NIECE SAYS ROHRER TOLD HER HIS WIFE 'DIDN'T WANT BILLY'
Author: Jane M. Von Bergen, Inquirer Staff Writer
Jean Burak said she, her husband, Earl, and her uncle Bill were talking outside the couple's Collingswood, N.J., house when the uncle - Haddon Township Mayor William G. Rohrer - started to cry.
"My uncle said to me that he didn't know what he was going to do. Mimi didn't like Billy anymore," she said. "I visibly saw my uncle cry when he told us that Mimi didn't want Billy anymore."
Burak told Camden County Superior Court Judge David G. Eynon about her recollections of the April 1975 conversation with her uncle yesterday in the fifth day of testimony before a jury in the murder trial of the mayor's wife, Mimi.
Mimi Rohrer, 43, has been accused of killing the couple's 2 1/2-year-old adopted son, Billy, through a pattern of child abuse. The boy died May 28, 1975.
Less than four months earlier, the Rohrers had brought two adopted children, Billy and a little girl, Laura, from El Salvador to their home in the Westmount section of Haddon Township. Rohrer, founder of the First Peoples Bank of New Jersey, has been Haddon's mayor since 1951.
Burak said she thought that her uncle was kidding when he called April 24, 1975, to ask her whether she wanted any more children.
"He's a great kidder," she said of William Rohrer. But a few hours later on that Thursday afternoon, she said, she found that Rohrer was not joking. She said her husband had arrived at their house with Billy Rohrer in tow.
As she bathed the boy that night, she testified, "I observed numerous bruises and scratch marks." The bruises were on his back, buttocks and upper thighs, she said, and the scratches were on his back. "They looked to me like finger marks," she said.
The next day, Burak testified, her family drove in Rohrer's car to pick up most of the boy's clothes. She said she had no idea how long Billy would be staying at her house.
William Rohrer visited his son Saturday and took him and the Burak youngsters - then 10, 7 and 3 - out for ice cream and candy, she said. On Sunday, she said, Rohrer came to take his son home.
"When he (Billy) got into the car, he kicked his feet," she told the jury, her voice breaking as she caught herself close to tears.
"I'm sorry," she apologized to the jury. "He was crying very hard."
While Billy stayed at the Buraks' home in Collingswood, he lived a life much like that out of a Norman Rockwell painting, according to Burak's testimony, except that the family skipped Sunday school on that weekend.
On Saturday, before William Rohrer came to visit his son, Burak, her three children and Billy went to a parade in Haddonfield, complete with marching bands and fire engines, she said.
She described Billy as a lovable boy with a good appetite and no tendency toward anti-social or self-injurious behavior. Defense attorney Raymond A. Brown Jr. had said in his opening statement that Mimi Rohrer thought that her son was self-injurious.
Brown asked Burak about her relationship with Mimi Rohrer and with the mayor's first wife, Floretta. "Isn't it a fact that you positively disliked Mrs. Mimi Rohrer because you loved Aunt Florie?" Brown asked. Deputy State Attorney General Anthony Zarrillo objected to the question, and the judge adjourned for the day.
The jury did not hear the testimony about William Rohrer's remarks or anything about his visit to take the children for ice cream; the judge ruled that allowing Burak's testimony quoting her uncle's version of Mimi Rohrer's statements would constitute inadmissible hearsay evidence.
In the morning, jurors heard testimony from the Rohrer family pediatrician, Dr. Robert Barroway of Cherry Hill, who talked about an April 26, 1975, telephone call from Mimi Rohrer. He said Mimi Rohrer told him that her son hated her.
Something about the tone of her voice prompted him to be "concerned about the child's emotional and physical well-being," Barroway said. He took the unusual step of referring her and Billy to a Philadelphia psychiatrist. He said that was the first time he had referred a mother and child so young to a psychiatrist.
In 1975, after Billy died, the Camden County medical examiner ruled that the boy died of "severe brain contusions" that were self-induced. But after an investigation by the State Commission of Investigation from 1976 to 1979 and a New Jersey state grand jury investigation ending in 1982, Mimi Rohrer was indicted on murder charges Dec. 3, 1982. She pleaded not guilty.