MIMI ROHRER CONFRONTS QUESTION: WHAT NOW
Author: Jane Von Bergen, Inquirer Staff Writer
Nine years of investigation, three months in court, seven weeks in jail and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses later, little has changed for Mimi Rohrer.
What happens to her next is up to the state attorney general's office in Trenton. It must decide, in light of a hung jury Monday in Camden County Superior Court, whether to retry her on charges of murdering her young son, Billie, through a pattern of child abuse in 1975.
The fate of Rohrer, 43, is as unclear as it was in 1976 when the State
Commission of Investigation reopened the Rohrer file after examining Billie's death and five others that had been ruled accidental in Camden County.
Although the jurors voted 10-2 in favor of acquittal, it was their consensus, they said in interviews later, that Rohrer had abused Billie and perhaps caused his death - although without murderous malice or intent.
"We let her know what she did was not right," a juror said. "But she'll probably get off the hook."
State prosecutors accused Rohrer of having beaten Billie time and again until he died May 28, 1975. Testimony about Billie's age when he died - 2 1/2 or 3 1/2 - differed.
Rohrer continues to assert that she is innocent - not only of murder, but also of child abuse. "They think I beat him," she said yesterday. "Get out of here; look, I'm not a child-beater.
"I don't know what's going to happen to my life."
Rohrer has learned, she said, about the pitfalls of being a sheltered homemaker. Slight, energetic, wide-eyed and curly-haired, the former high school cheerleader from a small town outside of Pittsburgh said she had learned about life from being in jail, where she said she spent weekends teaching people accused of murder how to crochet and serving as a matchmaker for inmates.
More important, she said, she has learned to accept little at face value.
"I was naive," she said. "I had been protected for so long."
During the nine years of talk about indictments and investigations and grand juries, along with visits by state police, Rohrer said, she dismissed it all as the fallout of being married to wealthy South Jersey power broker William G. Rohrer Jr., from whom she has been estranged. William Rohrer is a longtime mayor of Haddon Township and a founder of First Peoples Bank of New Jersey.
"I'd say, 'Oh, it's politics,' " she recalled during an interview several weeks ago.
William Rohrer, 75, a vitamin enthusiast whose bottles of B-complex are scattered about his desk at the bank, has emerged, according to his wife, as the architect and financier of a plan to keep her from vindicating herself in the eyes of the public and in the halls of justice.
"They all know that I was the victim of Bill Rohrer," she said yesterday. ''There's nothing different now. I was a pawn in lies to protect you-know- who."
Her husband, she said, paid more than $250,000 to Raymond M. Brown, the Newark attorney she repeatedly tried to fire. Brown, according to Mimi Rohrer, did not do enough to correct what she said were the jury's bad impressions of her.
On Nov. 29, William Rohrer also posted 10 percent of the $100,000 bail that allowed his wife to leave Camden County Jail, where she had been since mid- October.
Although her husband was home on the day Billie died, the only evidence that the jury heard about his role came from a prosecution witness; that is why, Mimi Rohrer contends, the jury believed that she abused Billie.
"It was the prayers of the people that saved me," she said.
From now on, she said Monday, things will be different. She said she thinks that she will take her brother Mark Mungello's advice and become a paralegal so she can make money of her own.
In the legal arena, she said, Nino V. Tinari of Philadelphia will be her attorney: "I'm going to do whatever Tinari tells me to do." In virtually the same breath, she said she would be nobody's pawn.
For now, she said, "I'm getting on with Christmas and I'm getting on with my life."
This afternoon, Mimi Rohrer said, she plans to hold a Christmas party for Tinari and her friends in her rambling Colonial home on a hill above the Cooper River in the Westmont section of Haddon Township.
On Monday, exuberant about the reprieve from the jury, Mimi Rohrer rode down the highway with the top down on her convertible. She bought her daughter, Laura, a $99 10-speed bicycle and a ping-pong table, which she said she would set up in the playroom next to Laura's jukebox and two pianos.
"I've got a child to consider," she said. In February 1975, she and her husband adopted Billie and Laura, who were unrelated, in El Salvador.
Whatever else happens, Rohrer said, she intends to dedicate the rest of her life to Laura, 11, a bright, curly-haired Michael Jackson fan with enough moxie to stay cool on the witness stand while television cameras recorded her testimony.
Rohrer's home comes close to being a Laura Rohrer shrine, with an entire powder room covered, floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall, with photographs of the child and other children in theater productions or on family holidays. Laura's artwork lines the kitchen walls, leaving barely enough room to tack up a grocery list.
"Her schoolwork has been messed up," Mimi Rohrer said. "We're going to have to spend the whole summer working to get her grades up.
"This child is not going to be scarred. She's going to grow up to be a good American citizen."