NEW KENSINGTON, Pa. –
The four men who put Steve Szarewicz away for murder all changed their stories at one time or another, yet Szarewicz still sits behind bars. That’s where he has been for almost 43 years.
A jury convicted him of killing Billy Merriwether, 25, who was shot twice in the back of the head and once in the chest, his body left facedown off a country road in western Pennsylvania on a rainy February morning in 1981.
There were no fingerprints, no eyewitness testimony and no DNA evidence linking Szarewicz to the scene. Investigators never found the murder weapons. Instead, the case rested on the words of four jailhouse informants who all testified that Szarewicz confessed to them.
Three of the four recanted: one in an interview with a famed newspaper reporter; one in a …