Deadly Goals

by Wilt Browning

  Again there was silence, as if the caller were struggling with his decision. That worried Denise. Questions raced through her mind. Would he hang up? If he did, would this be the only chance to find out what had happened to Jeannie?

  Finally, he spoke.

  “You’d have to make a deal for me,” he said.

  “What kind of deal?”

  “I know where the body is, but if Pernell finds out I told the police, he’ll kill me too. I’ll talk to the police if they won’t say that I told them where to find her.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “So, when will they be here? I can’t hold on very long.”

  “You’ve got to,” she pleaded. Keeping the anonymous caller on the phone had become a battle of wills.

  “I can’t,” he responded.

  Now Denise knew she had to take a chance on losing him. “Tell you what,” she said, “why don’t you hang up now and call me back in a few minutes when they’ve had a chance to get here.”

  “How long do you think that’ll be?”

  “Not very long, I hope. Half an hour at the most.”

  “I guess so,” he said reluctantly.

  “So you will call back in twenty to thirty minutes?”

  Now he began to waver again. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t afford any more phone calls.”

  “Call collect,” she said quickly.

  Another pause.

  “But I told you I can’t tell you who I am, so how can I call collect?” he said.

  “That’s okay,” Denise told him. “Just say you’re Mike.”

  He agreed, but without enthusiasm. She heard the click on the other end of the line. What if he didn’t call back? How could she tell Carrie and Ben that Jeannie was dead?

  Now Denise waited.

  Once again Carrie and Ben arrived ahead of Slezak. They had just walked in when Denise’s telephone rang again.

  “I have a collect call for anyone at this number from Mike. Will you accept the charges?” the operator asked.

  “Yes!’’ Deise said. “Hello!”

  “It’s me,” the stranger said. Though a stranger with bad news, his voice was welcome.

  “Will you talk to Jeannie’s dad?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  Denise handed the phone to Ben.

  “Yeah,” Ben said gruffly as he put the phone to his ear. “What do you know about this?”

  “I want you to know I’m a devout Catholic and I can’t bear to have this on my conscience any longer,” the caller began.

  “So, get it off your conscience,” Ben said. “What happened to Jeannie?”

  “She’s dead.”

  Ben later would recall that the words made his head spin. He fought to keep his emotions in check.

  “Are you lying?” he said, clinging to faint hope.

  “No, sir.”

  “You’d better not be lying because we’re recording this,” Ben said, lying himself.

  Slezak arrived while Ben was on the phone and joined the others. “I’m just telling you what I know,” the caller said.

  “Where is she?”

  “He buried her just outside of Richmond up here.”

  Ben had heard enough. “Would you tell this to the police officer? He’s right here.” Ben handed the phone to Slezak.

  “This is Detective Slezak of the Chesapeake Police Department. You say you know that Jeannie Butkowski’s dead?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “Pernell said he shot her.”

  “Where’d he shoot her?” Slezak pressed.

  “I don’t know. Somewhere here in Richmond, I guess.”

  “Do you know where the body is?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How do you know?”

  “’Cause I drove out there with Pernell when he went to bury it, that’s how.”

  “Do you know where Pernell is right now?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s at work. At Remco in Southside Plaza.”

  “I’m going to have to come to Richmond and talk to you some more.”

  The caller balked. The woman who’d answered the phone had told him that he would be kept out of this, he told the detective, sounding frightened.

  “If Pernell knows I’ve been talking, he’ll kill me, too,” he said.

  “How about meeting me somewhere up there where Pernell won’t know,” Slezak suggested without getting a response.

  “You’ve got to help us catch this guy,” Slezak said. “I’ll do everything I can to protect you.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, still reluctant.

  “Look, we’ll meet when and where you say,” Slezak offered.

  “Okay,” he finally agreed.

  “What’s your name?”

  “I told the lady I can’t tell you that.”

  “Look, I’ve got to know who you are sooner or later. I’m not going to go running to Pernell and tell him I’ve been talking to you.”

  “Okay, it’s St. Augustine.”

  Slezak jotted down the name. “You got a first name?”

  “They call me Joey.”

  St. Augustine agreed to meet Slezak near downtown Richmond on Thursday morning. When Slezak arrived alone the next day, he saw a tall, thin man with Asian features and a light complexion waiting on the street. The man came to his car when he pulled up at the curb.

  “St. Augustine?” Slezak said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  St. Augustine climbed into the car and talked with Slezak for an hour. He said that Pernell had called him well before sunrise Saturday to tell him he had killed Jeannie and he needed help in getting rid of her car. When Pernell came for him, he said he had to bury Jeannie’s body before taking care of the car. He drove Pernell’s car to a construction site for a new church off Belmont Road where Pernell said he had hidden Jeannie’s body, he told Slezak. There he let Pernell out and drove around for a while because Pernell was concerned that a strange car at the construction site might attract attention.

  “You’ll have to show me where the body’s buried,” Slezak told St. Augustine and he reluctantly agreed.

  Slezak had his office in Chesapeake alert the Chesterfield County Police Department that he needed assistance in a possible homicide. Chesterfield investigator Ernie Hazard received the request and called Ray Williams, a detective with the Richmond Police Department, asking that he, too, join the investigation.

