By all accounts, Mardell Rita Eames had been a breathtakingly beautiful woman in her youth. "When she was younger she was a stunner," Dennehy told Crime Library in a recent interview. "I've seen pictures of this gal when she was 30 and she was absolutely knock-your-socks off, drop-dead gorgeous."

She was, Dennehy has concluded, a woman who easily attracted the attention of men, and there was no reason to believe that their attention discomfited her. If anything, Dennehy said, she seemed to find solace and support in their company. As a young woman, she married a moderately successful local business owner, a baker.

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It's not clear precisely how she struck up her friendship with the boisterous priest. Dennehy contends that they may have first developed an affinity for each other while both were still in their thirties, both bound by their respective vows, when Father Leo helped Mardell and her then-husband arrange for the adoption of their son.

It is clear, however, that their friendship continued and apparently deepened as the years passed, as Mardell became single again, and throughout her courtship and marriage to David Stewart. By all accounts, it was a special relationship. Eames, who moved in with her ailing mother after the slaying, could not be reached for comment. But during David Stewart's trial for the Heineman slaying, Mardell Rita Eames Stewart testified that she spent much of her free time with the priest, and according to The Morning Call, she told the court that she even had a bed set aside for her at the rectory at St. Mauritius, although she insisted that it was just a place for her to sleep on occasion and nothing more. All she would ever acknowledge was "a fond feeling" for the priest.

The relationship never sat well with Stewart, Dennehy said. In many respects, Mardell Eames and David Stewart were an odd match. She was outgoing and exuberant. He was as brittle as the birches in autumn, a former engineer whose first marriage had ended in grief and who lived alone in a small house on a 30-some-odd-acre tract of scree and sorry ground in the hills outside of Berwick, supplementing his retirement income with a small truck patch.

The years had been hard on Stewart. Even as a young man, he was not the picture of health. A hunting accident as a kid had left him with a game leg, and that had kept him out of the military during the Second World War. All the same, Stewart, who had what Dennehy described as a real penchant for plastics, made a contribution during the war, traveling to England and Ireland as a civilian contractor, designing, manufacturing and installing turrets for the Army Air Corps long-range bombers. It was, Dennehy said, a task Stewart took so that he insisted that his service would later become a factor in the deadly showdown with Heineman.

By 1990, though he was still active, he was nearing seventy and his vigor was waning even more. "I wouldn't call him spry and vigorous," Dennehy said. "I mean, he wasn't like what I would call that big of a guy and he didn't have a lot of muscle on him, but he got around just fine."

"He would occasionally sell vegetables that he grew in his truck patch...out of the back of his station wagon," Dennehy recalled. "He could pick up a watermelon and...carry it into somebody's house from a car, so he was in decent physical shape, (but) like I said, he wasn't a big strong guy."

He and Mardell did share one thing, however. They both enjoyed a drink.