Reginald McFadden spent most of his life in prison. He entered custody at 16 for the 1969 killing of a 60-year-old Philadelphia woman, Sonia Rosenbaum, and he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life. More than two decades later, after several attempts, he persuaded the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons to recommend that his sentence be commuted, and in March 1994 Governor Robert P. Casey signed the order. McFadden was paroled to New York on July 7, 1994. He was back in custody on October 6, 92 days later. In that interval he killed Robert Silk, a 42-year-old computer programmer from Elmont, New York, and Margaret Kierer, a 78-year-old woman from Floral Park, and he raped and kidnapped a 55-year-old woman in South Nyack.
The case became one of the most consequential clemency decisions in Pennsylvania history. News of his arrest broke weeks before the 1994 election for governor, in which Lieutenant Governor Mark Singel, who had voted for McFadden's release as chair of the Board of Pardons, lost a lead to Tom Ridge. In 1997 Pennsylvania voters approved a constitutional amendment that requires a unanimous vote of the board before it can recommend clemency for anyone serving a life sentence. A federal appeals court later described the amendment as motivated by McFadden's case. The legal scholar Regina Austin, who reconstructed the decision from board and governor's office records in two essays published in 2022, called him "Pennsylvania's Willie Horton, but worse!"
McFadden was born on February 23, 1953, and grew up in Philadelphia. Most of what is known about his childhood comes from his own account in a clemency application he filed on February 28, 1992, which Austin quotes. He described a stepfather who drank and beat him with an extension cord, a mother raising ten children who could not protect him, and a father who was in and out of a Veterans Administration hospital. The person he described as caring for him was his grandmother, and he connected her death to his first arrest, at the age of 12. He wrote that he was arrested 16 to 18 times over the next four years, that he began using drugs and alcohol at 13 and that by 15 he was fully addicted. He was careful in the application to say that he was not using his background as an excuse, and he asked himself where he had gone wrong.
These are his statements in a document written to win his release, and Austin treats them as such. They have not been independently confirmed.
Sonia Rosenbaum was 60 and lived in Wynnefield, in Philadelphia. Little has been published about her life. Her son, Dr. Jerry Rosenbaum, wrote to Governor Thornburgh on June 1, 1983, urging him not to grant her killer a premature release, and her family opposed McFadden's later applications as well. The Philadelphia district attorney's office also opposed his release.
On December 7, 1969, McFadden, then 16, and three other teenagers broke into Rosenbaum's home in Wynnefield to burglarize it. They found her there. According to the facts recited by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and summarized by Austin, they tied her to her bed, gagged her with a washcloth held in place with tape and pinned her legs under a desk. She suffocated. Mark Singel, who heard McFadden's case on the Board of Pardons in 1992, later wrote that the youths stole from her and that she was found dead the next day, and that McFadden acknowledged that she died from the gag while insisting that they had never meant to kill her.
McFadden was arrested on December 11, 1969. He was held for about 22 and a half hours before he was arraigned, and in that time he confessed both orally and in writing. On December 12 he was arraigned on charges of first-degree murder, burglary, aggravated robbery, larceny and conspiracy.
The three other youths pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. According to McFadden's later application, they received indeterminate sentences with a maximum of 20 years, which left them eligible for parole, and by 1992 all three had completed their sentences.
McFadden went to trial and was tried twice. After his first conviction, the trial court ordered a new trial because the use of his written confession had been reversible error. At the second trial he was convicted on all charges and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder, with concurrent terms on the other counts. He later said that before the second trial the district attorney had offered him a plea bargain of 20 to 40 years, which he did not take. On appeal he argued that his oral statements should have been suppressed because of his age and his use of heroin. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held that the statements were voluntary and upheld the conviction in Commonwealth v. McFadden, 369 A.2d 1156, decided in 1977; rehearing was denied in March 1977.
