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Father Is Questioned In 3 Deaths

Daughters had testified of sex abuse

The Patriot News

Friday December 27, 2002

By Theodore Decker

Of The Patriot News

A man facing charges that he had molested his two daughters was questioned and then released by police yesterday in the shooting deaths of the sisters and their mother in their Middle town home.

Ernest Wholaver, 42, formerly of the 800 block of North Union Street, Middletown, does not face any charges in the deaths of his wife, Jean Wholaver, and his daughters. Victoria and Elizabeth Wholaver.

Authorities said they had no reason to hold Wholaver, who ended the interview with investigators after his attorney, Spero Lappas, reached him at the Ebensburg state police brracks by phone. By that point, police had talked to him for about two hours.

Lappas already had been representing Wholaver on charges that he sexually molested his daughters for years, a case that was due to go to trial next month. Police tracked Wholaver to Cambria County through relatives.

Elizabeth Wholaver testified that her father began assaulting her when she was In about the fifth grade.

Middletown Police Chief Keith Reismiller said three investigators are in Cambria County, where they will check leads and “run down whatever he did tell them,”

Reismiller would not elaborate on what Wholaver told authorities before ending the interview.

Prosecutors have hesitated to call Wholaver a suspect in the homicides, but court papers filed in the molestation case indicate both daughters were frightened of him.

“Both are very fearful of their father and indicated that he is going to get them for telling,” Middletown Police Sgt. Richard Hiester Jr. wrote in arrest papers filed in July against Ernest Wholaver,

Jean Wholaver and her two daughters were found dead in the home by Middletown police around 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, after relatives in the Johnstown area reported that they had not shown up there as expected.

The daughters were found upstairs and Jean Wholaver was downstairs. All had been shot once in the head at close range with a small-caliber weapon, Dauphin County Coroner Graham Hetrick said. He said the scene was gruesome but methodical.

“The one intent of the person was to kill every adult in that house,” Hetrick said.

He said the victims likely were killed Tuesday morning. No witnesses have come forward to report anything unusual at the home around that time, Dauphin County District Attorney Edward M. Marsico Jr. said.

Police also found the 9-month-old daughter of Victoria Wholaver upstairs near her mother’s body. The child was not injured.

Marsico said authorities are combing through evidence recovered in the home, including ballistics evidence. He would not say how the killer got in the home.

“We’re doing everything we can to find out whoever the perpetrator might be,” Marsico said. “Forensics will be very important in this case.”

“I have just got a ton, a ton of physical evidence,” Reismiller said. “It’s just going to take a little while.”

Ernest Wholaver was scheduled to stand trial in Dauphin County Court on Jan. 13 on 10 charges ranging from rape to aggravated indecent assault in the allegations made by his daughters. His attorney had filed numerous motions seeking to dismiss parts of the complaint in an attempt to get the case thrown out.

“I definitely expected it to go to trial,” Lappas said. Wholayer was free on bail, on the conditions that he stay away from his former home and his family.

The allegations of sexual abuse against Ernest Wholaver surfaced this summer, after both sisters came forward to police.

Victoria Wholaver, who would have turned 21 today, told police “she was not going to report the incidents but her sister was now the object of the assaults,” the affidavit filed against Wholaver states.

Victoria Wholaver told police that her father began sexually assaulting her when she was 6 years old. He stopped about 10 years later, she said. Elizabeth Wholaver, 15, testified at her father’s preliminary hearing that he began abusing her in about the fifth grade.

“One time my father took me upstairs and my mom had this set of lingerie or something,” Victoria ‘Wholaver testified at the August hearing. “I don’t really know what it was, and he like put it on me and put like lipstick on my cheeks and lips and made me look pretty and stuff. And then he, he made me have sex with him, then.”

She said she and her sister never discussed the repeated incidents with their father until this summer.

“One day I, I just had this really sick, strong feeling and I asked her, and eventually she finally came out and told me,” Victoria Wholaver testified, according to transcripts.

She said she was afraid of her father.

“He was mean, he was really short-tempered and always would scream at us and hit us for things that we shouldn’t be punished for,” she said. “I was scared to tell anybody about this because he told me that it would ruin his marriage and all that and then he said if I would ever tell anyone he would kill me.”

Elizabeth Wholaver said her father once held an unloaded, gun up to her head as a joke.

“He was bigger than me and I wasn’t very big,” she testified. “I was afraid of him hurting me.”

Laurie A. Reiley, executive director of Dauphin Countls Victim/Witness Assistance Program, remembered Jean Wholaver and her two daughters sought a protection front abuse order to protect the younger daughter.

While Reiley said they didn’t tell her that Ernest Wholaver had made specific threats, they were concerned about his reaction to the abuse allegations.

“It was the overall fear that this was being made public, the secret was being disclosed and it was putting them at risk,” Reiley said.

When Reiley met with the Wholavers in July, she said Jean Wholaver was still in shock from the allegations that her husband had been abusing both her daughters,

“I remember that she was very quiet, very exhausted, very upset, when she came in trying to figure out what she should do,” Reiley said.

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