'It's ... like she never existed'
A ginger jar lamp reminds Susan Yeakel that she really did have a sister.
She was there when her sister bought the lamp as a Christmas gift for their mother 30 years ago.
But the white lamp also reminds Yeakel that a killer is on the loose.
Her 20-year-old sister, Pamela Ann Pollock, was shot in a busy parking lot of the Whitehall Mall as she waited to pick up her husband from work. She died the next morning. An hour before she was found shot in the head in the passenger seat of her husband's car, Pollock had dropped Yeakel off from the shopping trip that yielded her mother's gift. It was three days before Christmas 1977.
Yeakel was interviewed at least three times by investigators, including once at the Bible college she was attending in New York. But she hasn't heard from investigators in three decades.
''I don't know how close they are or if they were ever close,'' said Yeakel, 49.
At her parent's home in Lower Macungie, photos of Pollock were relegated to a bedroom, away from the view of guests. Pained by memories of her violent death, Pollock's family still avoids talking about her.
''It's like it never happened, like she never existed, like she was never born,'' said Yeakel.
Many of the investigators who were involved with the case are long gone, either retired or deceased.
But for Gerald Procanyn, a Whitehall police detective at the time of the killing and now a detective in the Lehigh County district attorney's office, the killing is still fresh.
He remembers the desperation he felt in the back of an ambulance as he implored a dying Pollock to tell him who shot her, and the optimism 17 months later when detectives received a tip that took them to Missouri. It proved fruitless.
''Anyone and everyone at the mall was someone we were hoping would come forward with any kind of information,'' he said. ''Like maybe they saw a car speeding off and it almost hit them. That did not occur.''
With no suspects, no motive, no witnesses and no bullet, the case quickly froze like most everything else in the harsh winter of 1977.
Many questions, few answers Pollock went to work at the catalog section of the Sears department store after graduating from Emmaus High School, where she played clarinet in the marching band. She met her future husband, Ronald Pollock, at the store, where he sold tractors, fences and other landscaping items. He was recently divorced and 15 years older than she.
After dating for less than a year, they married on Dec. 17, 1976, in a civil ceremony in Allentown, Yeakel said.
They appeared to be ''madly in love,'' Procanyn said.
Yeakel remembers little about the day her sister was killed, but according to what she recalls, and reports in Procanyn's thick file on the case, Pollock and Yeakel spent most of the morning at Pollock's Catasauqua home. They dropped off Ronald Pollock at Sears for his 1 p.m. shift, then shopped for about an hour at the Whitehall Mall. By 2 p.m., they were in Bethlehem, where Yeakel had an appointment with an oral surgeon that lasted 15 to 20 minutes. Then they went back to the mall, where they shopped, and ate at McDonald's.
Pollock was quieter than usual that day, as Yeakel talked about a future after Bible school. She never said if anything was bothering her, Yeakel said.
Yeakel went home without buying anything, but Pollock purchased the ginger jar lamp for her mother and a decorative China dish for herself. She also bought a shirt for her husband.
By 5 p.m., they were back at Pollock's home, where they watched television until their mother called at 7:20 p.m. wondering when Yeakel would be home. They headed back, but before they did, they stopped at the former Jewelcor on Grape Street in Whitehall, where Pollock attempted to exchange a gift -- a pocket knife she had purchased for her husband -- but the item she wanted was sold out.
They got to their mother's home in the East Texas area of Lower Macungie about 8:30 p.m., and Pollock stopped in for about 15 minutes before heading back to Sears to pick up Ronald from work.
Police estimated it took Pollock about 30 minutes to get there, so she would have been in the parking lot about 9:15 p.m.
The car was parked in the north lot used by Sears employees, 107 yards from the catalog entrance. Her husband told police then that it was not normal for her to park there, since she always tried to find a spot closer to that entrance.
Ronald Pollock says he was having one of his best selling days of the holiday season. It was about 10 p.m., the end of his shift, when a co-worker, short of breath, came up to him and said he thought someone was stealing his car radio.
Pollock hurried to his car with that co-worker and another. They saw bits of shattered glass on the passenger side and the outline of a person in the car. As they got closer, Pollock could see that it was his wife. He tried in vain to get a response from her.
They called police. Before
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