Robert L. Moore talks to his attorney, Lou DeFabio, after a pretrial hearing in Moore’s murder case in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court. A jury found Moore not guilty of aggravated murder in the 2009 presumed murder of 16-year-old Glenna J. White but could not decide on the murder charge. His retrial date is Jan. 23.

YOUNGSTOWN — The retrial of Robert L. Moore, 52, of Alliance, who was found not guilty of aggravated murder in June in the 2009 presumed murder of 16-year-old Glenna J. White of Alliance, is now postponed until Jan. 23 because of the unavailability of a witness.

He had previously been set for retrial on murder Tuesday.

The trial jury was “hung” in June, meaning unable to decide, on whether Moore was guilty of murder, so prosecutors decided to try Moore again on that charge.

Mike Yacovone, Mahoning County assistant prosecutor, told Judge Maureen Sweeney of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court on Wednesday that the postponement is necessary because a witness would not be available.

Also during the hearing, Yacovone and defense attorney Lou DeFabio argued a defense motion asking that “other acts” evidence be suppressed from the next trial.

Sweeney allowed “other acts” evidence to be presented in Moore’s first trial, stating that she disagreed with the argument Moore’s earlier attorney, Max Haupt, made — that “prior bad acts” were “wholly irrelevant” to the case. She allowed the “other acts” to be presented at the first trial.

The evidence the first jury heard was that Moore was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 1993 and was sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison after admitting to killing Virginia Lecorchick, 22, near Berlin Lake in 1993. Moore spent 15 years in prison.

White disappeared from a home in Alliance late on June 2, 2009, after leaving with Moore, who returned about an hour later without White, according to a prosecution filing before the first trial. Moore was “covered in blood spatter from the waist up,” Yacovone stated in the filing.

Yacovone argued before the first trial that the evidence in the Lecorchick case is so similar to the evidence in the White case that it “provides a behavioral fingerprint, which, when compared to the behavioral fingerprints associated with the (White case), can be used to identify the defendant as the perpetrator.”

DeFabio became Moore’s attorney after the first trial ended. He said Wednesday the motion Haupt filed before the first trial “did not address” two Ohio Supreme Court decisions that addressed “other acts” of the type allowed in the first Moore trial.

In one case, the Supreme Court allowed “other acts” to be presented to a jury if the earlier conduct shared a “distinctive, one of a kind feature” with the new case.

DeFabio said in the Moore case, “we have a female who is presumed dead (White), though we have no cause of death, no body, no autopsy.”

But in the Lecorchick case “We do have a body, and it is women who are different ages.” He said the “lead up” in the White case is that Moore, the girl and others were “at a home.” But in the Lecorchick case, it started in a bar. “There was a confession,” in the Lecorchick case. “Certainly there is no confession in this case,” DeFabio said. The two cases are 16 years apart, DeFabio said.

“So I don’t know what distinctive, one-of-a-kind, fingerprint-like patterns there is between one (case) and the other,” DeFabio told the judge.

Yacovone, however, said: “The basic facts of Virginia Lecorchick, the basic facts in Glenna Jean White are a mirror of one another except for the names.”

He added, Moore “drinks with women of a younger age. He tries to get them drunk. He tries to seduce them, and when that doesn’t work, he takes it out on them with his fists.”

In the Lecorchick case, the body was found in a lake, Yacovone said. And in the White case, there is evidence that Moore had mud on his clothing after White went missing, he said.

Sweeney said she will rule later on the motion.