By Ed Balint
The Repository
KENT, Ohio — Driving to McDonald’s in Kent, the undercover police officer spoke into a recording device.
In a flat, businesslike voice, she rattled off information. The date: April, 20, 2018. The time: 8:06 a.m. The covert interview subject: Philip Snider.
For a long stretch, the Hartville police officer drove in silence, the only noise being produced by the rubber tires humming over the pavement.
Then she took a cellphone call from the man she greeted as “Phil,” and her tone shifted effortlessly into the upbeat and casual demeanor of “Melissa.”
“Melissa” was a fictional character created to foster a relationship with Snider, a 72-year-old Hartville man suspected in the death of his wife, Roberta.
“Hello,” the officer said, perking up. “Yeah, I’m almost there ... just around the corner, like at the light.”
Less than two minutes later, she entered the restaurant.
“Hello there, little girl,” Phil said brightly.
“Good morning; how are you?” she chirped.
“Peachy keen,” Snider said. “Or hunky-dory.”
Light laughter is heard from the officer in the secret audio recording.
Then she went to order a 99-cent coffee with two creams before taking a seat with Snider as cash registers beeped in the background.
Roughly an hour and 14 minutes would pass before she departed with what police said was Snider confessing to fatally bashing his wife in the head with a 2-pound stake hammer.
An hour and 14 minutes that culminated with Snider’s arrest on an aggravated murder charge and ultimately his recent guilty plea, conviction and a prison term of 20 years before he’s eligible for parole.
The hard-earned police work was a major break in a case that attracted national attention. From the start, the story seemed odd, an elderly husband telling investigators his 70-year-old wife had died of natural causes on the way to the Graceland mansion of Elvis Presley before he had flagged down random medics who loaded her into an ambulance that he couldn’t remember or identify.
His arrest and convictions were the end result, but reaching that point wasn’t easy. And it wasn’t quick.
Building and cultivating Snider’s confidence and trust took a month’s worth of fast-food meetups, short phone calls and snippet texts and a blending of ordinary chatter with relentlessly probing questions about his wife’s death.
It all led to a rarity: A murder conviction in a case without the victim’s body or the murder weapon.
Right officer at right time
The case was unique for the Hartville Police Department.
“I’ve had a vast, diverse experience with law enforcement, a lot of big cases,” said Chief Larry Dordea, who was Alliance’s chief for 10 years and has headed Hartville’s department for the last 10. “But none that have been as full of deception and intrigue or has garnered this level of media attention. This eclipses everything.”
When Roberta Snider’s brother reported her missing Jan. 9, Hartville police got to work, making a series of phone calls to hospitals, fire departments, coroner’s offices and other agencies in Tennessee in an attempt to find her body. Philip Snider’s story just didn’t add up.
When police confronted him with conflicting evidence, he altered his version of events and said his wife had died at their St. Abigail Street SW home in Hartville. Then, he said, he loaded her body in the back of his pickup truck and drove about 700 miles before discarding it in the Tennessee River.
Police conducted multiple interviews at Snider’s home. He sat on the same blood-stained loveseat where it later was determined he had killed his wife while she slept after the couple fought the previous night.
Authorities didn’t have enough evidence to arrest Snider, a retired union carpenter who crafted cigar-box ukuleles at his home. And he continued to deceive, failing a polygraph test and also inquiring about his wife’s modest life insurance policy.
“When you’re looking at Phil ... he’s a pretty good role player,” Dordea said, recalling how the suspect would rub his eyes in fatigue, act confused and feign the emotions of a grieving spouse.
“I’m telling you this guy is deception personified ... and I’ve dealt with a lot of people over my time.”
About the same time the investigation stalled, Dordea interviewed a woman applying for a job at the Hartville department.
Nearly three months had passed since Roberta Snider was reported missing.
The applicant had a wealth of law enforcement experience and years working undercover. Following a break from police work and a stint as a substitute teacher, she wanted to fight crime again.
After mulling it over, Dordea asked the woman about going undercover in the Snider case. Instincts honed from 40 years of police work told him Snider would respond better to a female. So the chief and new hire agreed to give it a shot.
