Abandoned Prayers (25 page)

The more Wanda talked to Susan, and the more they talked about Denny’s letters, the more Wanda thought he was gay. She suggested that possibility to her sister.

“She didn’t want no part of it. She could not believe her son could be like that. He was her only son, he was going to carry on the Ruston name,” Wanda recalled.

•    •    •

Mac Sawyer, who came back to Austin on January 31, 1984, found a nice house at 5110 Ravensdale Lane. Sawyer still didn’t know—Wanda would say “couldn’t accept”—that she planned to dump him. The place needed a little work: new paint, the kitchen sink replaced, glass sliders repaired.

The Century 21 listing agent referred Eli Stutzman to them to make the much-needed repairs. Stutzman was quiet, friendly, and appeared to be a hard worker. A crew of several men accompanied him.

He came out in September.

Wanda’s son,
Kyle
, went out front where the crew was working on painting the slightly run-down house. Kyle listened to a worker who was talking about being in a centerfold magazine, and Kyle’s interest was piqued. Soon it became obvious that the magazines being discussed were gay publications. Kyle asked if the workers were gay, and was told, neither shyly nor militantly proud, that in fact they all were.

Later, Kyle went inside to talk with Wanda, who was working on the interior of the place. “You know, mom, I think they are all gays.”

“No. Couldn’t be.” Wanda was surprised. They seemed so
normal
.

“I’m sure they are,” Kyle insisted.

In the fall of 1984, an administrator at the Missoula, Montana, Youth Home got Glen Pritchett a job at 4Bs South Restaurant, and the troubled man moved out of Sandy’s apartment.

“I always felt Glen left me and the kids because I wouldn’t drink with him anymore,” Sandy Turner recalled.

Though he was gone, there were still conflicts.

On September 21, 1984, Missoula police officer Gary Palmer, who was Jo Lyn Kuser’s brother, answered a call
at Sandy Turner’s place at 326 Clay Street. Bill Mayberry had pinned Pritchett to the floor. Pritchett was angry that Mayberry was there with his wife.

“I’m not your wife, anymore!” Sandy told him.

Pritchett responded by hurling insults and smashing a window. Officer Palmer knew Glen Pritchett from his problems at the group home. A tearful and angry Sandy Turner told the officer that they had divorced and that this was her apartment. “I want him to leave,” she told Palmer. “Get him out of here!”

By that time Sandy, who had earned her GED the previous year, was taking classes at the University of Montana. The morning after the police came, Pritchett asked for a ride to the edge of town. He said he was going to Helena for a while, though from there he seemed to have no plans. Pritchett left Missoula with nothing but a little bag of clothes. It was September 1984.

He was bitter and depressed about his marriage when he came to his sister Nona’s place. He put one hundred percent of the blame on himself. It hurt that he was no longer with his son and daughter, and Nona had no doubt that Glen still loved Sandy.

“He knew his drinking had cost him everything,” she said later.

Pritchett stayed at Nona’s for three weeks, drinking and not doing much of anything. When he left he told his sister he was going to Missoula, then on to Idaho to see his younger brother Cecil, and, after that, to Reno, where his dad and uncle were living. Pritchett worked in Reno for a few weeks and then disappeared—with nearly one thousand dollars of his uncle’s money.

“We didn’t know where he went,” Cecil Pritchett later said.

Two weeks after he left Helena, two of Pritchett’s good friends were arrested on drug charges.

Later in the fall, Pritchett called his ex-wife from Austin. He had a job doing construction work and had moved into a house with a couple of gays.

Sandy was incredulous.

“Gays?” she asked.

“Yeah, faggots!” Pritchett laughed. “Can you get that?”

Sandy laughed, too. She couldn’t imagine her husband—her ex-husband—living with some homosexuals in Texas. The Glen Pritchett she knew hated gays and would sooner punch one out than to move in with one.

After she hung up the phone, Sandy figured Glen had sunk lower than she had ever dreamed possible. If they had drugs and if there was plenty of drinking, maybe it was just plain convenience. Still,
gays?

After Wanda Sawyer returned to Austin, one of her nephew Denny Ruston’s ex-boyfriends got mad and told Susan Ruston that her son was gay. No matter how open-minded, no mother wants to hear that news. Susan took it hard. She even sobbed that “no one would be left to carry on the Ruston name.” Wanda told her that the men working on her house were gay and that they seemed all right.

