John Wesley Wable was convicted in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, of the murder of Harry Franklin Pitts, who died on July 28, 1953. Three days earlier, on July 25, 1953, Lester B. Woodward had died in the same county. On July 31, 1953, a third man was seriously hurt in Ohio and survived. Wable was indicted and tried for the death of Pitts alone. The jury found him guilty of murder of the first degree and fixed the penalty at death. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed the judgment and sentence on May 23, 1955, and he was executed on September 26, 1955.
The court treated the three events as parts of one plan. Only one of them produced a conviction.
Wable came from Ohiopyle, in the southwestern Pennsylvania hills. He was 25 years old in 1955, came from a family well respected in the community, and was a high school graduate. He had served in the Army, been court-martialed and received a dishonorable discharge. Afterward he worked for a time in Cleveland, Ohio, and lost that work a short time before the events of July 1953. He was 26 at the time of his trial.
His childhood, family and earlier life are not on record.
On July 25, 1953, Lester B. Woodward died in Westmoreland County. Three days later, on July 28, Harry Franklin Pitts died in the same county, in similar circumstances. The age, home and family of either man are not on record.
One account places the first death near Donegal, in Westmoreland County, and ties the conviction to it; the indictment and the trial were for the murder of Pitts, the second of the two deaths.
On July 31, 1953, a man was seriously hurt in Ohio. He survived and identified Wable, and the Supreme Court relied on that identification in finding a link among all three events.
Wable was arrested on October 12, 1953, in New Mexico. The arrest in New Mexico was for a separate matter, and it was admitted at trial only to explain how he was identified and found. He waived extradition. A Pennsylvania state trooper, an assistant district attorney and a Westmoreland County detective brought him back to the Westmoreland County jail.
On the journey east he wrote out a statement. In it he admitted being present during the events, but said another man had committed them. That man was never located.
The trial was held in Westmoreland County. A jury convicted Wable on March 13, 1954. The verdict, in the court's words: the jury "returned a verdict of guilty of murder of the first degree and fixed the penalty at death." The death sentence was pronounced in December 1954.
The Commonwealth was represented by the District Attorney, L. Alexander Sculco, and two assistant district attorneys, Joseph M. Loughran and John K. Best. Wable's lawyers were A. C. Scales, Richard B. McCormick and B. Patrick Costello.
The prosecution put in evidence the Woodward death and the Ohio injury, arguing that all three events formed a single scheme. The defense relied on an alibi. A defense witness said he had seen Wable on July 28; at first he could not fix the date, and after a recess he tied it to a newspaper article. Doctors for both the Commonwealth and the defense examined Wable, but his sanity was not contested at trial.
Wable appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The case was argued on April 18, 1955, and decided on May 23, 1955, in an opinion by Chief Justice Horace Stern, joined by Justices Stearne, Jones, Bell, Chidsey, Musmanno and Arnold. The court dealt with four of the grounds he raised.
The main ground was the admission of evidence about the Woodward death and the Ohio injury. The court held that it was properly admitted. It found the events close in time and place, his presence admitted, a similar motive and strikingly similar details. It wrote that the case presented "a clearer example of crimes committed in the course of a common scheme, plan, or design" than it would be "difficult to conceive."
The second ground concerned a defense expert's access to physical evidence. The court found no merit in it: the expert had examined the exhibits at counsel table, and the defense never called him. The third concerned the Commonwealth's psychiatric report, which had not been disclosed during the trial. The court called the point of no real importance, since sanity was never raised, and said it had grave doubt that a defendant has a right before trial to the prosecution's evidence. The fourth concerned a remark by the prosecutor in closing about the alibi witness; the court held it was not prejudicial, since it stated a fact and drew no objection at trial.
The opinion closes with the finding that the jury was "well justified" in concluding that Wable "was the person who committed these outrageous, deliberate and brutal crimes," and that the trial was "fair, impartial, and conducted by the court with painstaking and meticulous regard for all of defendant's legal rights." The final words are "Judgment and sentence affirmed."
Further appeals continued into 1955 and were rejected. Any application for clemency is not on record.
On September 26, 1955, Wable was taken from the Westmoreland County jail to Rockview State Penitentiary, near Bellefonte, and executed there.
Wable was convicted of one murder. The death of Lester B. Woodward was tried only as evidence in the Pitts case; an indictment for it is not on record. The Ohio injury led to no Pennsylvania charge. The court described the three events as a common scheme, but only the Pitts verdict was tested by a jury.
July 25, 1953: Lester B. Woodward dies in Westmoreland County.
July 28, 1953: Harry Franklin Pitts dies in Westmoreland County.
July 31, 1953: a man is seriously hurt in Ohio and survives.
October 12, 1953: Wable is arrested in New Mexico and later returned to the Westmoreland County jail.
March 13, 1954: convicted in Westmoreland County; the jury fixes the penalty at death.
December 1954: death sentence pronounced.
April 18, 1955: appeal argued before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
May 23, 1955: judgment and sentence affirmed.
September 26, 1955: Wable is executed at Rockview.