Abandoned Prayers: An Incredible True Story of Murder, Obsession, And

by Gregg Olsen

  Stutzman added that he was the father of a 7-year-old named Danny. A rubber-stamped image of a unicorn decorated the envelope and its Austin, Texas, return address.

  On March 23, Paynter struggled with three different versions of his response to Stutzman’s letter: he knew a good man when he saw one. He thanked Stutzman for the “very handsome picture,” and noted that his own penis was seven inches, cut, and that his balls were on the small side—“particularly in Texas’ cold weather.” He reaffirmed his enjoyment of casual sex.

  They talked on the phone, and Stutzman filled him in on Danny. Though Paynter wasn’t particularly interested in meeting a man with children, he listened carefully. He wanted to know all he could in case he was to become the little boy’s “stepfather.”

  On April 2, Stutzman wrote again, this time enclosing several more pictures of himself. One shot showed him clad in a bikini bottom and slung over Terry Palmer’s horse. Stutzman wrote that it was late and that he’d had a hard day, signing off with, “Danny’s in bed asleep and I should be, too.”

  Paynter caught a United Airlines flight to Austin on April 13. Stutzman had told him that he’d be working and that Paynter should walk to Banton Road—just a few blocks from the airport—and wait for Stutzman and Danny to return at the end of the day. Chickens in the backyard fueled fantasies that Stutzman might be the one to take back to South Carolina with him.

  “I could envision that he would be a real good person to settle down with,” he later said.

  Danny, Paynter, and Stutzman had dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and the two men topped the evening off with sex. For Paynter it was as good as good got.

  The following day, Paynter ran an electrical line to the clothes dryer. As the hours passed, it seemed that Stutzman was exactly what he had been looking for and Eli seemed to feel affectionate toward Paynter as well.

  On Monday morning Stutzman and Danny dropped the love-struck man at the airport. Paynter cried all the way back to San Francisco.

  Why do I have to go back to that horrible city? he thought. I could be here with this wonderful man in Texas, where it is warm and green and moist . . . and he’s so wellhung.

  In the spring of 1984, Stutzman told Austin banker Jim Donovan that he had met someone new. In fact, the new man—a porno star, no less—had moved into the Banton Road address with Eli and Danny.

  “I’m not sure if he was a porno star or not, but from what I saw one night he could have been,” Donovan later recalled. “If he made any movies, I doubt it was more than one.”

  Like all of Stutzman’s other relationships, the one with the porno star didn’t last long.

  Three weeks after they met, Willie Paynter called Stutzman to let him know that Paynter was going to take a vacation. He planned to travel through Colorado and make a side trip to Austin.

  “I have a new lover now,” Stutzman said, his words crushing Paynter. “We have a monogamous relationship. It would be great for you to come, and you could stay with us, but we couldn’t sleep together.”

  Paynter, who had been sure that Stutzman was Mr. Wonderful, fought back tears.

  “Eli,” he said, “I’m so attracted to you and I so much want to go to bed with you . . . it would hurt too much to see you. I won’t come to Austin.”

  Stutzman said that he was sorry and that he hoped Paynter understood the situation. Then, even though he had just dumped the man, Stutzman still asked for a favor. He wondered if Paynter could stop by the Colorado ranch and check on a few things. Paynter, not wanting to shut the door on the relationship—after all, things might not work out with the new lover—agreed.

  The harassing calls continued to frighten Terry Palmer, yet he refused to do anything about them.

  Finally, Ryan Bloom answered a call one morning at 4:00 A.M. and asked the caller: “Where are you calling from?”

  The crackly response Bloom thought he heard was “Boston . . . We’re having a hell of a party . . .” He knew Eli Stutzman lived in Austin, and he became convinced that he had misheard—that the caller must have said Austin.

  On May 3, Bloom went to the local sheriff, and the Austin police eventually notified him that the calls were indeed coming from Stutzman’s address. Stutzman was told that such calls were a criminal offense, and the calls stopped.

  “To this day, I can’t figure out why he was harassing me,” Palmer said later, still skirting the issue of their relationship.

  Chuck Freeman and his foreman, Byron Larson, thought they knew, based on what Eli Stutzman had told them.