She decided to talk to Stutzman.

Wanda Sawyer is the type of woman who understands that if you want to know something—ask. Stutzman could have told her his sexuality was none of her business, but he didn’t. He confirmed he was gay, and made her promise not to tell anyone. Wanda didn’t care about his sexuality one way or another.

She asked Stutzman what kind of advice he could give Denny Ruston or his mother.

“The only thing I can tell you to tell your sister is, if Denny can’t be himself, then it is going to be very hard on him if he knows he’s gay. It’s hard on the wife, it’s hard when you have children, and it’s hard on the marriage. Eventually, you really don’t love that woman. You have no desire for her, yet you’re forced, because this is the way society wants you to be,” he told her.

Stutzman told her that he had been married at one time, but that his wife had died tragically in a barn fire. He said
that he had known he had homosexual tendencies before he was married, but had been confused by them and unsure how to respond to them.

Knowing that he had been raised Amish, Wanda reasoned that such naïveté was not only possible, but likely.

One day, after working on the house, Stutzman asked Wanda if she’d like to go out, just friend-to-friend. Wanda, who had not gone out much since marrying and was a little stressed because of her upcoming divorce, was reluctant, but Stutzman persisted.

They stayed out late, going from bar to bar.

“Eli took me to a topless bar, and he was so embarrassed that he hadn’t known it was one. I guess I didn’t fully accept the fact that he was gay and couldn’t relate to it. I could see the embarrassment. ‘Let’s just drink our drinks and go,’ he said,” Wanda recalled.

As their first night progressed, it became obvious Stutzman did not frequent these places. Not usually, anyway. Nobody knew him. And he seemed so uncomfortable.

Wanda chalked it up to his being out of his element. Stutzman wasn’t used to straight bars.

Over the next several weeks, as Wanda and Eli became better friends, Stutzman took her to gay bars. Glen Pritchett, who now worked for Stutzman, often accompanied them.

Wanda began to accept the idea of men in drag, in dog collars, or entwined with studded strips of leather. It was weird, but the men seemed happy, and everyone was having a good time. It really could have been any bar, except, of course, that the couples were men.

She asked Stutzman if he would talk with Denny Ruston, maybe give him some support and encouragement. He said he would. Denny found Stutzman to be soft-spoken, yet possessing a sense of humor that he found appealing. Stutzman urged Denny to come down to Texas.

To pass the time and make a few dollars, Wanda took a job waitressing at the Pizza Hut on Reinli Street in South Austin. When she decided to file for her divorce, it was Stutzman who took her down to the county courthouse.

•    •    •

To hear Wanda tell it, her nephew Denny Ruston’s short life was a sad saga of family betrayal, divorce, and whispers of sexual abuse—more than one topic suitable for producers of daytime talk shows, looking for juicy material.

Maybe Wanda exaggerated a tad. Indeed, if that was the case, that’s all she did. Wanda Sawyer didn’t like to stretch the truth. She didn’t have to. She knew the truth was always more interesting than some silly story.

Denny’s parents had split up when he was still a tow-headed toddler. His dad had fooled around with another woman and gotten her pregnant. Wanda and Susan’s youngest sister had found out about it and was blackmailing Denny’s father to keep her mouth shut. He paid her twenty dollars now and then and, if she pressed him, let her use the Rustons’ car. Susan stood by idly, wondering what was going on and thinking it was all very strange.

As is often the case with divorce, a child forced the issue. Patty, Denny’s sister, asked her mother one day: “Mommy, why does daddy sleep with Auntie?”

“Auntie” was the girl Susan had hired to baby-sit the children. Later, the baby-sitter got pregnant, and Susan left her husband.

Susan, Patty, and Denny tried to start over in Iowa, but, even though the court had decreed her ex was to pay the bills, he refused. Collectors garnished her wages. Susan, fed up, left for Michigan and moved in with her parents.

It was not the best place for the three of them. Pointing an accusing finger at her father, Wanda recalled: “It has never been proven, but it has been spoken of by the grandchildren that my dad sexually molested Denny (and three other children). My children were never left alone with him, except that one night (Wanda’s son) stayed there—and after that he wouldn’t stay no more.”

