He says that she threatened to commit suicide.
A lot of people didn't believe the official story.
PLEVINSKY SHAVER: It rocked the town.
DECK: I just had a feeling that something wasn't right.
FLANNERY: They were looking for somebody who
knew their way around a crime scene,
and who would know how to stage a crime scene
better than somebody who investigates crime scenes?
I'm Sheriff Gary McFadden.
I was a homicide detective for 20 years.
I've worked more than 800 homicides in my career.
But even for the most dedicated detective,
there's no one harder to stop than a killer with a badge.
[glass cracking noises]
John Walker was a police officer for
a local department.
On November 13th, 1983,
he returns to his residence to discover his wife deceased.
He calls his dispatcher and says,
"Oh, my God, Lynda is dead."
ZIRPOLI: John said she had shot herself.
The dispatcher then called the chief of police and told
him, hey, "John's wife is deceased.
We need to do something."
McFADDEN: When 911 receives a call
and know the voice is a very familiar one,
it sets off alarm bells -- that 911 operator will call
everyone in the agency, and the big red handle is pulled.
NARRATOR: Lynda Walker was 24 years old.
When I found out that she died,
it was just a total shock.
[phone ringing]
In 1983, I worked with her at a law firm.
Lynda was the nicest person that you would ever want
to meet.
She was just a kind, gentle soul.
So people just really enjoyed being around her.
SEAMANS: I was the only lawyer in the town at the time.
She worked with me for gosh, at least two years.
She was a sweet, very nice young lady and so competent.
I mean, it's not like there was
a lot of gaiety in a law office.
But what stands out to me is she was just a fun person.
Both John Walker and his wife, Lynda Walker,
were born and raised in Susquehanna County.
DECK: And this is the town of New Milford.
New Milford is a real small town.
There's, you know, there's churches and grocery stores
and pizza shops and things like that.
It's mostly houses.
You know, if there's a rumor, it spreads like wildfire.
Everybody knows about everybody's business
in New Milford.
My father was a Pennsylvania State Police trooper in
the area, and when I went to college,
I looked back on my father's career and decided that I was
interested in it.
I always felt that I had to be
the person to bring justice for the victim.
[siren wailing]
ZIRPOLI: John makes the call.
The chief of police shows up,
walks into the trailer, looks into the room.
He comes out, no one says they ever went in the room,
touched her, or moved anything.
The Pennsylvania State Police were notified
of the incident because
they worked with John, and they both knew Lynda.
McFADDEN: After arriving on the scene,
the chief made one of the best decisions in his career.
He knew it would be a conflict of interest,
so he called in the local state police.
Doing any investigation,
there's always emotions, but when it's one of your own,
there's more emotion, and emotions can always get in
the way of an investigation.
DECK: When the state police showed up on the scene,
Lynda was lying on her back in the main bedroom.
She had the covers kind of pulled up
a little bit past her waist.
She had blue jeans on, and she had her bra on.
NARRATOR: Investigators process the scene.
Lynda has a single gunshot wound to the left side
of her chest, with an exit wound in her back.
FLANNERY: A 45-caliber semiautomatic pistol
was found near her right hand.
It was well known within the community
John slept with .45 supposedly underneath his pillow.
McFADDEN: So at first glance, it looks like
Lynda used John's service weapon to shoot herself.
The question is why.
NARRATOR: Looking for answers, investigators at the scene
question John.
ZIRPOLI: Lynda and John were estranged at the time.
Lynda was living with her parents.
John was living in the marital home.
DECK: He said that early afternoon,
he called Lynda at her parents' house and wanted to
know if she could come down and talk about their marriage.
She showed up within just a few minutes.
ZIRPOLI: From what we see at the scene,
you know, she leaves her purse in the kitchen,
takes her shoes off, and goes to the bedroom.
He says that they talked for a while.
Then they got into a heated argument.
He says that she threatened to commit suicide.
DECK: John indicated that whenever they had an argument
like that and he threatened to leave,
there was talk that he wanted a divorce, that she would,
in fact, say that she was gonna harm herself.
So he said that night, she did
the same thing, and then he just left.
NARRATOR: John gives officers a timeline of
what he did after he left Lynda.
DECK: John leaves the residence and goes for a drive to clear
his head.
He stops at a few places, and then he goes to
his dispatcher's residence
and talks to her for a while,
and then he returns to his residence
to find Lynda dead.
