McVan, 63, has been in private practice for over 30 years and has acted as lead counsel in hundreds of civil and criminal trials. (Photos by Len Lear)

by Len Lear

“I asked my client, 'Why did you kill him?' He said it was because he found the other man in bed with his wife. He was going to break the man's legs with a baseball bat, but he didn’t. Then he was going to cut his balls off, but he thought that might piss the guy off, so he shot him in the head instead. His wife then said, 'Are you gonna kill me, too?' He said no. Instead, he and his wife both buried the guy in the crawl space (of their house in Ambler) under 600 pounds of concrete!”

Attorney Brian P. McVan, 63, who has been in private practice for over 30 years and has acted as lead counsel in hundreds of civil and criminal trials, was sitting in his spacious Glenside office regaling this reporter over several hours with tales of some of the more notorious defendants he has represented. The one in the previous paragraph was Thomas Meconnahey, who was 34 in July of 1992 when he murdered Christopher Gambino, 29, of Plymouth Township. Meconnahey's wife, Kathleen, later testified that she was having an affair with Gambino because Thomas was “horrible.” She even accused him of sexually abusing a child.

Under questioning by McVan, Kathleen admitted she telephoned Gambino's family and friends after the murder, asking if they had seen him, knowing that was impossible, of course, since he was dead. “I did that because I was afraid for the safety of my children,” she testified.

Astonishingly, the murderer was only sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison for third-degree murder (without premeditation), a sentence that was bitterly criticized by then-Montgomery County District Attorney Michael D. Marino, who told a local newspaper that the sentencing judge, Paul W. Tressler, “doesn't have any guts!”

Another notorious case handled by McVan was that of Francis David Weiler Jr., then 59, who shot a man at random in July of 1994 near the Torresdale Train Station in Northeast Philadelphia. Weiler then murdered a man at random and wounded an 80-year-old woman at random at two locations in Lower Bucks County. At the trial in January, 1996, McVan argued that Weiler should not be tried because he was mentally incompetent. “My client is obsessed,” he said, “with the proposition that the government is controlling all of us with brain waves … He traveled as far away as England and the Philippines, claiming to be running from mind-controlling supersonic waves.”

McVan told me that during the first day of his murder trial, “He (Weiler) slept in the courtroom almost the entire time. Several times he snored audibly.” When McVan asked if his client's handcuffs could be removed in court, one woman said loudly, “Put them around his neck!” After hearing all of the evidence, the jury found Weiler "guilty but mentally ill," and the sentence was life in prison.

“I've had people who did the worst things imaginable,” said McVan. “They are seriously mentally ill or severely drug addicted, but I realize that when you do something so bad, the compassion button goes off. I look back on my career and say, 'Wow! For a small firm we have had amazing cases.' In the last few years I have been seeing drug addicts who are dying. They weren't before. The drugs, mostly heroin, are worse than before.”

Another of McVan's memorable cases involved a machinist who was working in a Lancaster County machine shop when he clicked a Bic cigarette lighter. It exploded, causing the man to suffer horrific burns. Bic is a French company. McVan showed that Bic engineers had come up with a solution for this problem but that it had not been implemented yet. In 1990 McVan went to Paris and took a deposition from the head of the company. The case was settled in 1998 for a substantial amount of money that McVan had agreed not to reveal.

“Big companies usually ask for an agreement on confidentiality,” he explained. “We had a five-foot high model of a cigarette lighter in the courtroom. Bic made it as hard as possible to get the case settled. My client was trying to pull his shirt off and burned off all his fingers and had burns all over his body. Cases like that do not attract so much attention. They only do if there is sex, drugs or a horrific violent crime involved.”

McVan, founding partner of McVan & Weidenburner, grew up in Germantown and later moved to West Oak Lane. He earned a B.A. in political science from La Salle University and his law degree from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, FL. He joined the U.S. Army in 1971, serving as an Airborne Ranger with the 20th Special Forces Group of the Green Berets.

“I made 11 jumps as an Airborne Ranger,” said McVan. “You believe you're bulletproof … I did not go to Vietnam, though. I was ready to go in 1975, but it was too late.” Instead, he served as Director of the Claims and Litigation Division of the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate at Fort Dix, NJ, and later as defense counsel in the Northeast office of the U.S. Army Trial Defense Command. He was also a criminal attorney at West Point, “mostly defending Cadets who had engaged in voluntary sex.”

McVan's wife, Michele Valera, is one of 12 children, and all 12 went to Bishop McDevitt High School in Wyncote. Brian and Michele have six children — a doctor, an oncology nurse, two lawyers (one is part of a security strike team currently in Somalia), a special ed teacher and an elementary school teacher. All six played at least two varsity sports in high school.

At one time McVan also ran a drive-in theater, the Bucks County Drive-in. “We showed 'Titanic.'” he said. “I tried to open the Tacony Drive-in also, but it did not work.”

When asked about the image most people have of lawyers, McVan replied, “Your profession has gone through a decline in respect by the public, and so has ours. There used to be collegiality at the bar and class in law. If you asked another lawyer for 20 days more (to prepare a case), he'd say OK. Maybe not now. It is dog-eat-dog, more mercenary.”

When asked how his firm gets their cases, McVan said, “We do no advertising at all. We do it the old fashioned way. Word-of-mouth. Cases generate new cases. I always wonder where the next case in coming from, but they always seem to come.”

For more information, call 215-884-6800 or email brian@mcvanlaw.com