GUILTY PA - Lisa, 44, & Hailey Scheetz, 16, murdered, East Drumore, 11 June 2015

As an East Drumore Township mother and two teen daughters were watching a Netflix movie late at night, a knife-wielding Leeton Thomas slipped into their apartment and savagely stabbed all three for accusing him of sexual assault, a prosecutor told a jury Wednesday as the double-homicide trial opened.

“This was rage. This was anger. This was vengeance,” said First Assistant District Attorney Christopher Larsen in highlighting testimony he said should lead the jury to convict Thomas, 39, of first-degree murder for the slayings of his neighbors, Lisa Scheetz, 44, and Hailey Scheetz, 16.

Larsen said testimony will show that Thomas cut open a screen window to enter the Scheetzes' basement apartment early on June 11, 2015. Then he stabbed Lisa Scheetz 14 times, Larsen said, before turning his knife on Hailey, killing her. Hailey's 15-year-old sister survived serious stab wounds and named Thomas as the killer.

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The teen survivor of a brutal knife attack that killed her mother and older sister two years ago identified Leeton Thomas as the assailant Thursday during the second day of testimony in a double-homicide trial.

“When I woke up, I saw him standing in the kitchen,” the girl said of Thomas, who was a neighbor and went by the nickname Pie. She said Thomas was holding two knives.

“He stabbed us,” said the girl, referring to herself, her mother, Lisa Scheetz, 44, and sister, Hailey, 16, both of whom died in the apartment of deep stab wounds.

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Trooper Timothy Connolly, who collects crime-scene evidence, said he smelled an over-powering odor of bleach when he opened the washer’s lid inside the farmhouse at 826 Conowingo Road, where Thomas lived with his wife and four children.

“I had to turn my head away, it was that pungent an odor,” Connolly told the jury in Thomas’ double-homicide trial in Lancaster County Court.

The trooper said he noticed the water had a reddish-brown tint. He said he also noticed a pocket flashlight on an adjacent dryer.

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A state police investigator testified Monday that Leeton Thomas asked to be shot in the head after being charged with fatally stabbing an East Drumore Township woman and her daughter.

“He asked me to do him a favor and shoot him in the head,” Cpl. Todd McCurdy said in the fourth day of testimony in Thomas' double-homicide trial.

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Dr. Wayne Ross, who performed the autopsies, said Lisa Scheetz suffered 12 stab wounds and cuts, including two forceful thrusts that penetrated the heart and lung and created a gaping, five-inch chest wound. Another thrust entered the spleen.

Hailey suffered six stab wounds, Ross said, including separate thrusts completely through the throat and the shoulder.

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The jury deliberated less than three hours before finding Thomas guilty of first-degree, or premeditated, murder for the June 2015 stabbings of Lisa Scheetz, 44, and her daughter, Hailey, 16.

He also was convicted of attempted homicide for stabbing and severely injuring another Scheetz daughter, now 17. And he was found guilty of burglary for breaking into the Scheetzes' basement apartment.

Thomas, convicted on his 40th birthday, faces a penalty hearing at 9 a.m. Wednesday at which the jury will sentence him to life in prison without parole or death by lethal injection.

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Lancaster County President Judge Dennis Reinaker sentenced 40-year-old Leeton Thomas to death after a jury convicted Thomas on Tuesday of two counts of first-degree murder for fatally stabbing Lisa Scheetz and her 16-year-old daughter – who would have celebrated her 19th birthday on Friday.

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“He has no remorse,” one of Lisa’s surviving daughters said. “It doesn’t matter to him that I’m not able to call my mom. That my (surviving) sister has to live everyday of her life with reminders on her body of that night.”

Kim Scheetz, Lisa’s husband, called Thomas an “evil man.”

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Leeton Thomas “should go to the very top of the list” for killing a mother and her teen daughter if Pennsylvania resumes executions, a Lancaster County judge said Friday in formally sentencing the convicted murderer to death.

President Judge Dennis Reinaker also chastised Thomas’ family and friends for “insensitive” testimony when they asked the jury two days earlier to spare the 40-year-old defendant’s life.

“The smiling, the frivolity — it was as though they were oblivious to the fact that the man of whom they were speaking had murdered an innocent woman and her child and tried to murder a third,” Reinaker said. “And to hear from folks what a man of God the defendant is and how important his faith is to him had to be particularly appalling” to the victims’ family.

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