NARRATOR: John's claim that Lynda had threatened
suicide before isn't a complete surprise
given her recent state of mind.
Lynda, when they talk with her parents,
was very self-conscious of,
no one's gonna want me if I get divorced.
No one's gonna ever want to be with me If I get divorced.
I think, you know, a lot of it is small town
and family and how you're viewed by the society.
In 1983, when this case happened, I was 17 years old.
When I was in high school,
I worked at a local restaurant, and John Walker was seeing
a girl that was my manager.
He was there talking to her every day.
I could picture them standing at
the end of the counter in that restaurant.
They were smitten over each other.
The affair was certainly common knowledge amongst
the employees at the restaurant that I worked at.
We knew that he was married to someone else, and we knew
that the girl that he was seeing
was married to someone else.
PLEVINSKY SHAVER: I did hear rumors that he was having
an affair at the time we worked together.
But, you know, that was just rumors around town that --
that that was the case.
He was -- he was seeing someone else.
I think it could have gotten back to her.
One night, she told me that they were having problems,
and, uh, maybe they'd be getting a divorce.
I know she took her marriage vows very seriously.
She was pretty upset.
ZIRPOLI: Lynda was taken from the scene to a funeral parlor.
Um, her body was embalmed, and then
the coroner was actually brought in to do the autopsy.
That was kind of a normal procedure back then.
And at that time, they ruled
it as a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
DECK: The investigators felt comfortable to call it
a suicide, because John was having
an affair, and I think it was the assumption that
Lynda knew about it.
The husband told the investigators that
his wife always talked about committing suicide.
This time, seemingly, she did.
PLEVINSKY SHAVER: It was just devastating
for the friends and family.
I mean, it's difficult to lose a loved one regularly
when they die, but when it's suicide,
it's just that much more traumatic for them.
I wondered, did I overlook something?
And should I have probed a little bit deeper
and asked a few more questions
and maybe I could have done something to prevent it.
DECK: The family didn't want to believe that it was a suicide.
ZIRPOLI: They talk about her being despondent
but never suicidal, never having suicidal ideations.
NARRATOR: The family launches their own investigation.
Lynda's father actually hired this, uh, blood spatter expert,
and he basically came and reviewed
the state police's report and the photos,
and he came out with a ruling
that said it was consistent with suicide.
The family had to resign to the fact that, okay,
we're gonna have to accept this.
So that's kind of how it ended back in 1983.
When I first got out of the State Police Academy,
I went to another neighboring county
and worked out of another station,
and as time went on, I decided I
wanted to come back to where I grew up.
So I went from a patrol unit,
uh, back to this county working as a criminal investigator.
NARRATOR: In his new role,
Trooper Deck reviews old case files.
One of them is Lynda Walker's.
DECK: There was a box of crime scene photos
to go with the report.
So I kept looking at them, and I kept reading the report.
There was blood in different places
that really seemed impossible to get there.
I just had a feeling that something wasn't right.
McFADDEN: A new set of eyes is always good in a case,
and a new set of eyes is determined
to look under every rock to make sure that this was
a suicide, or is it a suicide?
A new set of eyes will always find
something that the old set of eyes didn't see.
NARRATOR: 27 years after Lynda Walker's death,
state troopers want to reopen her case,
something her neighbors have wanted for years.
PLEVINSKY SHAVER: It rocked the town.
There's a couple local diners, and you'd walk in,
and you'd overhear the next table saying something
about Lynda.
It consumed the town for a long, long time.
WILSON: It seems that after Lynda's death,
there were a lot of people who didn't believe that
the official story of a suicide was the actual story.
PLEVINSKY SHAVER: From what I saw,
she was a very happy and stable person.
She had received another job working at a bigger
law firm, and she was moving to a bigger town.
She was very excited about that.
I never, ever thought that she would commit suicide.
NARRATOR: Trooper Deck believes the evidence doesn't add up.
DECK: When I was looking at the crime scene photos,
they didn't really make sense to me.
There was blood kind of all in different places,
and there was blood under the top bed cover.
That really seemed impossible to get there.
How does that happen if she's killed
pretty instantly?
Somebody would have had to have pulled that blanket up over
her for that blood spatter to get underneath that blanket.
McFADDEN: He's looking at the blood spatter,
and he thinks that something is not consistent
with what's told on the crime scene.
So at this point, he brings in an expert.
We all know that technology changed from 1983 to now.
And it's very important to know when
an expert is needed to be called in.
