Joseph Connelly, a 51-year-old man, was killed in Philadelphia on December 4, 1983, in a shooting that began with an apparently ordinary encounter at a neighborhood bar and ended with his death outside the establishment. Contemporary and later accounts identify the gunman as William Dean Christensen, although the man police arrested that day was calling himself Jeffrey Shrader. Reports of the case describe an argument between Connelly and the gunman before the confrontation moved outside, where Connelly was shot and fatally wounded.
Witnesses saw what happened and quickly provided information to police. The shooting did not lead to a prolonged search through the city. Within a relatively short time, officers located the suspected gunman inside another Philadelphia bar. Accounts from the period described him sitting calmly at the establishment, eating a club sandwich and drinking beer, despite having allegedly killed Connelly only minutes earlier. Police arrested him on December 4, bringing the immediate investigation into Connelly's death to a remarkably quick conclusion.
The suspect told authorities that he was Jeffrey Shrader. That identity initially complicated the investigation because police did not immediately realize that the man in custody was actually William Dean Christensen, a violent fugitive with an extensive criminal history who had been moving between jurisdictions and using different names. Even an early fingerprint inquiry reportedly failed to reveal his true identity. As a result, the Philadelphia prosecution of Connelly's murder initially proceeded against the defendant as Jeffrey Shrader.
Philadelphia prosecutors built their case around the circumstances of the shooting and the eyewitness evidence. Assistant District Attorney Jack McMahon prosecuted the case, and a Philadelphia jury convicted the man known as Shrader of murdering Connelly. The conviction carried a mandatory life sentence, and Christensen was ultimately imprisoned for life for Connelly's killing.
The discovery of the killer's real identity came after the conviction. Investigators in Montgomery County, Maryland, were pursuing information connected with William Dean Christensen and reportedly developed a lead from an address found among material associated with Christensen's parents in Bethesda. They alerted Philadelphia homicide detectives that their prisoner known as Jeffrey Shrader was actually Christensen. Once the connection was made, the seemingly isolated Philadelphia barroom murder became part of a much larger investigation into a fugitive suspected of serious violence across several states and Canada.
Christensen had been moving through the eastern United States under aliases before Connelly was killed. Investigators determined that he had previously been wanted in connection with violent crimes and was suspected in multiple homicides. Philadelphia detectives subsequently searched the row house where he had been living, while authorities in other jurisdictions began comparing Christensen with unsolved killings and attacks. His capture following Connelly's murder effectively ended a period during which he had repeatedly evaded authorities while traveling under false identities.
Connelly's killing remained one of the crimes for which Christensen was definitively held responsible rather than merely investigated as a suspect. Years later, Christensen was also convicted in Pennsylvania of the 1982 murder of 23-year-old dancer Michele Angiers, who had been stabbed repeatedly in Dickson City. Authorities in the United States and Canada investigated Christensen in connection with numerous additional deaths, but many of those suspicions never resulted in convictions.
For Joseph Connelly's case, however, there was a clear judicial resolution. The man arrested on the day of the shooting was prosecuted, convicted of the murder, identified afterward as William Dean Christensen, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Connelly's death on December 4, 1983, therefore became not only a solved Philadelphia homicide but also the event that finally brought Christensen into lasting custody after a lengthy period of aliases, flight and violent crime.
