Joann Katrinak’s Killer Still Has Innocence Advocates
(“A Woman Scorned,” Forensic Files)
Patricia Rorrer has been portrayed as a bully, petty thief, neglectful horse owner, and heartless killer — or a sweet, caring friend railroaded by authorities desperate to solve a double-murder case that snagged worldwide interest.
After Joann Katrinak, the wife of Patricia’s former flame, turned up dead along with her infant son, prosecutors suspected Patricia.
Highly charged case. Patricia’s accusers theorized that she resented Joann’s domestic bliss with the tall, athletic Andrew Katrinak. They allege that the North Carolina resident stealthily drove 500 miles to Pennsylvania and killed out of a sense of deadly indignation. Strands of the accused’s dyed-blond hair at two crime scenes proved it.
Or did they? Aside from the hair, there was almost zero forensic evidence. The state made a case fueled by circumstantial evidence and public outrage over the deaths of a modern-day madonna and child.
More than 20 years after her conviction, Patricia Rorrer still has advocates working to exonerate her.
Meticulous primping. For this week, I looked into the defenders’ reasoning as well as Patricia’s whereabouts today. And because some of Patricia’s advocates have suggested Andrew Katrinak had a motive for murder, I checked into whether he had a life insurance payout to gain upon Joann’s demise.
I also communicated with Patricia via email to get her input on some matters.
So let’s get going on the recap of the Forensic Files episode “A Woman Scorned,” along with extra information drawn from internet research:
Joann Marie O’Connor was born on Oct. 11, 1968, the youngest of Sarah and David O’Connor’s four children.
The Irish-Italian girl had full, fluffy dark hair, olive skin, and a pretty face. She made an effort to look perfectly groomed “even when she took out the trash,” according to her mother, who appeared on Forensic Files.
Great catch. Joann was “fun, likable, beautiful, always happy,” said her sister-in-law Cindy Wiard.
After a very early failed marriage, the 24-year-old Joann scored a new husband in Andrew Katrinak, 38, whom she met at a club. He had worked as a semi-pro boxer in Las Vegas in his youth and later settled into his own construction business.
The couple moved into Andrew’s sturdy brick house at 740 Front Street in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania. They had a son, Alex Martin, in August of 1994.
No show. On December 12, 1994, Joann answered a phone call from a woman she’d never met, Patricia Rorrer, her husband’s onetime girlfriend. She asked to speak with Andrew, who was home during the call; Joann refused.
Three days later, Joann had plans to pick up her mother-in-law, Veronica Katrinak, to go Christmas shopping.
Joann never showed up.
Combination locks. At 10:30 p.m., Andrew reported his wife missing. And yikes, he discovered someone had cut one of the house’s phone lines and pried the hinge on the basement door.
Family members found Joann’s tan Toyota sitting vacant in the parking lot of McCarty’s, a nearby bar. Inside the locked 1992 vehicle, police discovered some strands of blond hair stained with dried blood. DNA testing revealed the blood came from either Joann or her son.
Forensic Files didn’t mention it, but the hairs were actually brown at the top and the rest dyed blond, according to the show Autopsy Six: A Fatal Attraction.
At first, local police suspected Andrew.
Puny policy. Detective Barry Grube found it odd that Andrew fixed the severed phone line before police examined it — in essence tampering with evidence. And Andrew’s explanation of how the intruder got in through the basement door seemed contrived, according to Grube, who gave an interview to Wrong Man, a 2020 true-crime docuseries from the Starz network, which produced two episodes called “The Hang Up” about the Rorrer case.
But investigators conceded they had no solid evidence against Andrew. Plus, he had only a “minimal” life insurance policy on Joann and he passed polygraphs, according to The FBI Files: Family Secrets. His father confirmed his alibi that they were doing construction work together, putting an addition on the house of friends Tom and Kathy Holschwander, at the time of Joann’s disappearance.
Andrew described his existence with Joanne and Alex as a “little Camelot.”
Ex-spouse off list. “I can’t lose them,” he told the media. “That’s my life.”
The state police dropped him as a suspect.
Joann’s first husband, New Jersey construction worker Michael Jack, who had reportedly abused her during their marriage, also had a solid alibi.
Search is on. The police considered the possibility that Joann ran away, a theory disputed by her family. “She’s just extremely happy with Andy,” her brother, Michael O’Connor, told the media. “She’s extremely, extremely happy with the baby. In a million years, she wouldn’t do anything to harm that.”
