By Laurie Mason Schroeder - PhillyBurbs.com

June 8, 2011

“The locking of the hut was further evidence of this defendant’s intent to take her mother’s life,” Cepparulo said. “There can be no other suggestion from this action.”

The verdict, which Cepparulo handed down Wednesday following a three-day, non-jury trial in Doylestown, carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole.

Olenchock, 25, was also convicted of arson and possessing an instrument of crime, and could receive additional sentences on those counts.

She sobbed softly as Cepparulo listed his reasons for the verdict.

The judge rejected defense arguments that the slaying was committed under the duress of homelessness, a finding that could have resulted in a voluntary manslaughter or third-degree murder finding.

Venose’s sister, Debra McCormick, said the verdict brought little closure to the family.

“What she did was horrifically, absolutely terrible. Words can’t even describe. And it did not have to be. If she wanted a life of her own, she could have just left.”

Venose, 44, died from heart failure after crawling out of the burning shack on the morning of Oct. 17.

Rolling around on the ground in pain, she told a firefighter: “My daughter is trying to kill me.”

Olenchock would later confess to police that she hit her mom in the head with a baseball bat “10 to 15 times” before setting her mattress on fire and fleeing the scene.

The crime occurred the night after the two women had an argument over Olenchock’s plan to move in with a man she’d met through an online dating site.

Olenchock and Venose had been living without electricity or running water in the “tent city” homeless camp behind the Pathmark in Bristol Township for two years, enduring weather extremes and rat attacks.

Olenchock, who worked as a waitress at the Fairless Hills IHOP, had saved up enough to buy a used car and was trying to gather money for an apartment.

She told police that Venose refused to leave the camp because she feared she’d be thrown in jail. Court records show that Venose was wanted on shoplifting charges, and had been court ordered to get mental health treatment.

Olenchock’s lawyers showed the judge receipts documenting how Venose had spent nearly $700 of the waitressing money her daughter had banked for a rent deposit, using a debit card to purchase fast food and items such as Halloween decorations.

When Olenchock threatened to go to Tennessee without her, Venose said that she’d send members of the Breed outlaw motorcycle club to kill her and her new boyfriend, Olenchock told police.

These were the things on her mind when she woke up next to her mother inside the shack the day of the slaying.

“I wanted a new life and I wanted to take her with me, but she wouldn’t go,” Olenchock would later tell police.

She said she looked at the baseball bat she kept near her bed and came up with the plan.

“I thought, if I stayed here in the woods, my life would be wasted, too,’’ she told police.

Olenchock admitted that after bludgeoning Venose, she went outside the shack, took off her clothes and burned them in the firepit the women used for cooking.

She then gathered up her belongings and loaded them into her car before going back into the shack and pouring kerosene at the foot of her mother’s bed and setting it ablaze.

She was arrested several days later in Johnson City, Tenn., driving with her boyfriend.

He told police that he didn’t know anything about the murder, and that Olenchock had claimed that her mother had died two weeks before in a hospital.

In his closing statement, Olenchock’s attorney, public defender Joseph Haag, asked the judge to consider the pressure his client was under. She had to support both herself and her mother, who did not work due to health problems, all while enduring their squalid living conditions.

“All the pressure of getting out of homelessness was put on my client,” Haag said. “This camp, it wasn’t a place similar to a camping expedition where you can just get in your car and go home when it rains. This was home.”

Prosecutor Daniel Sweeney countered that no matter how desperate Olenchock was, she didn’t have to resort to murder.

“Maybe Kim Venose wasn’t the best mother. Maybe she was even a drag on her daughter. But that did not give her the right to bludgeon her with a baseball bat over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.”

Olenchock didn’t speak as she left the courtroom. Before she was taken to prison, she was permitted a private meeting with her aunt.

McCormick said she held her niece and they wept and prayed together.

McCormick said she offered to remain in contact with Olenchock, and visit her in prison.

Venose had not been in close contact with her sister for nearly a decade, but had visited McCormick’s home near Wilkes-Barre shortly before the killing. Family members said there was talk of the women getting an apartment in that area, although Venose didn’t follow up with a landlord who offered to rent to them.