  “Maybe Eli was jealous because Terry had taken a younger lover?” Freeman suggested, referring to Bloom’s appearance on the Colorado ranch.

  On May 28, Willie Paynter called Stutzman from Durango and reported that the ranch seemed fine.

  During the last school conference, Stutzman told Janis Bradley that he wouldn’t be able to be with his boy this summer and was looking for a summer camp.

  “Do you know of any place I can take Danny?” he asked. She suggested seeing the counselor. Stutzman never did.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Wanda Sawyer was fed up with her husband. And who could blame her? Mac Sawyer drank too much, laughed too loud, and had a smile so gap-toothed a drunk driver could have parallel parked in the spaces between his teeth. He irritated her, and she wanted a divorce. Wanda Sawyer, who had left Michigan at 19 and had married an air force transportation airman in 1962, dared to want something new.

  They had moved to Austin when Mac Sawyer was stationed at Bergstrom Air Force Base. After Austin, they had lived in Hawaii for twelve years. Wanda Sawyer had quickly become the kind of woman who could wear a floral-splattered muumuu without a trace of reservation. She reveled in it.

  If one thing could be said of her, it was that she wasn’t shy. She had a warm sense of humor that was frequently so bawdy as to make even a police detective blush.

  Once she had cut loose from her unhappy marriage, she would stretch all boundaries to their limits.

  Her hair was a halo of red, her eyes as wide apart as the towns on a map of southern Travis County. Best of all was her voice, which had a kind of cartoonish timbre that embued every word with personality and mischief. Wanda smoked like Mauna Kea, but never drank. Mac had done enough of that for both of them.

  She returned to Austin, the town that held her best and happiest memories, on June 27, 1984. She was sure her husband thought that if he bought her a house she would stay with him.

  She left Honolulu planning to “kick Mac out on the street, right on his ass.” The thought of it brought a smile to her face. Twenty-two and a half years and a kick out the door.

  Before returning to Austin, Wanda stopped off in Iowa to visit her sister, Susan Ruston. The reunion was marred by her sister’s problems with her son, Denny. Susan showed Wanda letters Denny had written while he had been away in the Marine Corps. The letters were disturbing. They may have come from the heart, but they were puffed-up, overblown sonnets to a woman—and the woman he directed the words of love to was Susan, his mother.

  “They aren’t letters a normal son would write to his mother. He wrote about love—mainly to his mother. He acted like—to me—like a husband would, writing these mushy letters to his mom,” Wanda remembered.

  Susan was very troubled. Something was bothering her son, and she didn’t know what to do about it. Worse, there seemed to be evidence to back up her concern: Denny had recently and suddenly been discharged from the Marine Corps.

  Wanda, the older of the two, tried to calm and counsel Susan.

  “Well, you know, there’s something wrong in it, the fact of him getting out of the service. No one goes into the Marines and gets out as early as Denny got out. Plus he was discharged on other than honorable conditions,” she said.

  The more Wanda talked to Susan, and the more they talked about Denny’s letters, the more Wanda thought he was gay. She suggested that possibility to her sister.

  “She didn’t want no part of it
. She could not believe her son could be like that. He was her only son, he was going to carry on the Ruston name,” Wanda recalled.

  • • •

  Mac Sawyer, who came back to Austin on January 31, 1984, found a nice house at 5110 Ravensdale Lane. Sawyer still didn’t know—Wanda would say “couldn’t accept”—that she planned to dump him. The place needed a little work: new paint, the kitchen sink replaced, glass sliders repaired.

  The Century 21 listing agent referred Eli Stutzman to them to make the much-needed repairs. Stutzman was quiet, friendly, and appeared to be a hard worker. A crew of several men accompanied him.

  He came out in September.

  Wanda’s son, Kyle, went out front where the crew was working on painting the slightly run-down house. Kyle listened to a worker who was talking about being in a centerfold magazine, and Kyle’s interest was piqued. Soon it became obvious that the magazines being discussed were gay publications. Kyle asked if the workers were gay, and was told, neither shyly nor militantly proud, that in fact they all were.

