Murders likely to remain mystery
The Christmas Day crime scene at 204 W. Boyd Ave. told a tale of savagery and cold-blooded execution.
Three dead — all shot in the head — on three different levels of the house in Butler. One of the victims had been bludgeoned.
Two victims were covered with bed sheets and blankets. Both had been dead for a while, their bodies showing signs of rigor mortis.
Apistol was found in the hand of a man's body in the living room. There appeared to be a suicide note on the kitchen counter.
Detective Sgt. Mark Peffer, the lead investigator, called the magnitude of the crime scene the worst he's seen in his nearly 20-year police career.
But despite the forensic evidence left behind by the victims and their killer,Butler police are still nagged by questions of how and why — one month after the triple shooting.
A medical examiner's report issued last week casts serious doubt that those answers will ever come.
City police quickly ruled that Joel Bodley, a 60-year-old unemployed former night watchman, had fatally shot his live-in girlfriend, Debby Chuba, 55, and her 17-year-old son, Andrew "Drew"Chuba.
Bodley waited hours before putting the gun to his head and killing himself, police said.
How this double-murder suicide unfolded, however, is still a matter of conjecture. The reason Bodley would commit such a horror is also doomed to speculation.
"There's a lot about what happened inside that house that day that we'll never know,"Butler police Chief Tim Fennell conceded. "There're only three people that know for sure, and they can't help us anymore."
A 911 call at 3:18 p.m. on Christmas sent police racing to the two-story rental house where Debby had lived with Drew for years. Bodley earlier in 2006 had moved in, after dating Debby for three years or so.The caller told a dispatcher that police would find three bodies in the home.The first body discovered was Bodley's. It was under a blanket on the first-floor couch in the living room. A .25-caliber Raven pistol was in his right hand.On the second floor in one of the bedrooms, officers found Debby's body, face down on the bed. Ayellow and beige pattern sheet covered her."There was evidence, you could immediately see, that a violent assault had taken place in that room,"Fennell said."Blood spatter on the walls,"Peffer noted. "Asmall amount of blood on the floor; there was blood on the sheet."Debby had been shot once, but she had also endured a brutal beating before being shot, according to Allegheny County Medical Examiner Abdul Shakir's autopsy report released last week.Police believe Bodley used a flashlight to pummel his girlfriend. Police found it in the room.Debby, who was a registered nurse, could have been assaulted as she slept, investigators said. Peffer noted that in the previous days she had been bed-ridden with a bad cold or flu.The second-floor bedroom revealed all the clues of a crime of passion. The killing was savage; the killer up close to his victim."Whoever did it was extremely angry,"Fennell said. "It was a very brutal assault."But the .25-caliber bullet, not the assault, killed her, Shakir ruled.Investigators also found a second bullet slug on the mattress. Bodley had fired two shots in that roomOne shot hit Debby, the other didn't."The second bullet just plain missed,"Peffer said, "or (Bodley and Debby) struggled and he missed."But police found no defensive wounds on Debby's hands.The home's basement held the third body. That is where Drew had been shot and killed with a .25-caliber bullet. Police believe Drew was sleeping or simply lying on a couch at the time.But police believe Bodley, for some unexplained reason, moved Drew's body. It was found about 8 feet from the couch, face down under a bed blanket that covered his head and body.Toxicology reports determined Bodley and Debby had been drinking. Police would only say that Debby's blood-alcohol content was "under the legal limit"of 0.08 percent in Pennsylvania for being intoxicated.However, Bodley, who had been drinking beer, was "three times the limit,"Fennell said, citing medical reports.