McCormick described her sister as “fun” and “full of life.” She noted that Venose decorated the campsite.

“She was very smart, very talented. Even though she lost her home she wasn’t homeless because she even made the homeless camp like a home.”

McCormick said the verdict was fair, and hopes that Olenchock will someday confess fully about the slaying.

“I don’t know if at some point Becky will get to that point and tell us,” she said, weeping. “I love my niece. I loved my sister."

Life in homeless camp detailed at murder trial

By Laurie Mason Schroeder - PhillyBurbs.com

June 8, 2011

“She said Becky would have to work longer and harder to get them out of the woods,” said Marlene Ritter, a volunteer from Langhorne Terrace Ministries.

Ritter testified for the defense during day two of Olenchock’s homicide trial in Bucks County Court in Doylestown.

Prosecutor Daniel Sweeney said Olenchock, 25, bludgeoned her mother with a baseball bat then drenched her with kerosene and set her on fire before fleeing to Tennessee to move in with a boyfriend she met on the Internet.

Defense lawyers concede that Olenchock committed the crime, but are expected to argue that the slaying was not premeditated murder.

“These tragic events were set in motion in the months preceding,” said public defender Joseph Haag.

Haag said numerous “stressors,” including the deplorable conditions Olenchock and her mother lived in for two years, and arguments they had over how to get out of their situation, led to the slaying.

County Judge Albert Cepparulo, who is deciding the case without a jury at Olenchock’s request, is expected to deliver a verdict this morning.

In court Tuesday, Ritter testified that she and her husband drove Olenchock back and forth to her job at the IHOP in Fairless Hills. She said she checked in with the women several times a week, and saw firsthand how primitive their living conditions were.

Olenchock and Venose, 44, lived near other homeless people in an encampment behind the Pathmark store on Durham Road in Bristol Township.

The wooden shack that the women slept in was covered with plastic tarps, but when heavy rains fell the inside would fill with water, drenching their clothes and mattresses.

Inside the shack on summer nights it often became so hot the women couldn’t breathe. Ritter helped them get a tent so they could drag their mattresses outside to escape the heat.

Insects and vermin were everywhere. Ritter described sitting with Venose outside the shack at a cast-off picnic table the homeless women had dragged from a Dumpster. Rats began to appear, looking for food, forcing Ritter to pull up her legs.

“There were raccoons, mice, rats, snakes, mosquitoes, gnats, flies, bees, hornets...,” Ritter said.

The women went to the bathroom in the woods and washed with bottled water, which was donated by the supermarket. Olenchock bought all their food, and brought her mother meals from the pancake house.

“Every night when she left work, she had a bag of food for her mother,” Ritter said.

Ritter said she never saw the women argue.

“They were more like two sisters who would finish each other’s sentences,” she said.

But others witnesses spoke of a growing tension between the women.

Family members said that Venose didn’t follow up on plans to find an apartment, and refused to live in the Red Cross homeless shelter.

“She was certainly a candidate to get in there, but she did not want to go,” said homeless advocate Sandra Mullican.

Olenchock had asked Mullican to help her save some of the money she earned waitressing. She didn’t want to keep it in the shack, because it had “gone missing” before.

Mullican arranged for Olenchock to keep her cash in a church safe. In four months, she’d saved $3,000, enough to buy a used 2000 Kia sedan.

It was in that car, police say, that Olenchock drove to Johnson City, Tenn., after the slaying. Her boyfriend, Mark Kendall, testified that he didn’t know anything about the alleged murder until police approached him and Olenchock as they were driving to a Tennessee welfare office.

Two weeks before, Kendall testified, Olenchock had text messaged him with sad news. Her mother had died of a heart attack, she told him.

He told the judge that Olenchock complained of having to rush around before work, making funeral arrangements.

“She didn’t really talk about what happened,” Kendall, 38, testified. “She seemed aggravated. Pissed off.”

