Saturday, November 10, 2012
The mother said her daughter had been abducted on the South Side but, later, the mother's boyfriend confessed to burying the toddler in Brookline.
The image of a little girl on a grocery shopping trip with her mother—then suddenly gone. That was happened the day of March 9, 1982 when Melody Childs Thomas told police that her daughter, Nicole Lynn Bryner, 3, had been abducted from a shopping cart at the Giant Eagle supermarket on the South Side of Pittsburgh. Though there were extensive searches, no trace of Nicole was ever found. Then, in 1986, Timothy Widman, Childs' boyfriend at the time, allegedly confessed he had punched Bryner and accidentally killed her. He told police that he and Childs' buried the body in a wooded area along Timberland Road in Brookline. Police searched unsuccessfully for the body. Without it, prosecutors could not pursue the case. But in 1988, a Superior …
Monday, June 4, 2012
Zandy Dudiak won a third place award for a story about the kidnap-murder cold case of Beth Lynn Barr, of Wilkinsburg.
- NEWS
-
Monday, June 4, 2012
Zandy Dudiak, associate regional editor of Western Pennsylvania Patch Region 2, won third place for enterprise reporting in the statewide Society of Professional Journalists, Keystone State Professional Chapter's 2012 Spotlight Awards. Her winning entry was "Kidnap-Murder Case 'Still Not A Lost Cause' 34 Years Later," which interwove the story of a woman who was approached by a man at a public bus stop just hours before 7-year-old Beth Lynn Barr was kidnapped on her way home from school the same day just blocks away—and how the two incidents might be related. The story was the first time the woman at the bus stop had been interviewed about the 1977 case. The award was presented Saturday in a ceremony at the Wyndham in Gettysburg, PA.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
The ‘woman at the bus stop’ tells her story about the day Wilkinsburg schoolgirl Beth Barr disappeared on Thanksgiving eve 1977.
Editor’s note: The identity of the woman interviewed for this story is being withheld for her safety. The woman stood alone at about 8:30 a.m. on Nov. 23, 1977, at a Port Authority Transit stop in Wilkinsburg, waiting for the bus that would take her to her job in downtown Pittsburgh. The 24-year-old had grown up in Wilkinsburg, and she and her husband had purchased a property on nearby Rebecca Avenue, which they were remodeling. The bus stop was close by on Ardmore Boulevard. As she waited in the chilly November air, a motorist pulled his car off the street, partially into an alley and onto the paved area of an auto repair garage—right next to her. “To the best of my recollection,” the woman said, during an interview last week, “... he …
Michael Buzzelli
12:02 pm on Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Congratulations! You deserve every accolade! more ›