Original subtitles

(intense music)

I've done over 13,000 autopsies in my career.

I perform autopsies

to try to figure out how in fact people died.

I have this echo going through my head,

constantly feeding me and telling me,

rule out homicide, rule out homicide, rule out homicide.

We're talking about two deaths in a small town.

Things started spiraling.

We have a relatively benign car accident

and a fall down the stairs.

I needed to know what caused those type of injuries.

Are these lacerations due to somebody striking her

with an object,

or is it due to a fall?

I wanted to examine that heart to see

if in fact she had a heart attack.

There were cuts and gashes and bruises.

She was fighting someone.

This is someone they trusted, they loved, they adored.

It was just a gut feeling.

She didn't fall around the steps.

There's more to it than that.

I don't think that anybody

would've expected what we found.

People are crying for justice from the grave.

[Voiceover] (whispering) Tell me, tell me.

Tell me how,

tell me,

tell me

how I died.

(heart thumping)

(intense music continuing)

It was the afternoon of April 23rd, 1999,

and a call came into 911.

It was a local pastor, Arthur Schirmer.

Everybody knew him as A.B.

He said that he was out for a run.

He came home and he saw Jewel, his wife,

at the bottom of the staircase.

She had fallen.

(ambulance siren)

When first responders showed up,

and they go inside the house,

and it was anything but calm.

When first responders tried to give Jewel medical aid,

she immediately started flailing her arms.

She definitely was still alive,

and she did not want to be touched.

According to EMS providers,

she was found at the bottom of the steps

with a cord wrapped around her leg.

Both shoes are off,

and she was brought to Hershey Medical Center.

It was a cold and windy and dreary day,

and the phone rang and my wife answered it,

and she came out in the kitchen,

and said, "It's A.B., he wants to talk to you."

So, I walked in the room, picked up the phone,

and he said that my sister Jewel had an accident.

The conversation turned for the worst,

because then he said, "She's in an intensive care

in the intensive care unit.

They don't think she's gonna make it."

So, when I hung up the phone,

I had walked down the hallway,

and I had to tell my father his daughter was gonna die.

When my father and I arrived at the Hershey Medical Center,

we walked down this long hallway,

and instead of rooms, it was all curtains.

So I walked over to that curtain and I pulled it back,

and I just stopped dead in my tracks,

because my sister looked

like she got hit by a freight train.

And the first thought I had was there

was just way too many injuries for falling down steps.

And I said to my father, I said,

"Something's not right here."

And he shook his head and said, "Yeah."

I said, "Look at her knuckles.

She was in a fight."

Maybe if she fell down the steps,

she would've busted one knuckle open,

but all 10 of 'em were were bloody.

It just didn't make any sense to my father or myself.

24, 28 hours after that point,

I lost my sister Jewel.

We were born here in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania.

Our family was a religious family.

My parents were both ministers.

Jewel and I were the only children,

and she was 13 years older than me.

Jewel met A.B.,

I believe it was her second or third year in college.

Arthur's nickname was A.B.,

because his middle name was Burton

and that's all I ever knew him by.

Jewel was graduated from college

and was married before I was in middle school.

So, it was a normal brother and sister relationship,

but it wasn't a very close one,

because of the age difference.

Jewel was married to Arthur for over 30 years.

He was a well-known pastor,

and in his church, the people really loved him.

Arthur and Jewel lived in a church parsonage,

very modest, split level home.

They had two daughters and one son.

Jewel was well-known and well loved in her community.

That is for sure.

Jewel's two passions in life

were her children and music.

My sister was like a she-bear with cubs

when it came to her children,

because if you mess with one of her kids,

you were gonna mess with her.

She taught Sunday school for little kids.

She had the children's choir.

She was a music teacher in a Catholic school.

She just had a overwhelming

love and compassion for children.

Pastor Schirmer was the wholesome church man

and cared about his community and his life at home.

People knew him.

He was charismatic.

He was a great singer.

He was even part of a singing group,

and they would tour and travel around and perform.

The people that attended that church,

they thought very highly of him.

After Jewel passed away,

that time period for me was difficult.

I hunt with a lot of police officers,

and I know state troopers,

and they all basically gave me the same answer.

The coroner has the final decision.

