Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Friends fondly recall murder victim
Denise Barger was slain in her Tredyffrin home June 17, 2016
TREDYFFRIN » Ask those who treasured Denise Barger what they remember most fondly about her and chances are the word “laughter” will feature prominently.
“There was lots of laughter,” said one of those friends, thinking back to the days before June 17, 2016, the day the 62-yearold widow died in her home in Tredyffrin. “She was smart as a whip, as smart as they come, and we had a rapport with each other that just made us laugh.”
Said another woman: “She had a wonderful sense of humor — impish, sly, very quick witted. There was a lot of fun with her. Word games, inside jokes, You always laughed when you were with her.”
One imagines that it is partly the memory of that laughter that guides those friends through the days since Barger’s death. The loss of Barger they feel is profound, but made only more so because of the way she died.
Barger was brutally beaten to death in the second floor bedroom of her home in the Daylesford section of Berwyn, two years ago Sunday. When she was discovered, the room had blood
throughout, on the walls and carpet, and Barger herself was lying in a pool of her own blood. The cause of death was blunt force trauma, meaning that she was beaten to death with blows to her head and face.
In the months since she was murdered, no one has been arrested and charged with killing her, although police investigators from the Tredyffrin Police Department and the Chester County Detectives have identified a “person of interest” in the case — a neighbor of Barger’s with whom she had had disagreements, including the suspicion of gunfire coming from his property, next to theirs.
The Citizens Crime Commission of the Delaware Valley has offered a reward of $100,000 for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the person who murdered Barger.
Last week, two women spoke to the Daily Local News about Barger’s friendship and their thoughts about her life, and death. They did so only with the strict condition that they would remain anonymous. Both said independently of one another that they are concerned about their safety if identified because their friend’s killer remains at large.
In separate interviews, the two women were asked how they met Barger, what they remembered about her, and their feelings about the lack of an arrest in the case.
The first woman said she first encountered Barger through work, and later became friends outside their offices.
“She was super intelligent, but not a show-off,” the woman said from her
home in the Philadelphia area. “She wasn’t an outspoken person, not a loud person. She was understated, but very quick witted.”
Barger, the friend said, was also among the most generous people she had ever met, with both her friendship and her possessions. She recalled a day when Barger drove to pick her up for an excursion in a brand new car, the kind of luxury model with windshield wipers on the headlights.
“She showed me all the features, walked me around the car, then handed me the keys and said, ‘Here, you drive,’ “the woman remembered. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding me.’ But she just said, ‘Get in the car and drive. Let’s go.’ The only other person who would trust me like that is my sister.”
Barger was equally as generous with the home she and her husband, Thomas Barger, who died at age 64 in March 2016, three months before her murder, purchased in Avalon, N.J.
“It was the happiest day of her life when they got that shore house,” the first woman said. “She said she always wanted a house of her own at the shore. She was over-the-top, and spent as much time there as possible. But she was very generous with that house. They shared it. They didn’t keep it to themselves.”
The second woman echoed those thoughts, recalling how often Barger would have her extended family at the Avalon home, and how today the house still rings with her spirit. “You can’t walk in there and not feel the two of them,” she said.
In an interview last Wednesday, the woman said she had met Barger while she was walking her dog in the township, a Norfolk terrier.
“That’s the cutest dog I’ve ever seen,” the woman exclaimed, and Barger was immediately drawn to her.
“She was a righteous person,” said the second woman, meaning not so much of the religious sense as the principled one.
“She and Tom were grounded in ethics,” she said. “What’s right and what’s wrong. They were solid people who always looked to do the right thing. They moved through the world guided by a great kindness.”
When Thomas Barger died, the second woman said, her friend became determined not to let her grief overcome her, but decided she had to leave the home on Heatherstone Drive they shared. “I the three months afterwards, she made such a remarkable effort to be brave and put one foot in front of the other, and make her life move forward,” the woman said. “She told me, ‘I have decided that I have to turn the page. I have to be productive and I have to be happy.’”
That effort ended the night of June 17, when someone entered the house and attacked her in her bedroom. At the time, Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan said Barger was “targeted. This does not appear to be a random attack.”
