Hummert Trial Wraps Up

ELIZABETH EVANS

Published 10/17/2006

During closing arguments yesterday afternoon, the defense suggested to jurors that someone other than Brian David Hummert may have killed Charlene Hummert:
Their son.

During the six-day murder trial, jurors have heard testimony including from officers who interviewed Brian Hummert shortly after he reported his wife missing indicating the Fairview Township couple had been arguing the night of March 19, 2004, in their 10 Boeing Road home, and that the marriage had soured.

Jurors heard that Brian Hummert told police, co-workers and others that Charlene, 48, left the home after the argument, shortly after calling someone on a secret cellular phone to pick her up. And jurors also heard that the defendant told police that sometime between 4:30 and 7 a.m. March 20, 2004, someone drove off with Charlene's white Land Rover, which had been parked in the driveway.

The Land Rover was found March 21, 2004, parked in the lot of Giant Food Store, 130 Old York Road in Fairview Township, about a mile from the Hummert home. Charlene's body was stuffed in the rear cargo area, covered with a blanket the Hummerts had for years.

Chief deputy prosecutor Chuck Patterson sought to convince jurors that Brian Hummert, 50, strangled his wife from behind with a plastic-coated cable used as a dog leash or collar, stuffed her body in the Land Rover and, sometime after son David came home and retired to his basement apartment, sneaked out and drove the Land Rover to Giant.

Jurors saw surveillance videotape and photographs of a man resembling Brian Hummert walking into the store shortly after 6 a.m. to buy dog biscuits.

Resemblance? But during his closing argument, chief public defender Bruce Blocher pointed out to jurors that 22-year-old David Hummert has physical similarities to his father.

Blocher also noted that Charlene had agreed to accompany David Hummert to a car dealership to co-sign a loan for him to buy a Cadillac Escalade on March 20, 2004.

"What if she decided to change her mind?" he said. "Could he have gotten enraged?"

Blocher reminded jurors that when David Hummert arrived home around 4:30 a.m. March 20 and his mother wasn t home, his father told him the two had argued and Charlene left.

The attorney then questioned whether David Hummert "saw an opportunity."

"It's something to think about," he said.

Not surprised: Outside the courtroom, David Hummert said he wasn't surprised his father tried to cast blame on him, and that he d been expecting it.

"I just think they didn't have anything else to defend him with," he said, noting that he was out that night with 20 people.

He also pointed out that he s much taller and significantly slimmer than his father, who is 5 feet 4 inches tall. "I know I didn't do it. My family knows I didn't do it," he said.

Charlene's brother, Wayne Meyer of Alabama, agreed.

"We know it's just a desperate ploy," he said.

'Rage of rejection' : In his closing argument, Patterson assured jurors David Hummert wasn't the killer. "There's only one killer. There's only one stalker: Brian Hummert," he said. (Prosecution testimony previously showed that someone sent letters indicating he was stalking Charlene in 2001 and 2002, and that police believe that person was Brian Hummert.)

Overcome by "the rage of rejection," he killed his wife and tried to cover it up, Patterson said.

"He s calculating - very calculating - but not quite clever enough," Patterson said, because Hummert made mistakes.

Patterson reminded jurors that Skip Palenik, "perhaps the foremost expert in trace evidence" in the country, determined that soil drag marks found on the sweatpants Charlene's body was clad in matched soil from the Hummerts' driveway.

Handwriting comparison: He also reminded them that earlier yesterday, state police crime lab employee Michele Zeiders, who works in the "questioned documents" section, testified she compared Brian Hummert's writing to that in letters sent to police and a reporter by a purported serial killer, taking credit for the killing.

"I could come to only one conclusion," Zeiders told the jury - that Hummert wrote the "serial killer" letters. Patterson also reminded jurors of testimony yesterday by Robert Leonard.

A founding member of doo-wop group Sha Na Na who performed at Woodstock, according to the New York Times, Leonard is now a forensic linguist and head of the Department of Linguistics at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. "(He) found striking and unusual similarities" between the "serial killer" letters and known samples of Brian Hummert's writing, the prosecutor said.

Can't 'explain it away': Patterson also reminded jurors that seminal DNA from underwear found on the victim matched Brian Hummert despite the fact that the defendant told police he and his wife hadn t had sex in at least two or three months.

"It does not make sense and he cannot explain it away," he said.

Brian Hummert succumbed to "the rage of rejection ... followed by an elaborate but shortsighted attempt to cover it up," Patterson said.

Jurors were expected to begin deliberations today.

Original Web Link:
http://www.yorkdispatch.com/local/ci_4501575