Abandoned Prayers

by Gregg Olsen

  Every detail was documented on a form that Bayardo would have his secretary type on Monday morning.

  A Y-shaped incision was made running from shoulder to shoulder then down the midline to the genitals. The precision of the doctor’s scalpel was evident, but in the end observers would say the body had been cut open like a gutted bass. With the exception of the appendix, which Bayardo determined had been surgically removed, everything was autolyzed, but intact. The heart was normal, as were the liver and lungs.

  Since no blood was in the body, a blood typing was not going to be a part of the examination. Given the mummified condition of the body, this was not unusual. Blood breaks down and separates shortly after death.

  Weaver had to consider each of the doctor’s words carefully. After the hundreds of autopsies he had seen Bayardo administer, he was fairly good at understanding Bayardo’s heavily-accented English.

  The head was saved for last. Saw cuts were made that revealed the gunshot wound—the victim had been shot through the left eye.

  As was his procedure in his examination of bodies decomposed as badly as this one, Bayardo removed the jaws to have X rays and dental charts made.

  Beneath the scalp, Bayardo hit possible crime-solving pay dirt and retrieved a distorted, mushroom-shaped .22-caliber lead projectile. Though it was badly damaged from its collision with the skull, the slug was a piece of evidence that could lead to some answers. In addition, Bayardo determined the path of the bullet: into the left eye and then the skull. The path was upward from the toes and into the head at about a thirty-five-degree angle, and from the right toward the left at about a thirty-degree angle.

  Wiggins got up from the little built-in desk where he spent most of his time during the autopsy and looked at the wound. He figured that the victim had been shot by someone shorter than he was, or that he may have been shot while lying on his back.

  Dr. Bayardo rinsed the bullet carefully, to avoid marring any of the delicate grooves that might later identify the murder weapon. No one really held much hope that the distorted, mushroom-shaped bullet would be very helpful, it was so badly damaged. But it was all they had. The medical examiner put it into a small manila envelope, which was labeled and notarized for evidentiary purposes. He handed it to Weaver. The chain of evidence was documented. It was 1:55 P.M.

  They still didn’t have a name for ME-85-466.

  On May 13, 1985, the Austin American-Statesman buried an article on page B-5, headlined “Body Found Near FM 1624.” Few beyond the victim’s killer probably paid much attention to the article—such dumpings were common.

  It was the middle of May, and the students in Marilyn Martinez’s second-grade class could feel the heat of approaching summer the day Eli Stutzman showed up with paperwork from the school office to take Danny out early. Danny didn’t know that he was leaving the school for good, but seemed glad to go with his dad. All of the kids wished him well and said good-bye.

  Martinez wondered what the rush was and why the boy’s father didn’t wait two more weeks and let the boy finish the school year.

  Stutzman said they were moving, though later she couldn’t recall if he had said where.

  “Danny was one of those little children you’d like to have more of in your class,” she later said.

  When Ruth Davis closed out her report on Danny Stutzman for 1985, it was with some disappointment regarding Danny’s progress. She wrote on May 29, 1985: “No progress observed. Danny needs to . . . continue working . . . his monitoring skills have slipped during spontaneous speech.”

  What caused Danny Stutzman to “slip”?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Homicide investigator Gary Cutler was the flip side of partner Jerry Wiggins. Young, and as hip as a Texas cop can be, Cutler was the opposite of the grizzled, chain-smoking, Levis-are-all-right Wiggins. If Wiggins was detective as scientist, Cutler was action and show. For Cutler, being a cop was an ego boost.

  Murder was their only link.

  Over the years they had worked a number of intriguing cases, most notably the murders attributed to Henry Lee Lucas. Lucas had allegedly killed three in Austin, whose bodies were recovered just off the interstate. The murders had occurred in October 1979. Wiggins and Cutler had worked the case in 1983, when Lucas had started pointing out dump sites throughout Texas. The total number of murders ran up like a Las Vegas jackpot.

  It was a great case, full of twists, innuendo, and even cannibalism. The national press covered the case. Cutler had thought it might be made into a movie, but it wasn’t. Joseph Wambaugh, Wiggins’s hero, talked about doing a book on it, but dropped out, reportedly because the story was too “difficult.”

  On Monday morning, Wiggins filled Cutler in on the body found out by Pilot Knob. Wiggins gave the details quietly and matter-of-factly. By the time Wiggins had painted the picture of the body and the autopsy, Cutler was glad he had been off on Sunday. Since the sheriff’s office divided caseloads between north and south, the north being Wiggins’s territory and the south belonging to his partner, the case would have been assigned directly to Cutler as lead investigator.

  Wiggins had been the first to work the case, so he had entered his name in the case file.

  Cutler took over and began the process of trying to find out who the victim was and, he hoped, to get some answers on how the victim happened to end up out in the middle of nowhere with a slug through his head. The victim had been dead for more than a month, and the trail was as cold as Bayardo’s table-side manner.

  The Austin American-Statesman, which the investigators liked to call the “American Misstatement,” published a small article in that morning’s edition. The text was only four inches, but it was enough to bring in a few calls from relatives and friends of missing persons, each caller sure that this might be his or her loved one.

  Wiggins took a call from a Mrs. Dodson from Granger, Texas. She was sure the body was that of her son, Mike, who she said had a drug and alcohol problem. She had kicked him out of the house, and her heart still ached.

  “What else could I do? I didn’t know what to do,” she kept saying. Wiggins listened and calmly took down the description. Mike had brown hair and a beard. His height was close to that of the victim.

  He had not had an appendectomy, however.

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry. The body we recovered had his appendix out,” Wiggins said, trying to let the mother down easy.

  “Well, he could have had it taken out in the last two months. Couldn’t he?”

  “It’s possible.”

  Wiggins had learned that you don’t argue with a killer or a mother. Both are always right.

  Across the street at the medical examiner’s office, Dr. Bayardo took down information from a caller who wished to remain anonymous. The caller believed the body to be that of a Michael Gordon. Bayardo gave the name to Cutler and Wiggins for follow-up.

  Other calls came in. Notes were left on Wiggins’s and Cutler’s desks. Lots of people thought they knew who that body might belong to. A cousin. A brother. Always someone who was missing from somewhere.

  Cutler had the victim’s physical description entered in the Austin Police Department’s missing persons computer. Nothing likely came up. Another option was to enter the details into a national computer, but because of the tremendous number of missing persons nationwide it was not done.

  By afternoon it had become clear that identifying the body was not going to be easy. DPS notified Wiggins that it was unable to match the prints with any recorded in its Henry Fingerprint System, one of two standard national systems for comparing prints. Weaver had the little white cards with the dead man’s prints forwarded to the FBI identification section in Washington. From there it would be a long wait.

  And a long shot.

  Weaver knew that only 20 percent of the population of the United States has been printed. If the John Doe had a criminal record or had been in the military, the FBI might get a hit. Otherwise, investigators would have to rely on pho
ne calls and missing persons reports, and those were not promising.

  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.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  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 wo
rn 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.’