MEADVILLE, Pa. (AP) — A jury convicted a 53-year-old truck driver Thursday of shooting to death a pregnant Amish woman inside her rural Pennsylvania home early last year.
Shawn Christopher Cranston was charged a few weeks after Rebekah Byler, 23, was found dead in the living room of her rural Spartansburg home.
Cranston was convicted in Crawford County of first-degree murder, second-degree murder of an unborn child and related offenses. He is scheduled for sentencing in late July.
“It is hard to fathom conduct more heinous than brutally killing a young expectant mother and her unborn child in her home,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday said in an emailed release. “Our homes are supposed to be our safe haven — this defendant violated the sanctity of home to commit these truly evil acts.”
A message seeking comment was left for Cranston’s lawyer, Louis W. Emmi.
Police have said Byler’s children, a 2-year-old girl and a 3-year-old boy, were in the home when their mother suffered sharp wounds to her neck and was shot in the head. The boy told investigators a man wearing sneakers had killed his mother. The children were not physically harmed.
Members of the area’s substantial Amish community attended the trial this week.
Investigators have said they began to focus on Cranston within a day of the killing and took several items during a search of his home in Corry, about 8 miles (13 kilometers) from Spartansburg.
Byler’s husband, Andy Byler, said during an earlier court proceeding that the children told him about the crime when he returned home from looking at possible roofing jobs. She had been doing laundry when he left earlier that day.
“I didn’t really believe it,” Andy Byler testified last year. “I walked in and saw her cap laying inside the door.”
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