Judge denies request to exhume corpse of Pittsburgh synagogue shooter's father

The federal judge presiding over the trial of the man convicted of killing 11 people at a Squirrel Hill synagogue denied a motion by the defense to have their client’s father’s body exhumed.

Defense attorneys for Robert Bowers, 50, of Baldwin, filed a motion Tuesday seeking to have Bowers’ father’s body exhumed to confirm his paternity.

In a three-page order issued Wednesday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Robert J. Colville said the motion was untimely and the defense itself injected paternity into the case.

“Given the late filing and inevitable delay that will result from the relief requested by way of the motion at issue, the court hereby denies the motion as untimely,” he wrote.

A jury found Bowers guilty of all 63 counts against him in connection with the Oct. 27, 2018, attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. Bowers’ trial, which is now in the sentencing phase, was in its 32nd day on Wednesday.

The defense requested to exhume the body Randall G. Bowers, which is entombed in Shaler, to prove paternity and potentially provide a hereditary link to schizophrenia. The motion said Bowers’ father had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and experts have testified that schizophrenia runs in families.

Randall Bowers died by suicide in 1979.

Despite documentation and evidence that Randall Bowers is the biological father of Robert Bowers, the government has speculated throughout the trial that he is not the father, attempting to undermine the genetic basis for the defendant’s mental illness.

Prosecutors filed a response in opposition Wednesday, arguing that the issue of Bowers’ paternity is tangential to the central issues of the case and the court is without the jurisdiction to exhume the body. The government also wrote that the request was untimely and threatened to delay the trial.

In its response, the government defended its theory that Randall and Robert Bowers are not biologically related. The government said it was valid to try to instill this doubt about paternity during its cross-examination of Dr. Katherine Porterfield, who performed a psychosocial history on the defendant.

“Dr. Porterfield failed completely to account for discrepancies in the defendant’s family history in preparing her report, generating her presentation slides and presenting sworn testimony to the jury,” the prosecutors wrote. “As Dr. Porterfield knew, the defendant’s mother expressed her doubts about the defendant’s paternity. This omission was wholly relevant to the jury’s evaluation of Dr. Porterfield’s credibility as an expert and justified the government’s line of cross-examination on this topic, which, again, was one of many covered by Dr. Porterfield over two days of testimony.”

Colville agreed, writing that Porterfield’s own notes regarding her interview with Bowers’ mother raised the issue.

The defense said it could not have anticipated the government would argue about paternity, but Colville called that claim “unsupportable.”

“The defense surely had access to, or at least the ability to learn, this information at a much earlier juncture so as to avoid confronting the court with a motion seeking the extraordinary relief it now seeks 31 days into the trial in this matter,” Colville wrote. “That the defense chose not to pursue disinterment at an earlier juncture was undoubtably a strategic decision, presumably because the defense believed they possessed ‘reliable facts’ establishing paternity and that ‘the evidence rebutting paternity is flimsy.’”

Colville said the defense can argue that the government’s paternity evidence is “flimsy,” but also noted that the government can present its argument as well.