Appeals stretch 4 decades for a prisoner convicted on little police evidence

The case rested on the words of four jailhouse informants who all testified that Szarewicz confessed to them, and three of the four have recanted.

The four men who put Steve Szarewicz away for murder all changed their stories at one time or another, yet Szarewicz still sits behind bars. That’s where he has been for almost 43 years.

A jury convicted him of killing Billy Merriwether, 25, who was shot twice in the back of the head and once in the chest, his body left facedown off a country road in western Pennsylvania in 1981.