Delaware County Daily Times - Jan 16, 2002 Article #1

Is Katelyn alive? New witness says ‘yes' by Gil Spencer

Delaware County Daily Times (Primos - Upper Darby, PA) - Wednesday, January 16, 2002

Finally, Robert Rivera , accused kidnapper and baby-killer, appeared ready to enter Courtroom No. 4. Dressed in dark green prison skivvies, his hands cuffed behind his back, Rivera stood with his head slightly bowed and waited.

A sheriff's deputy unlocked the cuffs. Rivera brought his hands in front of him and started massaging his wrists as he walked past the bench.

It was after 11:10 a.m. His trial was supposed to have begun at 9:30. But, true to form, Rivera had decided not to be cooperative with his jailers.

He was supposed to be wearing street clothes so as not to have the jury get the wrong idea about him. But here he was in prison dress for reasons that were not entirely clear yet.

Flanked by two deputies, Rivera strode to the table from which his defense would be conducted and sat down. His attorney, Guy Smith, greeted him and gave him what appeared to be a brief seminar on murder defendant etiquette.

The deputies took seats directly behind Rivera , just in case his disobliging attitude became physical in nature, and in came Judge Charles Keeler.

After lawyerly introductions to the court, reference was made to Rivera 's lack of collegiality. The judge addressed the defendant.

The defendant stood up, followed immediately by the deputies behind him. Rivera looked over his shoulder at the hulking officers and then back at the judge.

Keeler asked the defendant if he was interested in being present at his own trial.

"I would like to be in the courtroom, yes," he replied politely.

Rivera 's Eddie Haskell act was too much for Assistant District Attorney John F.X. Reilly.

"Your honor, I'd like to express concern about the defendant's behavior," the prosecutor said. "He appears in court as a lamb when he's tied us in knots all morning."

But Keeler seemed willing to let bygones be bygones. Anything to get on with the proceedings.

Rivera was recuffed and led out of the courtroom to change his clothes, from wolf's to sheep's.

He stands accused of kidnapping his own 20-month-old daughter and killing her because he was angry at her mother.

But the body of Katelyn Rivera -Helton has never been found.

And that is either because Rivera hid it so well or … because she's alive.

While after almost three years the second possibility seems remote in the extreme, the Rivera defense team has been contacted by a Delaware County woman who seems to believe it. She says she saw a toddler who looked just like Katelyn on a bus headed from Los Angeles a week after she first disappeared.

I know this because the woman, who is 68 years old and from Darby Borough, said the same thing to me yesterday.

"That baby is still alive," Rita Autry told me.

She said she saw the little girl in the company of a "real tall, rugged-looking man," when they got on the bus near Las Vegas in mid-August 1999.

"He had this little girl in his arms in a diaper and sleeveless top and no shoes," she said. "It was cold on this bus and he (the man) didn't have no blanket or nothing." She said that's what drew her attention to the child.

It wasn't until she returned home later that month that she said she recognized the child's photo in the Daily Times.

"I pick up my paper and this is the same little girl that was on the bus," she said.

Asked why she didn't immediately call the authorities, she replied, "I don't know. I didn't think to call the police."

She said that over the next couple of years every time she saw a story about the case with a photo of Katelyn , she tried to call someone, from her mother to the Daily Times.

But she was never able to get ahold of anyone, she said.

Monday afternoon, after reading that the trial was about to begin, she left a message for me. Then she contacted Guy Smith's office. Smith sent an associate out to interview her and she produced a ticket stub from the bus trip.

Whether she'll be called to testify remains to be seen.

Keeler has put a gag order on everyone involved in the case, so Smith couldn't go into details. But Smith did say that he wasn't "discounting" her story by any means.

Could Autry's testimony raise reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors?

I hope not. Rivera has proven himself to be a loathsome creature.

His brutal theft of the little girl and his wallowing like a hog in her mother's grief is enough to justify his incarceration for two lifetimes.

But the jurors should hear Ms. Autry's story and evaluate it themselves. Rivera 's, too. If only Smith is dumb enough to put him on.

Gil Spencer's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at gspencer@delcotimes.com