By DAN DEARTH, ddearth@herald-mail.com
Herald-Mail Media
CHAMBERSBURG, Pa. — Jurors deliberated for a little more than an hour Tuesday before they found John W. Strawser Jr. guilty of the 2014 murder of a man on Interstate 81 near Greencastle.
Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Judge Carol Van Horn then sentenced Strawser to serve life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“You took the life of a totally innocent person,” Van Horn told Strawser after calling him an evil man. “You have forfeited the right to ever be in a free society with other human beings.”
Strawser, 42, stood trial on a charge of first-degree murder in connection with the shooting death of 28-year-old Maine resident Timothy “Asti” Davison on Jan. 4, 2014. Davison’s mother, Theresa Allocca, addressed the court before Strawser was sentenced.
“My son was all about love,” she said. “Everyone who met him loved him. Strangers, when they would meet him, had an automatic connection to him. They wanted to be his best friend.”
She recalled a time when her son helped a friend who was stranded on the side of the road at 3 a.m.
“He was sensitive,” Allocca said. “He would have helped that man Strawser if he were stranded on the side of the road. … He would have said he was human and wanted to help him.”
Franklin County District Attorney Matthew Fogal said during his closing argument that although Davison wasn’t physically in the courtroom, he was still able to put Strawser at the crime scene through the 911 call on the night of his murder. Fogal then played the recording.
“I just had someone pull up to me and start shooting … It was like six shots,” Davison was heard saying as he drove north on I-81 near the Cearfoss exit.
Davison said the Ford Ranger was closing in on his Mitsubishi Montero as the vehicles sped through Washington County toward the Pennsylvania state line.
“They’re getting (expletive) closer,” he said. “This is not good.”
Davison then lost contact with Washington County’s 911 center. His distress call resumed a short time later with an emergency services dispatcher in Franklin County.
“He pushed me in the median,” Davison said as he sat in his vehicle near exit 3 on I-81. The dispatcher could be heard asking Davison to describe the other driver and the type of vehicle that rammed him. Davison said the Ford’s driver’s-side door probably was damaged by the collision. A few more minutes passed before the Ford returned and Davison was heard saying,
“Dude. He’s (expletive) here.”
The following sounds were what appeared to be footsteps, gunshots and Davison’s labored breathing.
“You just heard a young man get murdered,” Fogal told the jury. “Did you hear the footsteps? Did you hear the gurgles at the end (of the recording)?”
Fogal asked the jurors to consider several “what ifs,” such as what if Davison had escaped from the median or taken Interstate 95 instead of I-81 on his way home from Florida to Maine.
“What if this murdering hillbilly from West Virginia wasn’t in Pennsylvania waiting to kill someone?” Fogal asked as he approached Strawser at the defense table.
Pennsylvania State Police Trooper Jason Cachara testified early on in the seven-day trial that Strawser was having an affair with a Waynesboro woman named Courtney Breese around the time Davison was shot. On the night of the murder, Breese was with her husband, Jamie Breese, at a nightclub in Bunker Hill. Cachara said the evidence showed that the Breeses left the nightclub on the night of Jan. 3, 2014, and drove home north on I-81. Strawser then gave chase and mistook Davison’s Mitsubishi for the Breeses’ similar-looking Honda Pilot. Strawser chased Davison north along I-81 through Washington County and fired shots near the Cearfoss exit, Cachara said. He then forced Davison off the roadway about three miles into Pennsylvania. Strawser circled back roughly five minutes later and shot Davison four times.
Courtney Breese testified last week that she and her husband had a heated cellphone conversation with Strawser as they were driving home from Bunker Hill. She said they heard Davison had been shot and believed Strawser could have been involved. But they didn’t come forward until 16 months later on April 20, 2015, when they heard Strawser had been charged in connection with the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Amy Lou Buckingham, in Preston County.
Strawser was convicted of Buckingham’s murder in 2016 and currently is serving life in prison in West Virginia. Courtney Breese testified that she and Strawser grew up in Preston County, and they rekindled their friendship when she would come home to visit her family. That friendship, she said, progressed to an affair. During Buckingham’s murder investigation, West Virginia State Police found a Rossi .44 Magnum Ranch Hand handgun about 1,000 feet from Strawser’s home in Preston County. Fogal said in his closing argument that authorities believe Strawser hid the firearm in a box along railroad tracks while he was fleeing police after shooting Buckingham.
Fogal also said that between Davison’s and Buckingham’s murders, Strawser painted his Ford Ranger from dark blue to black and added green stripes to the sides.
Defense Attorney Kristopher Accardi took about 20 minutes to present his closing argument. He said Strawser wouldn’t have painted the pickup truck in front of an ex-girlfriend and his neighbors if he were trying to alter its appearance to cover up a murder.
“If you were going to do it … Why do it six months later … Why do it in front of your home where all of your neighbors could see?” Accardi asked the jury. He also questioned other pieces of evidence, such as why Strawser would have tried to openly trade the .44 Magnum on Facebook. And the testimony of a DNA expert, who said last week during the trial that samples taken from the murder scene couldn’t identify Strawser beyond a reasonable doubt.
“It might be. It could be. It may be. But not definitively,” Accardi said.
Fogal leaned heavily on Pennsylvania State Police’s ability to track Strawser’s cellphone on the night of the murder. That evidence showed the phone was near the nightclub in Bunker Hill before it traveled all the way up I-81 through Maryland. Perhaps the most damning evidence, Fogal said, was ballistic testing that determined bullet fragments taken from Davison’s body were fired from Strawser’s gun.
“We got him,” Fogal said. “It came from that gun.” Van Horn asked Strawser if he had anything to say, to which he responded, “Better left unsaid.”
She ordered Strawser to serve his life sentence in Pennsylvania consecutively to the life sentence he already is serving in West Virginia.