  Williams and Hazard met Slezak and St. Augustine in southeast Richmond, and the four went to the construction site off Belmont Road. After they had searched the site and nearby woods without coming upon any sign of a body or a fresh grave, St. Augustine expressed bafflement.

  Slezak felt that St. Augustine had led him on a wild goose chase and was not being truthful. He returned to Chesapeake, leaving Hazard and Williams to contend with St. Augustine.

  Williams thought that St. Augustine had been telling the truth. He gave too many details to be making it up, Williams thought, and had no discernible motive for getting involved in something so serious if he weren’t telling the truth. Also St. Augustine was clearly frightened of Pernell. Williams continued questioning him after Slezak left, and St. Augustine said that Pernell had told him weeks before the murder that he planned to kill Jeannie.

  “When do you think you’ll be seeing Pernell again?” Williams asked as they sat in Williams’ unmarked car talking.

  “He’s supposed to come by my apartment tonight,” St. Augustine answered.

  “When?”

  “About six-thirty, I guess.”

  “Good, we’ve got time to set up the wire,” Williams said.

  “The what?”

  Williams said he wanted to put a listening device in St. Augustine’s apartment and let St. Augustine lead Pernell into talking about the murder, hoping that he would say something incriminatory. St. Augustine was adamantly opposed to this idea. He was already in deeper than he’d ever planned to be, he said.
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  “If Pernell finds out I’ve been talking to you, I’m a dead man,” he complained. “If he finds out I’m setting him up, he’ll kill me on the spot.”

  “That’s just the point,” Williams said. “The quicker we get this man off the street, the safer you’re going to be.”

  St. Augustine pondered that rationale, but still he was uncertain. “I don’t know, man,” he said.

  Williams assured him that he would be able to hear everything taking place in the apartment and if any trouble started, he would be there instantly, but it took another hour and a half of persuasion to overcome St. Augustine’s fear.

  At mid-afternoon, Bill Showalter, a surveillance expert, arrived at St. Augustine’s apartment in an unmarked van. By 4:30, the listening device was in place and the van in which the officers would be listening was parked across the street. Williams had a clear view of the apartment from the rear windows of the van.

  It was almost seven before a Remco Rental truck arrived in the parking lot and parked near St. Augustine’s apartment.

  “There he is,” Williams said, as Pernell got out and walked to the apartment. Showalter turned on the recording equipment, and both officers slipped on headsets.

  They could hear Pernell tapping on the door, and St. Augustine opening it.

  “Hi,” they heard Pernell say.

  “How you doing?” St. Augustine said.

  But after that, the officers heard only low whispers, and they knew instantly that St. Augustine had betrayed them.

  Pernell remained in the apartment for 22 minutes before emerging.

  They knew that he was aware that he was being watched, but he walked calmly to his truck and drove away.

  Williams and Showalter waited after he left, making sure he didn’t return, before they went to the apartment.

  “What happened, Joey?” Williams said, his disgust and disappointment obvious.

  “Man, I was scared to death,” St. Augustine said. Williams could see he still was. “I just told him not to say anything.”

  Showalter retrieved the listening device while St. Augustine apologized repeatedly.

  Not only did the bugging fail, it also warned Pernell that the police were closing in. The next morning, he reported to work on schedule, but when he left for his lunch break, he never returned.

  21.

  The Long, Lonely Vigil

  BEN AND CARRIE WERE WAITING anxiously for word from Slezak about his meeting with St. Augustine, and when he called and said that the mysterious caller had led the investigation into a dead end, it gave them some hope.

  Still, the news left Ben with mixed feelings.

  “I was hoping he was lying,” Ben later said of St. Augustine. “I’m the kind who will always hold out hope until the very end.”

  Slezak told Ben only a little about the search for Jeannie’s body and said that St. Augustine had backed out of helping.

  Still, Ben had to wonder.

  “Why would some guy get involved in that kind of thing if he didn’t know something?”

  Ben had become angry that Slezak had not gone to Richmond immediately after talking to St. Augustine instead of waiting for a day. He wondered if the trip and the search might have been more productive if Slezak had reacted more quickly.

  The waiting soon turned from hours to days and finally to weeks, the Pricketts and Denise growing more frustrated and despondent with each passing day.

  Denise kept her lonely vigil beside the phone for more than two weeks before returning to work at the photo lab. Ben missed three weeks from work and decided he had to get back to his job as a way of distracting himself from the anger and frustration he felt. Carrie was out of work for more than a month.

  Sam had missed most of a week of work immediately after Jeannie disappeared. He had returned to his job more quickly than the rest, but spent all of his weekends now searching for his sister, sometimes with his mother and father, sometimes alone.

  And he was in frequent touch with Detective Ray Williams of the Richmond Police Department and Detective Ernie Hazard in Chesterfield County, the two men who had searched the church building site for Jeannie’s body. Although the investigation already was dragging by the end of May, Williams helped Sam keep up with whatever was going on and kept promising that the case would be solved, though he frequently admitted he was not certain when a breakthrough might come.

