A 146-Year-Old Case Gets a Fresh Spotlight

Monroe County DA Mike Mancuso and retired Chief Detective Eric J. Kerchner presented a program on their book "Etna: A Murder Out of Time" at Middle Smithfield Township’s 20th annual Memory Makers event on Aug. 8. The unsolved case goes back to Oct. 31, 1880, when 17-year-old Etna Bittenbender was murdered in Hamilton Township. Her gravestone reads, "Murdered by some person, unknown between the hours of 4 and 6 o’clock," per Middle Smithfield Township’s own listing. No one was ever charged, then or since.

Mancuso and Kerchner spent more than eight years applying modern investigative technique to a case that had no surviving case file. They worked from old newspaper accounts, census records, and other historical documents to reconstruct what the original 1880s investigators missed, and traced "long forgotten leads" forward to connect specific suspects to the crime.

They published their findings as a book in 2020, marking the crime’s 140th anniversary. We won’t give any spoilers away here (you have to buy the book!) but per the publisher’s own framing, the two do land on who they believe did it, even without a "case closed" stamp.