No activity on her bank account or credit cards took place after the day she went missing, so investigators dismissed the theory that she took her child and bolted.
Meanwhile, the case of the missing mother and baby turned into colossal news across the U.S. and internationally. State police and the Philadelphia division of the FBI appealed to the public for leads. They released a poster of Joann and Alex, noting that the baby had “almond-shaped blue eyes,” weighed 18 pounds, and was circumcised.
Sad discovery. Still, no good leads materialized. “It’s definitely getting rougher every day,” Andrew told the Morning Call. “I don’t even know it’s Christmas.”
Four months after Joann’s disappearance, farmer Paul Kovalchik reported seeing what at first looked like a pile of clothes on his land in Heidelberg Township woods, about 15 miles from the Katrinaks’ house.
On closer inspection, he saw it was the body of a woman. An infant was lying face down on her stomach. Both were deceased.
More hairs there. Police identified the pair as Joann and Alex Katrinak. His favorite rattle, shaped like a phone, lay near the crime scene.
Someone had shot Joann in the face with a .22-caliber pistol, then beaten her about the head — hitting her 19 times in all — with a blunt object. Police couldn’t determine whether the baby died of exposure or suffocation.
On Alex’s diaper bag, police found strands of the same type of hair from the car.
Stable situation. In April 1995, the family buried Joann and Alex in a single bronze casket after a funeral mass at a Bethlehem church.
Andrew mentioned to police that his former live-in girlfriend Patricia Rorrer once managed a horse stable two miles from the bodies’ location and would have been familiar with the riding trails close to the murder scene. (Media sources vary as to whether she actually worked at the stable or just rented a stall there for her own horse.)
Patricia “seemed like the girl next door but all of a sudden, something snapped,” Katrinak later told Wrong Man investigators.
No charmed life. Patricia Lynne Rorrer made for a good suspect. Then 31 years old, she had lived a rocky existence.
She was born on Jan. 24, 1964, in eastern Pennsylvania and moved back and forth between there and Davidson County, North Carolina.
At 17, Patricia dropped out of high school and married landscaper Gary Gabard.
Later, they both worked 12-hour graveyard shifts at a textile factory. Her mother, Patricia Chambers, provided day care for their baby son, Charles.
Trash-talking ex. Patricia Rorrer “was a cold woman. She was always looking for a fight,” Gary Gabard told the Morning Call, which noted that he was “a head shorter” than Patricia.
Once, when a gun-wielding farmer and his buddy caught Patricia and Gary riding motorcycles on his field, Patricia walked up and “got in their faces” and argued, Gary recalled to the Morning Call.
“She is a tough one,” Sheriff Gerald Hege would later tell the Morning Call in a June 29, 1997 interview. “I don’t think she was ever scared until we put the cuffs on her.”
Walmart woe. Patricia’s professional life included short-lived gigs as a Century 21 real estate agent and an Oldsmobile salesperson. In North Carolina, she reportedly enjoyed some success as a horse trader, riding instructor, and rodeo competitor.
But her reputation wasn’t exactly sleek and shiny. She got 12 months of probation for shoplifting at a Walmart in Lexington, North Carolina.
She was also accused of breaking into barns, stealing horses, and underfeeding the ones she owned. But none of those charges ever stuck.
New state, new man. Tragedy also touched Patricia’s life. Charles Robert, the 3-month-old son she had with Gary Gabard, died of sudden infant death syndrome; Patricia found him blue in his crib.
Patricia and her husband broke up after the baby’s death.
After relocating to Pennsylvania, Patricia met the 6-foot-2-inch Andrew in a restaurant. They moved into her house in Salisbury County, staying together for about two years. They broke up in 1993.
Dial-a-problem. Patricia defaulted on her mortgage and then returned to North Carolina, where she eventually moved in with a boyfriend named Brian Ward. Together they had a baby girl, Nicole.
When police traveled to North Carolina to interview Patricia about the murders of Joann and Alex, she said that on the day of the homicides, she had visited a feed store, a tanning salon, and a country music club.
Andrew told investigators that the unpleasant phone call between Joann and Patricia happened just three days before his wife’s disappearance.
