Mom faces trial for killing children
Her son, 8, daughter, 4, found hanged in their basement
Eric Bubblemoyer’s pager went off about 4:30 p.m. on Sept. 23, and the text asked if he was available to respond to a home along
Route 143 in Albany Township where two children were in cardiac arrest.
Bubblemoyer was employed at the time as an emergency room nurse at Lehigh Valley Hospital, near Allentown, but he was off duty so he was available to respond from his home that afternoon as a volunteer first responder with the nearby Kempton Fire Company.
He went out to his truck and on the radio heard the tail end of a dispatch from the Berks County 9-1-1 center. He couldn’t immediately process what he heard: A dispatcher said two children were hanging in the basement. He asked several times for the dispatcher to repeat the information.
“It wasn’t all adding up to me,” Bubblemoyer said Wednesday from the witness stand in the Berks County Courthouse, where Lisa R. Snyder, 37, sat for a preliminary hearing on two counts of first-degree murder in the slayings of her two youngest children, Conner, 8, and Brinley, 4.
Bubblemoyer was the first of seven witnesses called Wednesday to testify by Berks County Assistant District Attorney Meg McCallum. After the four-hour hearing, District Judge Kim L. Bagenstose ruled that Snyder, 37, should be held for trial on all charges, including two counts each of firstand third-degree murder and child endangerment. Other charges include endangering the welfare of children and tampering with or fabricating physical evidence.
State police filed the charges on Dec. 2 following a more-than-twomonth investigation. Moyer was arrested the same day and jailed without bail. First-degree murder is a non-bailable offense in Pennsylvania.
Bubblemoyer proceeded cautiously to the home along Route 143, meeting with another first responder at a residence across the street from the home. He said he was concerned about the safety of the responders because the scene wasn’t secured; state police had not yet arrived from the Hamburg station.
The pair approached the home and found no one, including the 9-1-1 caller, Lisa Snyder, in front of the home as they were told to expect. They knocked on the door, not knowing what to expect, and Snyder opened it. They asked her to step outside.
Snyder appeared “very anxious and nervous, but she wasn’t crying,” and was distracted by talking on a mobile phone. Bubblemoyer asked if anyone else was in the house, but he couldn’t get an answer, so he and the other medic entered the home together. They found no one on the main floor, so proceeded down the narrow basement steps.
They scanned the right side of the basement and found nothing. But when Bubblemoyer looked left, he saw two children hanging from the rafters. Their bodies were still warm, so the medics decided to free them from the nooses, which were at opposite ends of a vinyl-coated dog lead, the kind used to tether a dog to a stake or fixed object in a yard.
Bubblemoyer’s partner was able to release the clasp on his end to free the smaller child, Brinley. But her brother, Conner, was too heavy for Bubblemoyer to lift. His partner assisted in lowering Conner to the floor, and the two began CPR on the siblings.
Trooper Jeffrey A. Hummel of the Hamburg station was the first police officer to arrive. From the witness stand he described a chaotic scene, with Snyder and relatives in front of the home and several people gathered in the kitchen. He remembered someone saying, “they’re all in the basement.”
He had to crouch to descend the wooden stairs to the basement. Making a left turn, he was greeted by the sight of medics working on Brinley, on her back on the floor. Closer to him was the unconscious Conner.
McCallum asked Hummel what he did upon seeing such a scene.
“There really wasn’t much I could do other than stay out of the way,” Hummel said. “Eric had everything under control. I offered to take over CPR and do chest compressions. Those first responders were exhausted.”
Due to Conner’s weight, which was well above average for his age, responders decided it would be difficult to carry him up the narrow stairs. They decided to go out the bilco doors via fewer steps. Hummel and another trooper helped carry him out on a stretcher to an ambulance.
They were declared brain dead by a Lehigh Valley Hospital doctor
three days later and pronounced dead.
The pathologist who performed the autopsies found both children died of hanging, and the manner of their deaths was homicide.
Snyder’s story
Hummel began to choke up when McCallum showed her a previously taken photograph of a smiling Conner and Brinley, asking him to verify if they were the children he saw clinging to life in the basementy.
Hummel said he spoke to the children’s mother at the scene. Lisa Snyder told him that Conner was being bullied at school and one morning didn’t want to go to school, he said. She said she called a school guidance counselor about the bullying, but didn’t get a return call.
Hummel said that Snyder told him her son appeared stressed when he got off the school bus that day, and asked for the charger for his iPad so he could play games.
