‘Big-City Crime’ Happens in Pennsylvania Hamlet : Mental Patient’s Rampage With Gun Has Small Town Reeling

By pure and cruel chance, Ted Berchtold stopped to buy cigarettes and parked two spaces from a man who was loading a gun.

Berchtold’s daughter Lisa and her best friend, Denise Snyder, waited in the red Nissan pickup. The two 15-year-olds were chatting about summer vacations and listening to music.

Moments later, the gunman fired his Smith & Wesson .357-caliber Magnum, twice.

“I heard a real loud noise, like a cherry bomb going off,” said Lisa Berchtold, who was singing along to a Tommy James oldies tape on her portable stereo.

“I thought my headphones exploded. I ripped them off my head. Then I remember being thrown over to the side. Everything was in slow motion. I could hardly move. I couldn’t feel any pain but there was blood all over the place,” she said.

She had been shot in the shoulder and neck, and Denise had been fatally wounded in the head. Berchtold ran back to the truck and helped his bleeding daughter to the blacktop.

‘Don’t Let Me Die!’

“Dad, don’t let me die!” Lisa begged her father.

Thirty minutes later and four miles away, a burly, bald man wearing a print shirt, cut-offs, sneakers without socks and a baseball cap--the very description that witnesses to the girl’s murder were already giving police--lurked in another store.

The clerk, 25-year-old Cynthia Phillips, went to a walk-in cooler at the back of the convenience shop to get fresh cottage cheese for a customer. The man followed.

“I asked the guy what he wanted,” Phillips said. He replied, she said, by requesting oral sex.

She was able to trip a security alarm in her pocket before she was shot in the face. The bullet was of a type that expands on impact, for maximum damage to tissue and bone. This one struck below the left temple and tore down through the jaw.

“I never saw the gun. I didn’t know he shot me, don’t remember being shot, or the hospital the first seven days,” Phillips told police in a written statement. Her jaw was wired shut.

The shootings, at 3:31 p.m. and 4:05 p.m. on June 3, jarring this community of 16,365 in Western Pennsylvania.

‘Big-City Crime’

“It’s a big-city crime happening where it wasn’t supposed to happen. We’ve seen and heard these things on the evening news--but not here. It caused a community trauma,” said Mercer County Dist. Atty. James Epstein.

“We’re a little RFD area, and that’s big-city stuff--but nothing surprises me anymore,” the county coroner, John Mohney, said.

Stephen Rendick, 36, a jobless bachelor who lived in Hermitage, was arrested without a struggle at 6:40 p.m. that day, at an Orangeville, Ohio, bar about 10 miles from the scene of the first attack. While drinking four or five beers and two shots of tequila, he was fingered by a patron who had heard of the shootings on the police radio.

Rendick is charged with murder in the first and third degrees, two counts of attempted murder and two counts of aggravated assault. In a court hearing on Aug. 19, a defense psychiatrist described Rendick as a schizophrenic who hears voices that tell him what to do. Mercer County Judge Francis Fornelli ordered psychiatric testing to determine whether Rendick is competent to stand trial. Arraignment was delayed, pending the outcome of the tests.

The 6-foot-1, 240-pound Rendick played end on the football team and was a member of the track team at Hickory High School here. He had served in the Army and once worked at Sharon Steel Corp. He had been treated at the Community Mental Health and Counseling Center, which would not comment on his mental history except to say he had not been seen in the last six months.

Stood Up by Prostitute

Earlier on June 3, Rendick had cashed his disability check and gone to keep a date with Rachel Raver of Farrell, whose name frequently appeared on the police blotter in prostitution cases. She wasn’t home. He came knocking a third and last time at 3 p.m. that day.

Each time, the woman’s mother, Star Raver, answered the door. She said that Rendick was increasingly agitated at being stood up.

“I looked him dead in the eye and got a cold feeling in my stomach and up my spine. It chilled me. It was a phantom’s look, like looking into a black hole,” said Raver.

At 3:24 p.m., Rendick bought eight cartons of generic brand cigarettes at a Giant Eagle market.

Outside, Ted Berchtold was pulling into the parking lot for a five-minute stop on the way to the bank. Lisa wanted to withdraw $200 for her trip to Disney World the next day. Her friend tagged along.

“You pull in and take the first parking space you find. You can drive yourself crazy thinking about it,” Berchtold, 39, a self-employed carpenter, said six weeks after the shootings.

Killer Seen in Parking Lot

Carl Syphrit was loading groceries into his truck when he noticed someone squatting and loading a handgun behind a blue 1980 Chevrolet Citation. He saw the revolver’s six-inch barrel glinting blue in the sunlight. In April, police later learned, Rendick had bought a .357 Magnum for $235 cash.