I was just convinced,

she didn't just fall down the steps,

and I wanted her death to be investigated.

(ominous music)

My work is extremely important.

When I've completed an autopsy, and give a cause of death

and even testify in court,

lives are at stake.

Why not let the detectives do all the work?

Well, the problem is that law enforcement

is good at some things,

and we're better at other things.

(voiceover) This is Dr. Ross dictating a post-mortem report,

and I'm dictating this report on Jewel Schirmer,

50 year old white female.

Even to this day,

I can see the image of her body in my head.

I see this woman lying on this gurney.

She has bruises throughout her entire body,

and there were three injuries to the head

that really stood out then and stand out now.

She had two lacerations to the right side of her head

and a big laceration to the back of her head.

You know, forensic pathologists

have a sort of internal speak

that goes on as they're doing an autopsy.

And right now the body tells us something's wrong here.

I looked over the medical records

at Hershey Medical Center,

and they examined her heart

and believed that she had had a heart attack,

and she had fallen down a flight of stairs.

Well, I have to prove that or disprove it.

Suffice to say, if I'm going to court one day,

I have to concede that I don't know

if those injuries I see there are due to trauma or whatever.

It becomes quite a complicated issue

and can be very confusing,

because ultimately the courts don't want speculation.

And we had a big obstacle in this case,

and that was when we got the body,

we noticed that all these organs have been donated.

Whoa, I got a problem.

I'm really at a significant disadvantage here.

How am I gonna fix this?

Obviously you can't use a heart that's

had a real heart attack,

because the muscle's dead,

but you can use the valves.

And I'm thinking this is absolutely bizarre.

Here I am in the middle of an autopsy.

I'm trying to figure out the cause and manner of death.

One of the critical issues is she has a heart attack.

Does anybody leave the heart in the body,

so the forensic pathologist can examine it

and try to figure out what's going on?

Why on earth would you ever take the heart out,

and transplant it somewhere?

It doesn't make any sense.

You gotta save the heart so the forensic pathologist

can look at it under the microscope.

I had this echo going through my head constantly.

Rule out homicide, rule out homicide, rule out homicide.

Well, what's the answer to that?

Get the heart, get the heart, get the heart.

(ominous music)

This is a family portrait of my mother

and father and my sister

and myself.

And this is my sister's graduation picture from 1966.

And this one here is my sister's wedding picture

from 1968,

and that's all that I have of my sister.

Back in 1999,

I was contacted by the coroner's office

about the death of Jewel Schirmer.

So, I went in,

and first thing I noted was that there's no heart.

And let me tell you,

I felt like odd man out,

and I may have to be an insufferable nag,

which I'm more than willing

to do to get her heart slides.

During the following week, after Jewel passed away,

my father told me he wants to go up to

So, I took him up there and we knocked on the door,

rang the doorbell.

At one point he finally opened the door,

and I went right out into the kitchen,

into the garage, and down into the basement

where this supposedly happened.

It was just a gut feeling,

something didn't sit right,

that she didn't fall down the steps.

So there was more to it than that.

There was a concrete floor, concrete block basement,

and you could see where the walls were scrubbed.

And I followed the line to where the cleaning stopped.

And I look back at the steps and I'm thinking,

if she fell down those steps,

why would there be blood all the way over here?

Somebody really scrubbed up this basement.

I went back upstairs and my father was talking to A.B.,

and I squeezed right in between 'em,

and I was nose to nose with A.B. and I said,

"Who cleaned up all the blood?"

And he said, "The paramedics stayed behind

and cleaned it up."

And I couldn't help myself.

And I just said, "That's bull (beep).

Paramedics don't stay behind and clean up blood."

And I know that because I used to run

with that same ambulance organization.

I said to my father, I said, "He's lying."

I remember when I was approximately eight years old

at the time,

my parents received a phone call

from my sister, (phone ringing)

late at night that she was upset,

'cause her husband A.B. wasn't at home.

And I sort of connected the dots

that A.B. was having affairs.

That was the first sign that I remember

that they were having marital problems.

I knew of A.B. Schirmer's three or four affairs

that he had when he was married to my sister.

A leopard doesn't change their spots.

