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After 41 Years, Stakes Rise In Case

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By JOANN LOVIGLIO, The Associated Press

Published: September 5, 2007

PHILADELPHIA - Three days after Thanksgiving 1966, baby-faced rookie Officer Walter T. Barclay raced to a beauty salon that was being burglarized at 4 a.m.

At the bottom of a flight of steps he found William J. Barnes, 30, a man with a rap sheet and a gun.

The lives of Barclay, 23, a police officer's son, and Barnes, a criminal since he was a teenager, were defined by the seconds that followed.

Refusing an order to freeze, Barnes fired up the stairs. His target crumpled to the ground, paralyzed.

Barnes would spend most of his life in prison. An old man when released in 2005, he found a measure of peace by eking out an honest day's work at a supermarket and giving group talks about his life, mistakes and regrets.

As the decades passed, Barclay struggled to maintain his independence and self-respect. His life played out almost exactly as his surgeon had predicted years earlier: By his 60s, he was bed-bound, unable to care for himself, infection ravaging a body too weak to fight. Barclay died Aug. 19 at age 64.

His death wasn't just a sad end to a long struggle. Prosecutors said it was a new crime.

A medical examiner ruled Barclay had succumbed to an infection linked to the 41-year-old gunshot wounds. Tuesday, Barnes, now 71, was back in prison - charged with murder.

'When you set in motion a chain of events,' District Attorney Lynne Abraham said, 'a perpetrator of a crime is responsible for every single thing that follows from that chain of events no matter how distant.'
Barclay briefly returned to the force as a dispatcher and later manned an Amtrak information booth, but the work proved too taxing.

Hospital stays were more frequent as his organs and immune system weakened.

He knew what was coming.

'The surgeon gave Walt his lifetime prognosis right after he was shot,' said his sister, Rosalyn Harrison. 'He said what would happen to him in his 50s and 60s, and that's exactly what did happen.'
Barclay spent his last five years in a nursing home, an invalid with a feeding tube in his stomach and no control of basic bodily functions. It was the outcome he most feared.

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