Greenfield convict leads police to victim's remains

Four years after Patrick Kenney disappeared, the Greenfield man convicted of his slaying led police to what appear to be parts of his sawed remains, prosecutors said Monday.

In an effort to get a break on his sentence, Bryan Sedlak of Greenfield led detectives and his attorney to a remote location where police found pieces of bones that appeared to have been cut with a power saw, Assistant District Attorney Lisa Pellegrini said. She would not say where they found the bones Friday.

Sedlak, 37, was scheduled to be sentenced yesterday but Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey A. Manning postponed that while the Medical Examiner's Office runs DNA tests on the remains. Kenney's parents gave DNA samples for comparison, Pellegrini said.

Sedlak's attorney, Paul Boas, declined to comment.

"We had a prayer vigil after he was missing. Over 700 people attended," the victim's mother, Ellen Kenney, said. "We never had a funeral."

A jury in February convicted Sedlak of third-degree murder for killing Kenney, 22, of Jefferson Hills in 2005. Manning said at the time Sedlak "might want to rethink his story" about not knowing where the body was, if he wanted anything less than the maximum sentence of 21 to 42 years in prison.

Boas told Manning yesterday that Sedlak was "responding to what the court said." Pellegrini argued Sedlak needs to be more specific about where the rest of the body is located.

Pellegrini told Manning that police found four vertebrae "that showed evidence of having been sawed by a power saw," as well as the top portions of right and left femurs, a pelvis, a tailbone and a rib fragment after spending eight hours at the scene, Pellegrini said.

"The defendant did not reveal how the body came to be in the way in which it is," Pellegrini said. "He knew that we were hoping to search and recover the entire body, particularly the skull."

Ellen Kenney said recovering her son's remains is important to her, but she did not want to comment further until after the sentencing, which was rescheduled for Aug. 11.

Sedlak, a former owner of a Homestead tanning salon, testified during the trial that he killed Kenney in self-defense because Kenney was trying to rob him of drugs and money. The two were ingesting cocaine together that day.

Sedlak testified during the trial that a friend disposed of the body and he didn't know where it was.

He remains in the Allegheny County Jail.