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

by Gregg Olsen

  When he arrived, Stutzman was already there, pulled over in a parking space. He motioned for Ruston to get inside the truck. Stutzman rattled off the same statements he had made on the phone: Pritchett was dead, the police had questioned Stutzman, they thought he had killed Pritchett and that Ruston had helped him do it. Stutzman’s hands shook as he talked. Sweat beaded along his hairline.

  “They accused me of murder,” he said. “They think you helped me move the body.”

  Ruston wasn’t one to handle stress well, and the pressure of the meeting in the parking lot was enough to cause him to retreat into a kind of fog.

  “You have to go in, to talk to the detectives . . .” Stutzman insisted, giving Ruston a valium.

  “Don’t tell them that I met you here,” Stutzman said.

  Eli Stutzman was jittery, but Ruston was a nervous wreck. Stutzman hoped the valium would allow Ruston to at least give the sheriff a coherent statement, the statement he had told Ruston to give.

  Ruston arrived at the sheriff’s office at 2:00 P.M., looking every bit a Pizza Hut busboy on speed. Skinny, nervous, and disheveled, he talked fast as he gave Wiggins the basics and told the detective that he had met Stutzman in January, through his Aunt Wanda, and had lived with him at the Banton address. He had taken a vacation trip to Iowa on April 19.

  “When I left, Glen Pritchett was still living with Eli. I got back to Eli’s house on May seventh, a Tuesday. I asked Eli where Glen was and he said he had just left Sunday, May fifth, to go to Montana,” Ruston stated.

  Rancher Raymond Kieke had found the decomposed body on May 12, and Wiggins knew it was impossible for Pritchett to have been on a bus to Montana on May 5. Dr. Bayardo had determined that the victim had been dead four to six weeks. The murder had taken place in the middle of April, around the time Ruston said he had left for Iowa.

  When he returned and found Pritchett gone, Ruston said, he had moved his things into Pritchett’s room—and Danny had moved back into his bedroom. Later, when he thought about it, Ruston recalled that the drawers in which Pritchett had kept his clothes were empty.

  With the affidavits he had taken earlier in the day in mind, Wiggins asked Denny Ruston about his relationship with Eli Stutzman.

  Ruston answered quickly. “Eli and I are just friends,” he said.

  Just friends. It was the kind of remark a schoolgirl might make to convince her parents of her chastity. It rang with about as much truth.

  “What about Pritchett?”

  “I didn’t know him very well.” Again Ruston, smoke curling around his face, was emphatic.

  He signed his legal name to the affidavit and, like Stutzman, agreed to a polygraph examination. Wiggins thanked Ruston for coming in and told him that an appointment would be set up. Ruston said he had nothing to hide.

  After Ruston left, Wiggins noted the discrepancies in Stutzman’s and Ruston’s affidavits. How friendly were Eli and Denny? Denny and Glen? Ruston said he hadn’t known Pritchett very well. Stutzman had said he wouldn’t doubt that the two of them had had sexual relations. While the contradictory affidavits were a source of concern for Wiggins, what really bothered him were a couple of things that Stutzman had—or, really, hadn’t—done: he hadn’t asked where the victim’s body had been found, and when he had been asked to take the polygraph, he had simply said yes. He hadn’t asked, “Do you think I did it?”

  Most innocent people do.

  Back at Banton Road, Denny Ruston was tired and wound up so tight that the ticking of a clock could have made him jump. Stutzman gave him another valium, and Ruston went to his bedroom and smoked a joint before he fell asleep.

  Between 1:00 and 3:00 A.M.—Ruston later recalled looking at his clock—Stutzman flipped on the light and woke him up.

  Stutzman stood before him, fully dressed, wearing his work boots.

  “Denny,” he said, “I need some money. Do you have some you can loan me?”

  Ruston had sixty dollars in his wallet, but he lied and said he was broke.

  Stutzman asked if he could borrow Ruston’s luggage.

  “What’s going on?” Ruston asked. “Are you going somewhere?”

  “Yeah. My lawyer tells me to take a vacation and leave town until this whole thing blows over.”

