Jury Finds Daniels Guilty of Murder

COURT HOUSE — After 12 days of testimony, numerous pieces of evidence and photos, a Cape May County jury found Gerald Daniels guilty of murder shortly before 4:30 p.m. on Aug. 13.
The jury, consisting of eight women and four men, determined in one full day of deliberation that Daniels, a 39-year old mentally disabled man, was guilty in stabbing 81-year-old Wallace Savitz to death in his sixth floor apartment of Sandman Towers on the morning of June 14, 2004.
Savitz suffered 157 stab wounds and his throat had been slit. Daniels was arrested for the crime two days later after his fingerprint on a bloody frying pan linked him to the scene.
“One man’s life was taken and the remains of another man’s hangs in the balance,” said defense attorney Mary Pfeifle during closing arguments Aug. 10. “No justice is served if Daniels is convicted of a crime he did not commit.”
She offered the jury a timeline, through photographs and the apartment’s security video, which started as Savitz came through the front doors a little after 5:30 p.m. on the evening of June 12.
“It looks like he was going to turn in for the night,” she told the jury as she pointed to a photo with Savitz’s cane by the television and hat perched on a portable radio.
It was then, she said, that someone knocked on his door, room 606.
“He let them in because it was someone he knew,” Pfeifle said. “That person was James Reilly Jr.”
As Daniels’ family sat on one side of the court room and Reilly and his family sat on the other, Pfeifle recounted her client’s earlier testimony that names Reilly Jr., Savitz’s stepson and the initial focus of the investigation, as the killer.
Daniels, who had a habit of asking his fellow residents for money and cigarettes, testified that he was on the sixth floor looking for handouts when he saw Reilly walk out of Savitz’s apartment.
After going in to investigate and attempting a rescue effort, Daniels said that Reily attacked him with a frying pan and then threatened to kill his mother and sister if he told anyone what he had seen.
Pfeifle said that both men then fled down the stairwell.
She showed the jurors photographs of the suspected blood trail in a stairwell. Detective William Henfey of the county Prosecutor’s Office had described on the fourth day of the trial how he photographed the crime scene as it appeared that day, including what he suspected to be blood trail in the stairwell, beginning at the top of the sixth floor and running to the first of Sandman towers.
Daniels lived in room 203 on the second floor of the building, while Reilly Jr., lived in room 103 on the first floor.
Henfey had said he noticed that the trail leading down the stairwell was left on every other step. He testified that he noticed that the stains were different from the second to the first floor then there were from the sixth to the second.
Pfeifle argued that the trail was poorly photographed and that there was no comparison in stains.
“Overlapping trails?” she asked. “We have no way of knowing.”
Pfeifle told jurors that she didn’t want to diminish Savitz’s death, a man who survived D-Day but didn’t survive his own retirement.
“The investigation failed him [Savitz],” she said and argued various mistakes by investigators, such as missing photographs, poor quality photos and proving to an investigator that he was mistaken in documenting Daniels’ in the surveillance video.
“This case is riddled with reasonable doubt,” she said and urged the jury to “find Gerald Daniels not guilty. Exercise the prudence, the due care that the state did not.”
Chief Assistant Prosecutor Rob Johnson told the jury that the case was always about murder.
“This murder is not an accident,” he said. “But based on a strong dislike between Daniels and Savitz.”
Johnson said that Savitz “ultimately paid the price” by standing up to Daniels panhandling.
Johnson referred to other tenant’s complaints about Daniel’s habit of asking for money and cigarettes and argued that his behavior was getting more aggressive due to some written complaints about Daniels entering rooms uninvited.
According to Johnson, those complaints were getting Daniels in trouble.
“[Savitz] didn’t get to fill out his complaint, because Gerald Daniels killed him,” he told the jury.
The prosecution also argued that because Daniels lied to the police during the investigation, would also try and deceive a jury. His story he said was filled with unlikely coincidences.
“A rescue effort takes place while the real killer watches?” Johnson asked of Daniels’ testimony. “He didn’t tell his mother or sister of the supposed threats?”
Johnson said that although Savitz’s throat was slit and the muscles that connect the neck to the head severed, Daniels complained he heard someone cry for help.
“Does this look like someone who could have called for help?” asked Johnson as he showed the jury a bloody crime scene photo of Savitz’s body.
“And when he [Daniels] was confronted about inconsistencies, his only response was that ‘people just don’t listen,’’” Johnson told the jury.
“Did it sound right?” Johnson asked the jury of Daniels story. “Did it sound truthful?”
Johnson noted that while Reilly Jr., was the initial focus of the investigation, even providing DNA and finger print samples, “none of James Reilly Jr.’s DNA, none of his blood, none of his genetic code is found in 606.”
Johnson said that even though Savitz can’t speak now, he did a good job helping solve his own murder.
“He complained and now we have a record of that,” said Johnson. “And at 81 years old, he stood there and fought back against his attacker.”
“Because he engaged attacker we have his blood projecting out and tagging the real killer,” Johnson said and pointed to Daniels’ blood spattered navy shirt with a yellow star.
Johnson noted that investigators testified that Savitz’s blood was airborne when it landed on the shirt.
“None of his story, nothing he told you, would explain that,” he said.