Abandoned Prayers

by Gregg Olsen

  “I raised my kids to look at a naked body and see it was not dirty or nasty. Maybe that’s the reason I can be broad-minded when it comes to homosexuals.”

  Sitting in the living room after work, shortly after she had returned to Austin, Wanda asked Stutzman about Pritchett.

  “When is he coming back? I’d really like to see him,” she said.

  Stutzman told her Pritchett’s son was still in critical condition and in the hospital. There was no way of telling when he would return, but he was definitely planning on coming back to Austin.

  If Wanda had wanted to take Danny before she had left for Hawaii in February, she felt even more inclined to do so during her visit in the spring. Over the three weeks of her visit it became clear that, while Stutzman loved his son, he had little time for the boy.

  Danny was under strict orders to come directly home from school and to wait in the house for the others to arrive. A few times, Stutzman would go pick up Danny at some woman’s house a few blocks away. Wanda never saw the woman, but Stutzman told her she was a black lady who loved kids.

  Wanda, who had raised her five kids with love and independence, felt that Danny was a little spoiled. He didn’t have much in the way of toys and things—and he certainly didn’t have new clothes—but he acted babyish at times. Wanda surmised it was because he didn’t have the love of a mother.

  Considering all their hard times, Wanda felt Stutzman had done as good a job of raising his son as could be expected. When Stutzman punished Danny, she didn’t say a word.

  “He never whipped him, but he smacked him. He slapped him in the face, when we were in the truck. Danny kept asking for something, he wouldn’t leave it rest. Eli got very mad and slapped him.”

  On June 14, while Wanda was getting ready to go back to Hawaii, she again told Stutzman she was sorry that she hadn’t gotten to see Pritchett this trip. Stutzman understood her disappointment and told her that he had just talked with Pritchett on the telephone.

  “He told me complications have set in and the baby will have to be put in traction,” he said. “It sounds real bad to me.”

  Stutzman drove Wanda to the airport early the next morning.

  She hoped Pritchett’s son would be all right.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  June 15, 1985

  Wiggins and Lawrence Salas, a burglary detective whose name, like Wiggins’s, “was in the barrel to work weekends,” had a breakfast of migas—a green chili, cheese, and egg dish—at Taco Village, a cop hangout on Berkman Drive. Endless cups of coffee and a block-long chain of Camel straights topped off the meal as the two discussed cases, department gossip, and their plan to visit the Banton Road address.

  It was Saturday morning, and most of Austin was asleep when the detectives took a table at Taco Village. The town was like that—hopping at night along Sixth Street and quiet and lazy in the morning as the party crowd slept it off. Streets were deserted. The University of Texas campus was still. It was the kind of quiet morning typical of Austin.

  It was a good morning to get into the thick of the Pritchett murder investigation.

  The two men were friends. At 40, Salas was not much younger than Wiggins, but called him the “old guy.” It was a compliment. Whenever he had a case that was proving difficult or he needed advice, he went to see the veteran homicide investigator. Wiggins thought Salas was a good cop, conscientious and detail-oriented when putting an investigation together.

  The Austin native had only one flaw, but it was a big one. Salas couldn’t write a decent report, even if his career depended on it. Maybe he didn’t have the confidence. Maybe he was impatient, like Cutler. In police work, reports are a mundane exercise, a process during which the investigator synthesizes all he has learned at a crime scene or interrogation. He goes through notes and recollections and distills them into a report that, in the end, in court, is all that matters.

  Some investigators’ reports read like good novels, with clear narratives and a touch of drama. Wiggins’s detailed reports were like that. The reports of Salas, on the other hand, were vague and frugal with details. And since his memory couldn’t necessarily be trusted, if something didn’t make it into his report, it was lost for good.

  Salas didn’t like to drive, so Wiggins took the wheel when the pair drove out toward the airport and Manor Road. Both were familiar with the area and considered it a high-crime neighborhood. A few of the older, established families tried to hang on as dwindling property values forced their neighbors to turn the tree-lined community into a community of renters, and a kind of combat zone.

  The street address in the field report regarding Pritchett was 3408 Banton. Wiggins had no problem finding it. The address numbers were clear on the neatly painted white house—something bleary-eyed drug users looking for a score or cops looking for a suspect appreciate in a rundown neighborhood. The front yard, however, appeared well-maintained. The thick blades of buffalo grass were shorn and green. A 1978 green and silver Ford pickup with a trailer hitch was parked in the driveway. Like the yard and the house, the truck also stood apart from the other vehicles parked along Banton. Most of them were either old cars that had seen better days or jacked-up hot rods dripping oil onto the roadway.

  The Texas plates on the pickup were noted: SJ943. It was Eli Stutzman’s vehicle.

  If Salas ever drew the connection, he later forgot it, and he definitely never made any written notes on it, but next door to the Stutzman address at 3405 Banton lived Mark Taylor. Salas had worked a successful vehicle-burglary case on Taylor a couple of months before. He didn’t mention it to Wiggins.

