Police Chief Remembers Dark Day in Alburtis

At first he was puzzled. 

Then his heart sank. 

Alburtis Police Chief Robert Palmer clearly remembers the morning of March 11. 

He had just gone through paperwork with a newly hired officer.

"I had just told him that nothing happens here," Palmer said with a chuckle.

Until it does. 

The call came in on the police scanner that screams through both his office and the adjoining borough offices. The first transmission said it was a "mother and daughter down."

"One of the women came in and said, 'That's Althea,' and my heart just  sank," Palmer said. 

He won't say yet what he found there, at least not until the trial is over. There's still a lot of work to be done to get ready for that, he said. 

Palmer was genuinely fond of Althea Walbert. He smiled as he remembered some of her eccentricities including the day he saw her -- always with daughter Jeannette -- driving down the street with a flat tire. 

"She was a fiesty old woman with a truck driver's mouth. One day she greeted me by saying, 'Man! You're getting fat.' "

Palmer left his job as an Allentown detective to take his current job. In a city, he said, you expect things like this to happen. 

"But here you don't expect it. I take it personal. This is a nice, quiet place. Here there's more involvement, more interest.

"I don't want it here," he said. 

His connection with the community he helps protect showed vividly about a month after the homicides when Palmer addressed a town watch group -- a packed room -- in borough hall. 

There were things he couldn't tell the people of Alburtis that night, but he could and did tell them that what happened to the Walberts was a "crime of opportunity," and not something that was likely to happen again. 

"I thought it helped," he told Alburtis Council President Steve Hill when Hill stopped by the police station Monday to congratulate him. 

Hill said the panicked folks who went into the meeting that night left calmer because of Palmer's words.

Pastor Katherine Brearley of Longswamp UCC in Mertztown said Monday that the capture of Brandin Kasick is what has really relieved her congregation.

The Walberts attended Longswamp UCC and Althea left a sizeable chunck of her wealth to the church.

People were frightened thinking the killer could possibly be a member of the community or even their neighbor, she said. They're relieved to know he's not.

The arrest also bolsters their confidence in law enforcement.

"So often if people get away, it shakes a community's confidence in the system," she said. 

Not so this time. 

Palmer is thankful to State Police investigators for the work they did on what was never a cold case.

"Today," he said, "is a good day."