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
