John Shelkons, 54, was shot to death in his McNair Street home in Baden, Pennsylvania, in the early hours of January 7, 1978. The intruder entered through a locked cellar door, came up into the ranch-style house at the end of a dead-end road near the woods, and shot Shelkons at close range. The victim collapsed against the couch where his wife, Catherine Shelkons, 48, had been sleeping.

Catherine survived a brutal assault. She was awakened by the attacker, initially described to her as white but later identified as Black. He wore gloves, a flannel shirt, jeans, and a bandana, and struck her with a telephone and kicked her, breaking her nose, before fleeing—apparently startled by their daughter’s unexpected return home with her fiancé. The couple had three children.

The killing was later linked to a series of late-1970s shotgun and couple attacks in southwestern Pennsylvania attributed to Edward Surratt, a long-haul trucker known as the Shotgun Killer. Surratt was arrested in Florida in 1978 and decades later admitted to several Pennsylvania murders, including John Shelkons’s, though authorities did not pursue prosecution for this killing.

Does anyone have memories of the neighborhood or the Shelkons family from that time who could add details about the case?