The John Leonard cold case has a lot of unanswered questions. The situation with the sketch is a real head-scratcher IMO. Do you have any theories about why it went down the way it did? Please share with us in the comments.

Imagine if you were a child when your father is shot to death in broad daylight while sitting in his taxi. The killer takes off before anyone finds the scene. The crime seems completely random, making it just about impossible to solve. Even though it’s huge news in your tiny town, the case grows cold fast. Then settles into a decades-long deep freeze. No leads. No justice.

Fifty years pass. Now you’re at a place in life where you start to look back. You begin digging into the case yourself. You push law enforcement for answers. Bit by bit, some clues emerge.

And then, one detail stops you cold.

The police had a sketch of the main suspect. Two witnesses saw a man standing next to your father’s car around the time of the murder. They helped an artist create an image of that man. But that sketch was never released! Not to the public. Not even to your family.

Why?

Could you really be blamed for wondering whether police ever truly meant to solve this case? Was someone being protected — at the expense of your father’s life, and your family’s right to the truth and justice?

After all, this unsolved murder didn’t just happen anywhere.

It happened in the Poconos, where, in the 1970s, you couldn’t turn left or right without bumping into gangsters. And that’s not hyperbole. Those were the exact words of Joan Weiner, then-head of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission. She reported “‘a significant infiltration of organized crime figures‘ at all levels of the resort business in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania.”

John Leonard — the father in this case — was murdered just 50 yards from the grand stone entrance of the Inn at Buck Hill Falls, a 400-room luxury resort that once drew guests from across the country, particularly from Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York.

Today, the sketch is finally public — more than five decades after the murder. You can see it here and in the embedded video below.

But the case is still unsolved.

Who was the man standing by John Leonard’s car?
Was he the killer?
Why was the sketch kept from the family for so long?
And what else has been buried?

These are some of the questions we’ll be exploring in an upcoming episode of the new NEPA True Crime podcast. Even after fifty years, someone still knows something, and it’s not too late to speak up.

Sketch released in decades-old Monroe County cold case

Read more about the Leonard family’s fight for justice.

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