A Cheating Husband Causes a Double Tragedy
(“Dew Process,” Forensic Files)
Forensic Files has introduced us to many a physician who forgot his Hippocratic oath, and we’re not just talking about overprescribing opioids.
Dr. Maynard Muntzing secretly slipped his fiancée drugs to make her miscarry, Dr. John Schneeberger sexually assaulted a patient in his office, and Dr. John Boyle murdered his wife and buried her beneath his basement.
Dentists, on the other hand, come out pretty much unsullied by the series.
Smart mouth. After all, aren’t those who make a living drilling through enamel and pricking soft gum tissue the long-suffering stalwarts of the medical profession? The humble providers of a service we need but dread?
Well, Glen Wolsieffer, D.D.S., distinguished himself as the exception.
Wolsieffer, a dark and handsome 32-year-old Pennsylvanian, had much more than modest ambitions as a dental professional. He owned three practices in Luzerne County.
And he had such a high opinion of himself that he thought he deserved not only the love of the high school sweetheart he married but also that of at least two girlfriends on the side.
Short stint. It was his cheating that brought about his downfall and led to the deaths of two innocent people — his wife, Betty, and his brother, Neil.
Apparently, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections thought a lot of Glen Wolsieffer, too, and let him out of prison after just 13 years.
For this week, I looked around to find out where Glen Wolsieffer is today and whether he still has the support of his surviving family.
So let’s get going on a recap of “Dew Process,” the Forensic Files episode about the case:
Neighborhood crush. Elizabeth Tasker, known as Betty, was born in 1954, in Wilkes-Barre, the daughter of an insurance claims investigator and a hospital communications supervisor.
Betty met Glen Wolsieffer when they were both kids. Their families lived a few blocks apart in Wilkes-Barre. Glen played baseball and football in school and Betty marched with the drill team and belonged to the Junior Mozart Club.
Friends described Betty as bubbly and well liked.
Dashing dentist. She majored in sociology at Wilkes College. Glen got an undergraduate degree in biology at the University of Scranton.
After Betty married Glen — who sometimes sported a mustache and people would later say looked like a young Tom Selleck — she worked for Blue Cross and Xerox while he finished dental school at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
The couple moved back to Wilkes-Barre and bought a house on 75 Birch Street. After they had their daughter, Danielle, Betty stayed at home.
Upstanding citizens. “Everyone thought of them as the all-American family,” Citizens’ Voice reporter Carol Crane told the ID show Handsome Devils, which produced the episode “The Deadly Dentist” about the case.
Betty’s mother, Marian Tasker, described Glen Wolsieffer as a “loved son-in-law.”
The families were close. Betty’s brother Jack Tasker and Glen’s brother Neil played golf together.
Woozy and weak. While Glen built up his dental fiefdom, Betty did volunteer work for charities. They were both popular in Wilkes-Barre, which Forensic Files describes as a small industrial town with little crime — but, oddly, goes on to say that a string of burglaries took place in the Wolsieffers’ neighborhood.
On August 30, 1986, it was the Wolsieffers’ turn to have crime come to their house, and it was way worse than a theft.
Police responded to a call Saturday morning to find Glen Wolsieffer on the floor fading in and out of consciousness.
Little bro to the rescue. Glen told police he awoke to a loud noise around 6 a.m. and saw an intruder run down the stairs. Gun in hand, Glen followed the home invader, but he managed to sneak up behind Glen and strangle him with a belt, Glen claimed.
In a lucid moment, Glen said, he called his younger brother, Neil Wolsieffer, who lived across the street with his wife, Nancy. Neil rushed to the scene and called police at 7:19 a.m.
In the master bedroom, officers discovered Betty Wolsieffer, 32, dead on the floor with bruising to her face and obvious strangulation marks around her neck. She hadn’t been sexually assaulted.
Fuzzy ID. It looked as though the intruder had climbed a ladder to the second floor and entered the house through a window.
