Question in manslaughter case: How did felon get his guns?

As darkness gathered on Nov. 30, a handyman with a long rap sheet ferried almost 70 guns and a bag of ammunition from a lawyer's rural Montgomery County home to a horse trailer six miles away.

The orders, ex-con James K. Stewart told a Bucks County grand jury last month, had come from the lawyer who lived in that Worcester house: his boss, David Manilla.

Manilla didn't explain. "He just said do it," Stewart, 41, told the grand jury.

A day earlier, Manilla, 49, had shot and killed a fellow deer hunter near Quakertown. More than two weeks would pass before his arrest on manslaughter and firearms charges.

But on Nov. 30, prosecutors say, Manilla was deeply consumed with damage control.

New court documents - including unsealed grand jury transcripts - lay out Manilla's alleged efforts to hide his array of firearms after he shot Barry Groh, 52, on land Manilla owned in Richland Township.

Groh was killed Nov. 29 by a high-powered rifle that was illegal for hunting in densely populated counties such as Bucks. Manilla has said he mistook Groh for a deer.

As the manslaughter case moves toward a May 31 trial date, much of the public's attention may focus on how Groh was shot.

But from Manilla's perspective, the greater concern is that he had a gun in the first place. As a felon - convicted of aggravated assault in 1985 - he is banned by law from possessing a firearm.

If convicted of involuntary manslaughter, a first-degree misdemeanor, Manilla faces up to five years in prison.

But he also faces three felony counts of illegal firearms possession for the guns he had with him in Bucks County. Each count carries a maximum sentence of 10 years.

And federal authorities may be looking into additional firearms charges.

Manilla has not been charged for storing the dozens of guns prosecutors say he kept in his home for himself and his girlfriend. Nor have Bucks officials determined how he acquired the 30 rifles and shotguns they believe were his.

Agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) have requested copies of Bucks County's investigative files, said Deputy District Attorney Robert James, who is prosecuting Manilla.

Keith Williams, Manilla's lead defense counsel, said he believes ATF has been investigating. Beyond that, "we have not heard anything," he said.

An ATF spokesman said he could neither confirm nor deny an investigation.

The horse trailer where Stewart stashed the guns on Nov. 30 sat in the driveway of Manilla's longtime girlfriend, Barbara Fletcher.

That morning, Manilla had called Fletcher, 53, to say the rifles and shotguns would be arriving, she told Bucks County detectives.

"Fletcher asked why he was doing that," says a summary of her Dec. 10 interview. "Manilla responded that he was a convicted felon and was not allowed to have guns."

Fletcher "could not believe what he had told her" about his past, the report said.

And no wonder. Throughout their 13-year relationship, Fletcher said, Manilla had never told her of his conviction for bashing another man in the head with a weightlifting bar.

Instead, he brazenly continued to hunt. Fletcher said that together they had hunted and done target shooting in places such as Alaska, New York, and Canada. Several times they hunted with police officers or other lawyers, she said.

In 1993, Manilla was pheasant hunting with three other lawyers in Schuylkill County when he was charged with careless hunting.

A decade later, Manilla freely offered his name to a newspaper photographer who published pictures of him hunting in Montgomery County.

If the public or his hunting partners realized Manilla was hunting illegally, no one apparently spoke up.

But one lawyer who was well-aware of Manilla's past was his uncle, former Montgomery County District Attorney Michael D. Marino. Marino knew about Manilla's felony assault because he had served as his attorney in that case.

Despite that knowledge, Marino had brought an out-of-town friend along to hunt with Manilla on Nov. 29. Both were present when Manilla shot Groh in a creek bed, where Groh had dragged a large buck he had killed.

Prosecutors say Manilla waited more than 30 minutes before calling 911. Police say he spent part of the interim hiding his rifle and trying to find the spent shell casing.

"We found someone in the water . . . with a hunting accident," Manilla finally told the 911 dispatcher. "They look like they've already passed."

When rescue workers arrived, none of the hunters volunteered that Groh had been shot. They said nothing when one of the emergency workers speculated that Groh had suffered a heart attack. And they left before a deputy coroner discovered a bullet wound, according to court records.

Fletcher said Manilla had phoned her about two hours after his 911 call, sounding upset. At his house that evening, she said, Manilla told her a "man was shot" on his property - and little else.

Fletcher told detectives she believed Manilla was intentionally vague because "he is a lawyer" and knew that she "might be questioned by police about what he told me."

The next day, Manilla enlisted Stewart to get rid of the guns in his house. Stewart said he was a former DUI client of Manilla's who took an under-the-table job caring for his farm to help work off his legal fees.

He still works for Manilla, earning $13 an hour, he said.

Among his jobs in November, Stewart testified, was to erect hunting stands on Manilla's land in Bucks County and illegally bait them with corn to attract deer.

"Do you blindly do what David Manilla tells you?" prosecutor James asked during Stewart's Feb. 17 grand jury testimony.

"Yes," Stewart replied.

Stewart said he had heard about Groh's death on the radio the day he moved the guns but had been rebuffed when he asked Manilla about it.

"He said he didn't want to talk about it," Stewart told the grand jury, "and that was it."

Stewart was issued a grand jury subpoena, investigators said, because he had kept dodging their attempts to interview him. On March 16, Bucks County Court Judge Alan Rubenstein signed an order releasing the normally secret testimony so it could be shared with Manilla's lawyers.

Fletcher said she, too, had been enlisted by Manilla to move a gun.

A few days after the shooting, she said, he had her drive to his Bucks County property and remove a rifle of hers that he had stored there. Police say it was not the rifle used to shoot Groh.

Fletcher later moved the guns in her horse trailer to her attic, she told detectives.

She identified 18 of them as belonging to Manilla. Detectives later confiscated 12 others from his house as a condition of his bail.

Fletcher said she had spoken to Manilla the night before being interviewed Dec. 10 at her lawyer's office. She told him she would speak to detectives about him.

Manilla responded unhappily, she said, recalling his words to her:

"You just dropped a bomb on me."