For, it seemed like weeks, I was doggedly,

bothering just about everybody I could

to get that heart back,

'cause I wanted to examine that heart to see

if in fact Jewel had a heart attack.

We were able to get pieces of the heart back.

The organ donation team did have at least the muscle part.

I was able to get those microscopic slides

with the muscle tissue,

and examine 'em under a microscope.

At the hospital when they did those laboratory values,

there was one cardiac enzyme,

which is sort of a protein that leaks out of the heart.

When the heart gets damaged,

it gets released into the blood,

and we can measure those, enzymes in the blood.

So, what does that mean?

The police report points out that these elevated enzymes,

they believe were due to a heart attack.

What the police were ultimately unaware

of was the fact that a heart attack, CPR,

or even traumatic injuries will lead

to trauma to the heart,

which can cause the enzyme

to be released in the blood.

Anytime you get less oxygen to the heart,

it tends to get crippled.

But that doesn't mean it's a heart attack.

The body tells us there is traumatic brain injury.

There are two lacerations over this side of the skull.

There's also a laceration to the back.

There's a tear back here,

and there was a scrape and abrasion

around the back of that area.

So, there were actually three significant areas of trauma,

three tears, three lacerations that Jewel Schirmer had.

But you'll notice there's nothing to the top of the head.

So, obviously if she's falling down face first we

would expect it to be to the top of the head.

I am trying to determine are these lacerations due

to someone striking her with an object,

or is it due to a fall?

One of the things we were looking for

is what we refer to as a postural reflex.

So if she had fallen down that flight of steps,

her arms would've gone out in front of her,

and she would've impacted those hands on the ground.

Frequently they'll get broken wrists,

they'll get bruises on the palm of their hands,

get bruises up and down the forearms,

and then after that you get what we call a head strike.

You get a strike to the lips, you get bruises,

you get a laceration of the chin

or breaks, you know, in the teeth.

These sort of things.

And those sort of things were notably absent,

and I would expect us to see those things

had she fallen head first down the flight of steps.

There's no neck fracture,

there's no rib fractures,

there's no spine fracture,

there's no pelvis fracture,

no arm or leg fractures.

That's odd.

I looked at the injuries to the back

of the head of Jewel Schirmer,

and I determined that those lacerations were due

to impact with a long cylindrical object

such as a crowbar or something along that line.

I relayed that information

to the district attorney's office,

told them in no uncertain terms,

Jewel's cause of death was

a traumatic brain injury.

This case needs to be

pursued as a homicide.

(intense music)

Cause of death is what led to a death of an individual.

But the manner of death deals with the circumstances

surrounding that person's death.

In the case of Jewel Schirmer,

I had to rule it ultimately as undetermined.

And the reason why I did that

is because there was a lot of things

that were not done in this particular case.

Number one, there needed to be a crime scene reconstruction.

Number two, there needed to be a bloodstain analysis.

Three, there needed to be extensive interviews

of the husband in this case,

and none of those things were done.

So, I was pretty much stuck.

I hit a huge roadblock.

Listen, accidents happen.

So, it is also very realistic to think

that if someone's vacuuming,

and they're right in front of the stairs,

something happens to your heart, you could tumble down.

You also have a pastor,

someone in a position of trust,

a man that was very well known in the community.

He might have known some of the people

who were investigating this.

If the pastor says that this is what happened,

why would someone question it?

Based on the information received from Arthur Schirmer,

they decided they didn't need to investigate any further,

and they closed the case.

In 2008, I was contacted

by the Monroe County District Attorney's office.

And then lo and behold, in that discussion,

I found out that Pastor Schirmer had remarried

after the death of Jewel Schirmer,

and had remarried Betty,

and that Betty Schirmer had died.

You know, it was like getting hit with a ton of bricks.

I'm like, wait a minute,

you are telling me this guy remarries,

his wife's dead?

But that's not the end of the story.

According to Arthur Schirmer, Betty has TMJ.

She suffers from some type of jaw issue.

About 1:50 AM on July 15th, 2008,

he's driving her and rushing her off to the hospital,

because of this jaw pain.

He's traveling down 715.

Going to the hospital.

When a deer suddenly jumps out in the road.

He swerves and strikes a guardrail.

He said, to the responding officers.

that he was doing 55 miles an hour.

