Taxi Driver

A man jailed for six weeks on a murder charge was released Tuesday when the only witness against him admitted that he lied about his account of the slaying. Corey Christopher, 17, of the 1500 block of Wilton Street, was charged with perjury and related offenses after he told police that he had lied when he said he had seen Stanley Hill, 38, of the 5200 block of Woodland Avenue, shoot another man to death. All charges against Hill, an unemployed truck driver, were withdrawn Thursday by Assistant District Attorney James Long.

Five people died when three Harley-Davidson motorcycles they were riding were hit by a van on Route 72 in Manheim, Lancaster County, police said. Penn Township police said the crash occurred at 5 p.m. Sunday when a van driven by Alfred Moore, 64, of Harrisburg, for Harrisburg Taxi, struck the motorcycles, each carrying a driver and passenger. Police identified the dead as Joshua Pennington, 27, of East Earl; Linda and Samuel Lapp, both 48, of New Holland; and Dennis Wilheim Jr., 43, and Amy Wilheim, 50, both of Lancaster.

Lauren Bianco took a taxi to rob a Rite Aid store in Gloucester Township on Tuesday night, police said. Maybe, for a fleeting moment, it seemed like a good plan. About 8:45, police said, Bianco, 28, pulled a gun and demanded money from the cash register at the store on Chews Landing Road. She grabbed about $100 and tried to flee, police said. The store manager watched the robbery on a surveillance monitor and tackled Bianco by the entrance, police said. Bianco got away and tried to jump back into the taxi, police said.

GERMANY AMERICAN ACCUSED OF MURDERING CABBIE Police in the German city of Kaiserslautern arrested a U.S. soldier on suspicion of murdering a taxi driver and stealing $20, police said yesterday. A police statement said the 20-year-old soldier, stationed with the U.S. Army in the southwest German town of Baumholder, had confessed. The victim was stabbed about 20 times. Police said the taxi driver, who picked up a passenger from the U.S. army base in the early hours of Saturday, was found dead by the roadside.

A man abducted a teller yesterday while robbing the same Center City bank he had held up only 11 days ago, police said. The teller, who was forced into a taxi by the robber, was released unharmed minutes later at 30th Street Station. The robber then told the taxi driver to take him to 52d and Market Streets, where he left the cab after paying the fare. Sgt. Fritz Brennan of the police department's Major Crimes Unit, said the taxi driver was unaware of what had happened. The robbery occurred at 12:30 p.m. when the robber walked into the Continental Bank on JFK Boulevard near 16th Street, which had been robbed on July 7, Brennan said.

He gained some fame when he went from young Center City hip-hop fan to co-founder of his own indie-music label. But now Jared Heller is an international name - for all the wrong reasons. Heller, 34, apparently couldn't take the pressure of having his name printed in newspapers from Denmark to Philadelphia as a possible suspect in the dismemberment-murder of a Danish cab driver so he called Danish police early yesterday morning. "I am here," he told cops from a pay phone, according to police inspector John Lorentzen.

Back in early March, Jodie Foster didn't want to discuss who was the father of her unborn child. The Oscar-winning actress didn't want to talk about the method of contact or "anything of that nature" when she told columnist Liz Smith of the New York Post about her pregnancy and her intention to become a single mother. Foster said then that she only wanted to raise the kid "just like I was raised myself. " Well, that day came on Monday for Foster, who became the proud mother of a 7 1/2-pound, 20 1/2-inch-long baby boy named Charles.

The safest place to leave a 1988 Mercedes-Benz sedan and the worst place for a car thief should be the parking lot of a police station, especially during the hubbub of a midnight shift change. At least that's what the Rydal business executive and his wife thought when they drove their $43,000 luxury car up to the Abington Township police station about 11:45 p.m. Monday to report that a taxi had followed them all the way from Center City. But in the five minutes it took Richard Hall, an executive vice president of the Strawbridge & Clothier, and his wife, Dorothea, to tell officers their story - dinner at the Union League, a concert at the Shubert Theater, and then that mysterious taxi - the thieves had jumped from the cab and stolen their Mercedes from its space in the parking lot at York Road and Horace Avenue.

Born in 1945, Robert De Niro is widely considered this country's most brilliant actor. He grew up in Greenwich Village, the son of a distinguished painter of the same name, and left high school at the age of 16 to become an actor. He studied with noted acting coaches Stella Adler, Luther James and Lee Strasberg (who was later to act with him in "The Godfather Part II), and worked off- Broadway in suburban dinner theaters and on soap operas. De Niro made his motion picture debut in 1968 in "Greetings," the first of four films he would make with director Brian De Palma.

LAS VEGAS - Kenneth Cherry Jr. was an aspiring rapper who moved from the Bay Area to Las Vegas to pursue his career. His music videos online show him cruising the Strip in his Maserati. Michael Boldon was a family man and taxi driver who hailed from Michigan and loved fast cars. The two men's lives - along with that of an unidentified passenger in Boldon's cab - ended in gunfire, a fiery crash, and an explosion before dawn Thursday on the neon-lit Strip. As investigators Friday tried to find the gunman in a black Range Rover SUV who triggered the chain of events, families and friends tried to grasp the finality of it all. "Right now my heart is breaking," said Cherry's great aunt, Patricia Sims, of Oakland, Calif.