  Stutzman answered the door and identified himself. Wiggins told him that they were with the sheriff’s office and that they were investigating the murder of Glen Pritchett. Records indicated that he lived at this address. Stutzman, dressed in blue jeans and a shirt, apparently ready to go to work, neither seemed surprised nor concerned about Pritchett’s death.

  He invited the cops in.

  The house was spotless. A worn sofa adjacent to a TV dominated the living room, a raised area next to the entry. Stutzman told the investigators that Denny Ruston, Sam Miller, and Stutzman’s son, Danny, lived there. Ruston was at the Pizza Hut already. Miller sat quietly, alternately dazed and lucid. He had never met Pritchett.

  The detectives later maintained that Danny Stutzman wasn’t at home that morning. In fact, Wiggins later said that he had never laid eyes on the child, and his notes back him up. But if the child wasn’t there, where was he at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning?

  Stutzman told the investigators that he hadn’t seen Pritchett for several weeks.

  “I put him on a bus for Montana in May.”

  Stutzman told Wiggins that he was a contractor specializing in remodeling, and the detective scanned the room for recent repairs—paint that didn’t match, something that might indicate a patch job. Maybe a bullet hole had been filled in? It was obvious a carpenter wouldn’t leave a bullet hole if he had half a brain and a bucket of spackle handy.

  Stutzman said he had been letting Pritchett sleep on the couch, deducting fifty dollars a week from his paycheck. He had been expecting Pritchett to return to Austin after visiting his family in Missoula. He showed the investigators some blue jeans and shirts that belonged to Pritchett and that Stutzman had been keeping until he returned.

  That Stutzman was pacing and seemed nervous was no indictment. Who wouldn’t be uncomfortable or nervous with a homicide detective giving their house the once-over? While Salas interviewed Sam Miller in the living room, Wiggins looked through the rest of the house. The beds were made and the rooms were tidy. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. He asked questions casually, and Stutzman responded, often volunteering more information than necessary.

  “You have a horse?” Wiggins asked, indicating the ribbons and trophies Stutzman had displayed in his bedroom.

  Stutzman nodded. “I keep him out in the county.”

  “Where abouts?”


  “I had him out on a place on Onion Creek, but I moved him to a pasture off Sassman Road.”

  Close to the dump site, Wiggins thought. It was interesting, but it made Stutzman no more a suspect than Sam Miller or, really, anyone in Austin. But it was a link. Wiggins made a mental note of it.

  Stutzman and Miller agreed to come down to the sheriff’s office for a statement. Almost as an afterthought, Wiggins asked if Stutzman had any guns.

  “Yeah, a .22 rifle and a 16-gauge shotgun. I keep them in my room. Do you want to see them?”

  Wiggins watched Salas as he and Stutzman went to get the guns; .22 was the caliber of the murder weapon. Stutzman said that as far as he knew neither gun had been fired recently. He gave Salas a Marlin/Glenfield with a scope.

  Sam Miller rode with the detectives, and Eli Stutzman followed in his pickup.

  Wiggins moved Stutzman up a notch as a suspect. He had a truck that could easily have transported a body. He kept a horse out by the dump site. He not only had guns, he had a .22. But it was Stutzman’s reaction to the news of his roommate’s death that really made Wiggins suspicious. Stutzman hadn’t seemed surprised by the news, he simply claimed to have believed his roommate was alive and well in Montana. Even more peculiar was the fact that he didn’t even seem interested in Pritchett’s murder.

  “Most people are alarmed and ask questions about a murder involving a friend,” Wiggins later said. “Eli Stutzman didn’t ask one question.”

  The chain-smoking detective figured Sam Miller for a kid with a shoe size bigger than his IQ—he seemed naive and harmless. Conversation with Miller was futile, even though the detectives tried to get him to talk about himself, about Eli. In the end, they settled for small talk about the weather.

  Stutzman was instructed to park along the strip on Eleventh Street, across from the north door of the courthouse. This was done to protect the chain of evidence—the detectives could see the truck from their office, inside the courthouse. It was merely procedure. In this case it hardly seemed critical. After all, it had been at least two months since the murder.

  The L-shaped office was cluttered and smoky. Stutzman sat across from Wiggins in one end of the L. Out of view, at the other end of the office, Salas took Miller’s brief statement.

  Stutzman told Wiggins he had first met Pritchett in November 1984 at the Texas Employment Center, which was where he got most of his help. He said Pritchett didn’t have a place to stay, so he had rented him a room.

  “Anyone else living with you?”

  “There was another man living there with us named Denny Ruston. Denny is a homosexual, but as far as I know Glen was not homosexual.”

  “Are you gay?” Wiggins asked, again thinking about the unzipped Bill Blass cutoffs the victim had been wearing.

