Man agrees to plea deal in ’79 death

By Ed Runyan

The problem with the case was that no witness saw the knife that caused the victim’s death, the prosecutor said.

WARREN — Ronald Stahlman stood before Judge Andrew Logan and the family of Bernard Williamson and admitted he was there the night Williamson died of nine stab wounds but said Williamson’s death was “beyond my control.”

Williamson, 18, was found dead at the corner of Main Avenue and Fulton Street Southwest on April 29, 1979.

Stahlman, 56, pleaded guilty Wednesday morning to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to one to 10 years in prison.

He was on trial in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court on Monday and Tuesday on a charge of murder, and could have gotten 15 years to life if he had been convicted by the jury.

But before testimony could resume Wednesday morning, Stahlman agreed to a plea bargain that puts the length of his incarceration into the hands of the state parole board.

“I apologize to the Williamson family and wish there was something I could do, but I can’t,” Stahlman said.

Roger Collins, the other man involved in the fight, got six months in jail because he passed a lie-detector test, said Chris Becker, an assistant Trumbull County prosecutor. Becker noted that the results of that lie-detector test were not admissible in Stahlman’s trial.

Collins had turned himself in to police about a week after Williamson’s death and reached a plea bargain of his own that resulted in the six-month jail term.

Stahlman fled from Ohio and couldn’t be located for nearly 30 years. His wife and two small children joined him out west several months after the crime, and the family lived under the name O’Neil, settling finally in Payson, Ariz., north of Phoenix, for about the past 15 years.

Police finally tracked the family down by using Social Security records showing that the Stahlmans changed their daughters’ last names on their Social Security cards in 1993 from Stahlman to O’Neil.

Becker said the case against Stahlman was circumstantial because not one witness could place a knife in the hands of any of the three men involved in the early-morning fight that resulted from a minor traffic accident.

“What happened that night, unfortunately, nobody knows,” Becker said later Wednesday. “One of the two [Collins or Stahlman] had to stab him [Williamson], but which one, I can’t venture a guess.”

Collins testified Tuesday that he was driving extremely drunk and apparently struck Williamson’s car. Williamson confronted him about it, and a fight began that resulted in Collins’ getting beaten up and possibly knocked unconscious, Collins said.

When he awoke, Collins said, he had a cut on his arm, and Williamson was sitting next to his car, apparently wounded.

A witness said he saw Williamson beating up a man with short hair and then seeing a second man with longer hair get involved. Stahlman was described as having longer hair at the time, but Tracey Laslo, Stahlman’s defense attorney, tried to show that Collins’ hair also was long.

Jack Williamson, Bernard Williamson’s older brother, said he and his seven brothers and one sister would have preferred to see the case go to the jury, but “under the circumstances, we had to take it.”

The circumstances were that all of the blood evidence, clothing and other physical evidence from the case were lost by a Cleveland forensic lab that went out of business in 1979, Becker said.

“Something’s better than nothing,” Jack Williamson said.

Bernard Williamson, who had attended Warren Western Reserve High School, had just started working at American Welding in Warren before his death, his family said.

Bernard Wiliamson, the youngest of 10 children, was nicknamed “Punkin,” his sister, Carol Williamson, said. The family lived on Karl Avenue in Warren Township.

Because Stahlman’s crime occurred before 1996, he had to be sentenced under Ohio law that existed then, court officials said. Under current law, a judge would sentence a defendant to a specific number of years for an involuntary-manslaughter conviction. Before 1996, a range of years would be ordered, and a parole board would determine how many of those years must be served.

Stahlman will be eligible for shock probation after just six months in prison, but the decision on shock probation is made by the common pleas judge who handled his case, Becker said, adding that he doesn’t believe Judge Logan would allow shock probation in this case.

Shock probation provides the potential for extremely early release based on a determination that prison has shocked the offender to a degree that he has learned from his error and is unlikely to commit another serious offense.

runyan@vindy.com