It was still dark outside when the call came in — a husband on the line with Snyder County 911, calmly reporting that he had just killed his wife. That call, placed just before 5 a.m. on Sunday, June 28, set off one of the most disturbing and heartbreaking Sunday mornings McClure Borough, Pennsylvania, had seen in years.
Amanda Kay Heimbach was 37 years old. She lived with her husband Jason on West Specht Street in McClure — an ordinary street in a small, quiet town where everybody knows everybody. When Pennsylvania State Police troopers from the Selinsgrove barracks pulled up to 37 West Specht Street that morning, they found exactly what Jason had told the dispatcher they would find. Amanda was dead. She had suffered blunt force trauma to the head. A flashlight was recovered at the scene, and authorities believe it was used as the weapon. There was no sign of an intruder. No sign of a struggle from anyone else. Just Amanda, gone.
What makes this tragedy even harder to wrap your head around is that Amanda’s own car — a 2018 gray Buick Enclave — was the one Jason grabbed when he ran. He was already gone by the time troopers arrived, speeding away in a vehicle registered in his wife’s name while her body still lay inside the home they shared. The detail is brutal in a way that’s hard to put into words. He took her car. He left her behind.
For hours, McClure Borough was locked down. Streets were closed off. Residents were urged to stay away. State police were hunting for the Buick, and the entire western Snyder and eastern Juniata county area was on edge. People who had woken up to a normal Sunday morning were suddenly staring at police tape and unmarked vehicles parked up and down their neighborhood.
The hunt ended at 10:40 a.m. when troopers got word of a crash on the 8000 block of State Route 104 in Perry Township, south of Mount Pleasant Mills. A gray Buick Enclave had slammed head-on into a parked tractor-trailer and caught fire. When officers reached the wreckage, the SUV was still smoldering. Jason Heimbach was inside, dead. Snyder County District Attorney Heath Brosius later confirmed that when Jason called 911 that morning, he told dispatchers he planned to end his own life. It appears that is exactly what he did.
Several children were removed from the West Specht Street home following Amanda’s death. As of Sunday afternoon, they had not yet been interviewed by investigators, as state police at Selinsgrove continued working the case. The district attorney acknowledged that authorities were still waiting on cell phone data and that not all the details had been pieced together yet.
Amanda Kay Heimbach leaves behind a community that is shattered. People in McClure are not used to this. This is the kind of small town where tragedies are supposed to happen somewhere else, on the news, not on your neighbor’s street. Tonight, her family, her friends, and an entire borough are grieving a woman taken far too soon, in the worst possible way, inside the home that was supposed to be the safest place in the world. Rest in peace, Amanda.