  Stutzman shook his head. “No. I’m bisexual.”

  The subject was uncomfortable for Stutzman, and Wiggins moved on to ask about Pritchett.

  Stutzman described Pritchett as a nice, easygoing, and quiet type from Montana. He said he hadn’t seen the man for two months.

  “He kept talking about going back to Montana. About two months ago he said he was going back to see his kids. He said his little boy had been hurt.”

  Stutzman couldn’t remember the exact date that Pritchett, dressed in blue jeans and a short-sleeved shirt and wearing tennis shoes, had climbed on a bus headed for Montana. He hadn’t seen Pritchett actually get on the bus. Regarding the date, he told the detective he could check Pritchett’s time sheets.

  “I dropped him off at the Greyhound bus station downtown and left. I had given him the money he was due, about six or seven hundred dollars. He said he would be back.”

  Stutzman told Wiggins he had spoken with Pritchett a couple of times after he had left Austin. Pritchett had called him from a pay telephone because, he said, his ex-wife’s had been disconnected. It had been Stutzman’s understanding that Pritchett would be returning to Austin any day.

  Wiggins asked about Ruston, and Stutzman told him the basics. He was from Iowa. He liked to go to the gay bars on Red River and Ninth Street. Stutzman noted that Ruston had left for Iowa a couple of weeks before Pritchett had boarded the bus for Montana.

  Wiggins wrote it all down on a yellow legal pad under Stutzman’s watchful eye.

  His statement concluded: “I don’t know if Denny and Glen ever had sex or not but I wouldn’t doubt it. I never had sex with Glen. Denny just likes to give blow jobs but is not into anything rough that I know of. I have no idea who would want to kill Glen.”

  Wiggins finished the interview by asking Stutzman if he would take a polygraph in order to clear himself of any suspicion.

  Stutzman agreed and, in addition, volunteered to send Denny Ruston in for an interview that afternoon.

  A typed version of Stutzman’s statement was presented for his signature. In his haste, he neglected to correct a typo made by the central-records clerk. The typist had inadvertently changed Pritchett’s name to Danny’s in one sentence. It now read: “Danny smoked pot on occasion, and drank pretty heavily.” The error was so glaring, it seemed strange that a father wouldn’t correct it. But Stutzman apparently had other concerns.

  One glaringly obvious omission from the interview was any questioning about Danny Stutzman.

  Sam Miller couldn’t believe it. He had just been questioned by the sheriff’s office about a murder. It was enough to blow his mind.

  In the pickup on the way back from the courthouse, an agitated Stutzman started to ramble, his words strung together with barely a gap between them. Miller heard Stutzman say one thing clearly: “I killed him. He was getting in the way and I had to do something.”

  Stutzman said it as though the excuse could justify the act.

  Miller was too shocked to respond.

  “I had to,” Stutzman continued, “but don’t worry, it will all blow over. If they question you again, just keep quiet. Don’t say anything. You don’t know anything.”

  Keep quiet. Miller took it as a threat. If Stutzman had killed Pritchett, his roommate—his friend—he just might kill again.

  Miller sank low in the seat. Was knowing something like this as bad as participating? He listened as Stutzman went on, repeating, “I had to, but don’t worry.”

  Miller didn’t ask for details. He already knew more than he could handle.

  When they got home, Miller grabbed a beer and turned on the TV. Then Eli and Danny joined him in the living room. Again, as unlikely as it seemed and as unnecessary as it was, Stutzman talked about the murder. This time he told Miller that he had been forced to move the body.

  “I was afraid someone would find it,” he said.

  Again, Sam asked no questions.

  According to Miller, Danny Stutzman also heard his father talk about committing the murder and hiding the body, but the boy had no real reaction to the information. It didn’t seem to be news to him.

  Stutzman said something about a funeral in Dallas–Fort Worth, and he left for the rest of the day. Danny went with his father.

  Miller kept his mouth shut and didn’t tell anyone what Stutzman had said. He didn’t want to end up dumped in a ditch in the middle of nowhere.

  He realized that coming to Austin had been the biggest mistake of his life.

  It was the early lunch rush at Pizza Hut when Denny Ruston answered Eli Stutzman’s frantic phone call. At first, Stutzman was firing off words too fast to make any sense. Ruston pressed his ear to the phone to shut out the noise of the restaurant.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  “The police found Pritch’s body.”

  Ruston felt the blood rush from his head. He was not composed enough to ask for additional information.

  Stutzman rambled on anyway. “They took Sam and me in for questioning. They think I shot him and you helped. They want to talk to you. They want to question you.”

  Stutzman told Ruston to meet him in the parking lot of an Austin shopping mall. He said they had to
talk it over before Ruston went to the sheriff for questioning.

  Ruston agreed, hung up the phone, and, disoriented and shocked, drove to the meeting place. Later he wondered how he had made it there without wrecking his car.

  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.