She had just removed her seatbelt,

prior to this deer jumping into the road.

She has blunt force trauma.

She's bleeding badly from her head.

They treat her first.

They bandage her.

She's extricated from the car,

and immediately taken to the hospital.

(sirens wailing)

Betty was taken by ambulance to the closest hospital,

the Poconos Medical Center, which is a trauma center,

but she was brain dead

and she was taken off of life support.

Betty Schirmer's death was ruled an accident

from a motor vehicle collision.

Based on the information that was provided

to the coroner and the medical staff

about how Betty came to receive her injuries,

there was never an autopsy performed on Betty Schirmer

and she was cremated within 24 hours of her death.

Several months had passed since Betty's death,

and we received a phone call in the detective's office.

I answered it and it was a woman

who was calling pretty much every agency

that she could get to answer the phone

to express her concerns about Arthur Schirmer

and the death of his most recent wife, Betty,

as well as the death of his first wife,

which had occurred back in 1999

in Lebanon County.

She wanted to make sure that there

was a thorough investigation,

because of the other death that had occurred.

And the common denominator to her was Arthur Schirmer.

The officers were talking about how this

was the second wife that the reverend had lost.

I remember making the comment, "Well, that's strange,

somebody losing two wives."

There were people in the church who did come forward

and express that they had concerns.

We found out the reverend was having an affair

with his secretary.

Everyone started to wonder, wow,

this guy's not who they thought he was.

Based on those phone calls,

my chief here assigned me to open the crash investigation

into Betty Schirmer's death.

To help me understand exactly

what happened at the crash scene,

I had to reconstruct the entire accident,

and that involved gathering photographs

and examining photographs of the scene.

And in this case, the blood stain patterns

didn't come from this crash.

This is the photograph that I actually call the smoking gun.

There's blood drops diluted in the seat.

You can actually see it in the shape of a human body,

which is more consistent with loading her

in the car than taking her out of the car.

So that was very obvious that she was bleeding prior

to the crash and being placed in the car,

and seated in her own blood.

She didn't die in that crash.

He sat in his car,

and he let her bleed out.

It takes a wonderful person, an amazing person

to teach Sunday school.

And Betty was a Sunday school teacher, and she loved that.

She just had so much of a light in her.

The light of Jesus was shining out of her.

And I loved her.

Betty and A.B. Schirmer had a great relationship.

They loved each other.

And I did go do several of his services.

He was very charismatic.

He would make the congregation laugh and lighthearted.

It was a fun service.

He made it fun, and so everyone loved him.

I called Pastor Schirmer to see how he was doing,

'cause I hadn't heard from him in a while.

So he's like, "Oh yeah, Betty passed away."

I said, "What?"

I was completely shocked.

"What?" I said, "That's horrible."

I was like, "I am so sorry.

Oh my gosh."

Just gimme a second.

It's just horrible.

(music intensifying)

One of the first tasks that we undertook

was to do a full scale background investigation

into Arthur Schirmer.

We found that he had started his religious career

in the 1970s,

and became a pastor in the Lebanon area

early on in his career.

Arthur married Betty in 2001,

which is just two years after Jewel's death.

And then they moved to the Reeders area.

The congregation of the Reeders United Methodist Church

loved A.B. Schirmer.

But I started to look at the churches

that he worked at,

and we got some disturbing information

from those churches that Mr. Schirmer,

everywhere he went,

he had some type of flirting complaints

or sexual harassment complaints.

He was very charismatic.

He really was able to talk his way out of any kind

of situation that he got himself in.

Instead of removing him from that position,

they just moved him to another location.

Every rock I moved, every stone I turned,

the reverend was shadier and shadier.

I was reading the reports from Jewel's death investigation.

I realized that John Bahney was the motive

behind involving the police to investigate Jewel's death.

And I reached out to him,

and the things he told me were very concerning.

I learned that Reverend Schirmer

was having affairs on his sister,

and they had a troubled relationship.

I received a phone call in November of 2008

from Detective Wagner,

and he wanted to talk to me,

and I'm thinking, what does he want to talk to me about?

When it hit me,

they're investigating Betty's death,

because he did it again,

and they started connecting the dots.

(ominous music)

There was concerns about the car accident.

