Murders by Jehovah's Witnesses

or Why It Might be Unsafe to Marry a Jehovah's Witness

related: JW FAMILY murderers

 

Slain brothers to be laid to rest Saturday

Partner says investment deal is on track

Staff and wire reports
A funeral service for brothers Robert Norris and Mark Norris (below) will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday at a Bear church.
Mark Norris

As Philadelphia police continue to investigate the worst mass shooting there in six years, relatives of two brothers killed, one of them a popular Delaware resident, are making plans to lay them to rest Saturday.

The funeral service for Robert Norris, 41, of Newark, and his brother Mark Norris, 46, of Pilesgrove, N.J., will be at 1 p.m. at Cornerstone United Methodist Church in Bear. Visitation hours will be from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the church, located at 3135 Summit Bridge Road, a church employee said.

Robert Norris was a 15-year veteran of the New Castle County Police, retiring last year to pursue the business venture that ultimately got him killed, police believe. Norris starred on the University of Delaware football team before his law-enforcement career.

The Norris brothers were killed about 8:30 p.m. Monday by 44-year-old Bear resident Vincent Dortch, who went by his middle name, Julius, at a supposed business meeting in a second-floor conference room at the office of Zigzag Net, a marketing company located in a building at the former Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.

Dortch also killed James Reif, 42, of Endicott, N.Y., and critically wounded a fourth man, Zigzag Net employee Patrick Sweeney, 31, of Maple Shade, N.J., before shooting himself to death.

Sweeney was in critical condition Wednesday in a Philadelphia hospital, police said.

New Castle County Police spokesman Cpl. Trinidad Navarro said officers are planning to form a college fund for Robert Norris' three children, who range from 8 to 15 years old.

Meanwhile, a fourth man whom Dortch also had plans to kill said no money had been lost in the real estate investment deal that spurred Dortch's deadly rampage.

Dortch believed that he and two other investors lost money, perhaps a half-million dollars or more, on a plan to turn a former IBM conference center near Binghamton, N.Y., into an entertainment and banquet facility, according to police.

Philadelphia Homicide Lt. Phil Riehl said Dortch had invested his wife's retirement money, but he was uncertain how much that was. Dortch claimed he lost "somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000," Riehl said.

Police had not yet determined if Dortch's claim was true.

Investor Vasantha Dammavalam said the investment group, Watson International, was moving forward with the conference center idea, despite some setbacks.

Watson bought the property, formerly known as Traditions at the Glen, about a year ago for $1.33 million from a company that had bought it from IBM.

The worst flooding in at least 70 years hit the region in June and damaged the property. But Watson had insurance, and the company settled with its insurer about a month ago, Dammavalam said.

"The check has been issued, but it has not been cashed yet," he said Wednesday.

Dammavalam declined to go into specifics, but said Watson's development plan had been "going quite well."

Dammavalam said he was horrified when police told him Tuesday that Dortch had intended to drive to New York and kill him after Monday night's shootings in Philadelphia.

The two other investors, who attended the meeting with Dortch but weren't harmed, talked Dortch out of it, police said.

The shootings occurred after Dortch got the three men, all Watson International executives, together under the pretense that he had another investor, police said.

Dammavalam said he had been on a conference call at the beginning of the meeting, but was disconnected before Dortch opened fire.

Dortch and his wife, Stephanie, had been members of the Congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses in Elkton, Md., since it was founded a year and a half ago, said Minister John Higgins.

Always "jolly" and wearing a smile, Dortch showed up almost every Sunday, as well as for meetings on Mondays and Bible study on Wednesdays, Higgins said.

The 117-member congregation is shocked and taken aback, Higgins said. The Dortches always seemed happy.

"We just don't know what makes people snap sometimes," Higgins said. "It's a shame. It's a sorry shame."

 

August 31, 2005

Murder haunts family, Jehovahs
 

By Robert Lowell
Staff Writer

(Aug 31): Editor's note: This is the first in an occasional series on historic local crimes.

As a child, Diane Morton of White Rock feared the man jailed for killing her grandfather would return to kill her and her family.

“I was scared to death as a kid he would get out and come after us,” she said.

Her grandfather, E. Dean Pray, owner of a North Windham garage, was gunned down on Aug. 20, 1940, by Arthur F. Cox of Philadelphia, a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses religious order. Convicted of murder, Cox was committed to Thomaston State Prison on Jan. 13, 1942, to serve a life sentence.


The murder

E. Dean Pray had been working in his garage about 2 p.m. on a Tuesday when three members of the religious order went to his garage. Kenneth Carr, 23, of Cape Elizabeth, and Verle Adams Garfein, 18, of Portland, accompanied Cox to Pray’s garage apparently to play recordings on a phonograph.