When Wanda found out about what was going on at grandma’s house, she tried to confront her mother with the issue, but the old woman refused to discuss it—or deny it.

Wanda, accepting and tolerant, later racked her brain to come up with the reason why Denny had turned out the way he had. She wondered if it was his home life, his toilet training, his mother, his father.

There were so many possible reasons, but no real answers. She wondered if she was merely looking for excuses for the way things had turned out.

Austin police officer Larry Oliver encountered Eli Stutzman and Glen Pritchett on December 20, 1984, in a parking lot off Handcock, in Austin. On patrol that night, the officer observed Stutzman’s parked pickup, plus a couple of men standing around. When the officer and his partner passed by, the men got in the truck and drove to the other side of the lot, where Stutzman and Pritchett got out. Pritchett knelt on the pavement. When the men saw the patrol car approaching them, they again climbed inside the truck and started to leave.

Officer Oliver questioned Stutzman, who seemed evasive and would only state that he had stopped to let Pritchett stretch. Pritchett, who was drunk, didn’t recall stopping, then added he had stopped to urinate.

The officer noticed a bloody scrape on the left side of the young man’s forehead. At first Pritchett said the injury was the result of carelessness at a construction site.

Before leaving, Pritchett changed his story, telling the officers, “I got in a fight in a faggot bar.”

On December 29, Eli, Danny, and Glen went to Wanda’s daughter’s wedding and reception. The three of them looked like a happy, albeit, makeshift family. Pritchett seemed closer to the Stutzmans than one would have thought possible in just the two months’ time of their knowing each other.

Stutzman wore cowboy boots, a western shirt, and gray slacks that were an inch too short. Pritchett wore jeans, a jean jacket, and a chambray shirt. Danny was dressed just like his dad. As the reception wore on, Danny crawled into
his father’s lap and fell asleep. Pritchett slammed down scotch-and-waters, and Stutzman drank Budweisers.

Harry and Evelyn Reininger’s inherited twenty-two-acre ranch was small compared to most of the spreads in the area south of the city, near the highway to Creedmoor, Texas. Since the place had a good barn and stables, the Reiningers decided to earn extra money by boarding horses.

Mrs. Reininger saw an advertisement in the
Weekly Bulletin
, placed by a man looking for a place to board his horse. She called the number and talked with Eli Stutzman, who told her he had a stallion that he was boarding at a stable near Onion Creek—not far from the Reiningers’ ranch on Sassman Road. He was looking for a new place to take the animal. Stutzman agreed to the grandmotherly woman’s price of forty dollars per month, and the deal was struck.

Stutzman came out with the horse he called “Chris,” and made his first payment on January 1. He bragged about all the ribbons and trophies his son Danny had won showing the horse.

The Reiningers had no idea, of course, that Stutzman was lying and that it had been Terry Palmer’s “son” who had won the ribbons.

Mrs. Reininger felt that Stutzman was a fairly successful young man. He had a good-looking pickup, and he introduced himself with a business card that read
E. S. CONSTRUCTION
.

Over the next few months, Stutzman came frequently to see the animal and to ride. At least twice he brought Danny along. One time he brought another man, whom Mrs. Reininger only saw from a distance. She thought it was a friend or an employee.

If Susan Ruston had a hard time accepting son Denny’s sexuality, her third husband apparently found the situation
intolerable. But it wasn’t Ruston’s parents who sent him packing for Texas. Everything came to a head when Ruston and his lover had an argument over where the younger man was going to spend New Year’s. Denny was adamant that he would join his parents in Michigan; his lover said he would stay in Iowa.

“I finally figured I was old enough to make my own decisions and I’ll do what I damn well wanted. So I packed up my shit and left,” he said later.

He arrived in Austin on January 4, planning to live with his Aunt Wanda until she left for Hawaii at the end of the following month.

When he arrived at the Sawyers’, Wanda, who continued to look for every excuse to get away from Mac, suggested they call Eli Stutzman. Stutzman came over, and the three of them went back to his place, where he introduced Denny to Glen Pritchett.

Denny made the assumption that Pritchett was gay, because he lived with Stutzman. He was later disappointed when he learned that Pritchett was as straight as the interstate to San Antonio.