NORWICH – Defense attorney Mark Loughran and Chenango County District Attorney Joseph McBride offered jurors their respective summations in the murder trial of Peter Wlasiuk Thursday, bringing three weeks of testimony to a close.
This is Wlasiuk’s third trial for the alleged murder of his wife, Patricia, in April of 2002. According to the prosecution, Wlasiuk murdered Patricia at the couple’s Oxford home, later engineering a staged accident at Guilford Lake to conceal the crime. Two prior convictions, in 2003 and 2008, were successfully appealed, in 2006 and 2011, respectively.
Wlasiuk has maintained his innocence, first saying Patricia was driving his 1998 GMC pick-up truck east along County Road 35 when she lost control of the vehicle in order to avoid hitting a deer, veered into the lake and subsequently drowned. Wlasiuk later changed his story, however, stating the couple were arguing when his wife intentionally drove into the lake.
Loughran, in his closing statement, maintained his client’s innocence, and spent more than three and a half hours – the entire morning session – trying to convince the jury to come back with a verdict of not guilty. According to Loughran, “everything changed in this case” on April 5, when Wlasiuk was interviewed by Undersheriff James Lloyd, a Chenango County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Detective at the time. From that point on, said Loughran, it was a “search for a crime that did not occur.”
Witnesses, he added, have twisted their testimony over the course of ten years and three trials, and are now “on a team” and “the team is here.”
The burden of proof, he continued, rests entirely on the prosecution, and jurors must determine how much credit the testimony of certain witnesses deserves. Did the people, asked Loughran, “prove that this was a homicide?”
His client, who’s spent the past ten years in prison, has been labelled “a bad guy,” he added, and is innocent of any crime.
“Pete didn’t kill Patty ... they didn’t prove it,” Loughran told the jury. “Peter Wlasiuk is not guilty.”
McBride, whose summation took up the bulk of the afternoon session, began with a summarization of the events the prosecution believes occurred on April 3, 2002. Wlasiuk, he said, killed his wife at their New Virginia Road home; dragged her body to the bed of his pick-up truck; drove the truck to a 32-foot gap in the guardrail along the southern shore of Guilford Lake, and let the truck roll into the water.
“Patty still talks to us about what happened,” said McBride, reminding the jury of the burdocks found in Patricia’s hair, on Wlasiuk’s clothing and in the cab of the truck.
According to the prosecution, there are no burdocks along the shore of the lake, although burdocks – including one branch that had a sample of Patricia’s hair, identified by DNA analyzation – were found at the Wlasiuks’ home.
“Thank God Patty got to those burdock bushes,” stated McBride, who called Peter Wlasiuk a “cold, calculated murderer.”
McBride went on to describe the alleged crime in detail – which he repeatedly referred to as a set-up – from the time Wlasiuk’s truck went into the lake to the defendant’s arrest on April 8, five days after Patricia’s death.
“Set-up, set-up, set-up,” stressed the district attorney, who outlined Wlasiuk’s motives: an increasingly unhappy marriage; an extramarital affair that began as a three-way, sexual relationship with Joyce Worden, the couple’s babysitter; and $350,000 in life insurance and death benefits he hoped to collect on.
“I want you to think about Patty and how she talked to us,” said McBride, who – in closing – told the jury there is “only one verdict in this particular case” and Wlasiuk must be found guilty of murder for killing his wife.
If convicted for a third time, Wlasiuk – who is currently being held at the Chenango County Correctional Facility – could face up to 25 years to life in state prison. The trial will resume at 9 a.m. and the jury is expected to begin its deliberations before noon.