For ex-trooper’s family, cold case and frustration

BY BRENDAN GIBBONS
Times-Shamrock Writer

Karin Dorman held a copy of The Times-Tribune on Wednesday, the 20th anniversary of her father’s death. A front-page photo showed a long line of state police cruisers on the hunt for Eric Matthew Frein.

State police have combed the woods for almost a month searching for the Canadensis man accused of shooting and killing Cpl. Bryon K. Dickson II of Dunmore and critically wounding Trooper Alex T. Douglass of Olyphant during a Sept. 12 sniper attack at the Blooming Grove barracks in Pike County. Around 1,000 officers from federal, state and local police have joined the manhunt.

It made Dorman wonder: Why didn’t they try this hard to find her father’s killer?

Anthony Pappadakis was 63 years old when a trailer in Dimock Twp., Susquehanna County, burned down with him inside on Oct. 8, 1994.

State police at Gibson determined the fire was intentional and called Pappadakis’s death a homicide, according to a cold case report on the state police web page.

Despite years of off-and-on investigations, no one has been charged.

Pappadakis was also a Pennsylvania state trooper, though only for a short time in his 20s, Dorman said. He quit and got a job with Delaware and Hudson Railway. “He didn’t like giving out tickets,” she said.

She described him as a supportive father who didn’t delay in helping his only child, like when he helped her and her husband pay off their home.

“He was the kind of guy that used to say if you needed something, you didn’t wait for a holiday,” she said. “You got it when you needed it.”

By the time he was killed, he had retired from the railroad. The state police web page states he was living in a rooming house in Binghamton, New York. “He was trying to figure out his life,” Dorman said.

On Oct. 7, 1994, he came down to Dimock Twp. She didn’t know he was coming.

The trailer sat on a property abutting Dorman’s. It belonged to a Philadelphia man who said he didn’t know anyone was inside after the fire.

Pappadakis was last seen about 10 miles away in Montrose about 9:45 a.m., according to state police. He was dead by around noon, Susquehanna County district attorney Jason Legg said.

Dorman said she and her husband were gone for most of the morning. They were inside her house when she started hearing gunshots — the sound of ammunition inside the trailer exploding from the heat. They ran up the hill and saw the trailer in flames, then called 911.

“I was trying to get hold of the cop to make sure it wasn’t him in there,” she said. “I could see the charred, bald head and then the coroner said whoever it was had a gold tooth. That is when I knew,” she said.

Legg said Pappadakis may have been taking a nap in the trailer. Dorman said she thinks the arsonist forced him inside. “They obviously put him in there because he obviously saw something,” she said.

He knew where her house key was, she said. “If he wanted to go someplace, he could have gone in my house,” she said.

A few days after the fire, a forensic pathologist determined Pappadakis died of smoke inhalation.

Several troopers have investigated over the years, Legg said. Police and the district attorney had suspects, but Legg said they never came up with the evidence necessary to definitively link anyone to Pappadakis’s death. Arsons are some of the hardest cases to prove, he said. The crime destroys the evidence.

“Whodunnit, that’s what’s missing,” he said. “They just don’t have all the pieces.”

Though two decades have gone by, the case is still an open one, Legg said. The documents take up four accordion folders in the county courthouse, he said.

“Just because you put in a lot of effort doesn’t mean you actually solve it,” he said.

Dorman said she thinks state police and the DA’s office could have tried harder, putting more troopers on the case and relying on testimonies from people they said were unreliable, she said.

“Nothing was followed through,” she said.

She also thinks state police were spread too thin.

“They cover a large area and there’s only so many troopers but you can pull in a guy or two if you need it,” she said.

Legg said Dorman contacts him every year around the anniversary of her father’s death.

“It’s a hard, hard thing to deal with” for her, Legg said. “It’s hard enough to lose a loved one, even harder knowing his murderer is still out there.”

He did not think the case was comparable to Frein’s attack. “At this point, they’re trying to catch someone who’s basically a sniper killing people,” he said. “It’s a public safety issue.”

But faced with daily images of armies of troopers combing the woods, Dorman wonders what would have happened if the same vigor had been applied to her father’s death.

“It drives me crazy,” she said. “They need to treat everybody the same. Because no matter who it is, they had parents, they had children.”