  “Eli seemed real nervous, frantic, upset. Real worried. I’d never seen him like that,” Ruston said later.

  Ruston gave Stutzman three canvas tote bags, plus his marine duffel bag.

  Stutzman grabbed the bags and began stuffing clothes and papers into them. He unloaded his dresser drawer and pulled some things out of his desk. He folded nothing—apparently there was no time.

  “Where’s Danny?” Ruston said from the doorway.

  Stutzman didn’t look up from his packing. “He’s okay. He’s with some friends.”

  Stutzman didn’t say who, and Ruston didn’t ask. Instead, he followed Stutzman around like a puppy as the frantic man packed.

  One bag was stuffed so full that it took both men to zip it shut.

  “Can you give me a ride?”

  Ruston reluctantly said he would. “Eli, this doesn’t look good. Are you sure your lawyer is right about this?”

  Stutzman said it would only be for a little while.

  Ruston followed Stutzman into his room and watched as his roommate started throwing things into his wastepaper basket. It was a collection of sex toys that Ruston had never seen in the months that he had lived with him. All Ruston had known about were the butt plugs and a single pair of handcuffs. That night Stutzman stashed a treasure trove of paraphernalia into the wastebasket: additional handcuffs, two vibrators, a pair of nipple clamps, various cock rings, and something called a ball stretcher, a device for encircling the testicles and stretching the scrotum.

  Ruston was dumbfounded as he watched Stutzman load it all up, pull the liner out of the wastebasket, and head for the door. When Eli Stutzman left that night, he only took what was important to him.

  “Eli, it looks real stupid leaving like this.”

  “I know, but my lawyer said it would be better this way.”

  My lawyer. It was the second time he had mentioned his lawyer. In the previous six months, he had never mentioned having an attorney, or even knowing one. Even in his valium and marijuana fog, Ruston wondered what kind of lawyer would tell someone to leave town in the middle of a murder investigation.

  They loaded the bags into Ruston’s car, got in, and headed toward downtown, with Ruston driving. Stutzman directed him to a location off Interstate 35 and Fifty-first Street.

  The place Stutzman had Ruston take him was a vacant parking lot between the city and a rural neighborhood, the kind of place where no one wanders that time of night. Across the empty parking lot, a bar called the Carousel Lounge was as dark and quiet as the Cameron Villa Rest Home, just across the way. An office-furniture store with a loading dock showed only a few security lights. Ruston dropped Stutzman off on the south side of the furniture store.

  “I love you,” he told Ruston.

  “I love you, too.” Ruston’s answer was just words, a reflex response.

  Stutzman got out of the car and, even though burdened by the full bags, walked quickly through the walkway between the store and another darkened building.

  Ruston looked for Stutzman’s truck. He didn’t see it. There were no cars waiting to pick Stutzman up, either. Yet, he couldn’t have been going very far—he couldn’t have carried those bags much further on his own.

  Ruston turned around and drove back to the freeway, then home.

  The next morning he smoked a wake-me-up joint and ran through the events of the night before. He checked the driveway to see if Stutzman’s truck was still there—Ruston wore bifocals, didn’t have the best night vision, and had been stoned, so it was conceivable that he simply hadn’t seen the truck. Maybe Stutzman had left the truck in the lot, gotten a ride to the Banton Road address from someone else, and left Danny with them when he went inside to pack. That might ex
plain why Stutzman’s truck was no longer in the driveway, and why Danny hadn’t been home last night. But if that was the case, why hadn’t Stutzman had whoever it was wait for him while he packed?

  Ruston also thought it strange that Stutzman never once went into Danny’s room to pack any of his son’s clothes. Had he already done that? Later, when Ruston checked, he found that Danny’s clothes were where the boy had left them.

  The next day, Mark Taylor, Stutzman’s next-door neighbor, was at the Travis County courthouse checking in with parole officials in regard to the burglary charge Salas had busted him for, when he ran into Jerry Wiggins.

  Taylor, 23, had seen the homicide investigator out at Stutzman’s place two days before. He said he had some information about the case.

  He gave the following statement to Wiggins.