  By early June, Carrie visited the family doctor “for my nerves.” She was near exhaustion and her physician prescribed pills to help her sleep.

  “When I got home,” she said, “I took one of them and lay down on the couch. I fell asleep the way I was supposed to, but I had this awful dream and I couldn’t wake up to get away from it. When I finally did wake up, I flushed the rest of the pills down the commode.

  “Sleep becomes your enemy anyway when you’re going through something like this. Sleep itself is like a nightmare. You don’t want to go to sleep because you’re always afraid something would happen and you wouldn’t know about it. The phone might ring and you couldn’t answer it. But mostly I was afraid they’d find Jeannie and I’d be knocked out and they couldn’t get me to wake up. I didn’t even want to think of sleep.”

  By now Carrie, if not Ben, had accepted that their daughter was dead, and late in June, Carrie asked Ben to visit Holloman & Brown Funeral Home in Virginia Beach to make arrangements for Jeannie’s funeral. “When we find her, Ben,” she told her husband, “neither one of us will be able to do that. I want her buried at Rosewood Memorial Park.”

  Though he still was not willing to accept the possibility that his daughter was dead, Ben made the arrangements.

  Carrie called Jeannie’s dentist and asked that he prepare a set of Jeannie’s dental charts just in case they were needed. Within a week, the charts arrived in the mail.

  After Carrie had returned to work with the Corps of Engineers, she was always so lost in thought that she had trouble remembering the route she took to and from work.

  “All the time, you’re asking yourself, ‘Should we do this?’ ‘Have we done that?’ You pick up ideas about things you can do everywhere. I’d watch one of those talk shows on television and somebody would talk about trying to find people and I couldn’t do anything but sit down and watch, hoping that somebody would say something that we could do. And I wound up reading everything I could about how you find missing people.”

  One article she read was about a psychic from Greensburg, Pennsylvania, Nancy Czetli, who had helped police agencies solve crimes. Carrie leaped at the idea. She called Tony, Jeannie’s ex-husband in Pennsylvania, and asked if he could find out how to get in touch with Czetli.

  “Tony called back in a few hours,” Carrie said. “He had her address, her phone number, the whole nine yards and he told me to call the psychic’s secretary.”

  She did, only to learn that Czetli’s fee was $60 an hour, that she worked only with police departments, and that she needed a sample of Jeannie’s handwriting, the date and time she disappeared, the address of the house from which she disappeared, a picture of the house, a map of the area, and a picture of Jeannie.

  Carrie gathered all the material and took it to Slezak.

  “He let me know he didn’t believe in that,” Carrie recalled, and that angered her further.

  “But at least I’m doing something,” she snapped at him and walked out of his office.

  Back at home, she phoned Sam and told him about Czetli. She asked him to call Ray Williams, the Richmond detective, and appeal to him to work with her.

  Within the hour, Sam called back with the news that Williams was willing to cooperate and Carrie sent the material to him.

  Czetli responded quickly.

  “She told us she was dead,” Carrie said. “She said Jeannie would be found close to a stream fed by the tides. She said there would be a windmill close by and there would be scrubby pines there. I already knew Jeannie was dead. The only thing the psychic did was give us an idea where to loo
k.”

  From then on, the Pricketts used Czetli’s readings as the basis for organized searches for their daughter.

  “The point was,” Carrie said, “I was dying slowly inside. I was trying to do something. This was just something else to try.”

  For weeks, the Pricketts plotted locations in Virginia that seemed to correspond to Czetli’s descriptions, and on weekends and days off from work they made long, lonely automobile trips about the countryside searching out windmills and scrubby pines and streams fed by the tides. Regularly, Denise, too, made her own journeys to areas that had appeared on the Pricketts’ list of likely spots.

  A friend of the family remembered seeing a windmill in the Jamestown Plantation area, and for weeks the Pricketts covered the area, exploring every back road, all to no avail.

  By early July, the private investigator Ben had hired had traced Pernell to Florida where, the investigator learned, Pernell occasionally visited with relatives in Stuart.

  As soon as Ben got word of Pernell’s whereabouts, he drove to the Chesapeake Police Department and marched into Slezak’s office.

  “He’s in Stuart, Florida,” Ben would later recall telling the detective.

  “Who?” Slezak asked.

  “Pernell Jefferson.”

  “What would we do with Pernell Jefferson right now?” Ben remembered Slezak replying. “We have no body, no weapon. We still don’t know whether Jeannie’s dead or alive. Her car hasn’t even shown up yet. So what would we charge this guy with?”

  “How about kidnapping?” Ben said, bristling.

  “We’re working on it,” Slezak responded.

  “Okay,” Ben said, “I’m going after him myself. I can find him.”

  “You’re not going after him,” Slezak said, leaning across the desk, making it sound like an order, and that was how Ben took it. Years later, Ben said he had made the threat in the hope of pushing Slezak to action.

  “Frankly, I just wanted him to get off his ass and do something.”

  In another moment of frustration in July, Ben phoned Slezak to find out if there were any new developments, and getting a negative answer, told Slezak just what he thought of his investigation.