Sally Weiner’s Kidnapper Hid a Scary Chapter
(“The Stake-Out,” Forensic Files)
Before launching into the recap, I wanted to mention that forensicfilesnow.com is on Instagram. It’s my first foray into posting on that particular platform, so if anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears (or eyes).
This week’s episode takes us back to a time before social media, when most people weren’t even tech-savvy enough to know that the stuff they erased from their computer hard drives could land them behind razor wire.
Sally Weiner’s kidnapping, the subject of “The Stake-Out” on Forensic Files, took place in 1988.
Bad blood. David Carl Copenhefer harbored a massive grudge against Sally’s husband, Harry Weiner. He abducted Sally in a bid to extract money from Harry.
Like virtually all kidnapping-for-ransom plans, it backfired.
But Copenhefer was incorrigible. While he was awaiting trial, he came up with a new scheme.
In fact, researching Copenhefer was kind of like cleaning out the garage — there’s that last box buried way in the back with some disgusting old forgotten project inside.
In this case, the unpleasant discovery was something that happened in Copenhefer’s young adulthood, years before the Weiner case shook up a little town in the hinterlands of Pennsylvania.
Small-town folks. More on that and epilogues for the principles are coming up, so let’s get started on the recap of “The Stake Out,” along with other information drawn from internet research:
Sally Elaine Stough graduated from Strong Vincent High School in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1969. She married Harry Weiner, and they had two children.
The Weiners lived in Corry, a town of 6,500. Harry was the branch manager of a Pennbank in the Corry Plaza, the same shopping area where David and Patricia Copenhefer operated Corry Cards and Books.
Why, that’s wonderful. The Copenhefers and Weiners belonged to the First Presbyterian Church of Corry, although the Weiners later switched to the Corry Missionary Alliance, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Both couples had also participated in Marriage Encounter weekends.
But media accounts vary as to whether the Weiners and Copenhefers were close friends or just acquaintances.
One day in June of 1988, Sally, 37, got a call from a man identifying himself as an aide to U.S. Rep. Tom Ridge. Her husband, Harry, who was a civic leader in addition to a bank manager, had been chosen as Corry’s man of the year, the caller said.
Big anticlimax. After asking her not to divulge the great news to anyone, the caller made an appointment for Sally to meet him so they could secretly plan the surprise award ceremony in Harry’s honor.
Harry Weiner never saw his wife again.
He got a phone call with an audio recording of Sally asking him to follow the instructions in a bag under his car — otherwise, a kidnapper would cut off Sally’s hands.
Calling in the pros. A note said to fill the bag with “90 percent of the money stored at his bank,” pick up walkie talkies at Radio Shack, and deliver the cash at a secret location, according to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story from March 18, 1989.
Weiner immediately went to the authorities.
He already knew about the “man of the year” meeting — Sally, bless her, hadn’t been able to keep it a secret from him.
No payoff. The police and FBI arranged for a sharpshooter to hide in the backseat of Harry’s car and for agents to conceal themselves in the woods for the big meeting.
It would have been exciting to watch the confrontation unfold, but the bad guy never showed up.
Harry might have missed a second note, with additional instructions that Copenhefer had dropped near the scene, according to Forensic Files.
Also, as investigators later learned, a local journalist with a police scanner had inadvertently leaked news of the police’s involvement to Copenhefer, which spooked him.
Tragic development. Nevertheless, Copenhefer persisted. Harry received other notes, including one with a directive to look for him near an abandoned church a few miles from town, but a face-to-face meeting never happened at all.
In the meantime, Sally’s body turned up. Someone had shot her in the back of the head and thrown her into a farmer’s field. According to Forensic Files, the killer used a Glaser bullet, which made it impossible to determine the caliber of the murder weapon.
The Weiners had no known enemies, but police were able to zero in on a suspect fairly quickly.
Type of crime. Investigators found out that Harry Weiner had recently turned down the Copenhefers’ application for a $25,000 loan they needed to expand the bookstore and open a Rax fast-food franchise.
Next, a sharp-eyed police officer noticed that a sign posted on the door of the Copenhefers’ bookstore had a border design and typeface similar to those used in the ransom notes.
From there, the evidence slowly crept in. Tire tracks near Sally Weiner’s body matched those on Copenhefer’s van.
Investigators found a rough draft of one of the ransom notes in Copenhefer’s trash. Inside his house, they discovered Glaser ammunition and metal filing-cabinet rods that matched a rod the kidnapper had tied a ransom note to.
FBI bytes back. Next, they carted away Copenhefer’s PCs which, viewers may recall, looked like items from a $5 table at a yard sale today. But they were state-of-the-art back when computers were called word processors.
Although helpful programs to recover deleted files didn’t exist in 1988, the FBI managed to resurrect a draft of another ransom note and a to-do list that suggested Copenhefer planned to kill Harry after he got the ransom money.
Investigators theorized that David Copenhefer hatched the kidnapping plan while stewing about the loan refusal.
Loyal spouse. When Sally went to the designated locale to discuss the bogus awards ceremony, Copenhefer showed up, overpowered her, forced her to record the demand message to Harry, and then killed her, investigators contended.
