Unforgotten: A Classmate Cares for Slain Girl’s Grave 55 Years Later

by David Chernicky, Guest Contributor. From his forthcoming book, Justice for Christina: A Cold Case in My Hometown.

 Two strangers came together at a cemetery on a bright, sunny Memorial Day 2020 weekend and shared memories of the sweet girl whose spirit brought one to care for her grave so many years later. They reminisced about her shortened life and the unthinkable circumstances surrounding her death. 

For most people, cemeteries are peaceful, solemn places that families periodically visit to pay homage to a loved one, relative, or friend. My memory of visits to the graves of grandparents and other relatives dates back to my youth. Every Memorial Day weekend, usually after Mass on that Sunday, my brother and I gathered a trowel, shovel, bucket, and the potted geraniums, mums, or marigolds to give to Dad, who placed them into the trunk of our car to transplant beside a grave. Each quiet visit ended with a silent prayer.   

Over the years, Hollywood has produced a number of films that depict these hallowed grounds not as peaceful, but haunted. Night of the Living Dead opens with a classic graveyard scene where blood-thirsty zombies wander through the darkness attacking humans. Pet Semetary, based on Stephen King’s novel, also features a graveyard scene. Halloween advances that perception each year in yard displays of tombstones, ghosts, and goblins.   

While graveyards or cemeteries are all over the map with the mood they can create, I find them intimate and solemn, and since I’ve visited them in daylight, they are bright and sunny. Nature doesn’t care. Neither do the dead. The rest of it is what the living people project onto it, but generally speaking, a cemetery isn’t considered a practical venue for strangers to engage in a conversation or make new friends—unless you’re at Laurel Hill in Erie, Pennsylvania, or one of its sister cemeteries, Erie, and Wintergreen, where persons with no connection to the graveyard can come and walk the grounds for exercise. They can even walk their pooch, provided he’s leashed. All management asks of visitors is that they respect the property and clean up any messes.    

It was an ideal spring day for being outdoors at Laurel Hill the Sunday before Memorial Day, 2020. Laurel Hill occupies the site of the former Love Farm at the corner of Love and Sterrettania roads in Millcreek Township, where many summers ago locals could stop at the Love family’s produce stand at the end of their driveway and buy fresh vegetables for a decent price to enjoy with their supper meal. The stand was a favorite among locals, and families that were staying at Cassidy’s Campground across Zimmerly Road from the Watson home.

Millcreek resident Renee Love provided information on the former farm. She is a seventh-generation descendant of Samuel Love, who emigrated from Scotland to Maryland in 1700s. His son, James, then resettled in Erie’s Millcreek community in 1818 and purchased one-hundred-eighty acres that became the Love farm. The road that bears the Love family name extends for about three-fourths-of-mile connecting Zimmerly Road on the south with Sterrettania on the north. The Love schoolhouse that Tina’s father converted to raise his family was built on land that once belonged to the Love family.

Jean Cordier, a speech therapist who grew up in Erie, was visiting her parents’ plot around 11 a.m. when she observed a slender man wearing a T-shirt, light khakis, and gray ball cap kneeling beside a nearby grave flush to the ground. He was too busy pulling weeds and spreading mulch to notice the woman’s stare.

Cordier didn’t have to read the engraving on the reddish-orange granite marker to know whose grave it was that had his attention. 

“CHRISTINA M. WATSON, 1956 – 1966, DAUGHTER”

What is this man doing at her grave? Did he know her? A relative, perhaps? 

On previous visits, Cordier wouldn’t think of talking to a stranger, but something about this man told her it was OK. If he didn’t feel like talking he would tell her. 

She broke the silence, “How nice of you to take care of Tina’s grave, Sir. Are you related?”

The man immersed in beautifying the plot turned and acknowledged the inquisitive woman. “No, she was a classmate of mine at Our Lady of Peace,” he said. “Her classroom was across the hall from mine.”  

Jim Ritenour was a year younger than Christina Watson, and a year behind her at Our Lady of Peace Parochial School on West 38^th Street, one of more than dozen private schools for first through eighth grades operated by the Catholic Diocese of Erie, Pennsylvania in the mid-1960s. 

Ritenour remembered his classmate as a bright, sweet, girl with a bubbly personality, who always wore a smile. It was during a visit to his father’s grave about fifteen years ago that he noticed the weeds and other signs of neglect at Tina’s marker. He’s been keeping it pretty since. 