McFadden's prison record was mixed, and the parts of it that reached the officials who later decided his fate were incomplete. According to records Austin cites, he entered the state prison system in December 1974 and moved through several institutions, among them SCI Pittsburgh, SCI Graterford, SCI Camp Hill and SCI Rockview.
He studied. He pointed in his application to transcripts showing academic and vocational work pursued, as he put it, despite many obstacles, and he said he had gone without commissary for months to pay for correspondence courses. A professor at Regis College who had taught him a writing course by correspondence wrote to Governor Thornburgh in December 1981 in support of his release. Singel wrote that by 1992 McFadden had earned degrees and certificates and completed programs on drugs, alcohol and stress, and that one supporter told the board he had grown up, become educated and undergone a religious conversion. McFadden said he had joined the Nation of Islam in prison, partly out of fear, and left it in 1975. He later led a small group of worshippers in the mosque at Graterford.
He also had a disciplinary record. A 1995 newspaper report cited by Austin said he had at least 12 misconducts in his early years of confinement, including assault and conspiracy to escape. In 1984, by his own later account, he arranged to try to escape from SCI Rockview after losing faith in the commutation process; a staff member who did not know of the plan, he wrote, persuaded him to apply again. The governor's legal staff later called the escape arrangement serious misconduct.
He was also an informant. Austin reports, citing the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1995, that in the mid-1970s he testified against two inmates at SCI Pittsburgh who were accused of trying to kill a corrections officer, and he was moved to Graterford afterward. During the riots at SCI Camp Hill on October 25 to 27, 1989, Singel wrote, McFadden helped corrections staff, identified ringleaders and put himself at risk of retaliation; the board knew this, but it was never made public. McFadden's own account was that rioters held him down, tied and gagged him and threatened him. A story that he rescued a guard is not confirmed in the governor's office records Austin reviewed. After the riots he was moved into federal custody, first at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg and then at Leavenworth, for about two years, before returning to the Pennsylvania system at SCI Rockview in October 1991.
Pennsylvania's governors could commute a life sentence only on the recommendation of the Board of Pardons, which then needed only a majority vote. Board minutes cited by Austin show that McFadden applied eight times between 1977 and 1994. The board denied him in October 1977. It recommended commutation on October 19, 1978, but Governor Shapp denied it on October 23, 1979. It recommended him again on March 13, 1980, and Governor Thornburgh denied it on September 3, 1980. A third recommendation, on September 17, 1981, was denied by Thornburgh on March 23, 1983. The board itself turned him down in June 1984, October 1985 and December 1987.
His eighth application was filed on February 28, 1992. The board held a public hearing that August and, on August 28, 1992, voted 4 to 1 to recommend commutation. Singel, the lieutenant governor and the board's chair, voted with the majority. Singel later wrote that psychiatrists, prison superintendents, the corrections commissioner and the sentencing judge supported the application, and that the board was told McFadden had strong support in the community and a job waiting for him after two more years under halfway-house supervision. The commissioner of corrections, Joseph D. Lehman, had recommended in April 1992 a further two-year minimum and a placement in community corrections.
The one dissent came from Attorney General Ernie Preate Jr., who explained it in a statement dated September 18, 1992. Preate's criteria for a lifer's release, as Austin summarizes them, were more than 20 years served, sincere remorse, rehabilitation, a model prison record and a credible support system. He considered McFadden a loner without ties to lifer groups, called his application glib and said it showed not enough remorse.
The recommendation then sat in the governor's office. Casey, who had amyloidosis, received a heart and liver transplant in June 1993. His legal staff sent him a memorandum recommending approval on May 28, 1993, and a second, identical memorandum on January 11, 1994. On March 15, 1994, about 18 months after the board's vote, Casey signed a charter of clemency that reduced McFadden's sentence to a minimum of 24 years and a maximum of life.
