No contact with ex-girlfriend, judge tells defendant

WEST CHESTER » The Common Pleas Court judge overseeing the case of a former Tredyffrin man identified by authorities as a “person of interest” in the unsolved 2016 homicide of a Berwyn widow now charged with assaulting his erstwhile girlfriend has rejected a request by the prosecution to revoke the man’s bail while he awaits trial next month of the charges.

Instead, Judge Patrick Carmody ordered the man, David Bookstaber, to have no commu

nication or contact with the woman, who has told authorities that he coached her on how to convince authorities that the allegations of assault she had levied against him were fabricated.

“I don’t think he’s going to flee, and I don’t know what the danger (to the community) is,” said Carmody during a lengthy hearing Friday involving both the assault charges and new allegations of intimidating a witness and hindering apprehension filed last week. “I have been dealing with him for years, and he’s always complied with bail. He has showed up for every hearing.”

But Carmody also said he would require Bookstaber to wear an ankle bracelet and be on electronic monitoring, be restricted to where he can and cannot go before the trial starts, and refrain from deleting any information from his computer files that could be used as evidence that he had provided his girlfriend with “scripts” to use in her discussion of the case.

“I just want to be comfortable that the two are kept apart,” the judge said.

In a pair of motions filed last week, Assistant District Attorney Michelle Thurstlic-O’Neill alleged that during discussions in which she was being prepped for Bookstaber’s trial, Alicia Rosato, Bookstaber’s onagain, off-again girlfriend, let it be known that she and Bookstaber had collaborated on a story that would make it seem as though her accusations of being held against her will with handcuffs while being assaulted by Bookstaber had been a product of her emotional and mental health issues, and that charges against him should be withdrawn.

In an interview she gave to a Daily Local News reporter in December, a year after the incident at Bookstaber’s rented townhouse in Tredyffrin, Rosato maintained that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder symptoms she suffered from had made her imagine that Bookstaber, with whom she was living, had tried to harm her the night of the incident.

“I was very confused that night,” said Rosato, claiming she was experiencing a “dissociative event” the night of the incident. “I didn’t understand what was happening. He was trying to stop me from hurting, not only myself, but him.”

“David was only trying his best to help me,” she said in the December 2019 interview that came on the one-year anniversary of the incident. “I know he was not trying to harm me. David is the gentlest man I know.”

Thurstlic-O’Neill argued before Carmody that the new charges filed on Thursday gave Bookstaber a motive to flee the county before his trial, which is scheduled to begin Aug. 3 at the Chester County Justice Center. She also said that Bookstaber apparently had sufficient means to abscond, and might tamper with evidence on his computer that would substantiate Rosato’s claim of being scripted in her conversations with police and prosecutors.

“This is not your typical domestic violence victim saying, ‘I don’t want to testify,’” Thurstlic-O’Neill said. “This is a defendant generating information for his own defense.”

But the hearing also included an argument by Bookstaber’s attorney, Joseph P. Green Jr. of West Chester, that emails detectives had taken from Rosato’s computer actually showed that she was behind the move to tell authorities about fabricating the story of the assault.

“This is all created by Ms. Rosato and sent to Mr. Bookstaber to help her with,” Green told the judge. “This was her idea. She started this and sent it to him to edit. We are going off into an Alicia Rosato sideshow.”

Bookstaber is the man who Tredyffrin police and Chester County Detectives have investigated as part of their probe into the 2016 beating death of 62-yearold Denise Barger, who lived alone in a house next door to Bookstaber’s former home after her husband’s death and who had complained to police about his behavior before her murder.

He has not been charged in that homicide, and the investigation into Barger’s death continues.

In the assault case involving Rosato, Bookstaber was arrested on Dec. 5, 2018 after he allegedly handcuffed Rosato, restrained her on a bed for about six hours, and held a pillow over her mouth causing her twice to pass out. Rosato had called Tredyffrin police to Bookstaber’s townhouse on West Golf Club Lane after Bookstaber allegedly released her from the restraints.

After his arrest, in the spring of 2019 Bookstaber and Rosato resumed their relationship, according to the bail motion. That fall, she began contacting authorities in Tredyffrin and the D.A’s Office, telling people she spoke with the she was mistaken in her original description of the events, and that Bookstaber had, in fact, not assaulted her. She also made allegations of misconduct by police in asking that the charges against Bookstaber be dropped.

In a meeting with members of the D.A.’s Office, county detectives, and a Tredyffrin officer at the Chester County Justice Center on Monday, however, as the assault case was being prepped for trial, Rosato dropped the bombshell that Bookstaber had coached her through the interviews.

“Ms. Rosato explained that the aforementioned recanting statements were based on a ‘script’ that (Bookstaber) had shared with her via his (email) account. Ms. Rosato explained that Mr. Bookstaber would share these documents with her via Google Drive, and that they would collaboratively edit them,” according to O’Neill’s motion.

Rosato said that at the time she was contacting police, the prosecution, and the media, she was financially dependent on (Bookstaber) and that he “had made it clear that his continued support was conditioned on her continuing to ‘help him out.’”

Bookstaber, 54, now of Idaho Falls, Idaho, did not attend the bail hearing on Friday in person, but listened in on a telephone conference line. He has been quarantining in the area ahead of his trial.

Just selection for that proceedings is set for Aug. 3. Carmody bristled when Green suggested that because of the new information about Rosato being “coached” and the “thousands” of text messages Rosato had sent his client over the past months, the trial may last as long as two weeks.

“I want this to be a weeklong trial,” the judge declared. “Otherwise, I think it would be impossible to get a jury” because of COVID-19 fears.