Gun recovered from Donegal Lake connected to St. Clair woman's fatal shooting

The Westmoreland County District Attorney’s Office confirmed that a gun found Friday in Donegal Lake is related to the fatal shooting in December of a St. Clair Township woman.

Dive teams from the Greensburg Police Department and Murrysville Medic One discovered the revolver about 70 feet offshore, Medic One Director Darrick Gerano said.

An official from District Attorney Nicole Ziccarelli’s office confirmed the gun is related to the death of Alice I. Robson, 71, of St. Clair, who was killed in her living room Dec. 11.

Melissa S. Fox-Beacom, 49, of New Florence; Robert Patrick Jack, 18, of Fairfield; and Matthew Bates, 18, of Ligonier Township have been charged in connection with the shooting.

Divers searched the lake for about an hour before recovering the gun, according to a social media post by the Medic One dive team. Jack told police he threw the gun in Donegal Lake after keeping it in a trash bag in his vehicle for several days, court records say.

“There was a certain area identified through the county detectives’ investigation that pointed us to the boat-ramp area we searched,” Gerano said. “We ran two arch patterns with divers using metal detectors.”

Gerano said he doesn’t know what the visibility underwater was like, because dive teams located the gun before they needed to go beneath the surface.

“We never got deep enough that the divers had to submerge,” he said.

Police say Fox-Beacom, 50, enlisted the two 18-year-old men to kill her mother Dec. 11. According to police, Alice Robson was shot in the head twice and left buried under the porch at her New Florence home.

The fatal shooting at Robson’s Furnace Road home stemmed from what police described in court papers as an ongoing dispute between Beacom and her mother over the custody of Robson’s grandson.

In early April, a judge ruled that Fox-Beacom was competent to stand trial, after she was ordered to undergo a mental health evaluation.