How McFadden would leave prison was not settled clearly. Austin found that the board's and the governor's documents were ambiguous about whether the two years of pre-release supervision were meant to come before or after his release. In June 1994 the Parole Board paroled him into its Intensive Supervision Diversion Release Program, which was meant for prisoners considered high risk. At his own request his supervision was transferred to New York under the interstate parole compact. He had spent the previous two years working with minimal supervision at a nursery outside the prison, but he never spent time in a halfway house or community corrections center. He was released on July 7, 1994. He was 41.
In New York, supporters from a small Islamic group found McFadden an apartment, and he was given an old Cadillac that needed costly repairs, according to reporting in The New York Times summarized by Austin. He left a bookstore job, worked in a delicatessen and, about two weeks before his arrest, took a position as a counselor at the Edwin Gould Academy, a residential facility for young people in foster care. Preate later said McFadden had been left in the care of a retired New York schoolteacher.
Robert Silk, 42, was a computer programmer from Elmont, on Long Island. McFadden killed him and took his car. The courts later convicted McFadden of his murder. The date of Silk's death has not been reliably reported, and little more about the man himself has been published.
On September 21, 1994, McFadden seized a 55-year-old woman as she took her garbage out at her home in South Nyack, in Rockland County. She later testified that he raped her repeatedly, beat her and stole her jewelry, then forced her into a sleeping bag and drove her to bank machines to try to empty her account. She survived. She is not named here.
Margaret Kierer, 78, lived in Floral Park, on Long Island. McFadden beat and stabbed her to death. According to a report of his later sentencing, he killed her to vent his anger after getting lost near a Long Island Rail Road station. He took her car and used her bank card. Austin's account says he also raped her; the conviction on record is for her murder.
McFadden was back in custody on October 6, 1994. New York parole officials said their supervision had played a central part in identifying and catching him. In the South Nyack case, investigators had a photograph of him at a bank machine, apparently trying to withdraw money from the victim's account, and the woman's jewelry was in his possession when he was arrested.
The arrest landed in the middle of the race to succeed Casey as governor. Singel, the Democratic nominee, was ahead; in his own later account he led by eight points with four weeks to go. On October 11, 1994, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported that he called his vote for McFadden "the worst decision I ever made in my career" and said he would regret it for the rest of his life. A spokeswoman for his Republican opponent, Congressman Tom Ridge, said it was unfortunate that it took "two terrible crimes" for him to admit his mistake. Singel's campaign released an ad acknowledging that he had voted 60 times in four years to release lifers.
Ridge, campaigning on the slogan "Life Means Life," ran advertisements tying Singel to McFadden. Singel wrote that his eight-point lead became a seven-point deficit within days and that he chose not to hit back, because he could not pretend that he was not partly responsible. Polls cited by the State Clemency Project at New York University show Singel ahead 38 percent to 31 percent in early October and Ridge ahead 37 to 36 in November. Ridge won, 45 percent to 40 percent. The pollster Terry Madonna told the Daily Pennsylvanian after the election that Singel's campaign "started to fall apart with McFadden." Singel said years later, "The ads ended my political career." He also recalled that his son came home from school asking whether his father had killed someone.
McFadden insisted on defending himself. The South Nyack case was tried first, in Rockland County Court in New City. The trial lasted three weeks. McFadden told the jury he was the victim of mistaken identity and of a terrorist plot. He did not deny having the woman's jewelry, but said a Muslim organization had given it to him to pawn to raise money for Muslims in Bosnia. Under cross-examination prosecutors got him to admit that he had shaved his entire body, and at another time covered himself with feces, to defeat investigators' efforts to take hair samples. On August 24, 1995, after about two hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of rape, kidnapping and related charges. Newspaper reports of the period, summarized by Austin, described a defendant who threw excrement at guards, blocked his cell toilet and arrived at one hearing unwashed for a month; a competency examination was ordered in May 1995.
He was sentenced to 37 and a half to 75 years for the South Nyack attack. In the Kierer case he pleaded guilty to beating and stabbing her to death, and he received 25 years to life.