According to a search warrant that was executed five days after her death, police investigators quickly focused their attention on Barger’s next-door neighbor, David Bookstaber, an Air Force veteran, Yale graduate, financial and engineering consultant, and expert marksman. The warrant referred to him as a “person of interest” in her death.
He has never been charged in the murder, and has not publicly been identified as a suspect.
The eight-page long warrant stated that police found a trail of blood running from Barger’s bedroom, where her body was found, out a back door, across her yard, to a fence separating her house from Bookstaber’s, and eventually up to the garage door of his house.
County Detective Gary Lynch, a forensic evidence specialist, said Barger had suffered severe head trauma, and that there was blood throughout the room — under her body, on the walls, and in bloody footprints on the carpet. When he inspected the door that Gasparo had found open, he said the inside handle had blood on it.
Lynch, along with county Detective Ken Beam, another forensic expert, was able to track a trail of blood from the rear deck of the house across the grass lawn to the wooden post and rail fence that runs along the property boundary with Bookstaber’s home next door. In conducting a later search of that property, they detected what they thought was blood on a sink in the garage and a light switch near the sink. That substance later turned out not to be blood.
During that search, Balchunis said he also spotted a pair of Sperry boat shoes in a mudroom of the house, just outside the garage area. One of the shoes had a sole, while the other sole was missing. Beam reported seeing similar shoe patterns in blood on Barger’s bedroom floor.
In his search warrant application, which was used to retrieve the boat shoes, computers, and surveillance data from Bookstaber’s home, Balchunis wrote that when he and county Detective Kristen Lund interviewed Bookstaber at his home, he said that his hand
was swollen after be came in contact with poison ivy two days before.
At some point they were joined by Beam, who noticed that the swollen knuckles did not how bruising, indicating a recent injury. Beam opined that the injury was consistent with forceful striking of the fist. Bookstaber’s wife told Balchunis and Lund that she had not seen any signs of poison ivy or injuries to her husband’s hands in the days prior to Barger’s death, and that she had slept in a separate bedroom from him the night of June 16 and 17.
When investigators were taking Bookstaber to the Tredyffrin police station to be fingerprinted, he told them that his hand was beginning to hurt and that perhaps he had banged it into something.
Bookstaber was known to Tredyffrin police from an earlier incident. In July 2014, he had been arrested and charged with another incident involving gunshots at his property. He was charged with recklessly endangering another person and disorderly conduct after complaints, although he told police at the time that the noises were fireworks and not gunshots. Those charges were later withdrawn and records of the arrest expunged, according to Bookstaber’s petition.
Barger had also complained to police about possible gunfire coming from the property. An investigation into those complaints could not determine whether Bookstaber had been firing guns on his property in violation of township ordinances or not.
Bookstaber’s attorney, Joseph P. Green Jr. of West Chester, has declined to comment on the matter to the Daily Local News. He has told other publications that his client had nothing
to do with Barger’s murder, and that the evidence cited in the search warrant was more than 18 months old.
“This is an ongoing investigation,” declared First Assistant District Attorney Michael Noone last week. “As demonstrated by recent arrests in murder cases that were months and years old, law enforcement in Chester County tirelessly works to bring justice to victims and closure to families.
“The person responsible for this heinous murder will be held accountable and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” he said. “Anyone with information should contact the Chester County Detectives or the Tredyffrin Township police.”
Both of Barger’s friends told the Daily Local News that they continued to hold out hope that an arrest would be made soon.
“When I used to hear people whose loved ones had died saying they wanted closure, I would always think, ‘What difference does it make? Your love one is still gone. But I get it now - it’s very difficult to put it to rest without knowing who and why, the work friend said. “It is like you are always waiting.”
The dog lover also said she wanted someone brought to justice for the “unspeakable act” of her murder. But she said she had found comfort in the meantime though Barger herself.
“She did appear to me in a dream,” she said. “There she was, just the littlest thing, only 5-feet-1. I got to hug her. I could feel the sensation of her in my dream.
“I got to say, ‘I love you so much,” the friend said. “That comforted me.”