In fact, Dennehy contends, the couple met in a bar in 1989. In 1990, just seven months before the slaying, David Stewart and Mardell Rita Eames were married. Perhaps there was real love in their marriage. But in later years, David Stewart would insist to his attorney that his wife had married him largely because of the financial security that his pension and his truck farm could offer. One thing is clear, Dennehy said: The relationship between Eames and Stewart changed dramatically the moment they exchanged their vows.

"It was one of those deals where...before David and Mardell got married, every time they got together, it was sex," Dennehy said, recalling his client's account of his marriage. "They got married and that was it. Never had sex again. The night before the wedding was the last time they had sex. Mardell cut him off after that."

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According to Mardell Eames' own account in court, her marriage to David Stewart was a business-hours-only affair. As The Morning Call reported, "Eames said after they were married, she visited Stewart during the day and spent the nights at her mother's home," a few miles away in Berwick. When she did remain in the marital home, Dennehy said, Mardell slept upstairs in what had been the couple's bedroom, while Stewart was relegated to a pullout couch in the living room, a few short steps from the front door.

Though unusual, such arrangements are not unheard of in places like the eastern Pennsylvania coalfields, where multiple generations of a single family often live in close proximity and where the demands of second marriages, particularly second marriages later in life, must be balanced against the responsibilities of a son or daughter for their aging parents.

Still, the arrangement seems to have grated on Stewart. As Dennehy put it, "it became real clear real quickly what had happened," and as he spent his nights, alone on the pullout couch in his living room, it slowly dawned on Stewart that he was, as he later told Dennehy, "an old fool that's just been had."

It didn't ease Stewart's injured pride to hear his friends' mutterings about his new bride, or the rumors they spread about the priest's occasional belligerent outbursts, Dennehy said. "After he married Mardell...people (were) saying, 'Oh man, I can't believe you married her. She's mixed up with this nutty priest that has a history of getting into fights and getting violent when he gets drunk'," the lawyer recounted.

Despite his doubts, it seemed that Stewart was torn about whether it was worth trying to salvage the marriage, Dennehy contends. In fact, he was already beginning to wonder whether it might have been time to end the marriage. "He had mulled the thought over but...he wasn't sure what he was going to do because they had been married less than a year...He hadn't talked to a lawyer or anything like that yet. It was just one of these things that was bugging him and he hadn't made up his mind about anything," Dennehy said. "I'm sure this was in the back of his mind, you know? 'Maybe this is the only way to get away from the situation.'"

To be sure, he was uncomfortable about the amount of time she was spending in Father Leo's company. What's more, Dennehy says, "he wasn't exactly sure where she was all the time at night. She'd say, 'Well, I was over at the priest's and then I went over to my mom's to sleep it off,' and David's thinking, 'Well, cripes, coming back from the priest's place, you'd probably hit my house before your mom's...if you were driving in a straight line."

Those doubts also contributed to a strained relationship with Father Leo. Though Stewart and the priest had direct contact on only a few occasions, when they did, there was always a sense of simmering resentment. The way Stewart described it to Dennehy, the priest would from time to time call the house looking for Mardell, and on a couple of occasions, he simply showed up, strutting through the unlocked door as if he were part of the family. "The guy treated David pretty (badly)," Dennehy said. "He just looked down his nose (at Stewart)," the lawyer said. The priest, Dennehy said, was dismissive, sometimes to the point of being contemptuous to Stewart, viewing the old man as "just an old fart that was sort of an appendage."

"So David just tried to avoid him," Dennehy claims.

He managed to do just that for a time. But on Sunday evening, September 16, 1990, Father Leo Heineman and David Stewart got a little too close to each other, and one of the men ended up dead on the floor.