Fast acquittal ends 19-year wait for grieving Pinellas family

After so many years of waiting, the end came too quickly.

Pat Gicking waited 18 years from the day in 1991 that she'd gotten the call that the body of her eldest child had been found in the woods of northeast Pennsylvania. Eighteen years passed before the afternoon in July 2009 when officials from Pennsylvania came to her St. Petersburg home to tell her someone had been charged with the rape and murder of her 24-year-old daughter Laura Ronning.

Gicking waited another year for the trial of Jeffrey Plishka to start, waited through two weeks of jury selection, and another week and a half of testimony. She didn't have to wait long for the verdict.

Tuesday night, after three hours and 20 minutes of deliberation, part of which was spent ordering dinner, the jury returned a not guilty verdict on all counts.

Gicking's daughter collapsed. Gicking and her husband John, Laura's stepfather, were stunned.

They had misgivings during the trial, the first they ever sat through in person — the prosecutor seemed outmanned by the defense, they thought. But they had "prayed for a right verdict," Gicking said.

"The man is guilty. He killed my daughter and now he's getting away with it," Gicking said as she left the courthouse Tuesday.

On July 27, 1991, Laura Ronning was a counselor at Camp Cayuga near Honesdale, Pa., when she went for a walk to nearby falls on her day off. Her partially clad body was found the next day in the woods. She had been shot in the head.

In the end, the prosecution's case was undone by the same evidence investigators had amassed to bring the case last year.

In charging Plishka, 47, police had pointed to blood on the tip of the barrel of a rifle seized from Plishka's home 15 months after the murder. The blood was not an exact match to Ronning, the indictment said, but "Ronning could not be excluded as the source of the blood."

But two forensics experts, one of them called by Wayne County District Attorney Michael Lehutsky, said the .22-caliber bullet found in Ronning's head and the casing found near her body did not come from the weapon seized from Plishka.

Scrapings from under Ronning's fingernails revealed the DNA of three men, but none of them conclusively matched Plishka's. This enabled his defense team to suggest that the real killers were still at large.

What was left was a series of peculiar statements Plishka made shortly after the killing, when he told police he had seen Ronning near the falls, and in an interview in May 2009, when he said twice, "I hope I didn't kill that girl."

In the same interview he told police, "I remember that f---ing b---- never waved to me," according to the indictment.

A fellow jail inmate testified that Plishka had told him he had sexual contact with Ronning, that she had made fun of him and he had become angry.

At trial though, Plishka's father, Paul, a renowned bass singer for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, testified that his son's mental disabilities led him to say things that he knew nothing about.

"The case should never have been brought to trial," defense attorney Lee Krause said.

Lehutsky, the district attorney, insisted there was enough evidence to bring the case, but acknowledged "the case is closed."

Wednesday morning, the Gickings were still in the room at the Comfort Inn where Pat had stayed every year she had returned to Honesdale on the anniversary of the killing. Those trips had always included a vigil at the roadside cross she erected in Laura's memory.

The cross was taken down for the trial when the jury was brought to the murder scene.

"We're not going to put the cross back up," Gicking said. "It's somewhere in the courthouse, but we'll never come here again.

"It's enough," she said. "We know who did it."

Before she left town, a local landscaper gave Gicking a rose bush to take home to Florida.

"To remember that the town of Honesdale is with us — that they care," Gicking said.

She said she was eager to leave.

"I want to get home. I miss my boys. I miss my dog and cat," she said. "I want to get somewhere I feel safe and start again."

Bill Duryea can be reached at duryea@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8770. Information from the Associated Press and the Wayne Independent was used in this report.