Pray and Carr argued and, according to old newspaper accounts, Cox fired four shots from a .22 caliber six-shooter when Pray was driving them out of his garage. A witness said Pray, a deputy sheriff, staggered 100 feet in an attempt to get his gun from his car. He bled to death on the way to the hospital.

Pray’s 13-year old son, Dean Pray, was working in the garage that day as was mechanic Clyde Elder, who drove Pray to the hospital. The younger Pray, Elder, Cox and Carr are dead.

The victim, a veteran of World War I, was widely known in Windham. Dean Pray of Naples said his grandfather started the North Windham fire station and a plaque there bears his name. A funeral with an honor guard at the North Windham Union Church drew 1,000 mourners.

The murder fueled attacks on Jehovah's Witnesses. After the murder, a Kingdom Hall in Portland was raided by authorities, and there were citizen demonstrations.

Brad Poland of Gorham, a church leader known as an "elder," said Jehovah’s Witnesses are politically neutral and neutrality had fueled resentment nationwide at that time. He said that in 1940 the U.S. Supreme Court made it mandatory for Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the flag, but the justices later reversed the decision.

"That was the tinderbox that lit this up,” Poland said.


Murder's effect on family

Except for the Pray family, the murder has been largely forgotten. Pray’s grandson said that everyone in Windham once knew the name and the murder story until about 10 years ago.

The murder was rarely mentioned over the years in the Pray family, but it affected three generations. “My father ran to get (his wife),” said Morton, referring to his mother. “He saw the shooting.”

Morton's brother, Dean Pray, also said his dad never talked about it. “He was hurt so much he didn’t tell us about it,” he said.

Pray’s widow, Gertrude, never mentioned it, either. "I never remember hearing her talk about it,” Morton said of her grandmother.

David Bushley of Windham, whose wife, Sandy, is a granddaughter of the victim, said the family testified against Cox every time he came up for parole. "To walk in like that and do it to a sheriff,” Bushley said of the murderer.

Bushley said his father-in-law ran the garage as a kid after the murder. “He took over pumping gas, working for his mother,” Bushley said.

“I think it affected him more than people realized,” Bushley said of his father-in-law. “It’s pretty horrendous.”

Morton said the murder caused problems for her dad late in his life, but she declined to say more. She said in those days there wasn’t counseling available. “Everything was just kept in,” Morton said.

She remembered reading the clippings of the murder. Her fears ended when Cox committed suicide in prison, but she thinks there are still traces of fear among the older generation. “I don’t fear them. They still come back,” she said of Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on her door in Gorham.

Pray said the murder robbed him of a grandfather. “It was so brutal.”

Poland said he understood the grief the murder caused the Pray family, but said Jehovah's Witnesses bring a message of peace to the community.

"We bring a message of good news. You can’t judge an organization by the actions of one man,” he said.


Murder's effect on Jehovah's Witnesses

Poland said they go door-to-door in Windham seven days a week and that response is positive. “People appreciate the good news and the Bible has good news,” he said.

He said he goes out personally two or three days a week in Windham. “It never comes up anymore,” he said of the murder.

Carr, who only was held as a material witness following the murder as was Garfein, didn’t go to prison with Cox. Poland said Carr was a lifelong Jehovah’s Witness and worked in the ministry until he died. Poland had many conversations with Carr, and the man only briefly mentioned the shooting incident. “All parties have died,” Poland said.

And Betty Barto of Windham said Jehovah’s Witnesses had smashed the fruit stand of Marie Stevens in North Windham just before Pray was killed. She said Jehovah’s Witnesses were forbidden from coming to Windham after the shooting. But Barto said she didn’t know of any fear of Jehovah’s Witnesses today in Windham.

In 1984, there was a citizen’s request to the Town Council in Windham to hold up construction on a Kingdom Hall in town. At the time, the victim’s son, Dean Pray, said he and Betty Barto were doing everything they could to stop the hall from being built in Windham, according to a July 3, 1984, article in the American Journal.

But Poland said the hall was built in two days in 1985. “It was like an Amish barn raising,” he said.

The family is still uneasy about Jehovah's Witnesses. Morton, who lived for a while as a child near her grandfather’s Texaco gas station, doesn’t want members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to go to her door, but they did this summer.

Some of those Jehovah’s Witnesses, whom she has talked with in the past, were familiar with the murder story. “Can you please not come back,” she asks them.

The grandson, Dean Pray, said Jehovah’s Witnesses last knocked on his door two years ago. When he told them his name, they recognized it.

“You guys shot my grandfather in 1940,” he told them. “Get out. I’ve got nothing to do with you,” he ordered them.

“I’ll continue to do that the rest of my life,” Pray said.
 

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