Slaying Of 2 Girls At Scenic Overlook Still Unresolved -- No Suspects, Leads In Killings

BETHLEHEM, Pa. - Mary Orlando could better understand what happened if her daughter had been raped before she was murdered.

The pain affects Joan Grider no less: She has forced herself to visit the scenic overlook where her daughter was gunned down, hoping for a revelation.

"I used to sit here for the longest time just by myself and think. There's a million ifs," she said.

Five months have passed since Mary Orlando, 15, and Jennifer Grider, 17, were shot dead as they settled on the hill above Lehigh University to eat the take-out food they had just bought.

Police have no suspect. No motive. No weapon. No witnesses. The community remains puzzled and distraught over the loss of the energetic, popular girls.

"You'd think they would've been raped," said Mary Orlando, mother of the girl with the same name. Both murder and rape are horrible crimes, she said, "but at least there would be something there."

Investigators have ruled out a handful of possibilities. Bethlehem Police Capt. Herbert Goldfeder says police still do not even know whether the girls were shot by an acquaintance or a stranger. The girls had no criminal histories, no drug connections.

Jennifer's mother was the last in her family of six to see her daughter on the day of the killings. That was June 29. Jennifer had come home hungry from her summer job serving meals in a nursing home.

As a treat, her mother told Jennifer she could drive the family's new red Camaro. Jennifer yelled this news across her back yard to her friend Mary.

After driving Joan Grider, the mother, to work at a home for mentally handicapped children, the girls stopped at the drive-thru of the "39 Cent Hamburger Stand." Her mother says Jennifer probably ordered her favorite: chili cheese fries.

The girls then headed to "The Lookout," a 50-foot stretch of stone ledge along a winding, wooded road to the campus, which is just up the street from their neighborhood of tightly packed row houses.

The road widens a little at the ledge, just enough for cars to pull over and stop for a view of the town. Bethlehem is a picturesque and historic steel town of about 71,000 cradled in the Lehigh River Valley about 47 miles north of Philadelphia.

The girls got out of the car and sat on the ledge with their food. They apparently did not have time to take it out of the bags.

Grider believes Jennifer was shot twice and fell onto a grassy rise just in front of the wall before the drop. Orlando believes Mary was shot once and managed to crawl inside the car where she apparently bled to death.

Neither knows for sure. Police have not told the families the number or locations of the wounds, the type of gun, what the girls were wearing or even what food they had ordered.

Goldfeder will confirm only the locations of the bodies and say the girls were shot just before 10 p.m. Northampton County Coroner Zachary Lysek would confirm nothing. Both said they feared details would jeopardize the investigation.

The lookout is not a spot known for crime, Goldfeder said.

The girls' decision to eat there was apparently spur-of-the-moment, Grider says, so nobody with a grudge against them would have gone there.

The mothers are left only with speculation: Maybe the girls saw some illegal activity in the woods down the slope; maybe they angered another driver and were followed to the lookout; maybe a Lehigh student went crazy from stress.

Grider says she doesn't want to say, as other parents might, that the girls were "perfect little angels."

"They were typical teenagers," she said. "They had fun. . . . But they were never trouble. I don't think Jenny even had a detention."

The girls' lifelong friend, Maureen Brett, 18, said they had no enemies - only many, many friends.

Blond, athletic Jen, a senior at Bethlehem Catholic High, was trying to earn money for Penn State University where she planned to major in occupational therapy.

Slim, dark-haired Mary, a junior at Freedom High, was an assistant dance instructor who dreamed of fame in New York.

"The police should have found something by now," Brett said. "Nobody can understand. They were great girls."