Conflicting versions. Patricia’s phone bill showed no record of a call to Catasauqua that day, but police noticed she didn’t make any calls at all from her house in North Carolina that day either — suggesting she could have been out of state and used a pay phone to dial up the Katrinaks.
time of her arrest. One theory says that she had the baby with him
to sanitize her image in the wake of the murders
As for the words exchanged on the call between the two big-haired women, Joann told Andrew that Patricia had used profanity; Patricia said it was the other way around. Both sides agree Joann hung up on Patricia.
Police slowly built a case against Patricia. Her alibi about going to the club, called Cowboy’s Nitelife, got fuzzy when investigators discovered she hadn’t signed the guest book on that day. And dance instructor William Jarrett couldn’t remember whether she attended his dance class at the club the night of Joann’s disappearance. On a secret recording, Patricia asked Jarrett to vouch for her attendance or she might go to the electric char.
“Why would somebody tell you, ‘they’re going to fry me,’ if they didn’t do it?” Jarrett told Wrong Man.
Hair we go. As for the murder weapon, police didn’t find a .22 caliber pistol on Patricia’s property, but an ex-boyfriend claimed that she owned one — and it would always jam after one shot.
They also found a photo of Patricia taken 11 days before the homicide. It showed her usually all-brown hair haphazardly highlighted blond. Forensic tests suggested the hair found in the car and at the murder scene came from Patricia.
According to court papers from Patricia 2017 appeal, “DNA on the cigarette butt found near the two bodies belonged to Appellant.” (Prosecutor Michael McIntyre, however, told ForensicFilesNow.com that that the cigarette butt was never actually tested).
Incriminating words. At 6 a.m. on June 24, 1997, police arrested Patricia at her modest house in Linwood, North Carolina, and took her back to Pennsylvania.
Lieutenant Christopher Coble and Sergeant Suzanne Pearson would later testify that Patricia cried and apologized to 18-month-old Nicole, telling the baby, “I’m sorry for doing this to you” and lamenting to the officers that she would never see little Nicole again.
“If I knew I was going to get caught, I never would have brought you into this world,” the arresting officers testified they heard her say to Nicole.
Deal refused. The authorities charged her with two counts of murder. After her arraignment, she had to walk past a crowd of dozens of locals screeching “hang her!” and “baby killer!” Patricia clung to a Polaroid picture showing her and her own little girl.
Prosecutors offered Patricia a plea deal that would take the death penalty off the table, but she declined. “How could I explain to my daughter years later that I took a plea for something I didn’t do?” she said.
At the trial, prosecutor Michael McIntyre alleged that Patricia remained obsessed with Andrew Katrinak long after their breakup — despite testimony that she’d had “many boyfriends and live-in lovers” to occupy her bandwidth.
Kidnapped and killed? Ex-boyfriend Walter Blalock said that Patricia wanted him to be more like Andrew. Another former boyfriend said she talked about Andrew frequently and liked to gaze at old photos of him.
The prosecution alleged that Patricia called the Katrinaks’ house from a pay phone in Pennsylvania. Angry that Joann hung up on her, she stalked her for three days, then broke into her basement and cut the phone line, put a gun to Joann’s head as she was placing Alex in the car, and forced her to drive to the rural area.
After one bullet didn’t kill Joann, the gun locked up, so Patricia had to beat her to death, according to the prosecution. The 5-foot-9-inch-tall Patricia was physically strong, no match for 5-foot-4-inch Joann.
Testimony from Walter Blalock contradicted Patricia’s claim that she never had a gun. He said she did own a firearm, with its serial numbers filed off.
Prosecutor pounds away. And in a piece of salacious testimony, Patricia Rorrer’s half sister, Sandra Ireland, said that in May 1995, about six months after the murder, their mother, Patricia Chambers, stopped by the house and asked her to hold onto or hide a gun, or both. Ireland’s husband buried it in the yard because he didn’t feel comfortable with a firearm inside, she said.
During Patricia’s hours-long turn in the witness chair, Michael McIntyre grilled her relentlessly. According to a Morning Call account from March 5, 1998:
“McIntyre leaned forward conspiratorially like someone trying to persuade another to tell a secret, lowered his voice and said: “Here’s what I want to know: After you killed Joann Katrinak, did you kill that baby or just leave it to die?”
“Sir I would not kill somebody and I definitely wouldn’t kill somebody I never met,” Rorrer said.
Dance defense. The prosecution alleged that after the murder, Patricia drove Joann’s car to McCarty’s parking lot and backed it into a parking space. Those who knew Joann pointed out that she didn’t like to drive in reverse and would have never parked that way.
