The General Wayne Inn Houses a Homicide
‘Murder on the Menu,’ Forensic Files
Most new restaurants fail within a few years, and when you throw an unrenovated historic building into the mix, the venture barely has a ghost of a chance.
But not even the spirits who reportedly haunted the General Wayne Inn — built near Philadelphia in 1704 — could have imagined the horrible outcome when young entrepreneurs Jim Webb and Guy Sileo bought the place and made it into a fine-dining establishment in the 1990s.
When the venture faltered, Guy decided he’d rather collect the life insurance payout on his business partner than simply cut his losses on the restaurant and move on.
For this post, I searched for an update on Guy Sileo as well as more history on the General Wayne Inn and details about the murder trial. So let’s get going on the recap of “Murder on the Menu” along with extra information from internet research:
Specter center. The General Wayne Inn in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, had an esteemed, if fabled, history. Benjamin Franklin supposedly visited the inn, and George Washington is said to have spent the night there. Edgar Allan Poe wrote part of The Raven there in 1836.
The building was not only historic but also otherworldly. In modern times, a waitress said she encountered the ghost of a Revolutionary War soldier on the staircase. A deceased Hessian soldier allegedly showed up too.
Former innkeeper Barton Johnson told Unsolved Mysteries that minor supernatural shenanigans also happened on the property. For no discernible reason, a Cadillac parked out front started up by itself, TVs and adding machines would become possessed, and women at the bar would feel unseen entities blowing on their necks.
Stove unplugged. The restaurant also attracted the area’s well-to-do earthly eaters, who enjoyed old favorites like prime rib and sautéed flounder.
But palates changed over the years, with young professionals moving to the area and looking for more sophisticated cuisine. And at 291 years of age, the building needed a lot of work.
The General Wayne Inn went out of business in 1994.
Chefs Jim Webb and Guy Sileo, who had previously worked together at the American Bistro in Morton, bought it in 1995 for $1.2 million with the intention of restoring the building. Guy’s father gave them $100,000 to invest in the business.
Don’t wine so much. Guy and Jim, a rising chef who specialized in seafood, offered updated dishes, like lobster meat wrapped in chicken with a pistachio crust.
The amount of work the business needed was overwhelming and the partners often clashed. “They had their good days and their bad days,” Jim’s mother, Theresa Webb, told City Confidential.
Jim felt that Guy wasn’t pulling his weight. Guy, who was married, reportedly spent a lot of time drinking and flirting with women at the bar. He was having an affair with an assistant chef named Felicia Moyse who was barely 20 years old. Jim worried that Guy’s behavior would lead to sexual harassment lawsuits against the restaurant.
Grave injury. But Guy wasn’t the only employee to meet Jim’s disapproval. Many of the workers found Jim too demanding and hard to work with in general.
Still, it was shocking when Jim, a 31-year-old married father of two, turned up dead on the floor of his office at the restaurant on December 27, 1996.
Co-workers who saw the executive chef’s body thought he had somehow hit his head. There was a large knot on his forehead. It turned out, however, that someone had shot him in the back of the head and the bullet traveled to, but didn’t exit, his forehead.
Not a robbery. No one had stolen the gold chain from Jim’s neck or the cash in his pocket.
Police delivered the news of Jim’s death to his wife, Robin, who was a waitress at the restaurant.
“I cried. I screamed. I fell to the ground, I thought I was going to be sick,” she would later recall, as reported by the Times Herald. She and Jim had been together since high school.
Good policy. Still, investigators initially considered Robin a suspect because she couldn’t remember whether or not Jim came home that night.
But Robin wasn’t the beneficiary of any insurance policy on her husband, according to the Oxygen Network, and she had no other motive. Police also looked at a disgruntled waiter recently fired over a credit card scam, but he was in jail when the murder took place.
Then there was partner Guy Sileo, age 29. He and Jim had $650,000 insurance policies on each other to guard the business against hardship in case one of them died.
Guy had recently bought a pistol.
Tragedy strikes again. But Felicia Moyse could, truthfully, tell investigators that on the night of the murder, Jim was still alive when she left the restaurant with Guy. She and Guy were together the whole evening, except for a short window when they took separate cars to Mulligan’s, a bar in Upper Darby.
Two months after the murder, Felicia committed suicide.
Felicia used her father’s gun and left no note. According to City Confidential, she had been hoping that Guy would marry her, and recently found out that he was planning to stay with his wife. Police didn’t know what to make of Felicia’s death.
