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After discussing the case for about 3½ hours Wednesday afternoon, jurors asked Judge Jeffery Wright to be excused until 9 this morning.
Shannon Hess, 31, is charged in the 2007, beating and stabbing death of Barbara Fritchman inside a home the defendant shared with his wife, two children and the victim. Prosecutors claim Hess, bitter about his wife's affair, snapped on Nov. 23, 2007, when he returned home to find Fritchman on the phone with the other man.
Assistant District Attorney Mark Fetterman is asking the jury of six men and six women to return a first-degree murder verdict. Defense attorney Alan Goldberg is seeking a straight acquittal from the panel.
Hess has been incarcerated since his Nov. 29, 2007, arrest and faces a potential life sentence — or he could be freed by a not-guilty verdict.
Each attorney reviewed his case with jurors Wednesday morning in closing arguments.
Goldberg went first, leaning on a timeline of events on the day of the murder he presented to the jury with an easel. Goldberg said some of the arguments made by prosecutors couldn't have happened because Hess "can't be in all these places" alleged by the state.
Goldberg said his client was keeping tabs on his wife the morning of the homicide. First, Goldberg argued, Hess went to convenience stores, then to his place of employment in Leola.
At 11:10 a.m., Hess made a phone call from a pay phone on Strasburg Pike to the other man's wife. He then fought through Black Friday traffic to get to the Tanger Outlet Center in search of his wife's car.
"He was chasing his wife," Goldberg told jurors. "This is a man who has been hurt by his wife, and he still can't decide if she is being good to him."
Prosecutors allege the killing took place between 11:51 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. They countered if Hess did go to the outlet center, it wasn't in that time frame.
Goldberg disagreed, saying his client went to the outlets after making the call "looking through 1,200 parking spaces for his wife's car."
He finally did find the car and looked inside for evidence of the affair, Goldberg said. Then, he made the 25- to 30-minute trip back home, the attorney said.
"He couldn't get from here to there in time" to be the killer, Goldberg said.
Fetterman followed with a 90-minute argument, claiming Hess "bludgeoned and butchered his mother-in-law."
Fetterman argued that Hess was a "normal man faced with abnormal circumstances" who snapped inside 53 E. Boehms Road.
Hess' wife was not only cheating on him, Fetterman said, but she also was sleeping with his boss, Bill Frank, and bringing the couple's children along to meetings with her boyfriend.
"A man with power over him at work is having sex with his wife," Fetterman told the jury. "Think about that: (Frank) is exercising power over every aspect of his life."
Fetterman told the jury that killers aren't necessarily "evil" people, and Hess' reputation as a peaceful man shouldn't sway their verdict.
"We want our killers to be Charles Manson," Fetterman said. "Normal people become killers everyday. People who succumb to trials and tribulations of life which cause them to snap."
Fetterman said Fritchman's phone conversation with Frank was a final straw, and Hess responded in a fit of rage.
"He was a volcano, rumbling, getting ready to erupt," Fetterman said.
Fetterman countered that some of the timeline Goldberg outlined was based on Hess's claim that he went to the outlets after making the call to Frank's home.
Fetterman then showed jurors how Hess killed his mother-in-law in a "savage way."
At some point there was a "confrontation" between Fritchman and her son-in-law and she turned her back, Fetterman said. Hess used a claw hammer, or some other type of tool, to strike the back of Fritchman's head, breaking open her skull, he argued.
Fetterman stomped his foot on the courtroom floor, imitating, he said, what Hess did to Fritchman as she laid face down. Then, Fetterman said, Hess plunged a knife seven times into the woman's neck.
"She was down. She was probably out," Fetterman said. "He went for the jugular, and he succeeded."
E-mail: bhambright@lnpnews.com
