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Jerry Pacek was sometimes saddened, but never consumed by bitterness, for the 10 years he wrongfully spent in a state prison.

As a 13-year-old, he unintentionally got wrapped up in one of the Valley's most mysterious murders, one that is still unsolved today. If he had just taken a different route home from his girlfriend's house in Tarentum, he might not have stumbled into a murder scene in Brackenridge on Nov. 17, 1958.

Perhaps then he could have avoided the screaming headlines, the judgmental eyes of the community, the decade in jail and the lifelong shadow cast by his designation as convict.

Pacek died just before Thanksgiving at age 59 due to an aggressive stomach cancer. His wife Peggy saw fit to bury him with the 1991 document signed by Governor Bob Casey that officially pardoned him of the crime.

"I never had justice. Ten years were taken out of my life for something I never did," Pacek said in a May 30, 1999 Valley News Dispatch article. "He (the killer) should be made to pay for what he did to her and me."

In the same article, he said he wasn't happy with the criminal justice system.

"I'm not happy with the way it was then and is now. There have to be safeguards to keep this from happening again."

In interviews, Pacek said the system not only shortchanged him, but also the family of the murder victim, Lillian Stevick of Brackenridge. She also was raped.

A hero emerges

But though the justice system failed them, a hero later emerged.

Jim Fisher, a former FBI agent, called Pacek out of the blue in 1990 and said, "You don't know me, but I think I can prove you didn't kill Mrs. Stevick and I'd like to try and get you a pardon."

Allegheny County District Attorney Bob Colville reopened the case in 1990 after Fisher, also an Edinboro University criminal justice professor, uncovered irregularities and new information on the case. They were:

* Investigators found scrapings of skin under the woman's fingernails, indicating she had scratched her attacker. But Pacek showed no sign of being scratched.

* Stevick's murder was a bloody scene which required close body contact between the victim and the killer. But crime lab experts found no trace of the victim's blood, hair or textile fibers on Pacek.

* Three trial witnesses testified that just before the crime they had seen a suspicious-looking man loitering in the area. The description the witnesses gave fit the description of the man Pacek originally said he saw leap from the shadows.

* Police at the time thought Stevick was attacked at 9:40 p.m. Three witnesses testified Pacek was at their house watching TV from 7 to 11 that night.

* As a 13-year-old, Pacek only confessed to the crime after 17 hours of police questioning without a lawyer or parents present. He later told people he was worn down and just told police what he thought they wanted to hear. He thought they would continue investigating and prove someone else was the killer.

But once police got the confession, they stopped investigating, Fisher said.

"If you know anything about the history of law enforcement, cops were stupid and brutal in the '50s," Fisher said. "Today, law enforcement is better, they're better educated, better trained."

At Pacek's 1991 hearing before the state pardons board, one pardons board member apologized to Pacek and said he'd never seen "a more atrocious miscarriage of justice."

Pacek's plight and the reopened case attracted national attention. During nearly two years with two top detectives on the case full-time, police developed and pursued two suspects.

One suspect died in the mid-1990s, but the other may still be alive, said Jerry Fielder, the district attorney's lead investigator on the reopened case.

Police also found what they believed was the actual murder weapon. In 1991 in a Brackenridge basement, police found a blunt metal object that lab tests confirmed had traces of blood and human tissue on it, Fisher said.

Police were planning to exhume the body of the murder victim if there was enough DNA on the weapon, Fielder said.

But there wasn't.

Just as memories have faded, time had scattered the evidence. Without enough evidence, no charges were brought against anyone.

Fielder, Fisher and all Pacek's relatives believe Jerry Pacek was wrongfully jailed.

"There was no question that the kid didn't do it," Fielder said.

But they all believe the only way this open homicide case will be closed is if the real killer confesses on his deathbed.

"We didn't stop the investigation, but we picked up additional investigations and it just went into the background," said Fielder, who retired in February. "Unless somebody gives someone a dying declaration, I don't think we'll ever find out.

"When I get into the next world, that's the first question I'm going to ask: Who killed that woman?"

Pacek's family calls Fisher a guardian angel for coming into his life and all but exonerating him. But Fisher said he's the lucky one to have met Pacek.

"If my life ever hits a rough patch of road, I'll think of Jerry," Fisher said. "Jerry was, as a boy, and as a man -- in the wake of terrible tragedies -- a happy-go-lucky guy. But as bad as his life was, it didn't knock that happy-go-lucky out of him, and it would have anyone else."

System breakdown

Fisher said everything in the entire justice chain broke down for Pacek.

The police didn't consider other evidence pointing away from Pacek after they got their confession. Prosecutors brought an ax to trial to show the jury even though it wasn't used in the murder. The court-appointed defense attorney filed an appeal to the conviction but withdrew it after Allegheny County was late paying him for his services. The jury was swayed by an overzealous prosecution. No one ever heard about the two lie detector tests Jerry passed.

The media failed to dig for the truth and expose it. And the community was quick to judge.

"They let him down because he came from a poor family without community influence," Fisher said.

Hundreds of people -- some estimates say 1,500 people -- lined Morgan Street to gawk at Jerry as police forced the boy to re-enact the murder in a humiliating public spectacle.

"If I tried that in today's court, I'd be thrown out the front door," District Attorney Colville said in a 1991 broadcast on "Inside Edition," a television newsmagazine program.

Colville, now an Allegheny County judge, did not return a phone call for comment for this story.

Fisher attended Pacek's funeral last week.

"I don't feel good about Jerry being gone," Fisher said. "Somehow his life ended -- it's like a good book that ends too abruptly. There should have been a better ending for Jerry Pacek."

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