Secrets from the Grave

The true crime story of a Pennsylvania murder and the secrets that almost stayed buried—until the victim's body was exhumed twenty years later. ***Please note: This ebook edition does not contain the photos found in the print edition.***

He was a beloved family physician and a ruthless doctor of death who almost got away with murder.

It was a friendly hunting trip—two men kicking back, shooting at clay pigeons on campgrounds near rural Montrose, Pennsylvania. Then, a single shot rang out. Moments later, Marty Dillon, a promising young lawyer, was dead of a gunshot wound to the chest. His friend, Dr. Stephen Scher, later tearfully explained that Dillon had been running with a shotgun after a porcupine, and tripped and fell, accidentally killing himself. But what really happened?

Marty Dillon's violent death was immediately declared an accident by the local coroner in 1976. But as Dillon's body was lowered into the cold ground, did a damning secret, one that would haunt his friends and family for decades, go with him?

* Were rumors of an affair between Dr. Scher and Marty's wife, Pat, true?

* Why did the couple marry so soon after Dillon's death?

* If the shot was self-inflicted, why did the bullet come from Dr. Scher's gun?

* What was it about Dillon's bloody wound that cast suspicion on Scher?

After twenty years of pleading with authorities and finally hiring their own investigators, Dillon's parents persuaded the Pennsylvania State Police to reopen the case. They exhumed Dillon's body—and his decayed remains told the real story of that tragic day two decades earlier. On October 22, 1997, Dr. Stephen Scher was convicted of the murder of Marty Dillon—final justice for a cold-blooded killer who for twenty years thought he had gotten away with murder. Maria Eftimiades recounts the shocking true story in Secrets from the Grave.

© 2014 St. Martin's Paperbacks (Ebook): 9781466868205

Release date

Ebook: 15 April 2014