Unsolved Cases: Catherine Corkery

Today, 23 years after her death, people in Dormont Borough are still talking about what happened to Catherine Corkery. 

The 22-year-old left a party in Mt. Lebanon at the Academy Avenue home of Sam Amado in the early morning of July 22, 1989, and headed home to the apartment that she shared with a boyfriend, Tim Rooney, on Ordinance Avenue. But she never made it.

Somewhere along the light rail transit tracks where the "T" runs, Corkery met her attacker. She was just 5 feet 1 inch tall and weighed just 100 pounds.

The attacker twisted a rope-like restraint around her throat and pulled her to the tracks, splitting her head open when it struck a rail, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported. In a 1997 story, the newspaper quoted Allegheny County Homicide Sgt. Nicholas Bruich, the lead case detective, as saying that a man pulled her along with the restraint, using it as a human leash.

After he choked, beat, stabbed and sexually assaulted Catherine, her attacker set her on fire. The only accessory that she was still wearing: clip-on earrings.

Police speculated that the attacker opened the unlocked wooden gate to the rear of 2933 Voelkel Ave. and dropped her under a fruit tree at the end of a concrete walkway, about 40 feet from a red-brick house. She couldn't be seen from the tracks because of a hedge, according to a report in the Tribune-Review.

Bruich told the newspaper that Corkery was dead by the time that her attacker started a gasoline fire, placed her in the flames and fled. He took her blue jeans, pink top, sneakers and other evidence. The flames that consumed her naked upper body were so intense that they scorched the tree's limbs.

A man taking out his trash at about 7 a.m. on July 22 found her body under the tree in his yard—in sight of the "T's" Potomac Station. The county coroner ruled that Corkery died of strangulation and head injuries, with slashes to her abdomen a contributing factor. Police believed that some of the slashes near her breasts and groin were of a sexual nature.

Investigators said that her blood alcohol level was 0.22.

The 22-year-old bookkeeper, a graduate of Mt. Lebanon High School, had just moved out of her mother's home and in with her boyfriend in the Dormont apartment that they shared. She was planning to take community college night classes and become a social worker, like her mother.

Catherine Corkery had worked the day shift at Penn Parking Systems in downtown Pittsburgh on July 21. She had met two friends at a Mt. Lebanon bar after work. According to police reports, she and the friends walked a few blocks from the bar to the party, where about 40 people had gathered.

Corkery's boyfriend, Rooney, had also attended the party with her but left early because he had a painting job to be at early the next morning. He had hoped to someday ask Corkery to marry him.

Corkery told several people that she was planning to walk home, but at one point, she relented and said that she would get a ride. But police found no one who knew for sure whether or not she had started to walk home alone.

When Rooney didn't find her at home when he awakened at about 4 a.m., he assumed that she had stayed somewhere with friends. When she wasn't home at around noon, he began calling people in an attempt to locate her.

His stomach dropped when he saw the story about a murder near his apartment on an evening TV news show, and he called police to say that it might be her.

Detectives cleared Rooney and everyone that they could find from the party as suspects, Bruich told reporters at the time.

Intially, police thought that there might be a connection between Corkery's death and that of Christine Marie Weber, 25, of Beaver County, whose body had been found in the state gamelands in Washington County. She had been stabbed 11 times and sexually assaulted.

Detectives searched under porches in Dormont and in the trash for clues. They interviewed some 200 people. Yet, the case remains unsolved to this day.

It is a case that still bothers police. In fact, when former Dormont police Chief Russ McKibben retired in 2009, he told the Post-Gazette that his biggest regret was the department's inability to make an arrest in Corkery's homicide case.

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