The man who killed his wife and two daughters on Christmas Eve more than two decades ago is still on death row in Pennsylvania.
Ernest Wholaver Jr. continues to be incarcerated at SCI Somerset, even after 22 years have passed since the tragic incident where Jean Wholaver and her daughters, 20-year-old Victoria and 15-year-old Elizabeth, were discovered fatally shot inside their residence on North Union Street in Middletown on December 24, 2002.
Victoria discovered that her 9-month-old daughter was left unattended inside the house.
“It’s an awful case,” Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo told abc27’s Ali Lanyon in 2022 on the case’s 20th anniversary. “Any time you have a family wiped out, children murdered, it’s horrifying. And it happened on Christmas Eve, and you had a 9-month-old placed in danger. But for the concerns of the extended family and the diligence of police, the 9-month-old would have died, too.”
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Wholaver Jr. also also accused of raping his daughters and attempting to hire a hitman to kill the 9-month-old’s father. The person he assumed was a hitman turned out to be an undercover agent.
On August 31, 2004, Wholaver Jr. received the death penalty three times. However, Pennsylvania has not carried out an execution on a death row inmate since 1999.
Governors Tom Wolf and Josh Shapiro have both implemented moratoriums on executions during their administrations. As of now, Pennsylvania has 95 men on death row, but only three of them have been added to the execution list since 2020.
In 2022, Chardo expressed his lack of surprise regarding the absence of death sentences being carried out for the past 20 years.