But you don't need to be
a fisherman to know when things smell fishy.
ZIRPOLI: In 1983, that was the beginning of blood spatter.
They were just starting that science.
When you think about it from 1983 to 2010,
it took all those years to develop it and develop it into
a science that it is today.
It's just like DNA -- DNA back in 1983,
it's not the same as it is now.
DECK: We met with a blood spatter expert,
and he immediately showed us a point that
he felt was suspicious.
There was kind of a pooling of blood on -- in her arm.
It looks like her arm was against her body so that
the blood ran off of her torso
and into, like, the crook of her arm.
And then, after she had passed away
and her arm was moved out and the gun was placed there,
it was almost like a light bulb went off, and it was like,
I can see it now, I understand really what happened
that night.
NARRATOR: The expert determines that Lynda's death
looks more like homicide than suicide.
McFADDEN: That is a very critical point.
But you have to know that it's gonna take
more than one expert's opinion to push the case.
Now you have to show the evidence to make you
determine that this case will be investigated as a homicide.
ZIRPOLI: How Lynda Walker was dressed was definitely off.
She's laying in bed with just her bra on
and nothing else other than her jeans.
Anyone who knows Lynda, knows her family, knew her mother,
knew that she was a modest person and a religious person.
McFADDEN: So as a detective, you need to take your time
and question every photo -- a woman taking off her top,
you ask yourself, why would you take
off your top if you're gonna kill yourself?
That doesn't make sense.
ZIRPOLI: Also, you can see an indentation in between
Lynda's legs like
something or someone was there on top of that -- that area.
FLANNERY: It appeared as if somebody was on top,
discharged the weapon into her, and then pulled the blanket
up afterwards.
Really made sense that it was a staged scene.
And at that point, I just, I knew it was a homicide.
McFADDEN: But now, to reopen the case,
the detectives are faced with an uphill battle.
DECK: Back in 1983, the original autopsy was completed by
a medical doctor, and we felt it was very important to have,
you know, a trained forensic pathologist conduct
the autopsy.
Forensic pathology requires a different level of study from
a medical standpoint and a ton of experience, too.
ZIRPOLI: At the point Greg reopened all of this,
he wanted her wound and her wound track looked at again.
DECK: I don't really even think they used
directional rods at the time of her death.
McFADDEN: Directional rods are very important to determine
the pathway from the gun through the body to where
the bullet end up.
Using these rods will also place where
the gun was when it was fired.
NARRATOR: The only way to find out what happened is
to ask a court for permission to exhume Lynda's body.
It's extremely unusual, and it's a big deal and --
and courts don't order exhumations of bodies
every day.
DECK: I was a criminal investigator for 22 of my 25 years
with the state police, and I've only seen it happen three times.
McFADDEN: To exhume a body,
you need to prove to a court that only having
the body present would produce the evidence that they are
actually looking for.
It is rare to exhume a body, but they need her
to bring them the answers.
NARRATOR: 27 years after Lynda Walker's death,
detectives succeed in getting her case reopened
and her body exhumed.
DECK: We got a court order signed by a judge.
The cemetery that Lynda was buried in
is kind of in a remote place,
and it was interesting to me that word
spread very quickly that we had exhumed her body.
PLEVINSKY SHAVER: I actually had a call from
a friend saying that her body
was being exhumed, and I was just like,
it's about darn time that they're doing something to
vindicate her life.
DECK: We took her to the Lehigh Valley Medical Center,
where an autopsy was performed by a forensic pathologist.
His conclusion was the injury itself,
it's not a contact gunshot wound.
That means it's not hard up against her chest.
It's still off her chest a little bit.
The gun sits to her right side.
So she would have to fire it with her right hand into
her chest.
DECK: When we learn what direction the wound channel was,
if Lynda used her right hand, it really didn't make sense
that she would bend her wrist
in such a way to shoot herself like that -- she would have had
to bend her wrist way over.
ZIRPOLI: The forensic pathologist says,
once you turn your wrist that far, you lose the tensile
strength in your fingers to pull the trigger.
There's no way that she's able
to make that angle of that gunshot,
so he ruled this as a homicide.
PLEVINSKY SHAVER: Why did it take so long for these answers to come out?
It was horrible,
and you think of the what her family had gone through at
the time, it could have saved them
so many years of grief and not knowing what truly happened.
To me, that was a great injustice to the family,
because they were kind of
forced to believe something that their daughter didn't do.
