This website is an offshoot of a research project, tentatively titled To and From Bellefonte: An Innocent Man, an Unsolved Murder, and the Man in the Shadows. My primary goal for this project is to pursue a pardon for William K. Wilson, who was wrongly convicted and executed for the murder of Rose Haber.

Its origins are in a larger project on this history of the death penalty in Pittsburgh, titled State Killings in the Steel City, as part of which I researched the execution of William Wilson for the murder of Rose Haber. In the course of that original research, I developed considerable doubt about Wilson’s guilt.

More recently, I have returned to Wilson’s case and investigated it much more closely, including reading the trial transcript, obtaining the available public record, and reviewing the entire newspaper record. Doing so has strengthened my belief that Wilson is innocent.

Unexpectedly, it also led me to investigate the possibility that Hoy Houck, who was convicted of numerous assaults on girls and women in Central Pennsylvania in 1940 and 1941, had instead murdered Rose Haber. Though the available record makes a legal conclusion to this effect unlikely, there is a compelling case to be made that Houck is responsible for killing Rose Haber.

Even more unexpectedly, researching the many assaults committed by Houck led me to the still-unsolved murder of Rachel Taylor in State College in 1940. The available record related to that case is quite limited, though the circumstances of her murder do raise the possibility of Houck’s involvement.