Abandoned Prayers (29 page)

Wiggins requested the thumb print from Michael Gordon’s driver’s-license application.

On June 3, a call came in from the FBI office in Washington. The prints submitted by Wiggins and Weaver had been matched, with fourteen points of identity, to Coast Guard prints belonging to Glen Albert Pritchett, a white male born
September 30, 1961. The victim had been born in Logan, Utah.

A teletype was sent to the Montana Driver’s License Bureau and yielded additional information. Pritchett’s last address had been in Missoula County. He had one arrest for driving under the influence.

Next, a call was placed to the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office, and the dispatcher there indicated that the captain would call Cutler the following morning. The state police headquarters in Helena was also contacted.

At 10:00
P.M
., the dispatcher from the state police reported that Pritchett had been arrested by the Helena police for driving under the influence, and booked into the county jail.

A step at a time, as many details as possible about Glen Albert Pritchett were pulled together. Each agency presented a new lead. A records check was requested of the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Office. Courtesy of that office, it became apparent that Glen Pritchett’s life had seen plenty of rough spots. Pritchett had run away from home several times in the mid 1970s. He had been arrested September 3, 1984, for driving under the influence.

It seemed that Glen Pritchett had had nothing but bad luck.

The following morning Cutler received a call from Diana Duffield of the Montana State ID Bureau in Helena. She had some additional information about Pritchett. The bureau is the state repository for all criminal records—more than 90,000 Montanans have had scrapes with the law and earned a place in the files. Glen Pritchett’s name was among them. Duffield had pulled up Pritchett’s driver’s license, and she informed Cutler that the victim’s parents were a Robert Wesley and Evelyn Jean Pritchett. Additionally, she had learned that Robert had been employed as a maintenance man for the Postal Service. She didn’t have an address.

Later that day, Cutler talked with the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office, which agreed to send copies of the arrest
record and a photograph of the deceased. At least now Travis County investigators would have a decent photograph of the victim.

Missoula County called again the next day with a phone number and a Council, Idaho, P.O. Box for the Pritchetts, who had moved to a town of less than a thousand, near Hell’s Canyon, an hour and a half north of Boise. Cutler also learned about Sandy Turner—Pritchett’s ex-wife—and his two children, their names, and their dates of birth.

Parents, a wife, two children. Jesus, Cutler thought, someone would have to notify them of the murder. Undoubtedly there would be tears, followed by questions. Who had dumped Pritchett out by Pilot Knob? Why had he been in Texas, anyway? Cutler dialed the number for the Adams County Sheriff’s Office, in Council.

On June 7, Cutler contacted the Austin Police Department and requested a computer check on Pritchett. He learned that in December 1984 Pritchett had been questioned in a parking lot at Handcock Center. Pritchett had been drunk and in the company of a man named Eli Stutzman. Both men had said they lived at 3408 Banton Road.

The Banton address would seem to have been a good lead—an obvious lead—for the murder investigation. Later, Wiggins said that if he had been handling the case, he would have been there in a heartbeat. For some reason, however, Gary Cutler sat on it for more than a week.

His partner later suggested Cutler had waited because it was “just a fag murder.”

May 26, 1985

It was a clear day under a blindingly bright sun—“beach weather,” Stutzman called it—when an already remarried Wanda Sawyer stepped off the plane after an all-night flight from Honolulu. A lot had happened in the months since she had left the Texas capital. She had married a man who would scarcely understand and never condone her friendship with someone like Stutzman. She had come back to check on the spoils of her divorce and to watch her son graduate from high school. Stutzman invited her to stay at his place.

She was disappointed when she learned that Pritchett was gone.

“There was a family emergency up in Montana,” Stutzman told her. “His son was injured in a car-tricycle accident.”

Wanda found 18-year-old Sam Miller in Pritchett’s place, a straight-from-the-farm Amish boy from Ohio whom Wanda felt personified the phrase “just fell off the turnip truck.” Miller, from an Old Order Amish group in Newcomerstown, had come to Texas for work. A friend of Stutzman’s had sent him.

Stutzman was in good spirits and seemed happy to see Wanda. Of course, Stutzman had a reason to be happy to see her—he needed money.

