Famed trial attorney F. Lee Bailey remembered for Greensburg trial

Jun. 5—He came to town with a flourish.

It was the late 1980s and word spread quickly through the Westmoreland County Courthouse that famed defense attorney F. Lee Bailey was in the building. He was due to appear before Judge Charles Loughran to defend his legal acumen.

The dapper lawyer — who gained fame and a certain measure of infamy representing O.J. Simpson, the Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo, Dr. Sam Sheppard, whose life became the template for "The Fugitive," and heiress Patty Hearst — died in an Atlanta-area hospice Thursday. He was 87.

But more than 30 years earlier, when Bailey appeared before Loughran, he was a man in his prime.

Bailey had come to Greensburg to answer a petition filed by convicted murderer George Fitzsimmons, who was seeking a new trial. Fitzsimmons claimed that Bailey had rendered ineffective legal counsel when representing him in a trial before the late Westmoreland County Judge Earl Keim in the mid-1970s.

Fitzsimmons was facing a non-jury trial for the November 1973 stabbing deaths of his elderly aunt and uncle in their Potter County home, near the New York state line. The trial venue was moved to Greensburg after the defense argued it would be impossible for Fitzsimmons to receive a fair trial in rural Potter County.

Just four years earlier, Fitzsimmons had been found legally insane in the slayings of his parents in their Buffalo, N.Y., area home and sentenced to treatment in a New York state psychiatric hospital. His aunt and uncle, Nick and Fressie Nicholas, opened their home to Fitzsimmons after he was released in 1973, when doctors deemed him no longer a threat to himself or others.

At trial in Westmoreland County, Bailey argued that Fitzsimmons, who gave a rambling videotaped confession to the Nicholas slayings, should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Keim, after reviewing the evidence, found Fitzsimmons guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to life in prison.

Senior Judge John Driscoll, who was an assistant district attorney at the time, sat in on portions of the trial. He remembers the buzz in the courthouse when word got around that Bailey was coming to defend Fitzsimmons.

Bailey, by then in demand in high-profile cases across the country, jetted to Pittsburgh from Atlanta for pre-trial motions in Greensburg and then left the same day for Lafayette, Ind., for another case.

But he was coming back for the trial.

A pair of county assistant district attorneys, Henry Martin and Louis Ceraso, now both deceased, had been assigned to assist the Potter County prosecutor. So, local interest was keen.

"No question, he came in with a flourish. It was like a celebrity coming to town," Driscoll said. "All the secretaries and everyone in the courthouse were talking about it. I think Bailey had to sign autographs. I remember hearing he'd gone out to Mountain View and bought a lot of furniture and had it shipped to his home. But, when the trial started, you could see he was there for business. He knew the case."

Bailey allowed all the gory details of the case to be admitted at trial, including Fitzsimmons' rambling confession. Later accounts quoted Bailey as saying he thought it supported the insanity defense.

That very defense had served Fitzsimmons well in 1969. Then a 32-year-old veteran who learned karate during a stint with the Army in Korea before his dishonorable discharge, he flew into a rage against his parents. After an argument about attending church, authorities said, he killed William and Pearl Fitzsimmons with karate chops.

News accounts of legal proceedings in the case said a judge found Fitzsimmons, who had been diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, legally insane and sentenced him to the Buffalo State Hospital for treatment. That finding left him eligible to inherit his parents' six-figure estate.

So, Fitzsimmons was well set when he was released in early 1973.

The Nicholases, then in their 80s, opened their home in the village of Roulette, near Coudersport.

A week before Thanksgiving 1973, Fitzsimmons was arrested and confessed to stabbing and killing the elderly couple, insisting they were trying to poison him.

Flush with his inheritance, he hired Bailey to defend him.

Keim, however, rendered a guilty verdict. The judge later was quoted as saying it was a matter of protecting the public.

Bailey appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

"George Fitzsimmons is the sickest man I have ever seen in 26 years of practice," an article in Endeavor News quoted Bailey as arguing. "I do not advocate that Mr. Fitzsimmons be released to prey upon society, but it seems to me that from the outset we have failed to protect the public from George Fitzsimmons. The question now is whether we will permit that failure to be buried in a conviction which is highly suspect."

The high court upheld Keim.

Driscoll said Keim's ruling was solid based on laws in place at the time.

"Today, he'd probably be found guilty, but mentally ill," Driscoll said.

The Supreme Court, however, wasn't Fitzsimmons' last stop.

More than a decade later, he appeared in Greensburg again to argue that Bailey had failed to provide him with competent legal counsel.

Loughran vividly remembers when the two appeared in his courtroom. At one point, Fitzsimmons was escorted to the judge's chambers to address him privately.

"He was a pretty big guy. They said he worked out every day in prison. We had four big guys there to make sure he didn't jump me," Loughran said.

He said Fitzsimmons' arguments were weak.

"They didn't prove much at all during the hearing. So, I was left to review the record and hear from F. Lee Bailey. And I wrote an opinion saying Lee Bailey wasn't ineffective," Loughran said.

Fitzsimmons died in prison in 1999.

That was Bailey's last appearance in Greensburg, though not his last visit to Western Pennsylvania.

Years earlier, the famous lawyer had struck up a professional, then personal friendship with Dr. Cyril Wecht, the noted Pittsburgh forensic pathologist.

Over the years, Bailey would try more than a hundred murder cases. His courtroom theatrics, part of the tool kit that helped him win many cases, would spell trouble more than once, landing the famous lawyer in contempt of court and behind bars. Eventually a combination of issues cost him his law license.

But colleagues like Wecht still hold the famous lawyer in high esteem. His skills, extensive preparation, command of facts and dramatic delivery are among the characteristics for which Bailey is remembered.

"I had a very long-standing, close personal and professional relationship with Lee Bailey going back to the late 1960s, early '70s," Wecht said. "I worked closely with him and consulted on several cases. He came to my house and stayed overnight to discuss the O.J. case" — the 1995 murder case in which Bailey was part of the famous legal Dream Team that won an acquittal for O.J. Simpson.

Wecht said he had Bailey in to speak at Duquesne University at the Wecht Institute of Forensic Science, both in 2000 and 2017.

"My wife and I attended his 80th birthday party in Maine. I was in touch last week when I learned about his illness," Wecht said.

Wecht, who holds degrees in law and medicine and has consulted on thousands of high-profile murder cases, called Bailey one of the five best attorneys with whom he's ever worked.

"And in terms of cross-examination, I would rank him number one. I tell law students all the time, if you want to be a lawyer and you want to do trial work, you've got to read (Bailey's) cross-examination of Mark Fuhrman in the O.J. case," Wecht said. "That cross-examination was a masterpiece."

Deb Erdley is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Deb at 724-850-1209, derdley@triblive.com or via Twitter .