Glen described the assailant as having dark hair and dark eyebrows. He wore a translucent mask that made his race impossible to determine, Glen said.
According to Forensic Files, the intruder had taken $1,300 from a desk drawer and some jewelry — but Handsome Devils said that nothing was stolen from the house.
Fortunately, Betty and Glen’s daughter, Danielle, 5, lay unharmed in her bed.
Sensational story. When told that Betty was dead, Glen seemed shocked.
At Mercy Hospital, a doctor sedated Glen and kept him overnight for observation. He had a contusion on the back of his head, according to the Citizens’ Voice, but was in good condition overall.
The crime was colossal news for sedate Luzerne County. The Scrantonian reported on “the wife of a well-known dentist with offices in Hanover Twp., Nanticoke, and Shickshinny” found strangled. The Times-Tribune referred to Glen as a prominent dentist.
Magnificent 15. Panicked neighbors wanted to see the crime solved quickly.
Local and state police and the DA’s office joined forces. The police chief assigned 15 investigators to the case. The FBI helped evaluate evidence.
At first, the police believed Glen’s story that a robber committed the murder, according to the Scrantonian.
Guidance counselor. But Glen Wolsieffer started to look suspicious soon enough.
For one thing, by Sept. 3, just four days after the murder, Glen had engaged a lawyer, Mark Ciavarella, who advised him not to talk to police.
That situation didn’t exactly endear him to Betty’s family.
Plus, when Glen and Neil visited the Taskers after the murder, Glen admitted that the rumors about his having two girlfriends — his dental assistant, Debbie Shipp, and his married aerobics instructor, Carol Kopicki — were true.
Long mourning. After that, the Taskers abandoned Team Glen entirely.
Luzerne County District Attorney Correale Stevens would later recall the time spent with the Taskers. “I still get shivers down my spine,” he told the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader. “One night I went over by myself and sat with the whole family and just talked. I saw the sadness in their eyes and that’s what really motivated me, seeing that family torn apart.”
Local media outlets weren’t siding with Glen either. An unnamed source leaked to the press the fact that someone had damaged the window screen on the second floor from the inside — whereas an intruder would have broken in, not out.
Choking hazard. A veteran police officer told the Citizens’ Voice that, of the hundreds of burglaries he’d investigated, this was the first one that included a ladder. “Burglars fear ladders, feeling they could be trapped,” he said. “They would rather kick in a door.”
The coroner thought it strange that Betty had no blood on her face or nightgown after such a violent struggle — the facial and neck injuries were severe enough to prevent her family from giving her an open-casket funeral.
Glen had strangulation marks on the back of his own neck, inconsistent with his story that the intruder approached him from the back with the belt.
Office affair. It seemed more likely that, during a struggle, someone facing him pulled on a gold chain he liked to wear.
Glen’s girlfriend Debbie Shipp began talking to the police. Debbie said the two started seeing each other in 1981 and at some point, he began talking about leaving his wife for her.
Then, Debbie found out Glen was also having an affair with Carol Kopicki, whom he met at Aerobic World.
Night fever. Receipts from the Red Roof Inn later showed that Glen sometimes met both women separately for trysts before returning home to Betty.
At some point, Carol Kopicki divorced her husband, Mark, and Glen chose her over Debbie Shipp.
Before Glen stopped talking to police, he told them that he was out with friends at the Crackerbox Palace nightclub and had gotten home around 2:30 a.m. on the night of the murder. He went right to sleep and didn’t wake until he heard the intruder, he said.
Awkward climb. But investigators noticed that Glen’s car, unlike Betty’s, had no dew on it, which according to a meteorologist didn’t make sense scientifically for that particular night. They believed someone must have driven Glen’s car between 2:30 a.m. and the police’s arrival.
Other inconsistencies included a lack of the intruder’s footprints in the dew and the fact that the ladder was facing in the wrong direction. It also hadn’t made any indentations on the ground, as a person’s weight would cause.
