Deep below the Westmoreland County Courthouse, a locked steel door guards decades worth of insight into the minds of killers and thieves.
"I get bad vibes down here," said Clerk of Courts David Patterson during a recent visit to the evidence room his criminal case filing office maintains in the courthouse sub-basement.
Cybil Swank wrote in a diary about killing her roommate in the name of Satan before plunging a knife into the sleeping woman 58 times at a Greensburg halfway house for the mentally ill in 1991. Many blamed shortcomings of the mental health system for the death of 20-year-old Beth Hankinson, of New Alexandria. Swank is serving a life sentence.
A man who came to be known as the Phantom Turnpike Killer, John Wesley Wable, admitted in writing to killing truck driver Harry Pitts, of Bowling Green, Va., as the victim slept in his tractor-trailer parked along the Pennsylvania Turnpike near Irwin in 1953. County law enforcement officials got a confession out of Wable on the train as he was being extradited from New Mexico. Wable was executed in the electric chair in 1955.
The diary and the confession can be found within the stacks of evidence.
"It's like a little criminal museum," Patterson said.
Beyond the history, in a room behind a separate locked door, a repository of guns, knives and brass knuckles used in killings and beatings arguably makes the evidence room the most dangerous area of the courthouse. Ammunition is kept in a separate, locked area, away from the guns. Drugs are bagged up in a safe. One bag of marijuana on file is about as big as a bed pillow.
Patterson said his office is planning to purchase camera equipment to keep an eye on whoever may be coming or going near the room.
"The worst thing that happens is someone comes out of the bullpen (an area in which prisoners are held to await court proceedings). Someone comes down here. Someone leaves the door open. Someone gets a weapon and they go back upstairs," Patterson said. "I wouldn't want to be the guy who didn't do something and then, when something happens, people would say, 'Why didn't you do anything?'"
The courthouse sub-basement isn't meant for public access. Outside of the elevator, the scent of must wafting along brick walls and the grime accumulated over the years create an uninviting corridor.
While Patterson said he has no knowledge of anyone having tried to break through the room's locked steel door, he asks what's to stop anyone from exploring. "It would almost have to be an inside job," Patterson said.
"Down there, it's out of the way," said Park Police Chief Dennis Genard, whose officers serve as the front line of courthouse security. "John Q. Public isn't likely to go down there."
Still, Genard said he'd rather accommodate Patterson's request to add a new camera to the monitoring network than deal with repercussions if something were to happen.
Patterson said he got a price quote of $950 for the equipment. The money is included in the 2005 Clerk of Courts office budget.
Another project -- straightening up the room -- could become expensive. Patterson thinks doing it right requires hiring more workers.
"We've got to do some major housecleaning down here. ... A lot of this stuff, we could get rid of it," he said. "A lot of it is we don't have a big enough staff."
Because of financial constraints, Patterson said, he hasn't requested an increase in personnel.
Kara Caruso, an office clerk who serves as the evidence room custodian, has too many duties upstairs in the office to concentrate full time on rearranging boxes and boxes of case materials.
"That would be a monumental task," she said.
When something, be it a written statement or bloody clothing, is entered into the record at trial, it is filed away in the county's evidence room for future reference in the event of an appeal. Most of it is sealed in air-tight packaging. In a capital case, the evidence has to be stored for up to 75 years, Patterson said.
In a box that had recently come back down from a death-penalty sentencing hearing upstairs is the revolver used to kill 21-year-old Apollo policeman Leonard C. Miller in 1980 at the end of a bloody rampage that came to be known as the "kill for thrill" case. Co-defendants Michael J. Travaglia and John C. Lesko are both on death row.
To touch something like that, a gun used in a high-profile homicide case, is enough to make you shudder, Patterson said.
Same with the claw hammer prosecutors said a then 15-year-old Ian Bishop used to beat his 18-year-old brother, Adam, to death at the family's Hempfield Township home in 2002.
Or the Wable confession. Or the Swank diary.
A miniature pistol used in a 1981 case fits in the palm of Patterson's hand. Caruso showed another miniature pistol used in a 1996 case. The functional weapon is part of a belt buckle.
"Everything down here is something people got in trouble with," Patterson said.
