crystaldawn
07-26-2005, 08:59 AM
For those of you who remember this story (I don't think Lifetime has ever aired it) I found an interesting article about them:
By DEEPIKA C. REDDY
Collegian Staff Writer
With his piercing blue eyes and silvering hair, Jon Evans Yount is a distinguished-looking, middle-aged man who could look like any professor at Penn State. And if it weren't for a few moments in time almost three decades ago, he might have been a professor at some university.
The 1958 University graduate is now in his 26th year of imprisonment for murder, and he and everyone else involved have relived a thousand times over those 28-year-old moments that so drastically and irrevocably changed the lives of so many people.
His account of the ordeal begins on a dreary spring evening in 1966 when a slight drizzle muddied the rural country roads. Yount was a young math teacher at the DuBois Area High School and was anticipating a summer fellowship in Montana.
Yount said he was driving around the countryside looking for property to invest in, when he stopped to pick up Pamela Sue Rimer, a student in his advanced math class who was walking home in the rain.
As they talked, the topic of old farmhouses for sale in the area came up, and Yount said he asked Rimer if she would show him where those farmhouses were. He said she became frightened and asked him to stop the car. As she tried to get out, Yount said he grabbed her sleeve to stop her and to correct the misunderstanding. He said she panicked and struck him with her umbrella.
"You have no idea what it's like, unless you have been in a situation with a hysterical 18-year-old," Yount said.
Yount said he felt a rising anger for Rimer's misinterpretation of his intentions, and in the ensuing struggle, he reached for a wrench and hit her.
He said the rest of the night is hazy in his memory. But Yount thinks he followed her when she ran out of the car, still trying to calm her down.
Her body was found later that evening with shallow stab wounds to the neck that caused her to suffocate on her own blood.
Yount turned himself in to the authorities the next day.
"I've never denied my guilt, only the degree of my guilt . . . but I never perceived that to be an intentional killing," said Yount, who was convicted of first-degree murder. Intent to kill is the difference between first-degree and third-degree murder.
In Yount's account of that night, he denies having more than a student-teacher relationship with Rimer, despite an initial murder conviction that included that count, said John Reilly, who was the prosecuting attorney for Yount's murder trial in 1966 and is now a Clearfield County judge.
"(The rape charge) was dismissed but it set the tone in the community," Yount said. "In a rural community, a schoolteacher charged with homicide is like an O.J."
A mistrial was declared after the initial verdict because jurors admitted they were affected by extensive media coverage. The case eventually went before the U.S. Supreme Court, where the initial ruling was upheld because he never pleaded innocent.
Yount was assigned to the State Correctional Institute at Rockview and it took him several months to adjust to prison life and establish himself in the pecking order.
Although Yount is still conservative with respect to some things, the process of adjusting to prison life has had some impact on his personality and made him much more liberal in his views of other people.
"You wouldn't survive here if you couldn't tolerate some of the things other people do," he said.
Prison is a microcosm of a society, Yount said, describing how there is a kind of social order in which robbers see the killers as the real bad guys, and the killers in turn see themselves as superior to those "purse-snatchers" who were too cowardly to face their victims.
"It's human nature that we look for someone to take our sins," he said, attributing the overcrowding of prisons to that tendency. "Penitentiaries are necessary because people like to drive by them to reassure themselves that they are the good guys," he said, quoting from the movie Mississippi Burning.
Yount has taken his case before a state pardon board several times, but he has not been successful yet, due mainly to his escape in 1986, Reilly said.
After serving nearly 20 years of his sentence, Yount walked off the grounds of Rockview, where he was working at the time. He met his sweetheart, Diane Brodbeck, down the road.
"After 20 years I felt I had paid my debt, and if I was to be able to capture any meaning to the rest of my life, it was necessary," he said.
Yount and Brodbeck, who left her husband and children, drove around the country touring through various states while working odd jobs.
"I felt like Rip Van Winkle, waking up after 20 years to a different world," Yount said, describing how simple things like fast food restaurants and self-serve gas stations were foreign to him.
Two-and-a-half years later, Yount and Brodbeck were found in Boise, Idaho, when a neighbor saw a program about them on "Unsolved Mysteries." Yount was returned to the maximum security Huntingdon State Prison. Brodbeck was charged with assisting his escape, a charge for which she served five years.
Today, 56-year-old Yount regrets the pain caused to both his and Brodbeck's families because of their two-year disappearance, but said he would trade the rest of his life to have those years of freedom again.
"I don't think that students or young people really understand what a life sentence means," he said.
