By Seamus McGraw
April 14, 2006
LEOLA, Pa. (Crime Library) — Jesse Dee Wise, the young orphan arrested Thursday and charged with brutally beating, strangling and stabbing three generations of his own family, including his grandmother who took him in and his 5-year-old cousin, has had scrapes with the law.
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| Jesse Wise |
But nothing in the 21-year-old's rap sheet could possibly have foreshadowed the massacre he is alleged to have carried out last weekend at his family's prim house in this small Lancaster County town.
According to state police records, Wise, a former supermarket employee and the father of a young daughter who lives with her mother, has been charged with a dozen crimes in the past two years. In fact he was scheduled to appear in court later this month where he was expected to plead guilty to charges of burglary, robbery, weapons possession and reckless endangerment. He also had been charged with agricultural vandalism. And in September, authorities reportedly had to subdue him with a stun gun when they tried to arrest him after he allegedly punched a man in the face at a local fair and stole $20 from him.
But those crimes pale in comparison to the carnage he is alleged to have carried out in the home of his grandparents, who, according to published reports, gave him a place to live after the death of his own parents. Authorities so far have declined to release a motive for the slayings, perhaps the worst mass murder in this once-rural part of Pennsylvania since the infamous Conestoga Massacre nearly 250 years ago when 50 of the so-called Paxton Boys slaughtered six peaceful, Christianized Susquehannock Indians in their homes.
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