True Confessions? : Suspicions of Husband Linger in Murder Case, Even as Neighbor Faces 2nd Trial

A decade ago Paul Reggettz III spent 11 months behind bars after confessing that he murdered his wife and their two children. He was freed after a former neighbor confessed to the same crime.

Reggettz has spent the last 10 years struggling to rebuild his life, painfully aware of the stares and whispers of those who still think he is guilty.

Now the second man who confessed, John Moss Jr., is to stand trial again, in March. His previous conviction on three first-degree murder counts was overturned because of a judge’s mistakes.

“I don’t want to keep reliving that nightmare,” Reggettz said. “Every five years will I have to because of the state Supreme Court? Where are my rights? I’d like to have the right to get on with my life.”

The nightmare began on Dec. 13, 1979, the cold, rainy day Reggettz rushed into a restaurant a block up the narrow dirt street from his family’s one-story house in nearby St. Albans. He called police and said: “You’ve got to help me. My wife’s dead.”

Police found Vanessa Reggettz, 26, lying on the bedroom floor, beaten, strangled and stabbed with a pair of scissors. Their 7-year-old son, Paul Eric, was found in the bathtub, apparently choked with an electrical cord before being drowned. Their 4-year-old daughter, Bernadette, had been strangled and was hanging from a cord strung over a door.

As the bodies were carried from the white frame house, Reggettz, then a 36-year-old United Parcel Service worker, was taken to State Police headquarters for questioning. He was interrogated for 21 straight hours, with no food or sleep. Police deny any improprieties, but Reggettz said he was bullied, threatened, knocked to the floor and a gun was held to his head.

Finally, he said, the shock of seeing his family murdered, combined with the terror of the interrogation, overwhelmed him, broke his will. He confessed.

“The children were screaming and crying,” he told investigators. “My head felt like it was going to explode and I had to put a stop to the noise.”

Reggettz was taken back to the house where his family had been slaughtered and re-enacted the slayings for police and Kanawha County Prosecutor Mike Roark.

“I was put under so much pressure, tremendous pressure,” Reggettz said. “Now, what’s pressure to me might not be pressure to you. You might stand 10 times the pressure. I was put in a pressure situation where I would have told them I was anybody or anything doing anything they wanted. Anything.

“And people say, ‘You mean to tell me you would lie and say that?’. . . I didn’t want to lie. Why would I want to say something I didn’t do?

“But lying got to where it didn’t mean anything out of fear. Fear won over the lying. . . . I would have told them anything--anything--to get them to leave me alone and not put pressure on me.”

An autopsy report estimated the time of death at midnight, well before Reggettz left for work at 1:45 a.m.

The case seemed cut-and-dried, and Circuit Judge John Hey sent Reggettz to jail without bond. Charges against Reggettz were dropped before he went to trial, but he lost his job while behind bars.

“Three times--and I’m not trying to get dramatic--three times I planned suicide in there,” Reggettz said. “I came to the very end of my rope three different occasions.

“I thought dying would have to be better than living.”

Ten months after the slayings, and the day after Hey refused to throw out Reggettz’s confession, Moss told police he committed the murders.

In jail in Cleveland on other charges at the time, Moss was a former neighbor of the Reggettz family. He had been named in Reggettz’s indictment as a participant in the slayings, but he wasn’t indicted then because he was 17.

Tests showed that some of the blood found in the Reggettz home didn’t come from the victims or from Reggettz, but did match Moss’ blood type.

Moss also was linked to several items reported stolen from the Reggettz home.

The medical examiner changed the estimated time of death, which he had based on Reggettz’s confession, to sometime in the early morning after Reggettz had left for work.

Roark finally conceded that he believed Reggettz was at work 25 miles away in Rand when the murders occurred, and Hey dropped the charges against him.

Moss contended that he also was forced into a false confession by the state trooper who interrogated Reggettz, but Hey refused to throw out his tape-recorded statement. His defense lawyer argued that Reggettz committed the murders, picturing him as a volatile father with no affection for his family, and as a former motorcycle gang member who worshipped Satan.

A jury deliberated 14 hours before convicting Moss in 1984, five years after the slayings.

But the state Supreme Court in December, 1988, ordered a new trial for Moss on three grounds.

The court said the judge erred when he refused to poll each juror about possible exposure to prejudicial comments made by the prosecutor and broadcasts on local radio and television stations during the trial.

The court also said the judge allowed the prosecutor to make prejudicial comments during his closing arguments, including statements that Moss has “a ruthless, vicious, diseased criminal mind” and should never be released “to slaughter women and children in Kanawha County.”

The court also said Hey failed to allow admission of evidence regarding a polygraph test Reggettz took.

Despite Moss’ widely publicized trial, Reggettz still runs across people who assume that he is guilty.

“All this many years later they act like I was the one who was tried, and I’m out running around when I ought to be locked up,” he said. “I have a problem understanding that. . . .

“If you liked me before this stuff happened, you’ll probably say I didn’t do it. And if you didn’t like me, you’ll probably say I did it. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

During a recent shopping trip, for example, Reggettz said he waited outside a discount store while his wife--he remarried seven years ago--went through the checkout line.

“I was standing outside looking through the window waiting for her, and the woman checking her out said: ‘You know who that is? That’s Paul Reggettz. That’s the guy who killed his family.’ And my wife said: ‘That’s my husband.’ The woman didn’t know what to say.”

Reggettz, 46, now lives in South Charleston and earns his living doing odd jobs. A self-described “born-again” Christian who rediscovered his faith in jail, he and his wife have no children, but he said they’re considering adoption.

A member of a Pentecostal church, Reggettz struggles to explain his concept of good and evil when asked why his family died.

“I believe there’s a God in heaven,” he said. “I believe there’s a Satan--a real, live living devil. . . .

“He’s an evil thing out to destroy, kill. And I think he was the instigator. He used somebody to destroy my family. He’ll use anybody that’s open to his influence.

“Explain to me why a guy suddenly, one day he walks off the job and goes home and gets three or four guns and a thousand rounds of ammunition and goes to a school and starts shooting up kids. I don’t believe that one day the man said: ‘I think I’m going to kill a bunch of kids today.’ I’m sure a lot of them have thought that. But they may have help thinking of it.”

Ten years later, Reggettz said he is not bitter about what happened to him.

“I used to be,” he said. “It took me a long time to get to where I’m at today.

“The state of West Virginia, the State Police, some of them made mistakes. Fine. Everybody’s going to make mistakes. The state’s not perfect. The State Police are not perfect. Mike Roark’s not perfect. The judges aren’t perfect.

“I know a lot of people made big mistakes in my case. But the mistake would be even worse if I let it eat me alive.”