  Later, Kyle went inside to talk with Wanda, who was working on the interior of the place. “You know, mom, I think they are all gays.”

  “No. Couldn’t be.” Wanda was surprised. They seemed so normal.

  “I’m sure they are,” Kyle insisted.

  In the fall of 1984, an administrator at the Missoula, Montana, Youth Home got Glen Pritchett a job at 4Bs South Restaurant, and the troubled man moved out of Sandy’s apartment.

  “I always felt Glen left me and the kids because I wouldn’t drink with him anymore,” Sandy Turner recalled.

  Though he was gone, there were still conflicts.

  On September 21, 1984, Missoula police officer Gary Palmer, who was Jo Lyn Kuser’s brother, answered a call at Sandy Turner’s place at 326 Clay Street. Bill Mayberry had pinned Pritchett to the floor. Pritchett was angry that Mayberry was there with his wife.

  “I’m not your wife, anymore!” Sandy told him.

  Pritchett responded by hurling insults and smashing a window. Officer Palmer knew Glen Pritchett from his problems at the group home. A tearful and angry Sandy Turner told the officer that they had divorced and that this was her apartment. “I want him to leave,” she told Palmer. “Get him out of here!”

  By that time Sandy, who had earned her GED the previous year, was taking classes at the University of Montana. The morning after the police came, Pritchett asked for a ride to the edge of town. He said he was going to Helena for a while, though from there he seemed to have no plans. Pritchett left Missoula with nothing but a little bag of clothes. It was September 1984.

  He was bitter and depressed about his marriage when he came to his sister Nona’s place. He put one hundred percent of the blame on himself. It hurt that he was no longer with his son and daughter, and Nona had no doubt that Glen still loved Sandy.

  “He knew his drinking had cost him everything,” she said later.

  Pritchett stayed at Nona’s for three weeks, drinking and not doing much of anything. When he left he told his sister he was going to Missoula, then on to Idaho to see his younger brother Cecil, and, after that, to Reno, where his dad and uncle were living. Pritchett worked in Reno for a few weeks and then disappeared—with nearly one thousand dollars of his uncle’s money.

  “We didn’t know where he went,” Cecil Pritchett later said.

  Two weeks after he left Helena, two of Pritchett’s good friends were arrested on drug charges.

  Later in the fall, Pritchett called his ex-wife from Austin. He had a job doing construction work and had moved into a house with a couple of gays.

  Sandy was incredulous.

  “Gays?” she asked.

  “Yeah, faggots!” Pritchett laughed. “Can you get that?”

  Sandy laughed, too. She couldn’t imagine her husband—her ex-husband—living with some homosexuals in Texas. The Glen Pritchett she knew hated gays and would sooner punch one out than to move in with one.

  After she hung up the phone, Sandy figured Glen had sunk lower than she had ever dreamed possible. If they had drugs and if there was plenty of drinking, maybe it was just plain convenience. Still, gays?

  After Wanda Sawyer returned to Austin, one of her nephew Denny Ruston’s ex-boyfriends got mad and told Susan Ruston that her son was gay. No matter how open-minded, no mother wants to hear that news. Susan took it hard. She even sobbed that “no one would be left to carry on the Ruston name.” Wanda told her that the men working on her house were gay and that they seemed all right.

  She decided to talk to Stutzman.

  Wanda Sawyer is the type of woman who understands that if you want to know something—ask. Stutzman could have told her his sexuality was none of her business, but he didn’t. He confirmed he was gay, and made her promise not to tell anyone. Wanda didn’t care about his sexuality one way or another.

  She asked Stutzman what kind of advice he could give Denny Ruston or his mother.

  “The only thing I can tell you to tell your sister is, if Denny can’t be himself, then it is going to be very hard on him if he knows he’s gay. It’s hard on the wife, it’s hard when you have children, and it’s hard on the marriage. Eventually, you really don’t love that woman. You have no desire for her, yet you’re forced, because this is the way society wants you to be,” he told her.

  Stutzman told her that he had been married at one time, but that his wife had died tragically in a barn fire. He said that he had known he had homosexual tendencies before he was married, but had been confused by them and unsure how to respond to them.

  Knowing that he had been raised Amish, Wanda reasoned that such naïveté was not only possible, but likely.

