Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 25, 1991                   TAG: 9103250092
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MONONGAHELA, PA.                                LENGTH: Medium

MAN TAPES PLOT BEFORE HIS DEATH/ WIFE, FRIEND BECOME MURDER SUSPECTS

The discovery of the tape two weeks after his death led state police to reopen the case and charge the purported lovers.

John Dave Cassidy's body was dug up Thursday. Washington County Coroner Farrell Jackson scheduled a jury inquest for this morning to reconsider his original ruling of suicide as the cause of Cassidy's death.

He was killed Feb. 13 by a shotgun blast to the head at his home in this former steel town south of Pittsburgh.

Mary Kay Cassidy, 29, was charged with criminal homicide March 11 after investigators were given an audio tape. On the tape, they said, John Cassidy, her husband since 1978, recorded her and David Bowers discussing the killing.

Bowers, 18, was charged with conspiracy to commit criminal homicide.

The tape was brought to police by four of the Cassidys' relatives, including Mary Kay Cassidy's brother, Edward Hill, and her older sister, Bonnie Jean McKinley, 37.

In addition to having five children with his wife, John Cassidy, 33, was the father of four of McKinley's children and a 10th child by another woman, according to Mary Kay Cassidy.

Mary Kay Cassidy had told the coroner she was upstairs when she heard a shotgun blast and came down to find her husband's body on the living-room couch, with the gun next to it.

She said her husband was drinking and had taken cocaine the evening before he died; Hill said John Cassidy had talked about ending his life earlier that day, according to a 17-page transcript of the coroner's interview with them the day of the killing.

"He said he had put my two sisters through too much misery and hurt them so much that he wanted to alleviate the hurt," Hill said. "I said, `John, that isn't going to solve any problem except leave two women without a husband and a lover, or whatever, and kids without a father.' "

Mary Kay Cassidy was arrested based on information she provided to investigators after the disclosure of the tape led to the reopening of the case, according to state police Trooper Roy Fuller.

Police concluded Cassidy and Bowers were romantically involved based on the recording and personal notes found at the house.

But police refused to provide details of what Cassidy told investigators, how the tape came to be made before the death, or what was on the tape.