Yount now spends his time listening to a wide variety of music -- from country to rap -- between visits from his son, daughter, sister and mother.
His days in prison follow a steady routine beginning in the morning when he reports to his job as clerk with the activities office between 8 and 9 a.m. He helps organize sporting events for the inmates and usually spends the rest of the day reading. Yount spends a lot of time in the library, especially the law section.
Since his return to prison, Yount has had a lot of time to reflect on the 28 years of freedom he lived before the murder -- from his graduation from the University with a bachelor's and a master's degree in education to his childhood when he attended a one-room elementary school.
"The most memorable thing about my childhood is that my father was my hero," he said, talking about his bricklayer father from whom he inherited his love of the outdoors.
Yount is still trying to obtain a pardon from what he and other "lifers" jokingly refer to as "a living death."
But the victim's mother, Lavonne Rimer, has been unceasing in her efforts to ensure that he stays in jail.
"What he did just didn't end my daughter's life; it ended my life and my husband's life," said Rimer, who lost her son in a farming accident three years before the death of her daughter.
Her husband went insane and died as a result of their children's deaths, and so Rimer said she does not pity Yount's life sentence.
"I have nothing, no children, no grandchildren. No one calls me to say, 'How are you Mom?' My life is over since then," she said, adding that the only reason she stays alive is to take care of her mother.
Rimer said people in her community remember Yount as a cruel individual and that her daughter was trying to get out of his class when she was killed.
"I asked her what's so bad about Mr. Yount, and she said, 'Oh, Mom, you ought to see his eyes,' " Rimer said.
Visitors to her farm remember seeing Yount's car around there many times before the incident, she said, although Yount said that he did not know where Pamela Sue lived. Rimer added that she has no doubt that he intended to kill her daughter.
"Anybody that could kill like that isn't fit to walk the streets," she said.
But after 26 years, Yount said it has become an issue of vengeance.
"The government should never get involved in the business of vengeance," he said. "When you've finally come to grips with what you've done, you want to give something back."
Yount said he did just that during the two years he was free by helping everyone he could. That has been attested to by the people back in Boise who have offered Yount a job and a home if he ever gets released, he said.
His return to prison put an end to his helping other people and has made things worse for him.
"It's not just the (prison) environment, it's about your self-respect," he said. "When you do something that's out of character and so beyond what you think you're capable of, it can destroy you. But time can heal."
By DEEPIKA C. REDDY
Collegian Staff Writer
With his piercing blue eyes and silvering hair, Jon Evans Yount is a distinguished-looking, middle-aged man who could look like any professor at Penn State. And if it weren't for a few moments in time almost three decades ago, he might have been a professor at some university.
The 1958 University graduate is now in his 26th year of imprisonment for murder, and he and everyone else involved have relived a thousand times over those 28-year-old moments that so drastically and irrevocably changed the lives of so many people.
His account of the ordeal begins on a dreary spring evening in 1966 when a slight drizzle muddied the rural country roads. Yount was a young math teacher at the DuBois Area High School and was anticipating a summer fellowship in Montana.
Yount said he was driving around the countryside looking for property to invest in, when he stopped to pick up Pamela Sue Rimer, a student in his advanced math class who was walking home in the rain.
As they talked, the topic of old farmhouses for sale in the area came up, and Yount said he asked Rimer if she would show him where those farmhouses were. He said she became frightened and asked him to stop the car. As she tried to get out, Yount said he grabbed her sleeve to stop her and to correct the misunderstanding. He said she panicked and struck him with her umbrella.
"You have no idea what it's like, unless you have been in a situation with a hysterical 18-year-old," Yount said.
Yount said he felt a rising anger for Rimer's misinterpretation of his intentions, and in the ensuing struggle, he reached for a wrench and hit her.
He said the rest of the night is hazy in his memory. But Yount thinks he followed her when she ran out of the car, still trying to calm her down.
Her body was found later that evening with shallow stab wounds to the neck that caused her to suffocate on her own blood.
Yount turned himself in to the authorities the next day.
"I've never denied my guilt, only the degree of my guilt . . . but I never perceived that to be an intentional killing," said Yount, who was convicted of first-degree murder. Intent to kill is the difference between first-degree and third-degree murder.
In Yount's account of that night, he denies having more than a student-teacher relationship with Rimer, despite an initial murder conviction that included that count, said John Reilly, who was the prosecuting attorney for Yount's murder trial in 1966 and is now a Clearfield County judge.
"(The rape charge) was dismissed but it set the tone in the community," Yount said. "In a rural community, a schoolteacher charged with homicide is like an O.J."