  One day, after working on the house, Stutzman asked Wanda if she’d like to go out, just friend-to-friend. Wanda, who had not gone out much since marrying and was a little stressed because of her upcoming divorce, was reluctant, but Stutzman persisted.

  They stayed out late, going from bar to bar.

  “Eli took me to a topless bar, and he was so embarrassed that he hadn’t known it was one. I guess I didn’t fully accept the fact that he was gay and couldn’t relate to it. I could see the embarrassment. ‘Let’s just drink our drinks and go,’ he said,” Wanda recalled.

  As their first night progressed, it became obvious Stutzman did not frequent these places. Not usually, anyway. Nobody knew him. And he seemed so uncomfortable.

  Wanda chalked it up to his being out of his element. Stutzman wasn’t used to straight bars.

  Over the next several weeks, as Wanda and Eli became better friends, Stutzman took her to gay bars. Glen Pritchett, who now worked for Stutzman, often accompanied them.

  Wanda began to accept the idea of men in drag, in dog collars, or entwined with studded strips of leather. It was weird, but the men seemed happy, and everyone was having a good time. It really could have been any bar, except, of course, that the couples were men.

  She asked Stutzman if he would talk with Denny Ruston, maybe give him some support and encouragement. He said he would. Denny found Stutzman to be soft-spoken, yet possessing a sense of humor that he found appealing. Stutzman urged Denny to come down to Texas.

  To pass the time and make a few dollars, Wanda took a job waitressing at the Pizza Hut on Reinli Street in South Austin. When she decided to file for her divorce, it was Stutzman who took her down to the county courthouse.

  • • •

  To hear Wanda tell it, her nephew Denny Ruston’s short life was a sad saga of family betrayal, divorce, and whispers of sexual abuse—more than one topic suitable for producers of daytime talk shows, looking for juicy material.

  Maybe Wanda exaggerated a tad. Indeed, if that was the case, that’s all she did. Wanda Sawyer didn’t like to stretch the truth. She didn’t have to. She knew the truth was always more interesting than some silly story.

  Denny’s parents had split up when he was still a tow-headed toddler. His dad had fooled around with another woman and gotten her
pregnant. Wanda and Susan’s youngest sister had found out about it and was blackmailing Denny’s father to keep her mouth shut. He paid her twenty dollars now and then and, if she pressed him, let her use the Rustons’ car. Susan stood by idly, wondering what was going on and thinking it was all very strange.

  As is often the case with divorce, a child forced the issue. Patty, Denny’s sister, asked her mother one day: “Mommy, why does daddy sleep with Auntie?”

  “Auntie” was the girl Susan had hired to baby-sit the children. Later, the baby-sitter got pregnant, and Susan left her husband.

  Susan, Patty, and Denny tried to start over in Iowa, but, even though the court had decreed her ex was to pay the bills, he refused. Collectors garnished her wages. Susan, fed up, left for Michigan and moved in with her parents.

  It was not the best place for the three of them. Pointing an accusing finger at her father, Wanda recalled: “It has never been proven, but it has been spoken of by the grandchildren that my dad sexually molested Denny (and three other children). My children were never left alone with him, except that one night (Wanda’s son) stayed there—and after that he wouldn’t stay no more.”

  When Wanda found out about what was going on at grandma’s house, she tried to confront her mother with the issue, but the old woman refused to discuss it—or deny it.

  Wanda, accepting and tolerant, later racked her brain to come up with the reason why Denny had turned out the way he had. She wondered if it was his home life, his toilet training, his mother, his father.

  There were so many possible reasons, but no real answers. She wondered if she was merely looking for excuses for the way things had turned out.

  Austin police officer Larry Oliver encountered Eli Stutzman and Glen Pritchett on December 20, 1984, in a parking lot off Handcock, in Austin. On patrol that night, the officer observed Stutzman’s parked pickup, plus a couple of men standing around. When the officer and his partner passed by, the men got in the truck and drove to the other side of the lot, where Stutzman and Pritchett got out. Pritchett knelt on the pavement. When the men saw the patrol car approaching them, they again climbed inside the truck and started to leave.