Quite a slip-up. Solid evidence about Jim’s murder was also hard to come by. A .25-caliber bullet turned up outside the General Wayne Inn, but it didn’t match Guy’s Phoenix Arms .25-caliber handgun. Neither did the bullet that killed Jim.
A better lead came along when Robin Webb remembered that, right after Jim’s murder, Guy had said, “Who would have wanted to shoot Jim?” At the time, no one except the authorities and the killer knew Jim had died from a bullet wound; police withheld that information.
Investigators found out that Guy actually had two pistols. A leather gun case Guy owned contained impressions from his secret second gun, a Beretta Model 20.
Theory congeals. And Jim’s insurance policy was the only chance for Guy to enrich himself — or at least make himself whole — via the General Wayne Inn. The restaurant attracted plenty of diners, but it was losing money because of all the necessary repairs. Jim planned to close down, offload the inn, and end his partnership with Guy.
Meanwhile, Guy’s father was demanding the return of the $100,000.
Investigators believed that Guy took advantage of the window of time before he and Felicia met at Mulligan’s. He drove back to the restaurant, accidentally fired a bullet outside while checking his Beretta, and then climbed up the creaky steps to the third floor and shot Jim.
Mulligan stew. District Attorney Bruce Castor charged Guy with first-degree murder, announcing that he would aim for a sentence of life without parole. “There’s no legally recognizable aggravating circumstance that we could pursue the death penalty on,” Castor told the Associated Press. “If we could make it a death penalty case, we would.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that the most dramatic testimony in the trial —which featured more than a dozen witnesses for the prosecution — came from Mulligan’s bartender Chris Shuster. About a month before the murder, Guy asked him, “Chris, do you know any countries we [don’t] have extradition treaties with, where you could hide out if you wanted to kill somebody?”
Defense lawyer Richard Winters put Guy Sileo on the stand. Guy “gave answers and explanations that seemed plausible enough to cast doubt on his guilt,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
Freedom lost. But he was no match for Castor’s three-hour cross-examination, during which he hammered into Sileo over his lies, including denying that he owned a Beretta. The prosecution also pointed out that the bullet’s trajectory, from the base of the back of Jim’s head to his forehead, suggested that Guy, who was around 5-foot-5, stood behind Jim, who was more than 6 feet tall, and fired the gun in an upward position.
In August 2001, after seven hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Guy. He received life without the possibility of parole.
Today, Guy Angelo Sileo Jr., 57, is incarcerated at the State Correctional Institution at Laurel Highlands in Somerset, Pennsylvania. The fact that he’s in a minimum security facility suggests that he has behaved himself while behind bars.
No respect. Guy has, however, continued to make work for the justice system. From his prison cell, he sought an appeal based on his claim that Felicia murdered Jim. Guy said that Felicia told him that she did it because Jim disapproved of her relationship with Guy.
“If this is the truth, why not say it from the beginning?” prosecutor Wendy Demchick-Alloy told the press. “How convenient. Now he’s blaming the dead woman.”
Jim’s mother, Theresa Webb, told City Confidential that it was a typical self-centered ploy on Guy’s part. “When he blamed Felicia, he was just ruining another family,” she said.
Not much appeal. Even Guy’s defense lawyer Richard Winters turned against him, after Guy accused him of giving ineffective counsel. Winters noted that Guy told him that he had no idea who killed Jim; he didn’t mention any suspicions relating to Felicia until he was locked away.
Judges shot down Guy’s contention about Felicia as well as his other legal salvos over the years. Police thought that guilt over being Guy’s alibi might have driven Felicia to take her own life. Some online Forensic Files commenters have suggested that Felicia’s death merits a murder investigation — maybe she knew about Guy’s Beretta and he wanted to silence her forever.
The reason for Felicia’s demise remains unknown.
Changing hands. So what happened to the General Wayne Inn after the scandal?
A restaurateur named Frank Cacciuti bought the place in 2001 but closed it after less than a year because it didn’t bring enough revenue. Another buyer came along and opened a restaurant there in 2004, but it didn’t last long either.
Today, the General Wayne Inn’s tradition of wining and dining is over. The building belongs to a Jewish spiritual group, Chabad of the Main Line, which remodeled the exterior except for one outside wall with the original name and “1704.”
And speaking of things spiritual, in the end, it wasn’t paranormal activity that doomed the General Wayne Inn. It was a combination of high overhead costs and personal animosity, very much of this world and more threatening than any ghost.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — R.R.
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Peacock or Amazon
You can see the Unsolved Mysteries and City Confidential episodes on YouTube