A mistrial was declared after the initial verdict because jurors admitted they were affected by extensive media coverage. The case eventually went before the U.S. Supreme Court, where the initial ruling was upheld because he never pleaded innocent.
Yount was assigned to the State Correctional Institute at Rockview and it took him several months to adjust to prison life and establish himself in the pecking order.
Although Yount is still conservative with respect to some things, the process of adjusting to prison life has had some impact on his personality and made him much more liberal in his views of other people.
"You wouldn't survive here if you couldn't tolerate some of the things other people do," he said.
Prison is a microcosm of a society, Yount said, describing how there is a kind of social order in which robbers see the killers as the real bad guys, and the killers in turn see themselves as superior to those "purse-snatchers" who were too cowardly to face their victims.
"It's human nature that we look for someone to take our sins," he said, attributing the overcrowding of prisons to that tendency. "Penitentiaries are necessary because people like to drive by them to reassure themselves that they are the good guys," he said, quoting from the movie Mississippi Burning.
Yount has taken his case before a state pardon board several times, but he has not been successful yet, due mainly to his escape in 1986, Reilly said.
After serving nearly 20 years of his sentence, Yount walked off the grounds of Rockview, where he was working at the time. He met his sweetheart, Diane Brodbeck, down the road.
"After 20 years I felt I had paid my debt, and if I was to be able to capture any meaning to the rest of my life, it was necessary," he said.
Yount and Brodbeck, who left her husband and children, drove around the country touring through various states while working odd jobs.
"I felt like Rip Van Winkle, waking up after 20 years to a different world," Yount said, describing how simple things like fast food restaurants and self-serve gas stations were foreign to him.
Two-and-a-half years later, Yount and Brodbeck were found in Boise, Idaho, when a neighbor saw a program about them on "Unsolved Mysteries." Yount was returned to the maximum security Huntingdon State Prison. Brodbeck was charged with assisting his escape, a charge for which she served five years.
Today, 56-year-old Yount regrets the pain caused to both his and Brodbeck's families because of their two-year disappearance, but said he would trade the rest of his life to have those years of freedom again.
"I don't think that students or young people really understand what a life sentence means," he said.
Yount now spends his time listening to a wide variety of music -- from country to rap -- between visits from his son, daughter, sister and mother.
His days in prison follow a steady routine beginning in the morning when he reports to his job as clerk with the activities office between 8 and 9 a.m. He helps organize sporting events for the inmates and usually spends the rest of the day reading. Yount spends a lot of time in the library, especially the law section.
Since his return to prison, Yount has had a lot of time to reflect on the 28 years of freedom he lived before the murder -- from his graduation from the University with a bachelor's and a master's degree in education to his childhood when he attended a one-room elementary school.
"The most memorable thing about my childhood is that my father was my hero," he said, talking about his bricklayer father from whom he inherited his love of the outdoors.
Yount is still trying to obtain a pardon from what he and other "lifers" jokingly refer to as "a living death."
But the victim's mother, Lavonne Rimer, has been unceasing in her efforts to ensure that he stays in jail.
"What he did just didn't end my daughter's life; it ended my life and my husband's life," said Rimer, who lost her son in a farming accident three years before the death of her daughter.
Her husband went insane and died as a result of their children's deaths, and so Rimer said she does not pity Yount's life sentence.
"I have nothing, no children, no grandchildren. No one calls me to say, 'How are you Mom?' My life is over since then," she said, adding that the only reason she stays alive is to take care of her mother.
Rimer said people in her community remember Yount as a cruel individual and that her daughter was trying to get out of his class when she was killed.
"I asked her what's so bad about Mr. Yount, and she said, 'Oh, Mom, you ought to see his eyes,' " Rimer said.
Visitors to her farm remember seeing Yount's car around there many times before the incident, she said, although Yount said that he did not know where Pamela Sue lived. Rimer added that she has no doubt that he intended to kill her daughter.
"Anybody that could kill like that isn't fit to walk the streets," she said.
But after 26 years, Yount said it has become an issue of vengeance.
"The government should never get involved in the business of vengeance," he said. "When you've finally come to grips with what you've done, you want to give something back."
Yount said he did just that during the two years he was free by helping everyone he could. That has been attested to by the people back in Boise who have offered Yount a job and a home if he ever gets released, he said.
His return to prison put an end to his helping other people and has made things worse for him.
"It's not just the (prison) environment, it's about your self-respect," he said. "When you do something that's out of character and so beyond what you think you're capable of, it can destroy you. But time can heal."