Indiana County President Judge Thomas Bianco on Thursday ordered that the trial of Ronald Weiss for the murder of a Tunnelton teenager 44 years ago be postponed again. The trial had been scheduled for October 24th but is continued on a motion filed Wednesday by Weiss’s attorney, Taylor Malcolm Johnson.
Weiss is 74 years old. He’s charged with murdering 16-year-old Barbara Bruzda after playing pool with her in her family’s bar in October of 1978. Her body was found five months later in a wooded area and Weiss was convicted in 1997, after a state law had changed and allowed spouses to testify against each other. His then-common law wife testified, as did two prison inmates who said Weiss admitted killing Bruzda. But in 2018, federal judge Mark Hornack struck down the conviction based on a ruling that a deputy attorney general and a state trooper had lied about promising special treatment to the two prison inmates in exchange for their testimony. Weiss was released but immediately arrested and the charges re-filed, with Judge Bianco ruling that the murder and the prosecutorial misconduct were separate issues.
No new trial date has been announced.
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