And you know, that was important to finally
be able to find the truth for them.
ZIRPOLI: We knew it was a homicide.
So now our focus was who committed this homicide?
Staging the scene
takes someone with knowledge of how to stage the scene
and what detective or investigators look for.
Staging the crime scene will always give you
home field advantage,
especially when you know the investigators who are
investigating the crime.
NARRATOR: Detectives turned their attention to
the last person they know saw Lynda alive --
her husband, John Walker.
ZIRPOLI: John Walker was there.
So he was that initial person we had to bring in, sit down,
talk with, and see if he remembered
anything else or what he does
remember from the initial incident.
DECK: John was actually the sergeant
of a local police department.
I worked with him before.
He was always, like, very calm and poised.
John has a very standoffish demeanor,
very authoritarian, serious.
PLEVINSKY SHAVER: He did have that little air of, you know,
arrogance about him.
I didn't have close, close dealings with him,
but he just seemed like he was better than everybody else.
DECK: I think he could have been taken as
arrogant just because he was very calm and collected.
He was actually very professional as I knew him.
The police officers that worked with him,
really respected him,
even the older members of the department.
John knew that I worked at that station, and my job
was to investigate crimes that happened in this county.
And I figured that he probably really wouldn't talk to me.
So I wanted to, um, see if maybe two other troopers
that he didn't know called him,
if he'd come in and talk to them.
ZIRPOLI: I was chosen to do the interview with
another trooper.
We had never met John Walker.
We had never worked with John Walker.
Greg Deck brought us in, because we could bring
no biases with us.
I have no dog in the fight.
I'm here to find out the truth, and that is it.
NARRATOR: Investigators make arrangements for John
to come in for questioning.
DECK: We wanted him not to be working,
not to be in uniform, when he came into the station.
ZIRPOLI: That's a power thing -- when he comes in,
he's gonna feel like he has that level of authority
when, in turn, I own that level of authority.
So it'll take me an hour to fight
in that interview room to get that power back.
DECK: He came in, the troopers kind of met him at the door
and took him back to an interview room,
and I watched that take place from another room.
ZIRPOLI: We kind of talked to him a little bit about,
you know, the initial investigation and told him
that we reassessed everything.
We really think that there's something more to
the case and said, "You can help me.
"I'm trying to get information from you
of what had happened initially at the scene."
He seemed, like, kind of shocked, taken aback,
but he seemed like he wanted to be cooperative.
McFADDEN: This is the critical part when you're investigating the case
when you actually have the suspect in the room
with you.
This is the delicate dance that you have, like
the dance at the prom with the beautiful girl.
You don't want to spoil the night.
So you have to be careful of
giving too much or giving too little.
DECK: They had a page out of the report
that the initial trooper did with his statement on it,
and they handed it to John, and they said, "Well,
"could you take a couple of minutes and read what you told
the trooper back in 1983?"
ZIRPOLI: I wanted him to verify to me that yes,
those statements were true and correct to the best of
his knowledge.
DECK: I handed him the paper, and I just remember the paper
was shaking, and if he had nothing to hide,
I don't feel that he would have been as nervous
as he was that night.
He appeared to be reading the statement.
He signed it, and then they said, "All right, could,
"you know, could we talk about,
"you know, your recollection of what took place there
that night?"
And he kind of gave a different version of some things.
There's events that occur in your life, death of loved ones,
birth of children, things like that,
that you remember every minute of that whole day, and here is
your wife is killed, and you don't remember.
And what's more interesting about it,
I let him read what he told them back in 1983,
and he gave me something completely different from that.
McFADDEN: In our line of work,
we bring people back in years after to read their statement,
to see if there are any inconsistencies from the very
first time until now.
And if there is, that will be a problem.
The truth will always be told the same way.
A lie will always have inconsistencies.
All you're doing is setting him up.
NARRATOR: Investigators continue to press John.
DECK: John was saying, "I don't know what you guys, you know,
"want to hear from me now.
I don't know what else to tell you."
And they said to him, "Well, did you kill your wife?"
ZIRPOLI: It's my job to ask him that question.
You know, he knows that, he was a law enforcement officer,
and he knew when he came in that room with me,
that question was coming eventually.
At that point, he got angry, and he said,
"I'm not talking to you guys anymore."
And they said to him again, "Well, did you kill your wife?"
ZIRPOLI: He actually screams at me,
"My answer is no."