The FBI believed someone staged the crime scene.
Shaken and stirred. And the most incriminating part of the investigation involved something Glen and Neil Wolsieffer hadn’t done. Neither went upstairs to check on Betty and Danielle’s safety while waiting for police.
When asked why, Neil had no answer. He cried and shook during questioning. A detective later described Neil, who worked as operations director of the Wilkes-Barre recreation department, as a “very nervous person.”
During the course of three interviews with Neil, detectives began suspecting he knew more than he was letting on. He refused to take a polygraph, although he set up a meeting with the DA for later and promised to give additional information about what he saw on the night of the murder.
Violent end. But no further answers would be coming from Neil. While heading for the appointment, Neil turned into the path of either a dump truck or cement truck (accounts vary), which crushed his Honda.
Neil died instantly.
The driver of the truck told police Neil’s car seemed to deliberately cross into his path. The coroner declared the death a suicide.
Meanwhile, investigators found out that Betty knew about Glen’s cheating and was sick of his late-night partying. She wanted out of the marriage.
Yet another woman. The lab found evidence of a violent struggle on the night of the murder: Under Betty’s fingernails were blue fibers that likely came from the denim outfit Glen wore to the nightclub in Kingston the evening of the murder. On the bed, police found Glen’s hairs with roots attached, meaning someone forcibly removed them from his head.
Forensic Files didn’t mention it, but Nancy Wolsieffer — Neil’s widow — supposedly turned against Glen, too. According to Handsome Devils, the dentist and the Catholic-school teacher got cozy after Neil’s death, until she learned he was still seeing Carol Kopicki.
Nancy met with police and started bad-mouthing her brother-in-law.
Dentist’s a spectacle. By this time, Glen, who clearly sensed that folks in Wilkes-Barre weren’t exactly in his corner, had started a dental practice in Falls Church, Virginia, where he was living with Carol Kopicki and his daughter, whom he enrolled in private school.
In 1989, police treated Glen and Carol’s neighbors to some front-row theater. Officers surrounded their house and arrested Glen on a charge of first-degree murder for Betty Wolsieffer’s death.
The subsequent trial and media coverage offered “a tale of mystery and sexual intrigue that so gripped this town that headlines referred to Wolsieffer and his wife, Betty, by first names only and crowds stood in line for hours to get seats in an overflowing Luzerne County courtroom,” according to a Patriot-News account from Nov. 29, 1990.
Husband who parties. Authorities made a case that on the night of the murder, Glen met Debbie Shipp at a hotel for sex; she admitted it.
Apparently, the extramarital tryst wasn’t enough diversion for Glen, so he hit the Crackerbox Palace. There, he ran into Carol Ann Kopicki but she was with her husband, which put Glen in a foul mood.
When he got home, Betty confronted him — Betty’s pal Barbara Wende had told police that Betty confided in her that he’d given her bruises during previous fights, according to Handsome Devils. (Glen had refused to go to marriage counseling, according to a Times Leader account.)
Dew not. The prosecution alleged that a violent fight ensued the night of the murder, with Betty defending herself by tearing at Glen’s hair and his clothes and yanking his chain, literally, which left visible impressions on the back of his neck.
After choking her with his hands and finishing her off with a ligature, Glen changed her nightgown and washed her face in an attempt to mask his guilt, the prosecution alleged. Then he inadvertently erased the dew from his car by driving somewhere to get rid of the bloody clothing.
Next, he staged the scene, inadvertently placing the ladder the wrong way.
Blame it on an addict. He probably deliberately created his head wound by knocking himself into a wall. Or, perhaps, Neil helped him to both make the injury and ransack the house so it looked like a burglary. (It didn’t come up in any media accounts, but it’s possible Neil was the one who finished Betty off with the ligature — and then the guilt drove him to suicide.)
