The Unlikely Triggerman

A light snow was falling as Jim Davis eased into the driveway of his mother's house in Atwater Township. He noticed an orange garden tractor parked on the lawn of her neighbors, Bearnhardt and Cora Hartig. That's odd, Davis thought. He'd grown up next door to the couple and knew their fastidious ways, how Bearnhardt fussed over his equipment and yard, how Cora kept the ranch home neat as a church.

A short time later, Davis's mother arrived and mentioned that the tractor had sat out for two days. So he offered to check on the Hartigs, both 81.

No one answered when Davis knocked. Peering through the front-door window, he saw why -- Cora and Bearnhardt lay side by side on the kitchen floor.

The smell of death met police as they entered the house. Ten .25-caliber shell casings formed a crude outline of the couple's bodies. Five slugs had torn open Cora; three had pierced her husband.

The home bore signs of a search. Business papers pulled from a desk were strewn across the living room, while kitchen cabinets and dresser drawers stood open. But nothing appeared stolen. Whoever shot the Hartigs ignored the rings they wore and the wallet in Bearnhardt's pants. Watches and jewelry, cash, TVs and assorted electronics -- all remained.

The only things the killer failed to leave behind, it seemed, were fingerprints and forensic clues.

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Authorities pegged the time of death as late afternoon on April 5, 1990. Around noon that day, Tyrone Noling rapped on the door of Suzanne and Fred Murphy's home in Alliance. His car had broken down, and he wondered if he could call a friend.

Dressed in a denim jacket and jeans, his sandy blond hair trimmed short, the young man looked "kind of cute," Suzanne recalls. As he spoke on the phone, she returned to washing dishes. Her husband, planning to give the visitor a lift to a mechanic down the street, went to fetch his coat.

Moments later, curious about why she heard no voices coming from the living room, Suzanne walked back out of the kitchen. Noling was holding a .25 on Fred.

"You sit down in that fucking chair or I'll shoot you!" he yelled, snapping open the barrel and catching a bullet as it popped out. "I want you to know that this is real!"

Noling stuffed Fred's wallet and Suzanne's purse into a pillowcase he pulled from his pocket. Then he ordered Fred into the bathroom and told Suzanne to show him her jewelry. She remembers moving down a hallway to the couple's bedroom, the gun grazing her back.

Noling had stolen the piece a day before, when he and a friend robbed another elderly couple who lived a few blocks away. "It seemed so easy," he says. "You got a couple hundred dollars and got away. You think, 'Why not do it again?'"

Yet his nerve would prove as weak as his method. In the Murphys' bedroom, after grabbing rings worth $1,500, he began digging through a dresser -- until his trigger finger slipped, sending a round into the hardwood floor. The gunshot so startled him that he "ran like a scared rabbit," says Suzanne, who at 87 can recount the robbery as if it occurred an hour ago.

Clutching the pillowcase, Noling grabbed the couple's VCR before escaping through nearby woods to a friend's house -- one street over from the Murphys. He was, Suzanne says, "just a stupid kid."

Noling, weeks past his 18th birthday, had helped himself to five-finger discounts since his preteen years, stealing from cars, homes, and corner stores, juvenile records indicate. In the span of four hours on April 5, however, he attended criminal finishing school -- graduating from petty theft to double homicide.

That's the scenario Portage County prosecutors laid out at his murder trial. They claimed that around 4 p.m., on the heels of the Murphy robbery, Noling cajoled three friends -- Gary St. Clair, Joey Dalesandro, and Butch Wolcott -- to drive from Alliance to Atwater, where they spotted Bearnhardt on his tractor. He'd gone inside by the time the foursome circled back, according to authorities, prompting Noling and St. Clair to jump out of the car.

After the pair allegedly pushed past Cora at the door, St. Clair rummaged through the house as Noling held the couple at gunpoint. When Bearnhardt stepped toward him, prosecutors asserted, Noling plugged the old man, reloaded the .25, and shot Cora before fleeing.

The county's case pivoted on the testimony of Noling's alleged accomplices. St. Clair and Dalesandro struck plea deals in exchange for ratting out their friend, while Wolcott received immunity.

But St. Clair recanted in court, denying that he and his pals were involved. Dalesandro and Wolcott, meanwhile, provided accounts that clashed with their pretrial statements. One of Noling's lawyers contended that they would have testified to seeing a pink elephant at the scene if prosecutors wanted.

None of which bothered jurors. They convicted Noling and a judge upheld their call for the death penalty.