And then gets in his truck and leaves.
McFADDEN: He knew that he didn't have an answer.
So the best thing for him to do at
that moment is just walk out of the room.
For the investigators,
that's a base hit, two men on,
but now we have to bring it home.
DECK: When I reopened the investigation,
the chief at the time, he was
the chief after my father left the department.
And I knew him since I was a young kid.
I saw him sitting out by his garage one night,
and I saw my opportunity to kind of ask about John Walker.
So I said, "Hey Charlie, do you ever see John Walker?
He works for the police in Montrose."
And I'll never forget the look on his face.
He kind of sat up and said, "That guy killed his wife,
you know." And I said, "Really?"
And he said, "Yeah, you need to
go back to the station and solve it."
McFADDEN: It's very difficult opening a case this old.
Now you have to find your witnesses if they are alive,
and then you're gonna have to go back
and talk about their statements to see
if they are consistent.
But while you're digging up clues,
oftentimes, you find that little nugget that nobody else
knows about.
NARRATOR: In this case, investigators find
an overlooked clue in John Walker's alibi.
ZIRPOLI: John says he worked
the previous night in the police department.
He got off that morning.
He says he went to a remote area,
fired a couple of rounds of ammunition from the gun that
later killed his wife.
The troopers from back in 1983 asked John to actually take 'em
back to the range and show them
where he was standing when he was
shooting this gun that morning.
And they couldn't find any 45-caliber rounds.
John tells the detective, after working a long night,
that he wants to go to the range and practice.
That absolutely makes no sense.
When you get off, you want to go home and relax.
Nobody goes to the range to fire off a few shots.
NARRATOR: Investigators next look at John's version
of events before he discovered Lynda's body.
DECK: He's saying that, you know, he has an argument
with his wife, and she's threatening suicide,
and he leaves.
It's his own wife.
I didn't really believe that.
John says that after he left the trailer that night,
he stopped at his police station to use the bathroom,
and I believe that he washed his hands.
NARRATOR: John later tested negative for gunshot residue.
That would be somebody who has knowledge of a crime scene,
because if you wash your hands
to remove gunshot residue at the house,
we will probably find some of that gunshot residue
or some other evidence.
NARRATOR: At the time, John told police
he then drove to a restaurant in town.
DECK: He said he had a Coke that night.
When he left the restaurant, he went
a short distance away to his dispatcher.
She was kind of like a mother figure
to some of the younger police officers.
ZIRPOLI: He's there for about 20 minutes.
He explains to her that he had
left Lynda, and Lynda is very upset.
She says to John Walker, "You better
go home and check on your wife."
DECK: And then he returns to his residence
to allegedly find Lynda dead.
The troopers back then talked to the people at
the restaurant.
There was some people that were working there
that night that did indicate that he was there.
FLANNERY: And also, in interviewing the dispatcher,
the state police were able to confirm that he did, in fact,
stop and speak with her for roughly about 20 minutes.
By the police being able to verify.
at least that portion gives him some degree of credibility.
NARRATOR: The question investigators now look at
is when Lynda died.
Was it before John left the trailer or after?
We're trying to get from the neighbors
a timeline of if they heard a shot
and when did they hear that gunshot?
DECK: There was a neighbor who was hauling scrap up
behind a dump that was right up behind their trailer.
And he actually looked at his watch when he heard
a single gunshot that night, and it was 10 minutes
after five.
And he said it came from the direction
right down the valley where the trailer was.
John says that Lynda was still
alive when he left the residence.
But two of the neighbors were driving by that evening,
and they saw two vehicles at the residence.
They knew that one was John's,
and they knew that one was Lynda's.
When they got to the residence,
they heard a gunshot in the direction of
John and Lynda's trailer.
NARRATOR: If John was still in the house
when the neighbors passed by
but gone by the time they got home and heard the shot,
how long would it have taken them to make that trip?
DECK: I actually did the time
and distance study myself with a stopwatch.
He had a really small window
if you wanted to believe his story, that he wasn't in
the house.
The distance between the trailer and here,
you can tell it's only like a minute.
I don't think that
it was really possible for him to not be there.
NARRATOR: Investigators also question John's
original statement at the scene.
ZIRPOLI: John Walker says, "I never went into the room."
John Walker says, "I stand at the doorway,"
which is alarming to me.
John is telling the detectives he never touched her,
he never held her -- that is an absolute lie.
