Court: Ex-Ross Township postal worker who killed lover when she wouldn’t leave her husband needs to stay in prison
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Robert Metz killed his lover when she refused to leave her husband.
Her body was still there, lying on the floor of Metz’s Ross Township apartment, when police burst in three days later. And Metz, a 69-year-old retired postal worker, was sitting in a bathtub filled with bloody water, holding a kitchen knife. He had self-inflicted cuts to his arms, wrists and groin.
Metz ended up with a 15- to 30-year prison sentence after he pleaded guilty to third-degree murder for the June 2018 slaying of 56-year-old Dolores Miller.
And that is where he should stay, a state Superior Court panel has decided.
In an opinion by Senior Judge Eugene B. Strassburger III, the court rejected Metz’s appeal of his sentence and his claims that an Allegheny County judge didn’t fully consider Metz’s own needs in imposing it.
As Stassburger noted, police went to Metz’s apartment after Miller’s daughter reported her missing. Metz had previously told police by phone that he had last seen Miller when she left his apartment to go to a casino.
After his arrest, Metz told investigators he had strangled Miller until blood came out of her mouth and nose, then had driven her car to the casino and parked it. He said he had tossed her cell phone into a lake. Yet he never moved her body.
Metz pleaded guilty to the murder count and a charge of abuse of a corpse in January 2019.
He claimed on appeal that in choosing his punishment, county Judge Thomas Flaherty didn’t give enough weight to his mental health concerns and other issues that should have translated into a lighter sentence. Metz insisted that “copious” mitigating evidence included his regret about the killing, his four subsequent suicide attempts and his lack of a prior criminal record and his reputation as a long-serving, hardworking employee of the U.S. Postal Service.
In rejecting those arguments, Strassburger cited Flaherty’s conclusion that Metz’s punishment is justified by the “horrific nature” of the slaying and Metz’s ineffectual attempts to cover it up.