By  Seamus McGraw

December 18, 2006

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ATHENS, Pa. (Crime Library)  —  Over the course of a career that spanned decades, attorney David Keeffe earned a reputation as a tough but fair litigator, a skilled trial attorney who tended to take cases he believed in.

Though he had handled all kinds of cases, from criminal matters to complex civil cases, he had in recent years, according to other attorneys who had handled cases with him, tended to focus more on tort actions, representing people who believed that they had been wronged either by the system or by another.

Now, authorities are said to be poring over the records of those cases, along with other clues, hoping that something in those records might lead them to find the killer or killers who gunned down the 56-year-old gentleman lawyer and his 60-year-old wife, Carol, in the garage of their mountaintop estate.

So far, authorities have released few details of their probe into the Nov. 17 double slaying. Although Athens Township Police Chief Larry Hurley, who is working with the Pennsylvania State Police in the probe, says his office has received numerous tips, neither he nor state investigators have been willing to share any of them with the public.

Authorities have suggested, however, that one avenue of their probe involves delving into Keeffe's past cases to investigate the possibility that he was executed, along with his wife, either by a disgruntled former client, or an adversary bent on revenge.

It is just one avenue of the investigation, of course, and it is a stunningly daunting task that demands sifting through more than 30 years of documents involving Keeffe, who graduated cum laude from Suffolk Law School in the early 1970s and was admitted to the bar in 1975.

That same year Keeffe returned from Massachusetts to rural Bradford County, where he practiced law in the firm established by Carol's father, Michael DeSisti. DeSisti, who founded the firm in 1946 after returning from World War II, is still listed as the firm's senior member.

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