A husband seeing his wife
deceased or shot or injured would rush to her aid,
even if you were gettin' a divorce.
You don't even go to her to
check and make sure she's all right.
You just go right to the assumption that
she's deceased, she shot herself.
DECK: When he called his dispatcher that night,
he made the statement that she shot herself.
And from the crime scene photos, looking from
the doorway into the bedroom,
you really couldn't see the gun.
So I don't know how he saw it
if he didn't know that it was there.
FLANNERY: What investigators were looking for was somebody
who knew their way around a crime scene.
Who would know how to stage a crime scene
better than somebody who investigates crime scenes
every day?
We tried to talk to every police officer
that John worked with back in 1983,
and one of them remembered that John took
a course on -- on suicide
and what a police officer might look for,
uh, in a suicide investigation.
He used the knowledge that he gained
in that training to help stage the scene.
NARRATOR: To confirm their theory that the scene was staged,
Greg Deck's team wants to look at the physical evidence,
but it's gone.
ZIRPOLI: When it was closed in 1983,
John Walker came and took every piece of physical evidence
that Pennsylvania State Police had.
DECK: Bloody clothing and bloody sheets and pillows.
He actually took all that stuff with him.
And, in my experience, I don't --
I've never seen anybody do that before.
McFADDEN: Usually in suicides, when we ask a family member,
"Do you want the bloody sheets?
"Do you want the bloody clothes?
Do you want anything from the crime scene?"
It is always, "Absolutely not."
It is very unusual for someone to want the evidence,
the clothing, or the bed linen from a suicide
unless you have another motive.
NARRATOR: And then a surprise source comes forward.
John's second wife.
DECK: After Lynda's death, John married
his girlfriend, who was my manager,
and then years later, they ended up getting a divorce.
She called me and said, um, "I need to talk to you."
She told us that she remembers that after John signed
for the evidence that he took it and burned it.
That was very suspicious to us.
The second part that was really important was
she told us that the night that Lynda
was killed, before he went to the dispatcher's house,
he actually met with the girlfriend behind some
businesses in this town, and he told her
that he thought that Lynda had killed herself.
John told her prior to going home that his wife was dead.
The timeline doesn't fit.
Now we got another man on base.
That solidified in my mind that this is a homicide.
When I saw him coming into the restaurant,
I guess I never thought that he could kill somebody,
but it was from seeing what took place
in their relationship back so many years ago
that really kept me focused
on finding out the truth.
McFADDEN: The detectives are at this critical point of
bringing a officer in who is an active officer,
and you have to think, if he gets tipped off in advance,
will he run?
NARRATOR: Authorities are ready to bring their case
against John Walker to the grand jury.
FLANNERY: You have a review by
the forensic pathologist saying it's a murder.
You have the physical evidence not matching up
to what Walker told you, the blood spatter
is inconsistent with what was believed
and what was presented back in 1983.
Instead of a wide open investigation
into a suspicious death,
now, the weight of the evidence
is directed clearly towards John Walker.
The grand jury felt that it was
warranted to bring murder charges against John Walker.
And at that point, we acted pretty quickly.
I couldn't go to a local magistrate, because if I did,
then he would find out about it, because he was
a police officer in the county.
McFADDEN: Being a cop, you always have friends in
the courthouse and the magistrate's office.
So you have to be careful of when these papers are
produced for an arrest warrant,
because someone may tip him off.
DECK: I decided to see if I could meet with the county
judge, who also had the ability to issue an arrest warrant.
So I called the court administrator, and it was
somebody I worked with, I knew.
I said, "I need to meet with the judge,
but I can't have anybody know that I'm in the courthouse,"
and she kind of, I mean, she kind of chuckled.
NARRATOR: The woman tells Deck to climb up the back stairs.
She let me in, and I went in to see the judge with my, uh,
criminal complaint and affidavit.
I think he was kind of suspicious of why I was there.
And I said, "Your honor, we would like to
get an arrest warrant for John Walker for murder."
He took the papers from me,
and he sat and read every single word.
He sealed it, signed it, and said, "Here's your warrant."
And I left the courthouse the same way that I entered.
So I was pretty sure that nobody
knew I had an arrest warrant for John Walker.
FLANNERY: It was important to establish surveillance
on John to develop a location
or a place where he could be arrested where it
would present the least amount of --
of risk to the community.