Conner couldn’t find the charging cord, so asked his mother if he could borrow the dog lead she had purchased at Walmart earlier in the day. She told the trooper that Conner wanted to build a fort in the basement with his sister. His plan, she told police, was to latch the ends around rafters and drape a large blanket over it, according to the testimony.
‘He never looked sad’ Testimony from other prosecution witnesses, including a relative of Lisa Snyder, contradicted her claims that Conner was depressed, and that he was even being bullied.
Her cousin, Kimberlin Watson, 20, said she was particularly close to Conner and would talk to him almost every week. In the summer, she would spend a lot of time with him, hanging out with him at his home.
She last saw Conner a week before the hangings. That was right after his mother sent out a group message via Facebook to family members, telling them that Conner was being bullied and was “suicidal.”
Snyder asked the family
members to help Conner and “‘show him love,’” Watson said.
She picked him up after school that day to get a sense of how he was feeling. Watson didn’t notice any signs of distress.
““I said, ‘Are you happy I picked you up?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, but I do like riding the bus. I have a lot of friends on the bus,’ “Watson said.
She observed him for the rest of the day at her family’s business, where Conner spent a few hours until his mother picked him up.
“He never looked sad that day,” Watson said.
‘Two strong drinks’
Another prosecution witness, Jessica Senft of Slatington, Carbon County, who said she knows Lisa Snyder through her husband, described a text she received from Snyder in early October, about a week after the hangings.
In it, Snyder said she “needed to have two strong drinks.”
She drove to Senft’s home and said investigators had been to her home several times looking for a cellphone. She expressed anxiety over what investigators would likely find in online searches “under Conner’s account” because she “was looking up how to kill someone.”
Snyder said she was considering checking herself into a psychiatric hospital because she was depressed. If she were to be charged with the murders, she would “get out on bail and kill herself,” Senft testified.
Trooper Ian Keck, a criminal investigator who filed the charges against Snyder, said troopers seized one cellphone, which was issued to her for being on public assistance, but they have been unable to recover a Samsung smartphone that belonged to Snyder.
None of the electronic communication devices seized from the home as a result of the search warrant contained Internet searches that Snyder is believed to have made, he said, leading investigators to infer that the missing Samsung phone helds a lot of evidence.
On the day of the hangings, Snyder claimed she lost the phone the previous day, Keck said. She changed her account a week or so later, claiming she lost the phone more than a month earlier.
Keck said investigators interviewed people at Conner’s school, Greenwich Elementary, to try to validate Snyder’s account that he was being bullied and stressed out at school. Everyone from the principal to a guidance counselor to students described him as friendly and happy.
They even viewed video footage from bus cameras. The afternoon that his mother claimed he was so distress he decided to take his own life, footage showed contradictory images: Conner “horsing around” with other kids on the bus, Keck said, smiling and waving as he ran off the bus to his home, Keck testified.
Conner’s mother was the only person investigators could find who had any knowledge of the alleged bullying, Keck said.
Physical limits
Troopers talked to Conner’s occupational therapist, who cast doubt upon the notion that Conner was physically capable of fastening a dog lead around his own neck, let alone his sister’s.
Conner lacked dexterity and had trouble finding the center of his shoelaces to tie a decent knot, the therapist told investigators. Yet the ends of the dog lead were found hanging fairly evenly in relation to each other, Keck said.
Snyder’s explanation for getting a new dog lead was itself questionable, Keck said, noting that troopers were already stepping over and getting entangled by a dog lead in the backyard. But Snyder had told investigators the she wanted one for the front yard, Keck said
The dog lead she chose was purple and rated for a maximum of 250 pounds — more than twice the capacity of her old lead, even though there were plenty of purple leads for 95 pounds and 125 pounds available at the same store at the time.
Internet searches linked to the number connected to Snyder’s missing phone
showed she visited a sight that gave instructions on how to hang oneself with a “short drop, single suspension,” Keck said.
While searching Snyder’s online accounts, troopers found pictures that she shared with a man showing her forcing a dog to perform sex acts on her. For that, she was charged with bestiality and cruelty to animals, charges that were also held over for court.
Snyder’s private attorney, David Charles of Allentown, argued at the end of the hearing that the commonwealth doesn’t have a murder case against his client. Prosecutors failed to produce any evidence or testimony that Snyder killed or planned to kill her children, and have filled in the holes with speculation, he said.
McCallum said that some murder cases are built on circumstantial evidence, and Snyder’s account simply makes no sense. There would likely be more evidence, she said, had Snyder not gotten rid of one of her phones.