The sequence of the crime baffled investigators in the immediate weeks after the shootings. Police hoped that Shakir's analysis of forensic evidence could solve the puzzle.But it hasn't.Bodley's time of death is relatively easy to pinpoint. He shot himself immediately after making the 911 call.But when did he shoot Debby and Drew? Who did he shoot first?And, of course, why?Police are almost resigned to accepting they will never nail down the precise times of the murders. It appeared Bodley waited a number of hours after shooting Debby and Drew before turning the gun on himself.Investigators said their conclusion is based on forensic science. Debby's and Drew's bodies had telltale signs of rigor mortis, the stiffening of the body that sets in about three or four hours after death.The same two bodies showed signs of livor mortis, or lividity, the settling of blood in the lower portion of the body, which starts 20 minutes to three hours after death.But forensic analysis has failed to narrow down a time period when Debby and Drew died. Was it four or five hours, or 12 hours, or longer?The wide varying temperatures in the second-floor bedroom, which was warm, and the basement, which was cool, no doubt affected the onset and development of rigor and lividity, Peffer noted."What we're left with is a time frame of death,"Peffer said, "that is in many hours."Debby and Drew, however, died at least four or five hours before Bodley.
Police searched the house and for weeks interviewed family and friends, trying to solve the "why"part of the investigation."What police deemed a suicide note was not helpful. It was only three sentences long, written in cursive and on notebook-style paper.It offered more instructions than explanations. It told police to turn his body over to the Butler Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He wanted an Army burial.It told police where to find his two cherished Basset hounds, unharmed in the second-floor bedroom next to the room where Debby was killed.But police declined to reveal any more about the note, only that it did not disclose a motive.Fennell said, "reading between the lines, (Bodley) was making an attempt to deflect responsibility or blame for what he did."Investigators have uncovered no evidence of prior violence between Bodley and Debby or Drew. But he may have shared thoughts of killing himself, in the days before Christmas.Groping for a motive, Fennell and Peffer can only make a best-guess call:Bodley possibly was feeling desperate or angry when Debby decided to end their relationship after discovering he had been seeing another woman for years.Part or more of her decision to break up, if that was the plan, was over his excessive drinking and lying, all the while as she labored as sole breadwinner of the household.Still, Debby apparently never disclosed to family any plan to kick Bodley out of the house."We haven't been able to answer all the questions we have," Fennell said, "especially as to the why."
A small box remains in the basement of the Young Funeral Home in Butler. Inside the box are the cremated remains of Joel Bodley.The funeral home is waiting for Bodley's survivors to take it.Family members had been distant with Bodley for some time. The last time they saw him was on Mother's Day last year, when they held a memorial service for Bodley's mother, who died in April 2006."They didn't even know he was living in Butler," Fennell said.Bodley's closest relatives, a sister in Erie, and a brother in Renovo, Clinton County, did not want to comment for this story, according to other family members."We're all shocked about what happened, obviously,"said nephew Joseph Burney Jr. of Erie.Burney remembers camping with his uncle in and around Bodley's native Renovo, a former railroad town in central Pennsylvania."He was a good uncle," Burney said.Renovo, which has always been small, has only one traffic light and two full-time police officers.Like family and neighbors here, those who grew up with Bodley were startled to learn of the Christmas Day horror in Butler.Abrief news story of the incident ran in the Renovo Record, a weekly newspaper."It's something," said childhood friend Carol Beckes of North East, Erie County. "It's hard to take when you pick up the paper and read that."Beckes remembers Bodley as a personable, polite and caring young man. She recalls Bodley's older brother, 13, drowned while swimming in the Susquehanna River. Joel was 10 at the time."I never saw him lose his temper,"Beckes said of Joel. "He was very popular in high school.Bodley graduated from Bucktail High School in 1964. No one seems to know how he got the nickname, "Bloody,"as noted in this class yearbook.He returned to Renovo in 1999 for his 35th class reunion."There were no indication of any problems,"Beckes said. "He seemed like a regular guy; like the old Joel."The family ran no obituary in Renovo's hometown paper.The only obituary for Bodley appeared Jan. 14 in the Erie Times-News. It was one sentence long, stating when he died and where.There was no mention of family.