From afar, the stealth officer studied Philip Snider’s habits and routine and started showing up at fast-food restaurants in Hartville, where he met up with acquaintances for coffee.
They first made small talk on March 23 at Burger King and the duo soon began meeting regularly at the same spots.
The 50-year-old officer was visibly younger. Snider was gray-haired, partially bald and bespectacled, his voice worn by age. They resembled a son and daughter more than a couple.
Morphing into the crowd, the undercover cop didn’t wear makeup or doll herself up. Attire included sweatpants, workout clothes and sometimes a tie-dye shirt.
Steadily, she gained Snider’s trust by grousing about a sick elderly mother whom she couldn’t stand.
It was a ruse. Just like her cover story of moving from Cincinnati to care for her mom until she died. A large inheritance was waiting, the story went.
She was divorced, the mother of grown children. Again, all fabricated.
Their closeness was bolstered when she let slip she secretly wanted to kill her ailing mom. Snider calmly suggested it could be done without raising suspicion.
Day by day, card game by card game, question after question, he fell for it. Then she began asking about his wife.
At first he flinched, acting as if the subject was too sensitive to broach. But it wasn’t long before he confided he was the target of an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Roberta’s death.
A wedding ring and the CIA
There was nearly a misstep, however.
During one of their earlier meetups, Snider noticed a glistening diamond wedding ring on Melissa’s finger. She had forgotten to take it off.
“What’s that?” he quizzed.
Without pause or fumble, she explained it was the ring of her failed marriage. She wanted to pawn it for money and thought Snider might know what it was worth.
But the officer had to be careful. Snider was curious about her and asked where she lived. The sleuth gave a general description. Prioritizing her safety, Dordea had stationed other undercover law enforcement at their initial meetups. And she was armed whenever they met.
Eventually he wanted to meet her at fast-food restaurants outside Hartville because he apparently was concerned police might start asking Melissa questions.
At one point he asked her if she was a Hartville officer, though his tone on an audio recording is indirect and friendly in nature. Easily she brushed it off, joking she worked for the CIA.
Questions, questions, questions
The recorded interviews, obtained from the Stark County Prosecutor’s Office, provide a window directly into the hoax of a friendship.
The officer posing as Melissa never flirted. She never bribed him. She was kind, chatty, humorous and charismatic without overdoing it.
The most intimate gesture was when she asked employees at a doughnut shop to keep an order for him and sing “Happy Birthday” when he arrived.
The friendship progressed to where Snider wanted to join her on a trip to Cincinnati and later talked of them living together. Deftly she postponed such plans, mentioning an aunt and sprinkling in other convincing details of a life that didn’t exist.
Eventually he started to entertain questions about his wife’s death.
Conversations shifted bizarrely from whose turn it was in a card game to how long it took for a body to decompose. And he talked almost expertly about the human heart, oxygen levels and blood loss as it pertained to dying people or corpses, although he attributed some of his knowledge to television programming.
The confession
All of it led to April 20, the last time they met. The climax of her undercover work.
The duo conversed while playing “Kings in the Corner” amid the rhythm of cards being slapped down on the table and shuffled.
The retro soul of Etta James’ “A Sunday Kind of Love” played over the restaurant’s stereo system. Voices of other customers were heard. Sausage McMuffins were ordered.
Then, between sips of coffee and free refills, she did what she did best: pepper him with questions.
Every minute or two, after interjecting casual banter about cute children spotted at the restaurant or the stupidity of people who smoke cigarettes while filling their cars with gas, she would gamely return to Roberta’s death. Their voices usually lowered.
Snider talked almost nonchalantly about how to suffocate a sick, elderly woman by rolling her over during her sleep.
But he also fired back questions at this new and engaging woman in his life. Why was she so desperate to pry out details about the death of his wife of 53 years?
“I’m just curious,” she volunteered, “and ... I’m like consumed about it because I can picture ... myself there watching but I don’t know exactly what happened.”
And she also empathized with the insidious desire to kill someone, referring to her own crabby mother.
But like they did so often, conversation veered off course, with Snider proclaiming he had a “bizarre idea.”