The last case was the murder of Robert Silk, tried in Rockland County. On March 20, 1996, Justice William Kelly sentenced McFadden, then 43, to the maximum, 25 years to life, to run after his other terms. McFadden repeatedly interrupted and threatened the judge. "Give me a thousand years, why not?" he said. When Kelly began to say that he had shown no remorse, McFadden cut him off, saying he had no remorse and no mercy for his enemy, and told the court that he would rather be in jail than serve a society that, he said, had made him what he was. "Put me in jail, so be it," he said.
In total he was sentenced in New York to two terms of 25 years to life for the murders and 37 and a half to 75 years for the rape and kidnapping, all to run consecutively. Because the New York crimes broke the conditions of his commutation, he also remained subject to the life sentence in Pennsylvania for the murder of Sonia Rosenbaum.
In 1997, while held at Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York, McFadden sued Pennsylvania's corrections commissioner, Joseph Lehman, the head of the Parole Board, Martin Horn, and officials and psychiatrists at SCI Rockview in federal court. He argued that they had failed to rehabilitate him, had paroled him without any pre-release program and had ignored signs of mental illness and the rage he had suppressed in prison, and that this had contributed to the deaths of the people he killed on parole. On May 23, 1997, Judge Muir of the Middle District of Pennsylvania dismissed the complaint as frivolous, holding that prisoners have no constitutional right to rehabilitation or to pre-release programs. The opinion recorded that McFadden, after serving 24 years, had been paroled on July 7, 1994, and that he was convicted of all the New York offenses.
When Austin wrote in 2022, citing the New York prison locator, McFadden was held at Attica Correctional Facility and his earliest possible release date was August 2, 2084. She judged it unlikely that he would ever be returned to Pennsylvania to finish the life sentence there.
A death notice posted by the Pickens Funeral Home in Philadelphia records that Reginald McFadden, born February 23, 1953, died on March 6, 2023; the same death date was listed on a national obituary site on June 1, 2023. The birth date matches the one in his clemency file. Where he died has not been made public, and no official announcement or news report of his death is known.
Ridge took office in January 1995 and called a special legislative session on crime on his first full day as governor. He nominated Martin Horn, the former head of New York's parole division, as corrections commissioner; Horn's confirmation hearing in March 1995 dealt with McFadden. The daughter of the South Nyack survivor testified before the Pennsylvania Senate Judiciary Committee in 1995, proposing a unanimous board vote, interviews with applicants and a halfway-house stage before release. She later said she regretted that her testimony had treated every lifer as if he were McFadden.
The General Assembly passed the proposed constitutional amendments in April 1995, and the Senate approved them 45 to 5. On November 4, 1997, Pennsylvania voters ratified them, 1,182,067 to 811,701. The amendment changed Article IV, section 9 of the state constitution so that the Board of Pardons may recommend clemency for a person serving a life sentence only by a unanimous vote, and it changed the board's membership to include a crime victim and a corrections expert. The Pennsylvania Prison Society and a group of lifers challenged it as an unconstitutional retroactive punishment. In Pennsylvania Prison Society v. Cortés, decided October 1, 2010, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rejected that claim, noting that the amendment had been motivated by the 1994 McFadden case.
The effect on clemency for lifers was immediate and lasting. Board of Pardons figures show that Governor Shapp granted 251 life-sentence commutations, Thornburgh 7 and Casey 27. Ridge granted none. In 2009 the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that the "clemency spigot all but closed in 1994," and WHYY reported in 2016 that the case had made the road to commutation much steeper. Under Governor Tom Wolf, from 2015, commutations began again; the board's figures as of September 1, 2026, record 55 for Wolf and 17 so far for Governor Josh Shapiro. Austin, while holding McFadden primarily to blame for what he did, concluded that his release was the product of bureaucratic mistakes, the governor's illness, an image of an exceptional prisoner that supporters accepted without question, and a record shaped by his value as an informant. Singel, writing in 2017, said he still believed in mercy.
