Publication Date: February 5, 2006
Tag: 797900
Section: A
Page: 1
Gil Smart   

Gil Smart Lancaster County Coroner Dr.

G.

Gary Kirchner is the subject of an investigation by the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office over allegations that he provided a local newspaper access to sensitive information.

As first reported on 5thEstate.com Saturday, officials with the attorney general's office raided Kirchner's home at 610 Millcross Road in East Lampeter Township in mid-January.

The Web site speculated that officials seized computers that may contain copies of e-mails that Kirchner might have sent to reporters for the Intelligencer Journal, owned by Lancaster Newspapers Inc., parent company of the Sunday News.

A spokesman for Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett was unavailable for comment Saturday.

George Werner, an attorney for Lancaster Newspapers, refused to comment on the matter.

C.

Raymond Shaw, editor of the Intelligencer Journal, was on vacation and unavailable for comment; news editor Jon Ferguson declined comment.

Kirchner also refused to comment, saying only, "I have absolutely no idea what it is all about."

The allegations against Kirchner were referred to the attorney general by Lancaster County District Attorney Donald Totaro, who has had a long-simmering feud with the coroner.

Corbett's office has convened a grand jury to look into the allegations.

Totaro, reached at his home Saturday, said his office has nothing to do with the investigation.

"This is totally the attorney general's thing," said Totaro, who said he was approached last summer by local law enforcement officials with a complaint about Kirchner, and "in light of the problems between the coroner and this office over the past few years," Totaro opted to forward the matter to the attorney general.

"I felt it would have been a conflict of interest for us to pursue this," Totaro said.

He declined to comment on the specific nature of the complaint.

Sources say the complaint may have stemmed from an allegation that Kirchner provided access to an Internet site used by the coroner's office to reporters from the Intelligencer Journal.

That site, sources say, would have provided information on calls referred to the county coroner.

Sources also say local law enforcement officials have been angered when, on several occasions, details about investigations have shown up in the Intelligencer Journal, and they suspect Kirchner has been the source.

On 5thEstate.com, editor Ron Harper Jr. cited one case in particular: The investigation into the murder of Cortney Fry, whose charred skeletal remains were discovered by hunters in a wooded area of Manor Township in January 2005.

Fry, of Columbia, had been reported missing several months earlier; in July, police charged her boyfriend, Micah Stewart, with the killing.

Details about the condition of Fry's remains were printed in the Intelligencer Journal, which angered officials, who complained that the leak "compromised" the murder investigation, Harper wrote.

Reporters have been subpoenaed in the case, sources said.

Harper, who has ripped Totaro for the DA's reluctance to prosecute local officials Harper accuses of violating the state Sunshine Act and open records law, reported that the raid on Kirchner's home included 15 vehicles, two of them marked police cars.

Wrote Harper, "The only persons home, at the time of the mid-January raid, [were] the doctor's daughter-in-law and her two-year-old child. Several of the raiders watched the toddler while the mother showed the others around the large, rambling estate."

The feud between Kirchner and Totaro dates to late June 2004, when Kirchner commented in a Sunday News story that he believed local police are often too tight-lipped on investigations, and that a more open approach might actually help solve some crimes.

That prompted Totaro and other law enforcement officials to fire off a long letter, printed the following week in the Sunday News, criticizing Kirchner for being loose-lipped and heavy-handed at crime scenes and charging that he has compromised some investigations.

Named in the letter was the case of "Baby Allison," the infant found dead in a trash barrel at an Amish schoolhouse near Strasburg in December 2003.

That crime remains unsolved.

"The coroner does not seem to care that his premature release of sensitive information and his disruption of the crime scene jeopardize investigations and have the potential to allow criminals to escape justice," Totaro and the others wrote in the letter.