Man Accused of Killing Brother for Insurance Money

Pushing his deaf daughter into traffic. Handing his 4-year-old a high-voltage wire. Hiring hit men to murder his only brother.

Prosecutors say David W. Crist, 38, committed these crimes against his own relatives for a base reason: greed.

He collected $133,000 from a life insurance policy in his brother’s 1982 death and stood to gain $200,000 if his two young daughters hadn’t survived.

As a precaution, authorities also reopened investigations into the deaths of his father in 1968, his mother’s fiance in 1976 and his mother in 1981, although no charges have resulted.

Crist’s trial in the 1993 attempted murder of his deaf daughter, Diane, is to begin soon. When she was 9, prosecutors allege, Crist hired a woman to run over the child with a car, but the driver swerved at the last instant.

After that trial, another jury will decide whether Crist tried to electrocute his younger daughter, Miranda Jo, in 1990.

Then he goes to Maryland, where he is accused in the killing of his brother, Scott Crist. Prosecutors there plan to seek the death penalty.

“I can’t believe that none of his children ended up dead in their cribs, considering his history,” said Susan H. Hazlett, assistant state’s attorney in Baltimore County, Md.

Police and prosecutors in Pennsylvania wouldn’t comment on the pending cases.

Crist’s wife, Maryalice, has described her husband of eight years as a doting father reluctant even to discipline the two children they had together or the girls--Diane and Miranda Jo--he fathered in a previous relationship.

But she has said she was curious about the insurance policies.

“He had several policies from several companies on all of his kids from practically the day they were born,” Hazlett said.

Diane and Miranda now live with their mother, Kathy M. Millhouse, who has called Crist an abusive drinker. The two never married.

The Pennsylvania cases sprang from the investigation into the slaying of Crist’s younger brother, Scott, a self-disciplined, hard-working man who held his brother’s loose-and-fast lifestyle in contempt.

Relatives said David Crist used marijuana, held wild parties and frequently changed jobs.

On Feb. 21, 1982, while Scott Crist was taking luggage from his car outside his apartment in Cockeysville, Md., a man fired five shots from a .25-caliber pistol, hitting the 22-year-old engineer twice.

Thirteen years later, the getaway driver for that killing confessed while in prison on bad-check charges. Tryon Eiswerth said David Crist offered him and Daniel Pepperman $2,000 apiece and drugs for the crime; they say they got only marijuana.

Pepperman was sentenced in March to life plus 15 years for pulling the trigger and will testify against Crist in Maryland. Eiswerth awaits sentencing on murder charges.

While investigating Eiswerth’s story, police interviewed his girlfriend and the case broadened. Lisa Cohick told police that Crist threatened to hurt her children if she didn’t run over 9-year-old Diane for $5,000. She lost her nerve and swerved at the last minute.

Cohick will be among Lycoming County Dist. Atty. Thomas Marino’s star witnesses. Diane, who suffered only a broken foot, also is expected to testify.

Crist’s attorney declined to comment in detail.

“All I can tell you is that my client is innocent,” said public defender William J. Miele.

Friends and relatives said that when Scott and David were young they shared a bedroom, attended church, played basketball and raised a pet duck named Daffy.

In 1968, when they were 9 and 10, their father, Mellard, a postal worker, was found at the bottom of a stairway, dead of a fractured skull that was ruled accidental.

Eight years later, the brothers’ mother, Catherine, got engaged. Her fiance, Alexander Gruenberg, moved in but died soon afterward, apparently suffering a heart attack on a sofa. He left his business to Catherine Crist, who sold it for a few hundred thousand dollars.

She died five years later at age 58 of what was described as natural causes. David found the body. Her will divided an estate worth about $300,000 equally among her sons.

By then, relatives say, David was irresponsible and heavily involved in drugs.

According to Scott Crist’s fiancee, Wendy Lou Baker, Scott tried to curb his brother’s reckless lifestyle by asking the executor of their mother’s estate to make David responsible for maintaining their mother’s house.

Baker said Scott met with the executor the day before he was killed. Eiswerth and Pepperman told police they followed when Scott returned to Maryland from that meeting.

Police believe David Crist and Eiswerth conducted more business just a year later. Eiswerth burned Crist’s new record store, allowing Crist to collect $80,000. Eiswerth spent three years in prison; Crist was never charged.

Seven years later, police say, while Crist was remodeling his kitchen, he asked Miranda to hold a 220-volt line to the stove. She says her father went down to the cellar and she heard a “click.” She suffered electrical burns on one hand. Crist had a $142,531 policy on her life.

In March 1993, Cohick says, she agreed to kill Diane. Their plan called for Crist to stop on a rural road, flatten one of his own tires with an ice pick and stand by the road with his daughter.

“He had her by the shoulders and you could see that she was struggling,” Cohick said. “I went over in the other lane and kept going.”

Police say Crist had a $58,000 policy on Diane’s life.