“Do you have two thousand dollars you can spare? I only need it for a little while,” he said.

Not wanting to pry by asking why he needed the money, Wanda made the loan with the stipulation that she had to have the money back when she left for Hawaii in a couple of weeks. Stutzman agreed.

That afternoon, Stutzman, Danny, Denny Ruston, Wanda, and her daughter drove out to Hippy Hollow, a nude beach on the shores of Lake Travis. They stayed two or three hours. None of Stutzman’s party went nude.

“One guy was over there beatin’ his meat,” Wanda recalled. “I said, ‘Eli, if he’s doing that for my benefit, he may as well give up and quit. It’s not turning me on.’ ”

When they returned to Stutzman’s place, Wanda apologized, but said she was so exhausted that she needed to get some sleep. Stutzman let her use his water bed.

When she awoke later that evening—around eight or nine—she went into the kitchen to get something to eat. The house was deserted. On the table stood a metal box larger than a cigar box. Inside, she saw a stash of what she instantly knew had to be marijuana. She didn’t touch it. She didn’t want anything to do with it.

The following morning Stutzman was sheepish when he approached Wanda to tell her they needed to have a talk.

“I know you saw what was on the table last night,” he said.

She told him she had.

“That wasn’t meant to be left there for you to see. I apologize.”

“Eli, I’ll tell you what,” Wanda said, “if you want to do that kind of stuff, that’s fine with me. But please don’t put any on me and don’t do any around me. And please don’t let any of it get into my luggage. You do, and I’m dead meat. My husband told me that if I hung around with anyone who did this and got caught and it came between me and his job he’d choose the job. I’ve only been married two weeks!”

Later Wanda learned from Denny Ruston that Stutzman
usually kept his marijuana under his water bed. Still, she wasn’t about to take any chances on getting busted at the airport. One time, she searched under Danny’s bed, because it was the place she stowed her luggage. She also kept her suitcase locked. She didn’t want someone to come by and drop some pot into her bags.

A pattern emerged nearly from the outset. Stutzman would take strange men into the bedroom and close the door. After a short while, the men would leave. The visitors were average guys, dressed in jeans and western shirts. It happened every day. Sometimes there would be two or three in a group.

Wanda didn’t know what was going on. She felt that many of the visits were too brief for sex. She figured it was just Stutzman taking care of business.

A frequent visitor to the house she did come to know was Cal Hunter, Stutzman’s foreman. Stutzman made it clear to Wanda that nothing should be said in front of Hunter that might cause him to pick up on Stutzman’s homosexuality. He told Wanda that he was going to have Hunter handle most of his jobs so that he would be free to do some other work.

Whenever Stutzman did bring men home for sex, he usually made sure that Danny was in bed. As far as Wanda could tell, Danny didn’t know who his father was sleeping with.

By then, the Denny Ruston–Eli Stutzman relationship had worn thin—at least as far as Stutzman was concerned. He told Wanda, “Denny is too possessive. He doesn’t want me to go with other guys. If I have just one man—Denny—then others might pick up on me being gay.”

Some things had changed between the time Wanda had left Austin and returned. There was something different about Stutzman. It was more than the fact that he wanted some independence from Ruston. His temper at home and at the construction sites was short. He didn’t seem to have the patience he had once had. And he was forever leaving his work sites and running here and there.

Also, Wanda was left with Sam Miller more times than she cared to be. She thought Miller was a “dimwit.”

Where did Eli rake this one up?
she wondered.

It was just like Stutzman to take pity on someone down on his luck and bring him home and give him a job and maybe a meal. When Wanda told Stutzman she thought Sam Miller was an idiot, Stutzman was rather kind. “Well, at least he can do something.”

“Eli would tell him to go unload the trailer,” Wanda recalled. “Sam would say ‘Now which way do I go?’ ”

At home, Sam Miller, the former Amish boy, was fascinated with television. Wanda and Denny Ruston felt as though it would have taken a crowbar to pry him away from the set.

“At night, Sam didn’t want to go to bed because he wanted to stay up and watch TV,” Wanda later said.

Occasionally all of the men would gather to watch the porno channel.

