discovered by one of her sisters on Aug. 15, 1983. Ms. Hruby, though, said she is certain the killer struck five days earlier. Mrs. Schilling last picked up her mail on Aug. 10.
The two detectives who originally investigated her killing are gone, one retired, the other dead. The files they left behind are a start for Detective Hall, but they point in no clear direction.
"It's a whodunit, and we don't get too many whodunits," he said.
There is a bigger problem for Detective Hall. Scientific advances that solve many cold cases are not available in this one. All the physical evidence collected from Mrs. Schilling's home is gone, washed away in a flood that swept through an evidence room.
Even with no blood, hair or fingernail scrapings to be checked for DNA, at least one old suspect remains alive, and police know right where to find him.
Sean McHugh, 49, has been in prison for 20 years for the murder of another Bethel Park woman. He lived just one-tenth of a mile from Mrs. Schilling's house on Short Street.
Mr. McHugh even told police he knew Mrs. Schilling and did yard work for her. Leo Schilling, though, said his claim was untrue.
Not in dispute is that Mr. McHugh followed Lois J. Klaes, 63, after she left a restaurant in Bethel Park on Aug. 9, 1985. Her body was found the next morning under a pile of blocks in her back yard, not far from the restaurant.
She had been raped and beaten into a coma. Mrs. Klaes, who never regained consciousness, died in 1991.
Originally sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison for her rape and beating, Mr. McHugh pleaded guilty to third-degree murder after she died. With that admission, his sentence was increased to 25 to 50 years. He is doing his time in a medium-security prison in Houtzdale, Clearfield County.
Could Mr. McHugh have made up a story about working for the Schillings because he was involved in Tillie's murder and he feared his prints might be found in the home? Detective Hall said that was possible. Mr. McHugh, he said, knew details about the Schilling house that an outsider should not have known.
Still, parts of the Schilling case do not seem to fit Mr. McHugh. Sexual assault motivated him to follow the woman in the restaurant. Her pants were found tied around her neck, and detectives said bite marks on her chest were the doing of Mr. McHugh.
Police say Mrs. Schilling was not raped by her assailant, though she was naked from the waist down.
Her electric keyboard, which she loved to play, was still on. That means she probably was fully clothed and at the keyboard when the killer entered her home.
Could the assailant have removed some of her clothing to stage the scene so it would appear to be a rape?
Dr. Bennet Omalu, a neuropathologist and forensic pathologist, reviewed the 1983 autopsy report on Mrs. Schilling at the request of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He said the viciousness of the attack seemed like "intimate partner homicide," not a killing by a burglar or would-be rapist.
"Usually crimes carried out like this are not perpetrated by a stranger," said Dr. Omalu, formerly of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and now a medical examiner in central California.
Dr. Omalu said her "well-patterned" injuries indicate that she was strangled. He said the attacker probably jammed a hard object, like a metal bar, across Mrs. Schilling's throat and choked her.
A broken dining chair in the Schilling home could have been used to strike her in the head and face before she was choked. A piece broken from the chair matched the kind of hard object or "bar" that Dr. Omalu said figured into the strangulation.
"There was a significant struggle. She fought very hard for her life," he said.
All the way back in 1983, detectives knew that Mrs. Schilling was a proud woman in a loveless marriage.
Born in 1910, she was the oldest girl in a family of 14 children. Her birth name was Elizabeth Troth but most everybody called her Tillie. Pretty and vain, she sold cosmetics and sundries at Kaufmann's department store in Downtown Pittsburgh. She also regularly lied about her age, even on official documents.
She married Leo Schilling in 1948. On the license, she listed her birth year as 1915, the same as his. They were married for 35 years, but it was not until her murder that Leo learned she was five years older than he was, Detective Hall said.
Mrs. Schilling had been married once before. She divorced her first husband in 1945. In court papers, she alleged adultery. Her marriage to Leo Schilling would have the same problem.
After the murder, he told detectives that he and his wife lived in the same house, but that their marriage was broken. Yes, he said, he saw other women. Tillie knew of his straying and tolerated it.
Leo Schilling set out for Florida by car with another woman on Aug. 4, 1983, about six days before the murder. He told police that Tillie was home alone, as far as he knew.
He accounted for his whereabouts on the trip sufficiently enough that police did not believe he could have committed the murder himself, Detective Hall said. But Mr. Schilling was a suspect. He could have hired someone to kill his wife, the detective said.
Mr. Schilling, 68 at the time, took and passed a polygraph test. Even so, detectives continued to question him.
Polygraphs also were administered to most of the men he drank coffee with at an Eat'n Park restaurant. Only one was uncooperative with detectives. Police looked at him especially hard, but found no evidence connecting him to Mrs. Schilling, Detective Hall said. Everybody else passed his lie-detector test.
Tillie Schilling took cabs everywhere she went, so taxi drivers also were a focus of the investigation. None turned into a solid suspect.
Short Street, where she and Leo lived, contains only four houses, all on the same side of the roadway. The Schillings' house abutted a small hillside leading to railroad tracks. The light-rail commuter train to and from Pittsburgh travels those tracks. The area is not a gathering place for transients, but Detective Hall said other crimes have occurred along railroad lines, so the potential importance of the tracks also was on detectives' minds during the initial investigation.
Leo Schilling, who sold insurance, had just $2,000 in coverage on his wife's life. He sold the house that he and Tillie had shared, but otherwise did not seem to gain monetarily from his wife's death.
Soon after the murder, Mr. Schilling professed his innocence to his wife's family.
"He told me, 'I had nothing to do with Betty's killing.' He was the only one who called her Betty," said Mrs. Schilling's sister, Mary.
Leo Schilling died in 1993. By that time, Mr. McHugh was in prison and Tillie's murder was on the back burner. Police had moved on to newer cases.
But Ms. Hruby said she cannot move on. She remembered her aunt as kind, fastidious and proper -- a woman seemingly without enemies.
Ms. Hruby said the idea that somebody got away with murder motivates her to keep pushing for answers. She hopes Detective Hall's reinvestigation is a first step toward getting them.
First published on September 22, 2008 at 12:00 am