Friendly neighborhood tavern or nuisance bar?
Time has taken a toll on the Somerset Inn, which was the scene of the Robert Dickinson murder in March of 1985. For many years since, it has been vacant and rundown, with its parking lot overgrown with weeds. The building at the crossroads of Routes 136 and 519 in Eighty Four earned the reputation of being a nuisance bar after it was the scene of two murders in the same year.
Shortly after the Dickinson murder, in December 1985, Drayton Brown Sphar, 38, of Washington, was found stabbed to death in his car in the parking lot. Thomas Jeffrey Gorby, 27, of Eighty Four, was convicted of first-degree murder and was originally sentenced to death. He was eventually granted another trial and his sentence was reduced to third-degree murder. Gorby died of liver cancer at SCI-Fayette on March 23, 2022, at the age of 63.
Although the events of 1985 put the Eighty Four crossroads on the map, more than a decade earlier, 86-year-old Myrtle Amos was murdered in a house nearby. Mrs. Amos, the wife of the late Washington County Commissioner Earl Amos, was killed in 1971 by her housekeeper, Violet Marie Williams, 50, of Eighty Four. Williams was accused of killing the woman and storing her body in a freezer. Her burned body was discovered weeks later in a heap of trash in West Finley Township.
Williams was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. A record of her death couldn’t be located, but she would have been over 100 years old by now, so it is likely she died in prison.