At night, if Ruston and Stutzman went to a party, they left Wanda with Miller and Danny.

Wanda wasn’t concerned that Danny slept in Stutzman’s bed.

“It didn’t seem unnatural to me. I sleep with my children—even now. I raised my kids to think that when they see something like this it’s not bad. My oldest was sixteen when he climbed into the shower with me one time. We got home from the beach, there was seven of us, and only two showers. I had my two youngest in, and my oldest said, ‘Mom, I ain’t got no place to take a shower, can I crawl in with you guys?’ I told him, ‘Sure.’

“I raised my kids to look at a naked body and see it was not dirty or nasty. Maybe that’s the reason I can be broad-minded when it comes to homosexuals.”

Sitting in the living room after work, shortly after she had returned to Austin, Wanda asked Stutzman about Pritchett.

“When is he coming back? I’d really like to see him,” she said.

Stutzman told her Pritchett’s son was still in critical condition and in the hospital. There was no way of telling when he would return, but he was definitely planning on coming back to Austin.

If Wanda had wanted to take Danny before she had left for Hawaii in February, she felt even more inclined to do so during her visit in the spring. Over the three weeks of her visit it became clear that, while Stutzman loved his son, he had little time for the boy.

Danny was under strict orders to come directly home from school and to wait in the house for the others to arrive. A few times, Stutzman would go pick up Danny at some woman’s house a few blocks away. Wanda never saw the woman, but Stutzman told her she was a black lady who loved kids.

Wanda, who had raised her five kids with love and independence, felt that Danny was a little spoiled. He didn’t have much in the way of toys and things—and he certainly didn’t have new clothes—but he acted babyish at times. Wanda surmised it was because he didn’t have the love of a mother.

Considering all their hard times, Wanda felt Stutzman had done as good a job of raising his son as could be expected. When Stutzman punished Danny, she didn’t say a word.

“He never whipped him, but he smacked him. He slapped him in the face, when we were in the truck. Danny kept asking for something, he wouldn’t leave it rest. Eli got very mad and slapped him.”

On June 14, while Wanda was getting ready to go back to Hawaii, she again told Stutzman she was sorry that she hadn’t gotten to see Pritchett this trip. Stutzman understood her disappointment and told her that he had just talked with Pritchett on the telephone.

“He told me complications have set in and the baby will
have to be put in traction,” he said. “It sounds real bad to me.”

Stutzman drove Wanda to the airport early the next morning.

She hoped Pritchett’s son would be all right.

June 15, 1985

Wiggins and
Lawrence Salas
, a burglary detective whose name, like Wiggins’s, “was in the barrel to work weekends,” had a breakfast of
migas
—a green chili, cheese, and egg dish—at Taco Village, a cop hangout on Berkman Drive. Endless cups of coffee and a block-long chain of Camel straights topped off the meal as the two discussed cases, department gossip, and their plan to visit the Banton Road address.

It was Saturday morning, and most of Austin was asleep when the detectives took a table at Taco Village. The town was like that—hopping at night along Sixth Street and quiet and lazy in the morning as the party crowd slept it off. Streets were deserted. The University of Texas campus was still. It was the kind of quiet morning typical of Austin.

It was a good morning to get into the thick of the Pritchett murder investigation.

The two men were friends. At 40, Salas was not much younger than Wiggins, but called him the “old guy.” It was a compliment. Whenever he had a case that was proving difficult or he needed advice, he went to see the veteran homicide investigator. Wiggins thought Salas was a good cop, conscientious and detail-oriented when putting an investigation together.

The Austin native had only one flaw, but it was a big
one. Salas couldn’t write a decent report, even if his career depended on it. Maybe he didn’t have the confidence. Maybe he was impatient, like Cutler. In police work, reports are a mundane exercise, a process during which the investigator synthesizes all he has learned at a crime scene or interrogation. He goes through notes and recollections and distills them into a report that, in the end, in court, is all that matters.

Some investigators’ reports read like good novels, with clear narratives and a touch of drama. Wiggins’s detailed reports were like that. The reports of Salas, on the other hand, were vague and frugal with details. And since his memory couldn’t necessarily be trusted, if something didn’t make it into his report, it was lost for good.