At the trial, the prosecution played a tape secretly made by Betty Tasker’s father and brother, but it was no bombshell. It recorded Glen denying that he and Betty fought and saying that he thought the Taskers didn’t believe in his innocence. Glen said that Jack Tasker was the reason his softball team blackballed him, according to the Hazleton Standard-Speaker on Nov. 19, 1990.
Glen didn’t testify at the trial. His defense contended that one or two “druggies” broke into the house and killed Betty and inflicted head injuries on Glen that caused him to toggle in and out of consciousness.
Hostile witness. Carol Kopicki, Glen’s girlfriend at the time of the trial, refused to answer questions, but she did lend the trial a little window-dressing: “She stares icily at the news media and curiously at the court officers,” the Times Leader wrote in a Nov. 19, 1989 piece. “She strode into court fashionably dressed in a furry black sweater, her short hair cut into a bouncy bob, her face covered heavily with makeup.”
After deliberating six hours, the jury convicted Glen Wolsieffer of third-degree murder — rejecting the notion that Glen had premeditated the homicide.
Upon hearing the guilty verdict, “a relative waved what appeared to be smelling salts under the nose of Wolsieffer’s mother, Phyllis, who hung her head,” the Patriot-News reported. Glen’s sister, Lisa Myers, said she still believed in Glen’s innocence.
Give him liberty. On Betty’s family’s side of the courtroom, the Taskers hugged and wept.
“The verdict changes no minds, but rather calcifies the rancor of the two sides,” Richard Pienciak wrote in Murder at 75 Birch, a mass-market paperback about the case.
But the justice system somehow looked upon Glen with favor and allowed him to go free on $200,000 bail while he appealed the verdict. He returned to Virginia.
He enjoyed two years of liberty before his sentencing in 1992.
Adding insult to injury. Despite a plaintive letter his daughter, then 11, wrote to the judge (“Remember how much he means to me. I really love him and need him for everything”), Glen got a sentence of 8 to 20 years and went off to prison.
Betty’s mother, Marian Tasker, eventually took custody of Danielle.
The Taskers fought their former son-in-law’s bids for parole over the years.
Upon rejecting Wolsieffer’s first request for parole in 2000, the board noted that he might need sex offender treatment due to his multiple affairs and “view of women,” the Times Leader reported.
Steps to freedom. Five years later, Marian Tasker, then 78, said that she suspected bad news when she saw that a parole board letter had come to her certified — whereas denials “were sent regular mail,” the Times Leader reported.
Glen had confessed to killing Betty, spurring the board to approve his sixth try at parole.
Pennsylvania released Wolsieffer into a half-way house for anger management treatment in 2005, followed by transition into the community under a parole officer’s supervision, according to the Times Leader.
Credentials flaunted. Glen took up residence in Wilkes-Barre again instead of returning to Virginia.
I wasn’t able to find out what Glen did for work after his release, although the obituary for his mother, Phyllis Wolsieffer, referred to him as “Dr.” E. Glen Wolsieffer, suggesting he was using his degree somehow.
Whatever the case, his side of the family still supports him.
Not a waiting woman. Danielle became a hair stylist and is close to her father. A 2020 story in the local paper noting the 10th birthday of Danielle’s son mentioned Glen Wolsieffer as his grandfather.
Glen’s sister, Lisa Myers, also remains in his corner.
Carol Kopicki stayed in Wilkes-Barre, but apparently the entitled, self-indulgent dentist she once loved lost his sway over her. She married someone else.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube
This. Was. So. Terrible and horrific
Thanks, Rebecca. Having read Pa’s definition of third-degree murder, it seems to’ve applied correctly: there seems no evidence it was planned (though of course it’s possible – Betty seemingly knew of his infidelity, likely told him, and he was motivated to avoid the division of his relative wealth; it’s happened before). With a sentence of 40 yrs max, however, 13 seems too short given no obvious mitigation; I’d’ve expected at least 20. Betty’s family’s anger therefore seems justified. This perp went to considerable length to hide his crime – an aggravating feature in my book.
