PA PA - John Watson, 14, Dunbar Township, 2 May 1974

Cold case investigators in western Pennsylvania have arrested a childhood friend in the 1974 death of a boy killed while running a bike errand for his mother.

Police believe then-17-year-old Joseph Leos shot 14-year-old John David Watson Jr. in Dunbar Township, about 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh...

The 57-year-old Leos, of Mount Pleasant, was charged Wednesday with criminal homicide.

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According to state police, Watson left his Dunbar Township home on the evening of May 2, 1974, to go to the store, but he never returned.

His body was found the next morning in a yard near his home. State police say he had suffered a gunshot wound to the back of the head.

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Leos, now 58, of Mount Pleasant, was charged with criminal homicide. State police said that new tests done after the case was reopened in 2009 show the coat has gunpowder residue on it, yet they said Leos had never mentioned firing a weapon, according to an affidavit filed in Fayette County to support the charges. Police have also recovered a .22-caliber rifle, although they said tests to match it to the crime have been inconclusive...

Watson had left home at about 9 p.m. on May 2, 1974, and stopped to play pinball at the motel, according to the police affidavit. Witnesses saw him biking home with his purchase and waved.

Leos was staying nearby with his grandmother in the Wheeler Bottom section of Dunbar Township. Police believe that Watson was killed at about 9:30 p.m. following “an altercation or confrontation,” the affidavit said.

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Tom Watson, 24 years old at the time, told police he went to his brother's body, hugged him and found that John Watson's body was dry after a rainy night. He also said there were drag marks approximately 50 feet from the house of Joseph Edward Leos' grandmother to the location where the body was found...

“That morning of his death, he (Leos) was standing there and the things he said made me think he did it,” said Tom Watson, adding that he lunged at Leos before police pulled him off.

When he was pulled off Leos, Tom Watson saw something in Leos' eyes that convinced him of who killed his brother. “I just knew it was Joe,” Tom Watson said.

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The moment 93-year-old Alberta Myers read in her newspaper Thursday that Joseph E. Leos had been charged in a 41-year-old cold-case murder, she was taken back to the day her son died in a mysterious fire. Leos, she said, was among those police had questioned in the unsolved 1993 mobile home blaze that took the life of her son, Dennis A. Myers, 38...

Myers said Leos and her son had been in a domestic relationship. State police in Greensburg interviewed Leos several times after her son's death, she said, but “they said they never had enough to file charges”...

On April 26, 1993, Leos, who had been living in Florida, transferred the property to Myers for $1, according to county records. Five days later, a fire that police said was intentionally set destroyed the mobile home. Firefighters found Myers' body in the living room and the remains of his dog in the bathroom.

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