"It's all a blur to me, all a jumble," Shannon Hess told detectives hours after he found his mother-in-law beaten and stabbed to death in his Willow Street home.

Today, county Detective David Odenwalt told a Lancaster County jury the various accounts Hess gave police when they questioned him about Barbara Fritchman's death on Nov. 23, 2007.

Hess told police he was out running errands and came back to the East Boehms Road home he shared with his wife, their two children and his mother-in-law, to find the 45-year-old Fritchman "lying in a bunch of blood."

He called 911 and then told police he immediately started cleaning up the blood, wiping off his shoes and his fingerprints off the walls with a bleach-soaked sponge, then threw the sponge in his truck.

Or, Hess then told police, he left the sponge in the kitchen.

Or, he said next, threw the sponge out near his parents' Holtwood home.

"It's all a blur, all a jumble," Hess told Odenwalt, the detective testified this morning.

Hess, 31, is on trial in Lancaster County Court, charged with homicide in the woman's death.

The day after the body was found, as detectives questioned him, Odenwalt said Hess suddenly sighed and placed his head on the desk in front of him.

"Hess said he has something to tell us," Odenwalt said, "but was afraid of some of the things he did back at the house."

Hess originally told police that on that morning, he had been out running errands and came home to find the dead body.

"He told us he lied," Odenwalt said, adding that Hess said he had really gone to the Route 30 outlet where his wife worked to look inside her car.

Hess and his wife, Veronica, were having serious marital problems, police said, after she confessed to having an affair.

She wanted to separate, police said, Hess wanted to reconcile.

Assistant District Attorney Mark Fetterman is arguing that Hess killed Fritchman that day after coming home to find his mother-in-law on the phone with the man with whom his wife was having an affair.

Odenwalt said they asked Hess what was said between him and Fritchman that day.

"He said he must've blacked out," Odenwalt testified, "because he didn't remember."

Odenwalt said he and Detective Allen Leed told Hess they didn't believe he had intentionally killed Fritchman.

If she were still alive, how would he like to apologize to her, they asked.

"He said, 'I would like to,' " Odenwalt testified.

Fetterman said, in his opening statement, that the woman was struck on the back of the head with an object, stomped upon and then stabbed in the neck seven times.

Testimony in the case is expected to continue throughout the week in the courtroom of Judge Jeffery D. Wright.

On Tuesday, several neighbors testified about encounters they had with Hess around the time of the slaying.

Donna Ferko-Fox testified that she was driving by the Hess home that morning and was startled by the sight of an angry-looking man who jumped out from behind a tree.

"He was looking at me with these eyes that had such anger in them," Ferko-Fox said.

She said she was frightened by the man, who watched her drive away.

A few days later, Ferko-Fox said, she saw a photo in a local newspaper of Hess, who had been charged with killing Fritchman.

"I said, 'Oh my goodness, that's the same man I saw that day.' And I do see that individual in the courtroom today," Ferko-Fox said, referring to Hess.

"I am certain that is the same man I saw in the newspaper and at the tree that day."

Defense attorney Alan Goldberg asked Ferko-Fox for a more specific time when she saw the "angry man," but the witness could only say for certain it was "late morning."

Hess had picked his children up at his parents' home in Holtwood around 12:30 p.m. that day, but told police as the three of them walked into the house and he saw his mother-in-law's bloody body, he told them to go to a neighbor's house.


Staff writer Janet Kelley can be reached at jkelley@LNPnews.com or 481-6026.