For a half hour, Jean Cordier and Jim Ritenour reminisced about the girl everyone knew as Tina, and the heavy dark cloud that blanketed the OLP family — clergy, staff, teachers, and the children, and reverberated across the entire Erie area in the days, weeks, and months following her death. They talked about the tears classmates and teachers shed during a special memorial Mass where doves floated across the packed gymnasium as if sent from Heaven, and the intense fear that filled their community knowing that her killer was still out there. 

Somewhere. They wondered why justice had eluded the Millcreek cops for so long and worried that the killer might claim another young, innocent victim.

Despite not knowing each other, the two discovered they shared a common thread. Cordier was also a member of the OLP family. Her last name was Schwarz back and too young to follow the news reports about Tina’s death and experience the shock. Most of what she learned about Tina’s death came from her older sister, Mary.

Fifty-something years later, I asked Jim if he remembers the last time he saw Christina. He couldn’t, but guessed it was probably late in the 1965-66 school year as the students prepared for their final exams, or maybe at one of the Sunday Masses the two children attended with their parents after school let out for that unforgettable summer. The local newspapers and three TV stations reported that a little girl who disappeared near her home was found dead along the creek where she and a six-year-old neighbor boy had been playing.

Tina’s father, Richard, or Dick, bought the burial lot for his family in 1980, shortly before his wife, Rosemary and mother to Tina and her two siblings, Thomas and MaryAlice, passed away at the age of fifty-four. She died without the satisfaction of knowing the mystery of her baby girl’s killer would be solved. Once Rosemary was interred, Richard arranged the transfer of Tina’s remains from Calvary Cemetery to Laurel Hill to be near her mother.

Thomas, the middle child, rarely talked about the loss of his baby sister, sister MaryAlice, and an ex-wife, said. Thomas graduated from McDowell High School in 1971, and worked as a locomotive inspector at General Electric for 38 years. On December 16, 2010, he was found deceased at his home. Tom was fifty-eight years old. He and Christina are buried next to each other under separate granite markers flush to the ground. 

Dick Watson, a World War II veteran and founding member of Our Lady of Peach Catholic Church, passed away on November 25, 2005. He was eighty-two. Life was never the same after he lost Tina. His two other marriages both ended in divorce. 

 A single monument in the next row marks the graves of the parents. 

Reflecting on that chance meeting last year at Laurel Hill, one shouldn’t have been surprised that Cordier and Ritenour opened up to each other and talked about Christina Watson given their occupations or careers. Ritenour’s career involved sales and Cordier, a speech therapist, helped  others overcome speech impediments, careers that require a friendly, outgoing personality.

Cordier was so moved by the heartfelt discussion that the next day she posted it on social media, the Facebook group site, “You Might Be from Erie, If.” She never imagined the response. By the end of the week, she counted several hundred postings from others who also remembered the story of Christina Watson. Some of the messages were posted by children of retired police officers who participated in the search for the killer or had been affected in some way by the gruesome crime. “I think it was one of those stories that everyone in Erie followed.”

Here’s Jean Cordier’s post that went viral. 

  Some might remember the tragic story of Christina Watson, the ten-year-old Our Lady of Peace student who was murdered along Walnut Creek on Love Road. Her grave is just down from my parents. For the first time I saw someone one caring for it! I struck up a conversation and discovered he was a kind-hearted classmate from her OLP class. Can you imagine, a friend honors his third-grade classmate [54] years after her death! That’s character. Thank you, Mr. Ritenour, for being so thoughtful. Forever remembering the years we feared playing outside until Christina’s killer was finally identified….

About the Author:

Erie native David Chernicky is an award-winning investigative reporter whose interest in journalism dates back to his years at Gannon College, where he earned a B.A. in English in 1973. He is a 1969 graduate of Cathedral Prep.

In 1978, Chernicky joined the Daily Press in Newport News, Virginia, where he gravitated to the police beat while undertaking investigative projects. He’s written about serial killers, unsolved murders, or “cold cases,” the execution of a cop killer, and the Atlanta child murders in1980-81, to name a few. 

But of all the stories about violent crime and their impact on families, the most memorable is the murder of a sweet, innocent ten-year-old girl named Christina Marie Watson.  Chernicky was fourteen years old when that happened. 

If you have information relevant to the Christina Watson case, or her convicted killer, Eugene Edward Patterson, please contact David Chernicky at DJChernicky@verizon.net