It’s conditionally tragic that his bro killed himself. I use conditionality because there’s the possibility that he had a hand in the murder, though I’d prefer to think not. We can understand a bro’s involvement after the fact – helping to excuse when the damage is already done – if not condone it, in which case a guilty conscience is fitting, if not the suicide (and in this case the means could’ve hurt or killed the other driver, but he was likely desperate and it may have been unplanned).
I don’t judge his family for their love/loyalty, but I’m not at all sure I could overcome the horror of my father killing my mother, even if I forgave. Perhaps they accept his denial of guilt – he only confessed for parole – or even accept a claim that his bro did it (and the guilt led to suicide). Both require extreme credulity – but that might be easier than accepting the alternative…
The bro’s wife comes out at best tasteless and credulous and at worst appalling (if she suspected).
Unless he has a doctorate (doubtful) it’s incorrect for him to be styled ‘Dr’: he lost that when his license was revoked. He certainly shouldn’t be using it himself per his former status.
While ‘white privilege’ is a febrile concept in the current socio-political atmosphere in the US (and here in UK to a lesser extent), one wonders whether it applies to this former well-heeled professional’s case in his paltry sentence… [I’m most certainly NOT a left-liberal – but I do care for fair, consistent punishment.]
I just watched this episode this week ironically. The whole thing is shocking from start to finish. 13 years for a cold blooded murder and he could have been paroled even sooner? Wow. That’s a real slap in the face to her family and friends. So sad about the brother Neil too. I have to disagree with the possibility Neil had anything to do with the murder other than helping cover it up but the whole thing is so crazy who knows? He was probably blindsided to get a call from his brother in the middle of the night saying he killed his wife so come help cover it up. Poor guy must have been in shock. Who wouldn’t? The icing on the cake is Glen started sleeping with Neil’s wife! What a scumbag. Nice way to honor his own brother.
And of course the age old question comes up-why not just get a divorce? I wonder what Glen said to his daughter to explain what happened? She appears to have stuck by him. Kind of suprised he went back to Wilkes-Barre. It’s a pretty small town but he apparently has no shame of any sort so par for the course for the dog.
As always it was an interesting read and I enjoy finding out about stuff that wasn’t in the FF episode. Funny what they leave out sometimes.
Don’t move to Luzerne County. There’s the two judges, in jail now, for taking bribes to send teens to a filthy family owned correctional facility partly owned by the Pittsburgh DA’s brother, who got off scott free. Not a really wholesome place. Maybe Glen or his people pulled strings?
Cash for kids scandal. I didn’t know about this! Thank you for posting. Yes, perhaps Glen pulled strings.
One of the judges convicted was Glenn’s attorney. Mark Ciavarella.
Yikes, how sordid — glad they got caught!
The cash for kids scandal is heart wrenching…there’s a movie about it, but I couldn’t bear to watch..the news 1 night showed the judge leaving court, tv & mob of people..One mother was screaming, you remember me ??? (He .. didn’t..) her son, as with not sure how many others, committed suicide due to this travesty of justice…that was one of the most heartbreaking news shots ever…
In my opinion, Glen absolutely did not get anything near a proper sentence. We’ll probably never know whether Neil actually did help with the covering or finishing of said crime. Also, I agree Luzerne isn’t such a quaint little innocent county. Not that surprised about the whole situation. Sad to say this tragedy ended pretty stereotypically: Court allows the perpetrator to get off easy, society lets a person go on as before, the family defends them till the very end. Too bad for victims/families that had everything taken away without such privileges. Let alone any possible future casualties if the punishment was not fitting for crime.
Agreed: an inadequate sentence. It’s highly likely Neil was involved – it’s more the ‘what’ than ‘whether’ – for unless there was a history of serious depression, treatment, etc it’s too coincidental that en route to police questioning he takes his life (and in a selfish manner that could’ve taken others). We don’t know whether it was his own, his brother’s, or both necks he was worried about, or whether it was guilt at his part in the ‘murder episode’ if not the murder itself.