Melissa responded nimbly and playfully: “I love bizarre ideas.”
Then he suggested they enter into a “marriage of convenience” so she could receive $900 a month from his pension if he died.
“Just an idea,” he said in a voice that sounded more grandfatherly than romantic. “And we won’t even need to get frisky.”
The officer laughed politely, deflecting the comment. “Good,” she said, “because I’m not a frisky kind of person.”
An hour into the conversation, more questions tumbled out: “You’re going to tell me, though, how it happened, aren’t you?”
“After I get to Cincinnati,” Snider teased, “I’ll tell you how it happened.”
“No, no, no, no, good try,” she razzed him back. “I think that you should just tell me so we can get past that so I can quit wondering ...”
She got more pointed, asking him what drove him to kill his wife. “I had enough,” he said.
Back and forth they went, Snider dodging questions, Melissa prodding. She encouraged him to get it off his chest.
“You think I bonked her on the head? What do you want me to tell you? That I took a big 2-pound sledge stake-driving hammer and bonked her on the head?”
Asked if he killed her, Snider said, “maybe” before adding, “scenario-wise.”
“Just a scenario” was a phrase he had used liberally throughout the earlier portions of their discussion when talk had switched to the finer aspects of his wife’s death and his direct role in it.
But Melissa was tireless in her inquisition, skilled at this high-stakes game of verbal ping-pong.
“Can you imagine a hammer this big?” he said, spreading his hands about 12 inches apart.
More incriminating details spilled forth. He pointed to a spot on his head, where he struck his wife two times with the hammer.
Taking a deep breath, Snider said, “Anyway, that’s what happened.”
“Did you snap?,” the officer asked. “No,” he said, sounding mentally fatigued. "... Just numb and fed up.”
Before they parted, the elderly man asked the woman posing as his confidant for a peck on the cheek.
“A nice big wet one,” he said. “Only if what you told me is the truth,” the officer said. “It is,” Snider replied.
She gave him the peck, accompanied by a small hug.
Not so peachy keen
About 10 a.m., on April 20, Snider bid farewell to the friend who wasn’t.
Snider’s world soon would be closing in. Authorities listened to the audio and obtained an arrest warrant for aggravated murder.
Dordea tracked down Snider at Burger King in Hartville about 3 p.m.
The police chief walked into the restaurant. Sgt. Robert Wittensoldner was at his side.
Snider was anchored to a booth, his arms spread wide and feet propped on the opposite bench. Alone with his thoughts and a cup of coffee.
“How are you doing, Phil?”
“Peachy keen.”
“Peachy keen,” Doredea repeated amicably. “That good?”
“Yeah, that good.”
“Are you ready to talk?”
“No ... not yet.”
Dordea plopped down in the next booth over.
“Well, you’re probably going to be less peachy keen in a second because you’re under arrest.”
“For what?” Snider balked.
Moments later he was handcuffed and escorted out to a cruiser.
It’s unclear at what point Snider learned he had been tricked by an undercover officer.
But three days after his arrest, the operative received a phone call from the Stark County Jail. It was Snider.
Immediately, she disconnected the call. And he couldn’t reach her when he tried again through another party.
But on a trip to Tennessee last week to search for the victim’s remains, Dordea said he had the clear sense Snider was aware “Melissa” had worked for the cops.
At that point the case had moved on. Driving an unmarked cruiser across state lines, the chief was most interested in locating Roberta Snider’s remains in an effort to give her family some sense of closure.
Snider led them to a dumpster off Interstate 65 behind a bar and restaurant in Bullitt County, Ky. That led investigators to Pearl Hollow Landfill about 30 minutes away.
But there was something Snider didn’t know. “Melissa” had joined them on the journey.
Dordea made a point not to have her ride along. The two never saw each other. And while Snider was housed at a Kentucky jail, the undercover officer, Dordea and Sgt. Wittensoldner headed to the landfill on Wednesday morning.
“Just like the rest of us, she is an emotional human being,” Dordea said of the officer, adding that she invested her time and talent in the case.
“Everything we did was about Roberta, and to have a good chance to find Roberta,” Dordea said. “She wanted to be there.”