Proven by final convictions: the first-degree murder of Sonia Rosenbaum (1969); the murders of Robert Silk and Margaret Kierer (1994), the second by guilty plea; and the rape, kidnapping and robbery of the South Nyack survivor (1994).
Never charged or tried: the death of Dana DeMarco, a 39-year-old artist and musician from Rockland County, whose body was found in 1995 about a mile from the school that had employed McFadden. Press reports in 1995 linked him to her death, and her mother still hoped years later that he would be tried; the district attorney believed that McFadden's stated wish to take responsibility for her death was meant only to draw attention. No court has ever found that he killed her.
Not established by any conviction: the sexual assault of Margaret Kierer, which appears in Austin's account but not in the conviction record found.
Details that vary between sources: Sonia Rosenbaum's surname (Rosenbaum in most of Austin's text; Rosenblum also appears); whether she was a "neighbor" (UPI, 1996) or simply a homeowner in Wynnefield; how long McFadden served before release (24 years in the commutation order, the 1997 federal opinion and the Inquirer; 25 years in UPI's 1996 report and WHYY); the year of the commutation (1994 in the official record; 1992 in the State Clemency Project report, which confuses it with the board's vote); and the month of the board's vote (August 1992 in board minutes; March 1992 in a 2022 commentary). Some reports say Casey "pardoned" McFadden; it was a commutation. WHYY's 2016 statement that he killed three people in New York goes beyond the convictions, which are for two.
February 23, 1953: Reginald McFadden is born; he grows up in Philadelphia.
About age 12: first arrest, which he links to his grandmother's death.
December 7, 1969: McFadden, 16, and three other teenagers break into Sonia Rosenbaum's home in Wynnefield; she suffocates after being tied and gagged.
December 11 and 12, 1969: arrested, confesses, and is arraigned on murder and related charges.
First trial: convicted; a new trial is ordered because his written confession was wrongly used.
Second trial: convicted of first-degree murder and all other counts; life.
December 1974: enters the state prison system.
1977: Supreme Court of Pennsylvania upholds the conviction (369 A.2d 1156).
1978, 1980, 1981: Board of Pardons recommends commutation; Governors Shapp and Thornburgh refuse.
June 1, 1983: the victim's son writes to the governor opposing release.
1984: arranges an escape attempt from SCI Rockview, by his own account.
October 25 to 27, 1989: Camp Hill riots; he is later moved to federal prisons.
October 1991: returns to SCI Rockview.
February 28, 1992: eighth clemency application filed.
August 28, 1992: Board of Pardons votes 4 to 1 for commutation; Ernie Preate dissents.
June 1993: Governor Casey has a heart and liver transplant.
March 15, 1994: Casey signs the commutation.
June 1994: paroled into the Intensive Supervision Diversion Release Program, supervision to be in New York.
July 7, 1994: released.
1994: kills Robert Silk, 42, of Elmont, New York.
September 21, 1994: rapes and kidnaps a 55-year-old woman in South Nyack.
1994: kills Margaret Kierer, 78, of Floral Park.
October 6, 1994: back in custody.
October 11, 1994: Singel calls his vote the worst decision of his career.
November 1994: Tom Ridge defeats Singel, 45 percent to 40 percent.
1995: Body of Dana DeMarco found in Rockland County; McFadden is linked by the press but never charged.
May 1995: competency examination ordered.
August 24, 1995: convicted of rape and kidnapping in Rockland County.
1995 to 1996: pleads guilty to Margaret Kierer's murder; 25 years to life.
March 20, 1996: sentenced to 25 years to life for Robert Silk's murder.
May 23, 1997: federal court dismisses his lawsuit against Pennsylvania officials.
November 4, 1997: Pennsylvania voters approve the unanimity amendment.
October 1, 2010: Third Circuit upholds the amendment.
2022: held at Attica; earliest release date August 2, 2084.
March 6, 2023: dies, according to a funeral home notice.