Westmoreland County Judge Meagan Bilik-DeFazio is scheduled to conduct a hearing today in the Kevin Murphy case. The District Attorney’s office is challenging the judge’s August order granting Murphy’s defense team $2,500 to hire a ballistics expert to examine the weapon police say was used in the murders of Murphy’s mother, sister and aunt in 2009. Murphy sits on Pennsylvania’s Death Row for the murders.
Judge Bilik-DeFazio granted the defense request without notifying the prosecution, but D.A. John Peck contends his office should have been given the opportunity to object to the new ballistics expert.
Murphy’s original defense team, attorneys Bob Bell and Mark Bolkovac, hired their own ballistics expert to examine the .22 caliber pistol used in the killings and the State Supreme Court ruled subsequent to the conviction that the evidence was sufficient to support the verdict. But the new court-appointed defense team says two bullet fragments recovered from one of the victims do not match the pistol. They also say DNA evidence presented during the trial indicates another person had contact with the gun, which was found hidden inside a machine at the family’s glass business in Loyalhanna Township, where the bodies were found.
Murphy is now 59 years old. He lived in nearby Saltsburg, in Indiana County, at the time of the murders. Prosecutors said the murdered women objected to his relationship with a married woman and didn’t want her living at the family home.