  “I knew Glen Pritchett, who lived with Eli. I have heard Glen and Eli argue before quite a bit. I heard them argue pretty seriously one time and I never did see Glen after that. I don’t remember the date but it was some time in April. Eli started being real nervous and asking things like can they trace back to a gun from just a bullet. Eli has been acting real nervous since Glen disappeared. He asked me about the gun and bullet Saturday, right after the detectives left.”

  Was the statement true? Or was it the case of a young man in trouble with the law, and his hope that cooperation with the authorities might make it easier for him?

  Later, Taylor elaborated on the argument between Stutzman and Pritchett.

  “You’re either gonna be screwing me or someone else!” Stutzman had yelled at Pritchett as they went toe-to-toe in the front yard of the house on Banton.

  Screw? Was it sex? Or was it betrayal?

  The night after he was questioned by the homicide investigators, Stutzman started packing his truck, Taylor later said.

  “It was the last time I saw him.”

  Sam Miller called Cal Hunter with the news that Stutzman had fled Austin and left word that Hunter was to take over the construction business. Miller told Hunter to come to Banton Road the next morning and wait for Stutzman’s call.

  “Eli had a whole list of things he wanted me to do, mail to pick up, jobs to take care of,” Hunter recalled.

  “There’s enough work to keep you busy,” Stutzman told him, promising to pay him when he returned to Austin.

  “After my trouble with the law blows over,” he said.

  Hunter reluctantly agreed.

  “I didn’t know it was murder he was involved with. I thought it had something to do with his little boy. Abuse or custody or something.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  When Denny Ruston showed up unexpectedly at Leona Weaver’s apartment, he was a nervous wreck. It was all he could do to come inside and sit down before he began babbling about murder.

  “They—the sheriff—just talked to me and Eli about Glen’s murder . . . Glen was our roommate. They found him dead out in the county—near the pasture where Eli keeps his horse.”

  Ruston went on to explain to Weaver and her 20-year-old niece, Evelyn Martel, that after the investigators had questioned the two men, Stutzman had left town. Fast. In the middle of the night, no less. And he had taken his son with him.

  Before either woman could ask, Ruston quickly insisted that neither he nor Stutzman had had anything to do with the murder.

  “We didn’t even know Glen Pritchett had died,” he said.

  “Why did he leave town if he didn’t do it?” Weaver asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he did. Eli was scared, that’s for sure.”

  When it finally set in that this wasn’t a hoax that Denny Ruston was perpetrating, Weaver went to work trying to pry information from him.

  “Well, do you know if Eli did it or not?”

  Ruston said he didn’t really know.

  “Did you have anything to do with it?”

  “No. I wasn’t even here when it happened.”

  This statement troubled Weaver later. How did Denny Ruston know when the murder had happened? The most disturbing answers were the most obvious. Ruston had to have been there when it occurred—or else Eli Stutzman had told him about it.

  “Who did it if Eli wasn’t the one?” Weaver wondered aloud.

  Ruston seemed ready for that question. He thought it was a former, disgruntled employee of Stutzman’s named “Jay.” He did not know his last name.

  “I have a feeling he did it, and that Eli was only an accessory to the murder. It could be he was just there when it happened. Maybe he just helped move the body or something like that,” Ruston said, adding that such a scenario might make some sense of the proximity of the dump site to the stable where Stutzman kept the horse.

  “Maybe Jay forced Eli to help move the body!”

  Weaver was skeptical. She kept thinking that Ruston knew more about the killing than he was letting on and that Stutzman had told him all about it when Ruston had returned from his vacation in Iowa. Ruston was keeping his mouth shut, she thought, because he was scared about something and, more important, because he loved Eli Stutzman.

  June 17, 1985

  Ruston returned to Weaver’s apartment the next day, clutching a fist full of papers. He said he had proof that something funny was going on over on Banton Road.

  Weaver and Martel studied the papers as Ruston chainsmoked and ran on about their significance.

  They were time sheets for the weeks ending February 15, February 23, March 2, March 23, April 27, and May 4. Stutzman had made a notation on March 4, 1985, that he owed Glen $445, with entries made on March 5, 14, and 22. On May 4, the balance owed was $570, and a notation read: “Pd in full on 5/5/85.”