But I don’t make much of family defending its member: we can’t expect anything remotely like objectivity. The failure here was that of criminal justice.
The perp is an appalling creature and absolutely doesn’t deserve a contented life and supportive family.
Glen had another daughter with Carol Kopicki. The 2nd daughter uses the last name Wolsieffer.
RIP Betty
Do you have anything to prove this statement?
I knew Betty. She was a great mother and loved by so many.
He’s a coward.
Glad to hear that she’s remembered and loved!
Looks like Carole Kopicki passed away in 2012: https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/carole-kopicki-obituary?pid=161289278
That explains why I couldn’t find recent information on her – thanks much for the update.
Not the same Carole. The one in the obit was born in 1941 and had not divorced her husband.
I don’t believe it’s actually her but a relative with same name, she was married in 1960 – some, this Carol would be around 60ish now. I’m looking it up to see if I can locate her, someone else said they had a child together.
This is not the same Carol Kopicki. Kopicki was her married name. Her ex-husband owned Kopicki Funeral Home.
Oh,, so sorry, the confusion is lousy for people with same name, a lot of same details,etc..actually in doing genealogy search it’s hard as you come across same situation.
No. That is not the correct person. The real Carol in this situation is married, alive and well, and living locally.
A bit of a black widow. Carol married a guy 10 yrs. younger and they had a son. Her current name is Carol Buss. Her much younger husband passed away about a year ago. He was only in his early fifties. She continues to work at Odyssey Fitness Center. Glen may have somehow managed to get his license reinstated because my friend’s mother’s dentist.
Yes. Carol went back to Luzerne County along with her daughter, Kelsey, who was fathered by Glen. She was given a job at Odyssey Fitness Center where she still works. She went on to marry Mark Buss, 10 yrs her junior, who passed away in 2020. Her son, John Paul Kopicki, fathered by her first husband passed away in 2022. She still resides in Forty Fort with her other son fathered by Mark Buss.
It looks like Pennsylvania is the home of the most interesting murder cases, at least for me. This, as well as the Patricia Rorrer’s case, was one of my favourite cases treated in FF. IMHO the guy is guilty as hell and his brother could not handle the pressure of being interviewed again. Probably he just covered up his brother, I doubt he was directly involved in the murder. The two women, at least in the picture above, have a really weird looks, at least to me. They seem to be cold-hearted women, but probably it’s just my impression. I have not been able, as someone else said before me, to find them on Facebook or other social networks (just curious to see how they aged).
Now that you mention it, Pennsylvania is well represented on Forensic Files:
Shopping Spree (Lisa Manderach’s Murder in Limerick)
When the Dust Settles (Kathleen Foley Kills for a Player in Allentown)
Dollars and Sense (Update on Lawrence Murrell and Justin Glover in Harrisburg)
Summer Obsession (Craig Rabinowitz: A Double Life in Philadelphia)
… And an interesting one I’ve just seen about murder at the former General Wayne Inn there… but I’ll not spoil it pending your likely future coverage (I THINK FF covered it, and it’s both forensically slightly unusual and particularly tragic…)
Don’t miss the FF episode about Robert Aucker who kidnapped his wife from the Susquehanna Valley Mall in Selinsgrove and murdered her. Her cat’s hair was the clue that broke the case…
Cats, Flies and Snapshots — I need to watch that one again.
There is a recent episode on ‘The Wrong Man’ about Patricia Rorrer. Actually I believe it’s two episodes dedicated to her case. Anyway she’s innocent. It’s a Starz show but I think I watched it on Amazon Prime Video. You should check it out, it’s obvious she didn’t do it. And there’s a lot that actually points to the husband.
Just watched the Forensic Files about Patricia Rorrer. It would make a good blog post.
Patricia Rorrer is where she belong, in jail for murdering a mother and baby. She is definitely not innocent.