Patricia Rorrer in prison
But defense lawyer Robert Pfeiffer said that plenty of evidence supported Patricia’s innocence. For one thing, her mother never asked Sandra Ireland to “hide” the gun, and she retrieved it on the way home the next day — she worked as a bus driver and couldn’t take it with her to school.
Plus, two men, her baby’s father and his friend, testified they saw Patricia at the line-dancing club the night of the homicide.
Pal stays true. Pfeiffer and Burke claimed that police Sgt. Suzanne Pearson fabricated quotes from Patricia — including her claim that Patricia said, “I’m going to the electric chair” upon her arrest — because a conviction would boost Pearson’s career.
And Patricia wasn’t all edges. She was bubbly and likable, not disgruntled, according to friend Kathy Barber, who visited her friend in jail.
Other loyal friends and associates attested to Patricia’s kindness toward horses and devotion to her daughter, whom she took along as she worked in stables.
Not gender neutral. A newspaper account described Patricia as a soft-spoken, demure woman who had a sweet Southern accent and wore feminine clothes in court.
It all gave jurors a lot to think about — but only for six hours. They returned with a guilty verdict and a sentence of two life terms.
Advocates for her innocence complain of hype surrounding the case. “Men who murder are conventional, women are sensational,” posits the Worldwide Women’s Criminal Justice Network. “The media love the femme fatale.”
FBI lab blunder. The organization purports that “if there were awards for distorted reporting, the Morning Call…would win high honors.”
The Worldwide Women’s Criminal Justice Network’s website also points to a bombshell: In 2015, the Justice Department acknowledged that most of the team members from an FBI microscopic hair comparison unit gave prosecutors flawed data from 1980 to 2000 that could have unjustly contributed to a number convictions — including Patricia Rorrer’s.
Some lawyers call microscopic hair analysis junk science that today wouldn’t qualify as evidence in a trial like Rorrer’s.
Book her. Further, an early FBI report said the hairs found in the car had no roots — which contain the DNA — suggesting an evidence switcheroo.
But that’s just some of the ammo on Team Patricia’s battleship. She’s attracted the help of writer Tammy Mal (full name Tammy Malinowski O’Reilly), author of Convenient Suspect, a book about the case. And James Pfeiffer and Jim Burke have remained on her side.
They theorize that Andrew Katrinak framed Patricia and that the hostile phone call between Patricia and Joann actually took place not on Dec. 12 as Andrew said but rather on Dec. 7. Phone records confirmed Patricia placed the earlier call from North Carolina, not Pennsylvania.
Great communicator. Patricia’s defenders also say Andrew Katrinak staged the scene at his house by prying the door and cutting the phone line. The phone wire was located at the opposite end of the basement, which was dark. How would an intruder find it?
And the fact that Patricia called Andrew even after he married someone else didn’t mean she was still carrying a torch for him, according to one of her friends. “She just stayed in touch with everybody,” Kathy Barber said in her interview on NBC’s Murder in Lehigh Valley: Keith Morrison Reports in 2017. “And she would just call out of the blue.”
According to the Free Patricia Rorrer page on Facebook:
“I called him to let him know that I was going to the USA finals for a horse show. I was so excited that I called everyone, and Joanne picked up the phone … and she said Andy is married, and I said I know, then she said we have a baby, and I said yea I know, then she said don’t ever call here again. … I was like OK, maybe she was tired, you know with a new baby. …. I really never thought of it again.“
Cop defends accused. The Free Patricia Rorrer page responds to comments from supporters (“How is this even possible that this woman is still in jail?!?!”) and detractors (“This is another bs attempt to free a psycho”).
Barry Grube, one of the few — if not only—police officers sympathetic to Patricia’s cause, noted that Andrew didn’t seem particularly frantic while authorities searched desperately for his wife and son. In TV clips, Andrew didn’t come off as anguished.
Mal told Keith Morrison that Patricia’s dance teacher originally confirmed her alibi that she was in class on the day of the murder, then changed his mind.
Unbloody vehicle. At the state’s request, the instructor wore a wire during a phone conversation with Patricia. Although the prosecution used it as evidence that she was trying to create a false alibi, it actually sounded more like Patricia was simply trying to nail down the facts he had already asserted to her.
And even prosecutor Michael McIntyre, who wrote the book Hair Trigger about the case, acknowledged to Keith Morrison that it was a little odd that the police found blood on the hairs in Joann’s car but nowhere else in the vehicle. If Patricia drove it back from the murder scene after she shot Joann and then beat her to death, luminal would have lit up the interior.