DECK: He was a police officer, and we felt that he had already
killed one person, and we didn't want anybody else to
get hurt, we didn't want anybody to know that
we had this warrant for him, and especially him.
A police officer in Susquehanna County was
arrested today
and charged with killing his wife 29 years ago.
WOMAN: Today, 52-year-old John Walker was arrested
and charged with the murder of his wife
back in 1983.
DECK: There was people in his department that, you know,
they would tell me they didn't think he did it, but they,
you know, they were younger people, and they thought he was
such a good person that he couldn't have done it.
And, you know, they obviously didn't
know what I knew about the investigation.
When I first heard that John Walker got arrested,
it was just a sigh of relief.
I was really happy, if you can be happy
in this situation, that --
that he was gonna get what he deserved.
I think the community kind of had a sense of --
finally, and, you know, maybe this will
give her family a little bit of closure.
SEAMANS: Lynda was a very nice person.
You know, she could have gone on with her life.
It was cut short -- it was cut short just not for Lynda,
but cut short for -- especially for her mom,
and, uh, all of her friends and the community as a whole.
I wanted to look at him right in his eye and say,
"Why did you do it? Why did you do it?"
ZIRPOLI: Why did John Walker kill his wife?
Why not just be able to walk away and get a divorce
from her?
DECK: I was certain that he killed Lynda so that he could
be with the girl that he was seeing at the time.
ZIRPOLI: In 1980s, extramarital affairs was not acceptable,
especially here in this faith-driven small community.
And I think from John's standpoint
as being a young law enforcement officer,
he thought that was gonna be a tarnish on his career
and a stain on him that he was divorced.
So I think those are those motivating
factors for why he committed this crime.
After 30 years,
a cold case in Susquehanna County is now closed.
Former Montrose police officer,
John Walker, entered a plea to the death
of his estranged wife back in 1983.
NARRATOR: John Walker pleads no contest,
meaning he would not fight the murder charge.
MAN: He was immediately sentenced
to 2 to 4 years in prison.
Four years in jail for committing murder?
It's kind of...kind of a slap in the face that why isn't --
you know, she doesn't have the rest of her life to
live out -- why should he?
McFADDEN: We know everyone will be angry with the amount of
time that someone may serve after doing
this horrific crime.
But you have to understand time hurts us also.
Your witnesses are deceased, crime scene
is not there, evidence is destroyed.
So you have to get what you can get.
FLANNERY: Would I have liked to have tried it
and seen if I could obtain a first-degree murder
conviction? Absolutely.
But, uh, given the circumstances,
I think what transpired was appropriate.
His sentence is something I still think about.
I felt that John Walker should have been
in prison for the rest of his life.
But, you know, I was very happy that
we could bring this to light for her mom.
Her mom was a good person who
lost her daughter, and I felt bad for her.
So that meant something to me, that I could at least help
the family out a little bit
and kind of give them some answers for a lot of questions
that they had for a lot of years.
WOMAN: The victim's mother, Norma, says this case
has taken its toll on her.
It's difficult. You have your ups and downs,
you think things are gonna go the way you want them to,
and the next thing you know, they're not.
The only thing is I can say after 30 years,
at least he has served something.
DECK: In the end, the truth came out.
He'll never be a police officer again, and, you know,
he'll never be able to carry a firearm again.
And those things are important.
McFADDEN: When an officer is arrested for any crime,
it erodes the trust of our community.
How dare he continue to wear
the badge, continue to pretend
to serve and protect our communities?
It's a disgrace to the uniform.
It's a disgrace to our profession.
For 29 years,
this officer wore that badge, for 29 years,
he pretended to uphold the law, for 29 years,
he knew that he took someone's life,
and that life was his wife.
ZIRPOLI: You don't wanna believe another cop killed his wife.
It's a brotherhood -- you don't want to think
one of our own did this to their wife.
I gotta give Greg Deck the applause on this one,
because he really was that driving force.
When he dove into it,
and he says, I really want to give this 110 percent,
we all gave it 110 percent with him
just to get to that successful conclusion.
DECK: It didn't matter really if he was a police officer
or someone else.
I was gonna do whatever I could for the victim
and bring her justice.
He was a police officer that had murdered someone.
You know, as a state trooper,
I felt it was my duty to seek truth
and seek justice, and that's what we did.
We have unsolved deaths all the time in Jacksonville.
He knew at that point that he was a goner.
People do crazy things for $50,000.
They bring new meaning to the old phrase "Cops and Robbers.