Soooo right he ! He doesn’t deserve any life as far as I am concerned. I am thinking that if bro help cover up the murder, I don’t think he would take his own life for that, but if he actually did the murder, that I think that would drive him to suicide. But then I really don’t think he strangled her. ..I guess I just can’t get my head around someone would commit suicide for covering up the murder.
Well, it’s possibly not merely covering-up, as in the passive knowing-but-not-reporting, but aiding and abetting that Neil MAY have engaged in – helping his brother stage the scene. We have to assume, I suggest, that Glen was the killer, leaving a range of possible involvement of Neil, from merely knowing and taking no part ex post facto, to knowing in advance then helping to stage. My intuition is that he didn’t know in advance but may well have either been told by Glen or guessed and was enjoined to help stage for police.
His suicide may have been less because of a sense of his own culpability (to whatever degree that was, if at all) than horror at the knowledge his brother is a ‘murderer.’ Furthermore, he may have been deeply anxious that he’d implicate or disclose Glen’s guilt under questioning, being conflicted, as well as about their suspicion of his own possible role.
The trauma of the death; likely knowing Glen is the perp; potential guilt at his own part; fear of implicating Glen and/or himself under questioning: I suggest these are indeed plausible bases for desperation and therefore impulsive suicide attempt (as opposed to a means more likely to be successful and avoid pain and suffering). Of course, the latter caveat could equally be cited as reason for the crash being accidental… But on the balance of probabilities the crash was deliberate and Glen probably has two people’s blood on his hands. I hope he feels extreme guilt…
You got a few things wrong. My parents were friends with them and my aunt and uncle lived across the street.
Danielle wasn’t home when this happened. Glenn sent her to his parents’ house for the night conveniently.
The window was also broken out, not just the screen. And it had been wiped down which a burglar wouldn’t do. Plus as you said the ladder was backwards with no indent in the ground.
His mother referred to him as DR because she still believed his innocence and believed since he HAD a doctoral certificate that he always would be a doctor. Though he can no longer practice medicine. Family denial at its greatest.
I will never understand Danielle forgiving her father, or being ok with him in her life after what he did to her very sweet loving mother.
Forgiveness is good for the heart. What good would it do for Danielle to hold on to the grudge? She would lose both parents if you did that. That’s not good.
This very interesting. I just watched the Netflix series on Ted Bundy. What was interesting about the Bundy case was that he charmed everyone with his good looks and endearing personality. So much so that everyone who knew him – including church members – wrote letters attesting to his flawless character. This triggered a memory. About 30 or so years ago I was referred to a new dentist. His office was in an apartment in Arlington, VA. I was a social worker and had several clients in that building. After seeing Dr. Wolsieffer I made a home visit. I casually mentioned to my client that I just saw my new dentist in the building. She said, “You mean Wolsieffer? You know he is being investigated for murdering his wife in PA.” This was before the internet so I had no way to confirm. Six months later when I called to schedule my exam the practice was closed. I remember him having model good looks and he was very charming. After watching the Bundy series I Googled his name and this popped up.
I personally spoke to someone just today, that said, he doesn’t believe it was a suicide. He knew these people, and said it was an accident, the coroner wrote it wrong.
Neil’s death is somewhat peripheral to the story anyway, but based on what’s in the public domain a catastrophic collision (i) on the day he was to be interviewed by police and (ii) (it is claimed) his driving directly at the truck suggests intention in the context of the circumstances. And I would in any case prefer the finding of the coroner – with probably far more information – over the opinion of an acquaintance. Friends and family typically find suicide hard to believe in the absence of known mental ill-health and clutch at straws for other explanations. Because such a verdict is ‘hard’ on loved ones, anecdotally coroners only find it over accidental death when there is robust evidence.
Also, if I recall correctly, he’d driven beyond the venue for the interview, suggesting he had no intention of attending but – at least in the heat of the moment – had a different intention. If I am correct in this, suicidality is almost conclusive.