There’s also the matter of a woman who suddenly remembered she saw Joann with another man at a Food Mart store five days after the disappearance. (Disclaimer: I’m not a big fan of eyewitnesses who come forward years after the fact, but it’s possible).
Flaw in reasoning. Another witness, Walter Traupman, who never testified, had told state troopers that on the day of Joann’s disappearance, he saw a couple who looked like Joann and Andrew arguing about the paternity of a baby. Traupman claimed that when he reported the dispute, trooper Robert V. Egan III got mad and practically kicked him out of his office. The police report misspells his name (“Troutman”) and doesn’t include his address, suggesting authorities didn’t want anyone to track him down, according to Patricia’s side. (McIntyre said that Egan ignored Traupman because he was a nut who said that the man he saw arguing with the woman in a car was Hispanic but wearing a fake mustache and a toupee. Traupman died in 2016.)
The Wrong Man investigators Ira Todd and Joe Kennedy have some theories of their own. They noted houses near the murder scene would have heard a gunshot in December, when no farm equipment is making noise, and question why the murderer didn’t just kill Joann inside her house instead of risking being seen in public in her car. (A good point.)
And in another bombshell, Joann’s good friend Karen Devine said Joann planned to leave Andrew after the holidays. “She had a suitcase packed,” Devine said. “She had money put aside. He wanted to move to Colorado and she was against it.”
Nailed? The Free Patricia Rorrer page points to a sliver of a fingernail found at the murder site that didn’t come from either Patricia or Joann.
Despite the new evidence and hypotheses, the courts have rejected all of Patricia’s bids for a new trial.
The Innocence Project has declined to take her case.
Weak wages. Today, Patricia Lynne Rorrer resides in State Correctional Institute at Muncy, a medium and maximum security facility that has the highest rate of cancer of all prisons in Pennsylvania, according to a story from northcentralpa.com.
The article also notes that most inmates earn around 19 cent an hour at their jobs and must pay $5 each time they need medical attention or medicine.
I was able to email with Patricia via the PrisonConnect platform around Christmastime. She said that she’s no fan of Forensic Files and that the show had “many misrepresentations” about her case and that she’d heard ForensicFilesNow.com mixed up some facts as well. (We didn’t get into the specifics.)
One on one? Patricia also pointed out that when author Tammy Mal “started her research and speaking to me, she was not an advocate at all” — but she reversed and ended up advocating for Patricia’s innocence.
Most of all, Patricia said, she would like a rematch with prosecutor Michael McIntyre.
Now retired, he declined ForensicFilesNow.com’s invitation to spar directly with Patricia via a podcast.
“I most definitely will not personally afford Patricia a platform,” Michael said in an email to ForensicFilesNow.com “She had her chance to answer my questions and tell her story in court over 20 years ago. She failed miserably to convince me, or anyone else who mattered, of her innocence. “
Meanwhile, interest in Patricia’s plight continues on social media. In addition to the Facebook page, there are Reddit threads on her case. On Instagram, I found a post for a two-part Win at All Costs podcast featuring journalism professor Bill Moushey’s interviews with Patricia Rorrer from prison in December 2019.
Media galore. As for an epilogue on ex-flame Andrew Katrinak, he has moved to Colorado and kept a low profile since the trial ended. He gave an audio interview to the Wrong Man investigators when they made a surprise visit to his house, but he declined to appear on camera.
As for Joann’s parents, her father died a year after the murder. “My husband passed away of a broken heart,” Sarah O’Connor said on the Montel Williams Show in 2001. “He would be alive today if it were not for Patricia Rorrer.” The mild-mannered Sarah died in 2019 at the age of 83.
For more on the Katrinak murder case, you can watch Autopsy Six: A Fatal Attraction for free on YouTube.
Murder in Lehigh Valley: Keith Morrison Reports is also available on YouTube, but it costs $1.99 to view (Keith comes off as an advocate for Patricia’s innocence on the episode).
If you subscribe to Hulu and upgrade to Starz (there’s a free one-week trial offer), you can stream the Wrong Man episodes about Patricia Rorrer. The series was produced by Joe Berlinger, who made the Paradise Lost documentaries, which garnered actor Johnny Depp’s attention and ultimately helped free the West Memphis Three.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube
