Deadly Goals

by Wilt Browning

  Attempting to overcome her fear, Denise paced. Down the hall to the bedrooms. Back again. Into the kitchen and then the den. To the closed door to Jerome’s room. Several times she paused at the door to Jeannie’s room. That room had always smelled of Jeannie, her favorite perfumes, her choice in powders, even the hint of freshness in her shampoo.

  Now Denise realized that those comforting, familiar aromas were gone. “It was like confirmation that she was dead,” Denise later recalled.

  Denise paced some more, trying to gather her thoughts. Finally she decided she could not wait for the Pricketts. She dialed the Chesapeake Police number and asked for Detective Slezak. The dispatcher reported that Slezak was out of the office but probably could be reached in his car.

  “Please tell him to come to 123 Hibben Road. I think Jeannie Butkowski has been kidnapped again,” she said, hanging up just as the Pricketts arrived.

  Carrie and Ben stopped in astonishment at the sight of the splintered door that had been ripped from its hinges and now rested battered and broken against the living room wall. Both knew that this time something horrible had happened.

  As she stood there, Carrie tried to envision Jeannie’s face, she later recalled. She knew merely by closing her eyes how her older daughter Carrie looked, and how her son Sam looked with that red hair and that warm smile. But in her memory now Jeannie’s features were blocked out.

  “Ben,” she said. “Jeannie’s dead.”

  “Carrie, we won’t know that until we find her,” Ben said.

  Then, calling on all her strength, Carrie said, “We’ve got to find her.”

  Yielding to his feeling that he ought to do something—anything—Ben tried unsuccessfully to restore the front door to its hinges. He struggled with it, trying to align the hinges that no longer would match up with the places they had connected to the frame. Finally, realizing the door was too badly shattered to be of any more use, he leaned it against an outside wall just as a TV news crew from WBEC, Channel 13 in Norfolk, arrived and walked into the living room without invitation. They soon were followed by a reporter from the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot.

  The police were the last to arrive. Instead of Slezak, two uniformed officers had been dispatched. Slezak would not enter the case until Sunday morning, after reading the preliminary written report.

  “It was mass confusion,” Ben remembered years later. “The television people, the reporters, and here were these policemen walking around, talking, trying to figure out who else might have been involved.

  “We knew who did it. We just couldn’t prove it. The police just walked in and didn’t do anything. They didn’t even dust for fingerprints.”

  What Ben had not realized at the time is that by attempting to rehang the front door, it was possible that he had contaminated the best prints the intruders might have left.

  The TV crew interviewed one of the officers, who said that he was not yet certain whether this had been an abduction, angering Ben and Carrie. Then the crew turned its lights and camera on Ben and Carrie. “Suddenly, I saw a side of Carrie I had never seen before,” Denise remembered.

  “Get out of here and leave us alone!” Carrie screamed.

  Ben came quickly to his wife’s side. “We don’t have anything to say,” he said, and ordered the reporters out of the house. Outside, the TV crew filmed the shattered door.

  “Just leave us alone,” Carrie screamed through the door, then collapsed in tears on the living room couch. Denise ran to her side and put an arm around her. “I didn’t mean to do that,” Carrie said. “Tell them I’m sorry. I just can’t talk to anybody right now.”

  Though she thought it unnecessary, Denise made the rounds to the reporters apologizing for Carrie, explaining that the Pricketts were under a lot of stress.

  The Pricketts and Denise got the feeling that not even the police knew what to do next.

  “Maybe Mike knows something,” Denise said but she had no phone number for him. She knew only that he was a police officer in Norfolk’s K-9 unit. The information operator told her his number was not listed.

  Out of desperation, Denise pushed the redial button on the phone in Jeannie’s bedroom, though she had no way of knowing who had been the last person to get a call from Jeannie. Denise guessed it would be the Pricketts’ own number.

  The phone on the other end of the line was ringing. Once. Twice. Almost three times.

  “Hello,” came the strong voice of a man.

  “Who is this?” Denise asked.

  “Who wants to know?” Mike responded cautiously.

  “I’m a friend of Jeannie’s,” Denise said just as cautiously.

  “Denise?”

  “Mike?”

  Each had recognized the other’s voice at almost the same moment.

  “What’s wrong, Denise?” asked Mike, now sensing the desperation in her voice.

  “Mike, she’s gone,” Denise said, once again close to tears. She told Mike about the battered door, the missing car and Jeannie leaving no message.

  “What do you think happened?” Mike asked.

  “I think Pernell took her. He did this once before, a couple of months ago. That time he let her go. What do you think we ought to do?”

  “I think you ought to call the Chesapeake Police,” Mike advised.

  “We already have,” said Denise. “They haven’t done anything.”

  “In the early part of the case, we didn’t know if the victim was alive or dead,” Detective Michael Slezak said in an interview in June 1995. “There was more information that she was alive than that she was dead, we felt.”

  “I guess the Chesapeake Police were going by the book,” Carrie said. “But we weren’t interested in the book. We wanted Jeannie found.”

  Through the long night, the Pricketts and Denise kept a sleepless vigil at the house, hoping for the phone to ring as it had before, with Jeannie on the line. Uncertain what to do, where to look, they could only wait.

  Late in the evening, Carrie called her longtime friend Nora Casey, who had prepared the food for Jeannie’s aborted wedding to Tito, and she came to offer whatever support she could. Carrie remembered Jeannie saying once that she and Pernell had visited some friends on New Market Road. Carrie and Nora drove out to the road looking for Jeannie’s car, but couldn’t find it and returned to the house.

  Twice, Mike called Denise for updates, the second time near midnight.

  “I decided I’d just go get Jeannie and bring her home,” Mike said years later, recalling his thoughts about that night. Like the Chesapeake Police, Mike had not thought the battered door was a particularly ominous sign. “I still didn’t feel like Jeannie was in a life-threatening situation,” he said. “It’s what we’d call a domestic situation. But I knew her mom, too, and I decided I owed it to her to go get Jeannie.”

  During his second call, Mike told Denise that he would do just that. He knew Pernell. He was certain that if he could find him he could persuade him to release Jeannie. Denise, however, was unable to provide Pernell’s address, only his telephone number in Richmond, which she had found among Jeannie’s phone records. She told Mike that Pernell would be driving a gold Pontiac Fiero.

  Mike was scheduled to work later Sunday morning, but he arranged for his hours to be changed, and at two, he took his intensely trained German shepard, Lesko, and headed to Richmond. There he went to a police precinct, indentified himself as an officer from Norfolk and said he had come in search of a friend who had been abducted from her home. He asked if the Richmond police files held any information that would tell him where Pernell lived, but nothing turned up.

  Mike didn’t want to call Pernell’s number and give him a chance to flee with Jeannie. He just wanted to knock on Pernell’s door, tell him to hand over Jeannie and get back home in time for his delayed shift. He found a phone book at a convenience store and searched it for Pernell’s number, hoping to find an address, but no number was listed for Pernell. He searched through all the Jeffersons in
the book, hoping to match the number Denise had given him, but had no luck at that either. Then he remembered that Pernell’s sister was named Richardson. Under that name he found a match for his number and jotted down the address. He stopped a passing policeman for directions and headed for a neighborhood on the city’s south side, where he expected to find Jeannie with Pernell.

  He located the apartment complex and spotted a gold Fiero nearby. He looked for Jeannie’s charcoal gray Nissan ZX with the TIGRE Z license plate, but it was nowhere in sight.

  Getting out of his car with Lesko at his side on a leash, Mike walked to the Fiero and placed his palm on the hood to feel for heat from the engine. It was cold. The car had not been moved in some time.

  Cautiously, Mike approached the apartment and knocked on the door. He started to knock again but heard movement inside and waited. Soon the door opened and Pernell was standing before him in his undershorts.

  “Mike,” Pernell said, seemingly surprised. “What brings you here at this time of morning, man?”

  “I’m looking for Jeannie, Pernell,” Mike said. “I know y’all have been having some hard times and I wanted to come check with her. She’s been missing for a while and her parents and friends are worried about her.” As he talked, Mike looked for telltale signs of a struggle on Pernell’s body, scratches, bites, anything, but he saw none.

  “I guess I can’t help you,” Pernell answered. “Jeannie and I broke up some time ago. It’s been two weeks since I saw her, maybe longer.”

  Pernell didn’t invite him in, but Mike remained at the door for at least ten minutes chatting, hoping for some sign that Pernell knew something, but Pernell displayed no discomfort, no stress. Mike later recalled that Pernell was not acting like a man who had something to hide.

  It was almost six when Mike headed back to Norfolk. He stopped just off the interstate to call Denise.

  “I found Pernell,” he told her. “Jeannie’s nowhere around here.”

  He doubted that Pernell had anything to do with this, he said.

  “Thanks for checking,” Denise said.

  “I’m on my way home. Let Carrie know. And let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”

  Mike was not the only driver on Interstate 64 that morning worried about Jeannie’s fate. At about the same time Mike was heading home, Jeannie’s brother Sam was leaving Richmond for Chesapeake. He had waited at home hoping for good news about his sister, but it hadn’t come, and now he was going to see what he could do.

  “Have you heard anything?” he asked, when he arrived at Denise’s house where his parents were still waiting an hour after sunup.

  “Nothing,” his mother reported. “Sam, I think she’s dead.”

  “She was so scared of Pernell,” Sam said. “Maybe she’s hiding somewhere.”

  In desperation, Sam began to search the house, even climbing into the dark, dusty attic, but finding nothing that might lead him to his sister.

  At mid-morning, the Pricketts decided they had to do something and launched their own search. Carrie and Nora in one car, Ben and Sam in another drove through the parking lots of every hotel and motel within a mile of I-64 from Chesapeake to Williamsburg looking for either Jeannie’s distinctive Nissan or Pernell’s gold Fiero. They searched for hours, calling Denise regularly to see if there was any news.

  A friend of Denise’s arrived with a new door and installed it. Unannounced, a TV news crew arrived for an update and trained the camera on the repair work. When Denise was alone again, she busied herself by sweeping the wood shavings from the new door out of her driveway. As she worked, a police cruiser stopped at the curb and an officer got out and walked over to her.

  “Just between us,” she later remembered him saying, “what’s the real story? You can tell me. What really happened to your friend? You know where she is don’t you?”

  Denise flew into a rage. Screaming at the police officer, she ordered him from her yard. As he left, Denise ran crying to her house, slamming the new door behind her, and throwing herself onto her bed, no longer able to control her emotions.

  Since her telephone conversation near dawn with Mike, Denise once again had been trying to decide what she should do. She was certain that Pernell was lying. Given the March abduction and the abuse he had heaped on Jeannie in recent months, there could be no other explanation. And if the police weren’t going to question Pernell, Denise decided she was certainly going to try. She dialed his sister’s number in Richmond.

  “Hello,” a woman’s voice answered.

  “Is this where Pernell Jefferson lives?” Denise asked.

  “Yes it is.”

  “May I speak to him?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Denise Edwards.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “I’ll call back.”

  Twice more over the next two hours Denise called and got the same response. Growing frustrated, she dialed the number again late in the afternoon, this time changing her voice and mimicking jive talk.

  “Hey, mama, is ol’ P.J. ’round?”

  “Just a minute.”

  Denise heard the woman calling, “P.J., it’s for you.”

  Then Pernell was on the the line.

  “I don’t know what you’ve done to Jeannie,” Denise said, bristling, “but you’d better bring her home. And you’d better return her safe. Do you understand, Pernell Jefferson?”

  “What are you talking about?” Pernell responded. “I didn’t do nothing to Jeannie.”

  “Pernell,” Denise said, raising her voice as anger rushed over her. “I’m warning you. You’d better not harm a hair on her head.”

  “You will get down on your hands and knees and beg for forgiveness for threatening me,” Pernell shouted and slammed down the phone.

  On the Sunday evening news, Channel 13 in Norfolk reported that Jeannie was still missing and so was her charcoal gray Nissan 300 ZX bearing the unusual license plate, TIGRE Z.

  The Chesapeake Police Department also had issued a Crime Line alert for the Nissan, and suddenly calls began coming in. Cars matching the description had been seen traveling west on I-64 near Norfolk, in Virginia Beach and on U.S. 460 near Petersburg. At times the calls came in clusters, keeping the Chesapeake Police busy hurrying to various locations.

  “That went on for several days, sightings all over the place,” Slezak said in 1995. “We were doing all we could to hunt that car down and we were getting lots of reports.”

  Sunday night, Carrie, Ben and Sam returned home to rest. “We only slept from exhaustion,” Carrie said. “We went for as long as we could, but after a while the body just shuts down on you and you have no choice but to rest.”

  On Monday morning, Carrie called her office to say she would be out of work for a while, and Sam phoned the computer service center where he worked in Richmond and asked to be excused for a few days. Ben went to work as usual but was unable to keep his mind on his job and came home early. “I went because I had to do something,” he said later. “I had to keep busy if I could.” He would not return to his job for three weeks.

  By Tuesday afternoon, Ben was becoming a problem for the Chesapeake Police. He kept calling to ask if there had been a break in the case, if Pernell had been arrested, if he had even been questioned. He was growing more and more convinced that the case really was being treated as nothing more than a runaway.

  Sam stayed until Wednesday afternoon and continued to search places in the Tidewater he knew had been familiar to Jeannie. Several times he turned around to chase passing Nissans, hoping they might be Jeannie’s, but each time he was disappointed.

  Denise had not been able to return to work either, and Jeannie’s disappearance had changed her life in a more important way. She no longer felt the house in which she had once wanted to raise her daughter was a safe haven. She now left Dawn with her mother around the clock, seldom seeing her, while she kept a vigil at the house. “If Jeannie was still alive and called home,” Denis
e said, “I was going to be there to answer the phone.” She kept a loaded .22-caliber pistol in the hand-pouch of her baggy sweatshirt as she waited, and she jumped every time the phone rang, fearful of the news it might bring.

  On Wednesday, May 10, four days after Jeannie had been discovered missing, the day Sam returned to Richmond, a call came with news she didn’t want to hear.

  “Are you a friend of Jeannie Butkowski?” an unfamiliar male voice asked.

  “Yes! Yes!” Denise answered.

  “Don’t ask me my name. I can’t give you my name and…”

  “Okay, you didn’t hear me ask, did you?”

  “I want you to know that I’m Catholic, and I was raised right. And I just can’t live with this on my conscience.”

  “Where’s Jeannie?” Denise blurted, interrupting him.

  “She’s dead.”

  For a moment, silence dominated the line. Denise struggled to keep her composure. “Please,” she finally said, “can you hold on for a few minutes?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t afford to hold on long,” the voice said.

  “I’ve got to do something. It’ll only take me a minute.”

  Again there was silence and Denise held her breath. “Just hurry,” he finally responded.

  “Good,” Denise said.

  Denise placed the receiver beside the phone, raced to a neighbor’s house and called Detective Slezak. She told him she had a man on the phone who knew something about Jeannie’s disappearance. Slezak said he would get there as quickly as he could. Then Denise called Carrie and told her to bring Ben and get to the house quick. She then rushed back across the street to the telephone.

  “Are you still there?” she asked breathlessly, jerking the telephone to her ear.

  “I can’t afford this phone call,” the man complained.

  “Look, there are a couple of people you’ve got to talk to. They’re on the way to the house,” Denise said, worried now that she would scare him away. “Will you do that?”

  “Who are they?” he asked.

  “Well, the police for one.”