Copenhefer denied everything.
His wife, Patricia, stood by him, saying the charges were “180 degrees off the mark” and her husband was a “kind and generous man” who did “a lot of things anonymously to help other people,” according to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story from June 22, 1988.
She also said that her husband was either with her or their 9-year-old son, Paul, in Erie at the time the crimes occurred.
Diabolical. The defense lawyer contended there was no link between the notes and the murder — and emphasized that David Copenhefer had no prior criminal record.
But Copenhefer more than made up for that while in Erie County Prison awaiting trial. He and fellow inmates Walter Koehler and Daniel Verosko came up with a plan to kill three people: Harry Weiner, Erie FBI agent Kim Kelly, and Verosko’s wife.
Fortunately, those murders never happened and Verosko agreed to testify about the plot when David Copenhefer went on trial.
Wacky story. David Copenhefer took the stand in his own defense — and got creative.
He explained that he handled some of the ransom notes and followed some of the instructions because he wanted to help Harry Weiner. Patricia Copenhefer testified that her husband had spoken of the case but only because he viewed it as an interesting “puzzle,” according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Nonetheless, a jury convicted David Copenhefer of first-degree murder in March of 1989, and he received the death penalty.
Wife in on it. Sadly for the Copenhefers’ son, Patricia Copenhefer ended up getting her hands dirty, too.
In October 1988, she was arrested for sending “coded messages” via classified ads and greeting cards to intimidate Verosko out of testifying at her husband’s trial.
Patricia’s messages to Verosko sounded more like desperation than intimidation, but a jury found her guilty of a misdemeanor charge related to the notes.
After she asked for mercy because of her little boy, Erie County common pleas Judge Shad Connelly gave her one to two years in prison and a $500 fine, and ordered her to pay prosecution costs, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in November 1989.
Secret past. Epilogues about those parties are coming up in a minute, but first I need to share the bombshell from the reel-to-reel tape era.
The Weiner case was not the first time David Copenhefer had been charged with a homicide.
On January 9, 1971, a Copenhefer associate turned up dead in Kettering, Ohio.
John L. Calkins and Copenhefer had allegedly planned to open a computer-repair business together. Copenhefer was managing the gubernatorial campaign for Roger Cloud, who he hoped would award him state tech-maintenance contracts, according to the Dayton Daily News. (Cloud lost the election.)
Gory murder. A few days before the murder, Copenhefer had taken out $550,000 in life insurance on Calkins — who was only 24 years old — and named himself the beneficiary of $400,000 of the payouts, according to the Dayton Daily News, which covered the ensuing murder trial extensively.
Prosecutors believed that Copenhefer, also 24 at the time, tried to kill Calkins by running him over with his car on Mud Run Road, then discovered he was still alive and shot him nine times, nearly severing his head.
At least one witness reportedly spotted Copenhefer’s blood-stained Opel GT near the crime scene, but others said they heard gunshots at times that contradicted the chronology the prosecution laid out.
After a 22-day trial, the longest in Greene County history, a jury found Copenhefer not guilty in August 1971.
Doubly loyal. Apparently, prosecutors couldn’t use this against Copenhefer during the Weiner murder trial because an acquittal doesn’t count as incriminating evidence. So, technically, Copenhefer did have the “clean record” he liked to emphasize.
Patricia and David Copenhefer were already married at the time of Calkins’ murder, according to the Dayton Daily News, although it’s not clear whether any of the couple’s friends from church or customers at the bookstore in Corry knew about his history.
As to why Patricia stood by David during not one but two murder trials, newspaper accounts describe him as coming from a prominent, well-to-do family in his native Ohio, so maybe she thought he deserved a supersized benefit of the doubt.
Copenhefer’s mother, Doris, who underwrote the cost of her son’s defense in the Calkins’ trial, was chairperson of the Miami County Republican Party and ran for a seat in the Ohio House of Representatives in 1972. His father, Carl, who died before either murder, had founded the Copenhefer Meat Co.
Sentence ends abruptly. So, skipping ahead to the age of edge-to-edge smartphone screens and gluten-free bagels, where are all the parties today?
After many unsuccessful swings at appeals, including claims that investigators invaded his privacy, Copenhefer’s legal counsel persuaded a district court judge to throw out his death penalty sentence.
But in 2012, a circuit court trio of judges voted 2-1 to reinstate it.
It mattered little, however, because Copenhefer soon died of natural causes at the age of 65 while on death row.
Patricia Copenhefer lives in Ohio today. It’s not clear what her marital status is now, but she remarried at least once after parting with David. Her former mother-in-law, Doris Copenhefer, died in 1983.
Son rises. Harry Weiner stayed in Pennsylvania but left his bank job shortly after the trial and became an assistant director for the Christian Coalition, according to his LinkedIn profile. He later worked in management for Burton Funeral Home and Crematory in Erie, Pa., and today is semi-retired.
The two kids he shared with Sally Weiner have had their privacy guarded over the years, and no information surfaced about them.
But some intelligence turned up about the Copenhefers’ son: Paul went into the business of saving lives via a long career in the paramedical field.
That’s all for this week. Until next time, cheers. — RR
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