NORRISTOWN — An Abington Township woman remained calm and showed no visible emotion as she accepted her fate of life imprisonment for fatally shooting her elderly parents and then dismembering their bodies with a chainsaw.
Verity Ann Beck, 45, pleaded guilty but mentally ill in Montgomery County Court on Monday to two counts of first-degree murder in connection with the Jan. 17, 2023, deaths of her parents, 73-year-old Reid Beck and his wife, Miriam, 72, in the home they all shared in the 1100 block of Beverly Road in the Jenkintown section of Abington.
Judge William R. Carpenter accepted a plea agreement and immediately sentenced Beck, a former teacher at the Saint Katherine School of Special Education in the Wynnewood section of Lower Merion, to two concurrent terms of life imprisonment, mandatory sentences for first-degree murder, which is an intentional killing.
Specifically, Beck admitted that she had the specific intent to kill and that the double homicide was willful, deliberate and premeditated.
“That’s what happened?” Carpenter asked Beck.
“Yes,” Beck replied calmly.
By pleading guilty but mentally ill to the homicide charges, Beck admitted that as a result of a mental disease or defect, she lacked substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law. The specific nature of Beck’s mental illness was not revealed in court.
The sentence ensures that Beck will spend the rest of her life in the State Correctional Institution at Muncy without parole and receive mental health treatment while serving the sentence.
Beck, on the advice of her lawyers, did not make any comments in court before the sentence was imposed and said nothing as sheriff’s deputies escorted her from the courtroom to begin serving the sentence.
Several grief-stricken relatives of the deeply loved victims, described by others as a devoted couple, sat in the front row of the courtroom to witness Beck’s admission.
“My parents were two of the kindest and most loving people you could ever meet and we will miss them dearly every day for the rest of our life,” Justin Beck, the victim’s son, his voice quivering with emotion, said solemnly after the brief hearing. “I’ll be praying for my sister.”
Reid Beck was a steamfitter and a 50-year member of Union Local 420 and Miriam Beck was a former Lower Moreland High School nurse for 20 years.
Justin Beck and his wife, Mary Stephanie, thanked Assistant District Attorney Samantha Cauffman and co-prosecutor Gabriella Glenning and county detectives for their professionalism and compassion during the investigation.
“I want to thank the district attorney’s office, especially Samantha Cauffman. I want to thank all of the detectives that worked on the case, especially Anthony Caso. They treated us incredibly humanely throughout this entire process,” Justin Beck said.
Cauffman said the plea agreement spared the Beck family from having to relive the tragedy during a trial and also held Beck accountable.
“The family doesn’t have to relive their loss or the tragedy every day at trial. And this defendant is a danger and she’s going to go to prison for the rest of her life,” said Cauffman, explaining the benefits of the plea agreement.
For the Beck family, it was an “unimaginable tragedy,” Cauffman said.
“It’s an unimaginable tragedy that you really can’t put into words,” Cauffman said.
Hinting at a motive for the slayings, prosecutors alleged Beck was facing financial struggles and when she was confronted by her elderly parents about stealing from them, she killed them.
“This case was all about greed and self-preservation. She was stealing money. She wasn’t supporting herself. She was living off of her parents and when they started to tighten the reins a little bit too much she didn’t want to have to get in trouble for still using their money and she certainly didn’t want to go to prison over it. So, she killed them. That’s what this was about. It was a simple time-tested motive, which was greed,” Cauffman said.
Defense lawyer James P. Lyons said Beck accepted responsibility for what occurred and is remorseful.
“She did not want to subject the family and herself to a trial with these kinds of facts and this kind of pain for everybody. There was a finding by the court that she’s mentally ill,” Lyons said after the hearing.
“The facts of this case are such that it would have been a very difficult case from the defense perspective and she understood that as well. Mostly, she had a great deal of remorse and shame and she has a lot of grief over this. This was her mom and dad,” added Lyons, the chief homicide lawyer in the county public defender’s office.
Glenning praised county and Abington Township detectives for doing an “excellent job” investigating the deaths and unraveling the timeline and the suspected motive.
“The Abington Police Department that night had no idea what crime scene they were about to walk into and then it unfolded as they began to clear the house what a tragedy this was. They did excellent work to get this family justice,” Glenning said.
With the plea agreement, Verity Beck essentially abandoned her previous intention to seek a jury trial and a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.
Defense lawyers previously filed a notice of an insanity defense for Beck, claiming she “was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act she was doing, or that she did not know that what she was doing was wrong.”
Under state law, a person who is diagnosed as insane suffers from a mental defect that prevents them from knowing right from wrong or from realizing the nature and quality of their actions.
A person who is determined to be not guilty by reason of insanity at trial initially would be committed to a mental health facility for treatment and receive periodic evaluations. Once that person was deemed “cured” of mental illness they would be released from supervision with no requirement to serve any jail time.
Booking photo of Verity A. Beck (Courtesy of Montgomery County District Attorney)
During the last year, Beck had several mental health evaluations and eventually was determined to be competent to proceed with court proceedings on the charges.
The investigation began on Jan. 17, 2023, after the victims’ son notified Abington police that he had gone to his parents’ home to check on them, because he hadn’t spoken to them by phone since Jan. 7, which was unusual, and he observed a deceased person lying on a floor, covered with a bloody sheet and a chainsaw near the body, according to a criminal complaint.
The son told police he spoke to his sister and when he asked if something bad had happened to their parents she responded, “Yes.” Beck allegedly told her brother that things at the home had “been bad.”
At 12:10 a.m. on Jan. 18, Abington police entered the residence through a side door.
“Officers immediately noticed a strong odor of decomposition in the residence,” Caso and Abington Detective Robert Hill Jr. wrote in the arrest affidavit.
When police announced themselves and asked Beck to make her whereabouts known she followed commands and entered the kitchen. When police asked Beck about her parents she replied, “They are dead.”
Detectives found a deceased male wrapped in a cloth sheet and determined he was decapitated.
“In close proximity to the male’s body detectives located a 55-gallon trash receptacle. This receptacle was filled with white trash bags and these trash bags were filled with assorted severed body parts,” Caso and Hill wrote in court papers.
“An electric-powered chainsaw with biological material in the chain portion indicated this chainsaw had been used to sever, at least some, of the body parts,” detectives added.
Detectives found additional severed body parts in a trash can in an attached garage.
The autopsies revealed that Reid and Miriam each suffered a single gunshot wound to the head. Prosecutors alleged Beck then used a chainsaw to dismember the bodies.
Newspapers, dating from Jan. 7, were found outside the home leading detectives to theorize the victims were likely killed on Jan. 7, which was when the victims’ son last had voice contact with his mother, according to the criminal complaint.
In the second-floor master bedroom detectives found a wall-mounted safe and tools nearby and drill marks on the safe indicating someone, without a key or combination, had been trying to access the safe.
Detectives found a pillow that contained powder burns and a hole, consistent with a firearm projectile having been fired through the pillow, according to court documents.
In Beck’s bedroom, detectives found two Charter Arms .38-caliber handguns, one containing one spent round and four live rounds and the other containing two spent rounds and three live rounds, according to the arrest affidavit. Both firearms were registered to Beck, detectives said.
Additionally, detectives recovered a third .38-caliber handgun, a Smith & Wesson, containing two spent rounds and three live rounds.
