NORWICH _ Attorneys are scheduled to make closing arguments today before jurors begin deliberating at Peter Wlasiuk's murder retrial in Chenango County Court.
Wlasiuk, 39, is accused of smothering his wife, Patricia, at their home on New Virginia Road in Oxford, then staging an accident at Guilford Lake to make her death seem like a drowning.
Convicted of second-degree murder in 2002, he has been in jail or prison since April 8, 2002, five days after his wife's body and their white GMC pickup truck were pulled from the lake. In 2006, his conviction was overturned by appellate judges who found numerous errors in the trial and ordered a new one.
Broome County Judge Martin Smith was assigned to preside at the retrial and noted Wednesday afternoon that this is a circumstantial case with no eyewitnesses.
During the four-week trial, 67 witnesses have testified. Prosecution witnesses have said they found burdocks (prickly flowering plants) in the victim's hair, as well as the victim's hair in burdocks at the couple's yard. Two forensic pathologists, Dr. James Terzian and Dr. Michael Baden, have said that based upon her injuries _ abrasions, contusions and a broken sternum _ they believe she died from being smothered.
On Wednesday morning, Dr. Michael Sikirica, Rensselaer County medical examiner, said that while he respects both colleagues, he believes Patty Wlasiuk drowned in the lake.
With a textbook slide of lung tissue from a drowning victim projected onto a screen for jurors to view, Sikirica said Patty Wlasiuk's lung tissue looked like that image, ``very consistent with drowning.''
She also sustained temporal bone hemorrhaging, a weak indicator of drowning, he said. Asked by Wlasiuk's attorney, Randel Scharf of Cooperstown, whether temporal bone hemorrhaging is a sign of
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smothering, Sikirica said ``no.''
With Karen Lyon's law class from Cooperstown Central School watching, the medical examiner said he was contacted about this case in 2003 by Joyce Worden of Guilford, a friend of the defendant. For an initial fee of $200, paid by the defendant's father, Thomas Wlasiuk of Oxford, he said he has spent ``between 40 and 80 hours'' on the case and will not bill the family any more for his services.
Sikirica said he has testified ``at least 150 times'' in court, almost always for the prosecution. This trial marks the first time he has testified for a defendant in a homicide case.
Under cross-examination by Chenango County District Attorney Joseph McBride, Sikirica acknowledged that the prosecution's murder theory is possible. Sikirica agreed with McBride that medical evidence has to be viewed together with other evidence, including what McBride deemed ``a history of domestic disturbance.''
However, at the end of his testimony, when asked whether he doubted Patty Wlasiuk drowned, he said, ``No.''
Other witnesses speak
Also testifying for the defense Wednesday was David Daniels, transportation director for Norwich City Schools and a Guilford emergency medical technician and firefighter. Prosecution witnesses, from an EMT to an insurance agent to a banker, have said Peter Wlasiuk accepted his wife's death with little overt feeling.
Daniels, who was standing outside a room at The Hospital in Sidney when Wlasiuk was informed his wife had died, testified, ``He was obviously shaken, kind of distraught. Everyone deals with that sort of situation different.''
After the defense rested, McBride called diver Brett Wightman to testify. Wightman cleared up a small mystery in this trial: how a search light ended up on the bumper of the Wlasiuks' truck at the bottom of Guilford Lake. He put it there when he was helping to retrieve the truck, he told McBride.
Central to the case against Wlasiuk are the burdocks found in Patty's hair, on her clothes, and on a pair of boots identified as Peter Wlasiuk's. Several prosecution witnesses, including Julian Shepherd, an associate biology professor at Binghamton University, have said they found no burdocks near the accident scene at Guilford Lake in April 2002.
By comparison, there were many of the sticky plants at the Wlasiuk's property, photographs have shown.
But defense witnesses, including private investigator David Beers, have said they found what appear to be burdocks growing by the lake this year.
McBride called Shepherd back to the stand, the last witness of the trial, to examine photographs and samples of plants found by defense witnesses.
Shepherd said that some were burdocks, some were not. He concluded the trial's testimony while looking at a somewhat blurry photograph taken this year of a plant on the lake shore, near the crash site.
Asked by Scharf if the photo displayed burdocks, he answered, ``I can't be sure.''
After jurors left the room, Scharf asked for charges to be dismissed before the case goes to the eight-woman, four-man jury today.
``Motion denied,'' said Smith, then discussed with the attorneys the instructions he'll deliver to jurors today before they begin to deliberate.