The damage to the car didn't seem to fit the gravity

of the injuries that Betty Schirmer sustained,

and Arthur Schirmer wasn't injured at all.

It was important that we be able

to show that accidents don't happen like this,

but there's also what we don't have.

What's missing?

Could the injuries have been caused

by Betty striking something in the car?

and they were interested in

if we could perform certain verification tasks

for a crash case where somebody died.

First, we were told the assumed speed

of the crash, 50 or 55 mile per hour.

So, we ran many stages of the analysis,

and this analysis was basically

repeating the simulated crash many times

with increasingly lower and lower and lower and lower speeds

until the outcome was matching what

was observed in the actual crash scene.

He ended up around 18 mile per hour.

So, I believe that it was an intentional crash

performed at a low speed for hiding the fact

that the victim was actually attacked prior

to the accident,

and it was staged to justify the injuries to the victim.

One of the obstacles we had

was the fact that Betty Schirmer was not autopsied.

But we were able to send CT scans that were done

when Betty was brought into Lehigh Valley Medical Center

at Cedar Crest.

Dr. Ross and the forensic pathologist

takes Betty Schirmer's medical records

and compares them to the autopsy of Jewel Schirmer,

and finds evidence that blows the case wide open for us.

(intense music)

As they say, the story continues and the story deepens.

The Monroe County District Attorney's office

asked me to get involved

and look at Betty Schirmer's case in more detail,

so I did,

but we hit another huge roadblock.

The coroner got involved when she expired,

took a couple pictures, made some phone calls,

determined it was

a traffic accident,

and they didn't even really

do an external examination.

Typically speaking, you're supposed to take everything off,

photograph everything, document everything.

It never happened.

Not only that, within days of her death,

Pastor Schirmer had Betty Schirmer cremated.

The body was completely gone.

But in this case we were able to take that CAT scan,

and do what's called a

three-dimensional reconstruction,

and they reconstructed,

and created images of Betty's head.

And lo and behold, when we did that,

we're able to examine the scalp,

and I noticed that there were two lacerations

over the right side of the head.

In Jewel Schirmer, we have two lacerations

to the right side of the head,

and one to the back of the head.

They were very similar,

and that was sort of the connecting point.

We have two deaths,

two wives,

same husband,

and both from a similar object.

I have pure scientific evidence showing

that I have a reproducibility of the same mechanism

that caused the injuries to Jewel Schirmer

to Betty Schirmer.

After my conversation with Dr. Wayne Ross,

I was convinced that I had two murders on my hands.

Betty Schirmer's death was ruled an accident

from a motor vehicle collision.

We had to go back and get the manner of death

changed from accident to homicide.

And the information that I got in Jewel's case

prompted me to contact the authorities

in Lebanon to reopen that investigation.

The detective told me, he said,

"I don't think your sister had a heart attack

and fell down the steps."

And I basically said, "Yeah, no kidding."

I said, "What's going on up in Monroe County?"

And all the detective would tell me, he said,

"I think A.B. Schirmer's life

is gonna get very complicated very shortly."

The Lebanon County District Attorney's office

really wanted to know about Jewel Schirmer,

'cause everybody was in the dark about that.

There were various aspects of this case that upset me.

Why didn't we resolve these things earlier?

We want the right answers.

We want to get justice.

Sometimes you gotta have a forehead of flint,

you just gotta hang in there,

because that is the right thing to do.

And if you're going to change the manner of death,

you better have the physical evidence to back it up.

And I'm thinking, let's reconstruct this scene

and find out if in fact,

Mr. Schirmer's telling the truth or not.

The idea of tossing dummies down a flight of steps

was my way of doing the crime scene reconstruction

that I wanted to do back in 1999.

We went back out to the original crime scene

where Jewel Schirmer had died,

and we had a series of six dummies

that were also chalked up with chalk.

When the head or the body hits, right?

The chalk gets wiped off.

And that tells us there's an impact there.

We analyze that impact in the context

of the injuries to her head.

We look to see if it lines up at all.

And as these dummies went down fairly violent,

the head strikes and it stops.

The body keeps going.

And as that body keeps going,

you got the neck in between,

that thing's going to is gonna kink and break.

Jewel Schirmer never had a neck injury,

never had a rib fracture,

never had a spinal fracture,

never had a pelvic fracture.

