NORWICH – A woman who claims she heard Peter M. Wlasiuk bragging about how to murder someone by drowning them in Guilford Lake a year prior to the death of his wife, Patricia, testified in his murder trial Friday.
“Sometime in the first part of 2001, did you have a conversation with Mr. Wlasiuk that sticks in your mind?” District Attorney Joseph McBride asked witness Brenda Golden. She confirmed she did while sitting at Wlasiuk’s bar, The Angel Inn (formerly The Pillars) in Guilford.
Golden told the court that Wlasiuk said it “would be easy” to make “problems” go away.
“He said, for instance, it would be easy to kill someone and make it look like a drowning accident. He said, ‘But you have to be smart, you can’t just drown them and say, throw them in the lake because they could test the water in their lungs and tell whether or not it came from the lake.’ He said, ‘Say I wanted to put someone in Guilford Lake ... the thing to do would be to get a bucket or a container of water from the lake and drown them in that, then throw the body in the lake.’”
Wlasiuk, 39, is charged with second degree murder in the death of his wife Patricia, 35, whose body was found in Guilford Lake after what he claimed to be a truck accident that took place at about 12:30 a.m. April 3, 2002.
Investigators claim Wlasiuk killed his wife at their Oxford home, and staged the Guilford Lake accident to cover it up. A jury convicted Wlasiuk of murder in January 2003, but that decision was overturned on appeal in August 2006.
Golden said she drove to the scene of the accident May 4, 2002 after hearing about Patricia’s death. After visiting the site, she said she concluded that a murder had taken place and needed to tell “someone” about what she heard. Golden said she was not drinking the night of the alleged remarks and also told the court she overheard Wlasiuk say he wanted to get rid of the drug problem in Guilford.
One of the first on the scene the night of Patricia Wlasiuk’s death was tow truck driver Kenneth Constable, who helped to perform CPR on Mrs. Wlasiuk after she had been pulled from the lake.
“I had the overwhelming taste in my mouth of fresh beer,” said Constable.
Constable helped pull Peter Wlasiuk’s 1999 GMC truck from the lake at around 5 a.m. the next morning. Constable testified that the vehicle was in drive when it was pulled from the water and while in the course of getting the truck out of the lake, crews “tore up the sod” on the embankment.
Defense Attorney Randel Scharf asked Constable if he remembered testifying in 2002 that the accident scene had been contaminated. “You said it was contaminated because in your estimation you saw all those people going through the area, including yourself, right?” asked Scharf. Constable responded, “Correct.”
Chenango County Sheriff’s Deputy Kevin Powell testified that he collected items in the lake that came from the truck the following morning because a complaint was made regarding the floating debris. Powell said he removed two beer cans, a rope, a bandana and other items. He also collected a roll of garbage bags believed to be from the truck, which he then used to gather the items in.
“Everything found was an arm’s reach away. I didn’t get into the water and it was all in about a 20-foot radius,” said Powell.
Powell testified that he was not collecting evidence for a homicide at the time and was simply cleaning the area up and retrieving the accident victim’s belongings. The items were, however, entered into evidence at a later date, he said.
Powell said he arrived at the scene of the accident April 3 around 10 a.m., just nine hours after the accident, and found that the emergency crews had left and he was the only one at the lake. “There was no one there. Was there at least police tape or any area roped off?” asked Scharf, to which Powell said, “No.”
Chenango County Sheriff’s Sgt. Timothy Urnaitis said he searched beneath the surface of the lake four days after the alleged accident as a diver for investigators. He discovered a jacket under the water and brought it to shore and recovered Patricia’s license from one of the pockets.
Scharf asked why several other items later found in the pockets were not included as part of the evidence or handed over to the defense in the 2002 trial. Urnaitis responded by saying, “I don’t know sir, but once we realized the jacket belonged to the victim, we stopped and placed the jacket into evidence because we didn’t want to contaminate it anymore than we might have already done. We left the rest up to the lab.”
Court resumed Monday at 8:30 a.m. with Broome County Judge Martin Smith presiding.