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Inset: Shawn Christopher Cranston (Crawford County Correctional Facility). Background: Fish Flats Road, in Sparta Township, Pa. (Google Maps).
A Pennsylvania man will likely spend the next several decades behind bars for killing a pregnant Amish woman in her home.
Earlier this month, 53-year-old Shawn Christopher Cranston was convicted on charges of first-degree criminal homicide, second-degree homicide of an unborn child, first-degree burglary, and first-degree criminal trespass.
The victims, 23-year-old Rebekah A. Byler and her unborn child, were brutally killed during a burglary in April 2024. At the time of her death, Rebekah was six months pregnant with her third child.
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Details from a search warrant application acquired by Law&Crime depict a distressing scene that Rebekah’s husband, Andy Byler, walked into on February 26, 2024.
Rebekah Byler’s “throat had been cut” and she was “laying on her back in a pool of blood in the living room of the residence,” police wrote. There was also an “evident laceration” on the front side of her neck and what appeared to be “a scalping type wound on her head.”
“Rebekah Byler was discovered laying on her back in the living room of the residence,” another affidavit filed in the case reads. “A collection of blood was around and she displayed multiple sharp force wounds to the neck.”
The two Byler children — a 2-year-old girl and a 3-year-old boy — were home when their mother was killed but they were left unharmed. The boy would later tell authorities he saw a man wearing sneakers who drove a green truck enter the house and kill his mom.
Investigators later found a shoe print resembling the design on the bottom of a Nike Air Force One inside the Byer house on Fish Flats Road in Sparta Township, some 120 miles north of Pittsburgh.
The Amish do not traditionally wear sneakers.
At a probable cause hearing last year, the grieving husband testified that his children were the ones who told him about their mother’s murder when he arrived home from surveying potential roofing jobs.
“I didn’t really believe it,” Andy Byler testified, according to The Associated Press. “I walked in and saw her cap laying inside the door.”
During the trial, prosecutors called 24 witnesses.
One of those witnesses was a prison inmate who testified, in graphic detail, about Cranston’s confession regarding the burglary gone awry.
The woman happened upon the intruder in her living room and began to scream, the inmate told jurors in Crawford County.
Then, Cranston attacked.
“Spun her around and started choking her,” the inmate testified during the two-day trial. “She didn’t pass out, so he slit her throat. He said she didn’t die quick enough, so he shot her.”
The defendant, a truck driver, worked for an Amish family who lived near the Byers — driving them around due to prohibitions in the Amish community against the personal use of motor vehicles.
The defense did not call any witnesses.
Cranston’s defense attorney did, however, offer a closing argument focused on the lack of DNA evidence on the killer’s clothing, shoes or car. Such lacking evidence was a telltale sign of his innocence, the attorney argued, because of how gruesome the murder scene inside the Byler house was.
The state eschewed essaying a formal motive argument for the killing — a fact Cranston’s defense sought to make an issue during last year’s probable cause hearing. Prosecutors also never provided a definitive murder weapon.
The gun used in the murder has never been recovered. The knife may have been found — investigators discovered a knife along a nearby country road several months after Rebekah Byler was killed — but was lacking both fingerprints and DNA.
But in the end, those discrepancies did not matter enough for Crawford County jurors to significantly question Cranston’s guilt. Deliberations took less than three hours before the defendant was found guilty on all of the charges against him.
“It is hard to fathom conduct more heinous than brutally killing a young expectant mother and her unborn child in her home,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday said in a press release. “Our homes are supposed to be our safe haven — this defendant violated the sanctity of home to commit these truly evil acts.”
Cranston is slated to be sentenced on the morning of July 28.
