Man Spends 33 Years in Jail for a Murder He Didn’t Commit : Crime: A scared 13-year-old confessed to protect his girlfriend. After a life in prison, he has finally been pardoned.

Jerry Pacek spent his youth as a convict and his adulthood branded for a murder he didn’t commit. Now he is adjusting to life as the kind of man he always thought he was--a good man.

“It’s unbelievable how much support I get from strangers. I don’t know what to say to people when they come up and shake my hand. I don’t know what to do with that,” he says.

Jerry Pacek, at age 46, has not often experienced that kind of open-faced friendliness since he was wrongly convicted of murder, at age 13, based on a confession he gave police after a night and a day in custody.

“I think they looked at me as just a kid from the other side of the tracks, just a throwaway,” Pacek says.

The state now admits that Pacek was wrongly convicted. Gov. Robert P. Casey signed a pardon on Nov. 15 on the recommendation of Allegheny County Dist. Atty. Robert Colville and the state’s Board of Pardons.

Official acknowledgment of his innocence has lifted a great weight from Pacek after 33 years of agony. He is more relaxed and his temper is slower to flare. “I feel like a good guy,” he says.

Pacek’s long ordeal began the night of Nov. 28, 1958, as he walked home from his girlfriend’s house through Brackenridge, a poor steel-mill town on the Allegheny River about 20 miles northeast of Pittsburgh.

He said he heard a moan, walked toward the sound and saw a man rise up and run away from a woman lying bleeding in a decaying vegetable garden. It was almost midnight. Pacek said he tried to flag down passing cars and finally pounded on the door of a neighbor, who called police.

The victim, Lillian Stevick, 52, had 19 head wounds made with a heavy metal object and died 45 minutes later on the operating table.

Police settled on Pacek as the prime suspect. He was mature for his 13 years, stocky, and had been shaving since age 10. They questioned him all that night in a police car, all the next morning, took him in the afternoon to Pittsburgh, where he passed lie detector tests twice, sent him home after 17 hours, then picked him up again and began more questioning that night. Finally he broke down and said he was the killer.

“It’s not unheard of for young people to confess just to get the case off their back,” says Dist. Atty. Colville. “I’ve seen it happen before.”

At his trial, Pacek said he confessed to protect his 20-year-old girlfriend, Mary Daley. His parents had put her under a court order to stay away from their son because of their age difference. Pacek says he believed that if he had explained his alibi to police, Daley could have been arrested. He trusted police to figure out the truth. Instead they charged him with rape and murder.

“I look back and think, ‘How did I let them do this to me?’ But I realize I had no choice,” he says.

Before the trial Pacek was persuaded to re-enact the crime at the scene. Scores of townfolk flocked that day to watch the boy pretend to beat a female police officer who stood in for the victim. A local television station aired its footage of the manufactured drama.

“Try to imagine,” Pacek says, “the center of attention and telling the story one at a time to all these people, answering the same questions over and over. I lost track of who I was talking to or how many times I told it to. I just lost myself.”

Under Pennsylvania law, juvenile suspects are tried as adults in murder cases. Pacek was convicted as an adult and sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison. He served 10 years of the term and 10 years probation after that.

He might have gone to his grave labeled a murderer if it had not been for a criminal justice professor and author, Jim Fisher of Edinboro University in Edinboro, Pa.

Casting about for notorious Pennsylvania murder cases worth researching, Fisher came across microfilm copies of old newspaper stories on the Stevick case. And there it was.

“Pacek confessed to killing her with a pipe, then changed it to a hatchet,” Fisher says. The true killer, he says, surely would have known what weapon he used.

According to Fisher, the county’s chief homicide investigator at the time, Ted Botula, couldn’t find the murder weapon so he produced a plausible substitute, a rusty, muddy hatchet in the woods 100 yards from the murder site.

He took it to the crime lab, Fisher says, where a forensic chemist determined it could not have been the murder weapon. Nevertheless, the hatchet was entered as trial evidence as one of the types of weapon that could have done the deadly job.

“You might as well have introduced a lamppost,” Colville says.

Fisher said police and the prosecutor also knew that:

* Pacek’s clothes were clean, even though the attack spattered blood in a 25-foot radius, and bore none of the victim’s hair or clothing fibers.

* Conversely, none of Pacek’s hair, semen or fibers was found on the victim.

* Pacek bore no scratch marks even though the victim had bits of her attacker’s skin under her fingernails.

* The one pubic hair was found on the victim was not Pacek’s.

“The only evidence against Jerry Pacek, Fisher says, “was his confession.”

Fisher believes an appeals court would have thrown out such a slim case, but Pacek’s court-appointed defense attorney, John V. Snee, dropped the appeal. Pacek, in jail, was not informed and assumed that the appeal was turned down. Fisher says Snee was running for district attorney and had taken the case for the publicity.

Pacek says his parents, uneducated and unsophisticated, didn’t challenge authorities. “I’ve come to realize that a lot of people in my parent’s position just take it,” he says.

He says he can’t be angry at Snee, though, because the lawyer once hugged him when he started crying. That hug, Pacek recalls, was the only compassion he remembers from his long ordeal.

Snee has since died. So have other figures in the case: Common Pleas Court Judge Henry X. O’Brien, prosecutor Samuel Strauss, town Constable Edward Roenick.

A reporter’s recent phone call to Botula, the county detective, was not returned. He has stopped talking to reporters about the case, but told the Valley News Dispatch in Tarentum the day of Pacek’s pardon, “We did a job and the record speaks for itself. If people want to make something out of it, let them.”

Pacek has spent his adult life living down the conviction. At one time, the name Jerry Pacek was so notorious that even after his 10-year prison term, rumors about him continued. People he met told him they heard he died in jail or drowned after his release.

Actually, he lives in a rural area barely 13 miles from the town where his life was derailed and works as a carpet installer, a trade he learned in prison and one of the few jobs he could get as a ex-con.

He married Daley, who bore him a son while he was in jail. She later died of cancer and the boy, Jerry Jr., was killed in a traffic accident in his 20s. Pacek has remarried and has two children.

But prison has left its scars. To this day, he is wary of making close male friends.

“I feel I could have been a different person if I’d never had the experience,” he says. “You have this huge thing that is pulling you down. I could never know the extent of what I could have been.”

Pacek has started discussions with an attorney about a possible lawsuit, but he is not inclined to be bitter.

“There’s a lot more pain there. There’s a lot more healing I have to do, and it’s going to take the rest of my life.”