  “May 5 was the date Eli said he put Glen on the bus for Montana,” Ruston said. “Look at the signature on May 4,” he pointed out. “It doesn’t look like Glen’s writing, unless he was in a hurry or something.”

  The signatures on March 23 and April 27 were identical, and the time sheets dated February 15 and 23 and March 2 did not have any signatures at all.

  It was the one dated May 4 that they all focused on as they pieced the story together. The forgery was blatant.

  Weaver kept reviewing the date on which Stutzman said he had taken Glen to the bus (May 5), as well as the dates of the last time sheet (May 4), Ruston’s departure for Iowa (April 19), and his return to Austin (May 7), and, finally, the date the body was found (May 12). She made a list in a notebook. She believed the time sheets were good evidence.

  “The way it was all filled out, you could tell—there was no way this guy would have signed his name that way,” she said later.

  Martel suggested that the papers be photocopied before Ruston handed them over to the sheriff. She—and her aunt—had doubts whether Ruston could be trusted to do the right thing. Around midnight the three amateur sleuths found a photocopy machine at an all-night Safeway.

  “Take the time sheets and give them to the sheriff,” Weaver urged Ruston. Weaver didn’t think Ruston had had anything to do with Pritchett’s murder, she simply believed he had learned about the murder a whole lot sooner than he maintained.

  If Jerry Wiggins thought Denny Ruston was a “trip” the first time he met him, the second time left no room for doubt. Ruston came in with six time sheets and a complete, detailed scenario of what they meant and how they were critical evidence against Eli Stutzman.

  To Wiggins, Ruston seemed to be in the same nervous state Stutzman had exhibited during the investigation at the house and the interview at the courthouse office. And, like Stutzman, who had given Wiggins and Salas the rifle, Ruston was being overly helpful by handing over the time sheets and a theory to boot. Wiggins had seen his type plenty of times—sometimes these amateur cops were helpful, but mostly they got in the way when they fussed with the evidence.

  Wiggins felt Ruston’s motive was revenge.

  “Denny turned vindictive. He was out to get Eli. I think Denny was pretty crazy about Eli as a person or as a meal ticket. He wa
s mad that he had been left in this mess alone,” he later said.

  “He wanted to prove Eli Stutzman had done the killing.”

  The investigator felt there was enough evidence for a probable-cause warrant, which he hoped would lead to a confession. The DA’s office, however disagreed. They wanted the detectives to come up with enough to land a grand-jury indictment against the ex-Amishman.

  “Mark Taylor told us about the gun, Denny told us about the time sheets, and Eli lied about Pritchett’s death when he told us he had put him on a bus for Montana, and then he left town in the middle of the night. He was our prime suspect—and then he was gone,” Wiggins later said.

  Leona Weaver rubbed the sleep from her eyes and did a double take at her alarm clock. It was 1:30 A.M. A visitor at that hour meant trouble. When she opened the front door she knew she was right. It was Ruston and another young guy, whom Ruston quickly introduced as his roommate Sam Miller.

  Weaver had never heard Ruston mention Miller. She didn’t know he had another roommate besides Stutzman.

  “Something’s going on at the house,” Ruston said. “We keep hearing noises at the house, in the yard. Can we stay here for the night?”

  She waved them inside.

  The two of them seemed frightened beyond belief; their eyes were wide with fear. She thought they looked like a couple of little kids who had been frightened by a horror show. Ruston was even more jittery than he had been when he came over to tell Weaver about being questioned by Wiggins.

  “What’s the matter? What noises?” she said, after locking the door behind them.

  “I think it’s Jay. He’s come back to kill us.”

  “Why would he kill you?”

  “Well, maybe he thinks we know something.”

  Weaver thought they were overreacting, but in fact there was a murderer on the loose, so she listened and tried to calm them down.

  Sam Miller said little. Weaver’s heart went out to him—he seemed so out of place, so young. He seemed alternately lost and in a state of shock. He seemed more like a child than Ruston. He looked to be 14 or 15 years old, shy and nervous. Weaver offered him something to drink, and he politely declined.