When Olenchock arrived at his home on Oct. 17, her mood had brightened.

“She was joyful. Just excited to be there,” Kendall said.

Olenchock has not testified, but could take the stand this morning.

If she’s found guilty of first- or second-degree murder, Olenchock will be sentenced to life in prison. A verdict of third-degree murder or manslaughter will mean a shorter sentence. Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty.

Bucks County woman standing trial in mother's death

By Larry King - Philly.com

June 7, 2011

For two years they shared a tarp-walled hut in a wooded homeless camp in Bristol Township - mother and daughter, seemingly devoted to each other.

Kimberly Venose, 44, was unemployed, hobbled by medical problems.

Her daughter, Rebecca Olenchock, worked long hours in a nearby pancake house, scraping together enough cash to buy a car, pay for essentials, and set a little aside for her dreams of someday.

But, authorities say, Olenchock grew impatient for her new life to start, and was willing to kill her mother to get it.

Olenchock, 25, went on trial Monday in Bucks County Court, accused of bludgeoning her sleeping mother's head with a baseball bat on a Sunday morning last fall.

Authorities say Olenchock burned her bloody clothes in the fire pit of their camp behind the Bristol Pathmark store, doused her mother with kerosene, and set her ablaze, padlocking a makeshift door as she fled.

Then Olenchock, who had no driver's license, roared off to Johnson City, Tenn., in the green, 2000 Kia sedan she had purchased. She drove so fast to join the boyfriend she had met on the Internet that she got pulled over for speeding in Virginia, forcing her beau to come fetch her.

When she arrived in Tennessee that night, Deputy District Attorney Daniel Sweeney said Monday in his opening statement, it was "with her birth certificate, her Social Security card, and the car . . . ready to begin her new life."

But Kimberly Venose somehow managed to escape that locked, burning hut. Volunteer firefighters, summoned to what they thought was a brush fire, found her moaning in a patch of burning weeds beside the hut, her clothes still aflame, begging for help.

When volunteer firefighter Ryan Cummings asked her what had happened, Venose responded, "My daughter [is] trying to kill me," Cummings testified.

Minutes after that statement, Sweeney said, "her heart gave out." Venose died of cardiac arrest.

Olenchock faces homicide, arson, and other charges. She has chosen not to have a jury trial, leaving her fate in the hands of Judge Albert J. Cepparulo. Cepparulo said he expected testimony to conclude late Tuesday or Wednesday.

Detectives tracked Olenchock through her cellphone, obtaining a court order to "ping" the location of her phone in Tennessee.

Two days after the Oct. 17 slaying, Bucks County Detective David Kemmerer and Bristol Township Detective Jack Slattery eased their rented car beside a white Mazda Miata convertible in a Johnson City parking lot, Kemmerer testified. Inside, he said, sat Olenchock and her new boyfriend.

Olenchock first tried to pin the killing on a large African American man who she said "looked like Mr. Clean" and forced her at gunpoint to beat her mother with the bat, Kemmerer said.

But when the detective confronted Olenchock with her mother's dying statement, asking her to "show some remorse," she confessed, Kemmerer testified.

"We may never have heard those words but for Kim Venose's extraordinary efforts to save her own life," Sweeney said.

In her handwritten confession, Olenchock complained that her mother had refused to move with her to Tennessee and had stolen large sums of her savings to buy drugs. She said her mother was associated with a motorcycle gang and feared retaliation if she left.

The slaying mystified area advocates for the homeless, Kemmerer said, who described the mother-daughter relationship "as being very loving and caring."

Tom Smith, a friend who said Venose sometimes babysat his 5-year-old son, described a lighthearted supper with the pair the night before the killing at a nearby Friendly's restaurant. Smith testified that he was struck by Olenchock's free spending, saying she had urged her mother "to order anything she wanted."

During the meal, Smith said, Olenchock "was on the phone, texting all night."

And when they parted, Smith said, Olenchock made what he took to be a casual remark at the time.

The women needed to stop on the way back to camp, she told him. They needed more kerosene.

Bucks homeless homicide trial starts