Woman wants charges dropped against murder case figure
WEST CHESTER >> The woman who authorities said had been assaulted by a former Tredyffrin man identified by authorities as a person of interest in the unsolved 2016 homicide of a Berwyn widow says she was mistaken about the events that led to his arrest on felony charges, and that she now believes that her then-boyfriend was trying to help her, not harm her.
“I was very confused that night,” said the woman, who says she suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and 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,” the woman said in an interview on Wednesday, coincidentally the one-year anniversary of the incident. “I know he was not trying to harm me. David is the gentlest man I know.”
“David” is David Bookstaber, the man who Tredyffrin police and Chester County Detectives have investigated as part of their probe into the 2016 beating death of 62-year-old Denise Barger, who lived alone in a house next door to Bookstaber’s former home and who had complained to police about his behavior before her murder.
The woman, who had dated Bookstaber after he separated from his now former wife, contends that even though she has realized that her hazy description of what happened to her was incorrect, Chester County District Attorney officials have repeatedly refused her request to withdraw the criminal charges against Bookstaber. Instead, she said, they are plowing ahead with plans to try him for the incident, at which she would be called to testify.
She also said the top leaders of the office declined to meet with her to discuss her concerns, and that a secretary for District Attorney Tom Hogan and First Assistant District Attorney Michael Noone had told her that they would not accept voicemail messages from her.
“I made it very, very clear” that she did not want the criminal charges against Bookstaber to proceed, she said. “Indeed, I will be testifying on behalf of the defense” if the case goes to trial. “To call me a hostile witness would be an understatement.”
Hogan did not respond to a request for comment on the woman’s accusations. Noone referred the matter to Chief Deputy District Attorney Michelle Frei, who is the point person on domestic abuse cases in the county and who the woman said she met with for two hours in October — the last time she heard from anyone connected with the prosecution.
In an email, Frei declined to comment specifically on the matter, saying the case was pending and an investigation continuing. However, Frei noted that domestic violence cases often involve victims who recant or want charges dismissed for various reasons, but proceed regardless.
“For example, the victim may be dependent upon their attacker, they may still be in love with their attacker, or they may still be victimized by their attacker,” she wrote. “That is why law enforcement does not rely solely upon the statement of the victim in these prosecutions. Domestic violence is a very serious crime and charges are not withdrawn simply because a victim changes their mind, often due to the undue influence of their attacker.”
The case is on Common Pleas Judge Patrick Carmody’s trial list for December. A status hearing on his cases is set for next week.
The Daily Local News is withholding the name of the woman — a 43-year-old mother of one who now lives in Montgomery County — at her request because of the nature of the case.
Bookstaber now lives
in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and could not be reached for comment. His attorney, Joseph P. Green Jr., of West Chester, did not comment specifically on the woman’s contentions after he was informed of them. “We are looking forward to a prompt resolution of this case,” he said Monday. Bookstaber is charged with felony aggravated assault and strangulation, among other counts.
In the interview last Wednesday that she initiated, the woman said that the night and morning of the incident — Dec. 4 and Dec. 5, 2018 — she was having what she characterized as a psychological episode associated with her diagnosis of PTSD, which she had developed from a childhood assault. She said her memory of the event remained sketchy. The scenario she painted for police on the morning she called 9-1-1 and reported that Bookstaber had assaulted her and restrained her with handcuffs, at one point holding a pillow over her face so she could not scream for help, was inaccurate, she contends.
Instead, she said that Bookstaber, who was aware of her mental health condition, was trying to keep her calm and restrained so that she would not lash out at him or try to harm herself.
When she was able to recover more of her memory of the night through her counseling sessions with a therapist, she said she went first to Tredyffrin police and then to the DA’s Office. “I’ve told them to drop all the charges,” she said, but they did not, in significant part because of Bookstaber’s connection to Barger’s murder.
“The DA is under political pressure for the murder of this woman,” she said. “They have been out for him ever since.”
When a family member found Barger’s lifeless and bloody body on June 17, 2016 in the second floor bedroom of the home on Heatherstone Drive In Berwyn, Bookstaber was her next-door neighbor and had had previous confrontations with her over allegedly shooting guns on his property, which she felt had put her in danger.
He was deemed a “person of interest” after police investigators found a trail of blood leading out of Barger’s home that seemed to end on Bookstaber’s property, and noticed injuries to one of his hands. He has not been named a formal suspect in her murder, and has not been charged with any crime involving her death, however.
After his arrest on the assault charges last December, Deputy District Attorney Carlos Barraza, who is the prosecutor assigned to the open investigation into Barger’s murder, said that Bookstaber’s arrest in the domestic assault at his new home had no bearing on the investigation into the homicide. “They are unrelated,” he said at the time.
The woman in the assault case, said that she had first not known about Bookstaber’s connection with the murder investigation, but later learned of it while they were dating and living together. “At some point I did find out about it. I asked a lot of questions. David is different. But he did not do anything. He just happened to live next door.”
She said she believes that were it not for that connection, the case against him involving the events of Dec. 4, 2018 would not have been pursued by the District Attorney’s Office as aggressively, and that her requests to have the charges withdrawn based on her new recollection of events would have been honored.
The last contact she has had with the DA’s Office, she said, was in November., when she called to speak with either Hogan or Noone and was told that the call would not be sent to their voicemail.
“I am hoping they will do the right thing,” she said in the interview. “It seems so far they are not going to, at least until the new administration comes in,” she said, referring to District Attorney-Elect Deb Ryan. “They are re-victimizing me over and over again. They are ignoring me, which I find appalling.”