“I was close enough that I could actually hear the shells dropping into the gun. I thought he was going to get into his car. He shoved the gun clear into (Berchtold’s) truck and pulled the trigger and shot twice,” said Syphrit.

The girls had no warning.

“It seemed for a split second Denise was rolling the window up,” Lisa said later. “I remember catching that out of the corner of my eye. Then I don’t know what happened.” She spent nine days in the hospital.

Roseann Snyder, 39, telemarketing manager for The Herald newspaper in nearby Sharon, was in a business meeting when the hospital called. She found her daughter on an emergency room gurney.

“I didn’t believe anyone could shoot my little girl,” Snyder said, tears streaming from her brown eyes. “I wanted to go in and look at her because I thought these people were all making a big mistake--but it was her. She had a bullet hole in her head. (The sockets around) her eyes were blue. She was cold.

“I have had the ultimate pain,” Snyder said. “There’s nothing no one in this world could do to hurt me again.”

Witnesses saw the killer calmly drove off in the little Chevy.

Waitress Merely Harassed

At 3:50 p.m., a man who matched Rendick’s description had coffee at the On-A-Bun Restaurant, four miles from the Giant Eagle. He harassed a waitress there, then went three doors down to the Lawson’s convenience store.

On the only day she worked the afternoon shift, Cindy Phillips went to the cooler for a customer who had noticed that the expiration date on a cottage cheese carton had passed. The man in cut-offs was loitering near the cooler.

“There was a noise in the back. It just sounded like somebody setting a milk case down,” said Margaret Taylor, who was waiting in line to buy newspapers.

Taylor heard the cooler door close. Then a man in cut-offs walked out.

When Phillips didn’t reappear in 10 minutes, another customer found her slumped in a puddle of gore against the cooler’s side.

At 4:30 p.m., about a mile away, a blue Chevy pulled up to the curb in front of the Pine Hollow Village apartments, where Linda Reed sat outside, baby-sitting. Startled, she got up to leave.

“That guy’s crazy!” she told a neighbor, Diane Johnson. “He said, ‘Hey, I have a problem. I’m in dire need of (oral sex).’ ”

When the man appeared again, Johnson called police and reported the Chevy’s license number.

Appears at Beer Bar

The Village Inn, a honky-tonk beside a cornfield on a road that separates Pennsylvania and Ohio, is eight miles to the north, in a hamlet of 300.

Rendick arrived at 5 p.m. and began ordering beers. He sat near a color TV that was perched atop a beer cooler.

The bar owner, Tom Miller, turned up the sound for the 6 o’clock news; the shootings were the top story.

“Can you believe this? Some (expletive) just shot these people!” Miller recalled telling the stranger.

“He never said a word. He just sat there. He was staring out the front window. He looked like he was just waiting for someone to come to arrest him,” said Miller.

Michael Holodnak of Kinsman, Ohio, was taking measurements for an air conditioner at the nearby Five Points Cafe and heard a description of the gunman and his car from a barmaid who had been listening to the police scanner.

Holodnak stopped to see his friend, Tom Miller. He parked next to a blue Chevy. Inside, Rendick sat alone.

“Holy mackerel! That’s the guy they’re looking for,” Holodnak said to himself.

Flees to Telephone

Holodnak backed out of the place and went to a cousin’s store, where he phoned to double check the license number and then alerted police.

“I was only in there about 35 seconds. I was scared to death,” Holodnak said. “I didn’t want to alarm him. All I wanted was out of that building. He looked at me like I knew .”

Rendick was backing the Chevy out of the gravel lot when Orangeville Marshal Ray Chalfont stopped him at gunpoint. He gave up without a fuss, and said only, “Do you want me to shut it off?” Chalfont recalled.

In the trunk was a .357 Magnum with a spent cartridge in the chamber. Two other shells were found on the car’s floor.

On Friday, June 5, there was a memorial service for Denise Snyder at Hickory High. Shock ran so deep that two school psychologists and four counselors were on hand to help the students vent their grief.

“Some of the students were so broken up, they just wanted to sit in the courtyard and cry. They were just numb,” said guidance counselor George Lewis.

Schoolmates’ Grief

“They were holding onto each other. They would blurt out little things. They just couldn’t contain themselves,” Lewis said.

For Frank Ammaturo, a close friend of Denise, it was his first funeral.

“Everybody was in a daze. A lot of people were roaming the halls,” said Ammaturo, 16, who was a pall bearer at the June 6 services.

Denise had moved here from Sunbury, Pa., in February, 1986, when her divorced mother began a year’s training program at the newspaper. Snyder was offered a full-time job and planned to buy a house that summer.