We had physical evidence, physical proof.

She did not fall down that flight of steps.

You look at the rest of the evidence,

and it's obvious, it's staged.

So, I amended my report.

Coroner reissued a death certificate for Jewel Schirmer,

saying that the manner of death was a homicide.

And that kept the ball rolling in this particular case.

Once it was ruled out that Betty Schirmer's injuries

were sustained in the car accident,

we took the next steps to determine

where did these injuries occur, what location?

It made most sense to us that

that would've occurred at the parsonage

where Betty and A.B. had lived during their marriage.

Mr. Schirmer, he doesn't know that we're onto him at all.

He still thinks he got away with this crash.

I needed to go get a search warrant

to locate the actual crime scene at that point.

I wanted the element of surprise when we hit Schirmer.

(intense music)

During my investigation of Betty's crash,

I noticed that there's blood drops

in the seat that are absorbed or diluted,

as if her body was placed in it.

That told me immediately that she was bleeding prior

to getting in that car.

And there was a blood leading event somewhere

that we had to go find.

I had to go and look at where she came from.

I knew they lived in the parsonage.

So, myself and my investigative team,

we are forming a strategy

to execute a search warrant on the parsonage.

I remember when I walked in the garage area,

I could see blood visibly on the concrete

as if he missed it during cleanup.

There's still potentially blood evidence present,

and we utilize the chemical luminol to help enhance

and to help better see that blood

that we can't see with the naked eye.

You can start to see that mysterious blood appear

in the darkness.

Once I find this,

this story tells me that Betty was assaulted

somewhere outside the garage and with some type

of blunt force weapon such as a crowbar.

She's carried and brought by Mr. Schirmer

into the car seat,

and that blood supports all of that.

That was then packaged and sent to the DNA lab.

Once that was processed,

that blood did come back to Betty Schirmer.

[Announcer] Police charged Schirmer Monday

with killing his wife Betty and trying to cover up the crime

with a Reeders car accident in July of 2008.

The trial for A.B. Schirmer commenced in January of 2013.

The prosecution presented a motive.

During the trial, it came out that he was having an affair

with someone that he was counseling.

That's probably why he killed her right away,

'cause she knew about the affair.

He killed her, so, she's gone.

He didn't have to get to the divorce.

[Announcer] Today, prosecutors told the jury,

"Do not believe for a minute Betty

was killed in that crash.

Use your common sense and life experiences."

You have Dr. Wayne Ross,

who clearly is saying that these two women

have both suffered blunt force trauma to the head.

I compared the injuries to Betty Schirmer,

to those of Jewel Schirmer.

[Interviewer] And you've said they're both homicide

in your opinion?

Yes, they are.

(intense music)

The testimony lasted into the third week.

The evidence was overwhelming in our favor.

The jury deliberated for a short period of time,

and the verdict was guilty.

In March of 2013,

Reverend Schirmer was sentenced to life in prison

without parole

for Betty Schirmer's death.

My goal was to make sure he died in prison,

so he could never do this again to another woman.

And yeah, I was happy.

Ultimately, when he was convicted,

there was relief.

But even more important than that,

there was justice for the family,

friends, neighbors.

I heard about the vigilance of family members

in the death of Jewel.

They had pushed to get an autopsy done,

and look at what happened.

It took a long time, but I believe we got it right.

When Schirmer killed my sister,

he didn't have a place to bury her.

So, he asked my father if he could have a spot

on our family's plot.

He got a double tombstone,

and he had his name in a heart

and my sister's name in a heart.

And he had the hearts touching.

And

that just drove me nuts every time I saw it.

So, I even told Schirmer at the sentencing hearing

that my sister was gonna get a new tombstone,

and his name wasn't gonna be on it.

And I bought my sister her very nice,

I feel, very nice tombstone.

After he was sentenced,

I went right to the cemetery

to my sister's grave,

and I just said to Jewel, "Well, I hope I did well.

I hope you're proud of me.

I did everything I could."

Nothing I was gonna do was gonna bring her back.

But at least the truth finally came out,

and justice was done.

I believe my mom, my dad, and my sister

are in heaven together,

and Schirmer?

I don't think he's gonna make it.