Abandoned Prayers (32 page)

“Mark Taylor told us about the gun, Denny told us about the time sheets, and Eli lied about Pritchett’s death when he told us he had put him on a bus for Montana, and then he left town in the middle of the night. He was our prime suspect—and then he was gone,” Wiggins later said.

Leona Weaver rubbed the sleep from her eyes and did a double take at her alarm clock. It was 1:30
A.M
. A visitor at that hour meant trouble. When she opened the front door she knew she was right. It was Ruston and another young guy, whom Ruston quickly introduced as his roommate Sam Miller.

Weaver had never heard Ruston mention Miller. She didn’t know he had another roommate besides Stutzman.

“Something’s going on at the house,” Ruston said. “We keep hearing noises at the house, in the yard. Can we stay here for the night?”

She waved them inside.

The two of them seemed frightened beyond belief; their eyes were wide with fear. She thought they looked like a couple of little kids who had been frightened by a horror show. Ruston was even more jittery than he had been when he came over to tell Weaver about being questioned by Wiggins.

“What’s the matter? What noises?” she said, after locking the door behind them.

“I think it’s Jay. He’s come back to kill us.”

“Why would he kill you?”

“Well, maybe he thinks we know something.”

Weaver thought they were overreacting, but in fact there was a murderer on the loose, so she listened and tried to calm them down.

Sam Miller said little. Weaver’s heart went out to him—he seemed so out of place, so young. He seemed alternately lost and in a state of shock. He seemed more like a child than Ruston. He looked to be 14 or 15 years old, shy and nervous. Weaver offered him something to drink, and he politely declined.

Weaver couldn’t imagine someone like Miller ending up in that house on Banton Road. He was out of his league with Ruston and Stutzman. Eli Stutzman, whom Weaver knew only by reputation and his sideline: dealing drugs.

Miller had his things in the car and said he would be taking the bus back to Ohio in the morning—as soon as he got the money being wired by a friend in Ohio. Stutzman owed him five hundred dollars, but Miller knew it was a lost cause. Besides, it would be worth that much to never lay eyes on the man again.

Weaver went to fix up the sofa bed, but Miller wouldn’t let her. He didn’t want her to think he was gay and planning to sleep with Denny Ruston that night. He insisted that he’d sleep on the floor. Weaver shrugged it off. It was too early in the morning to argue and try to win points as a hostess. At first, Miller even refused a blanket, but the frigid breeze
from the air-conditioning got the best of him and he took one.

At daylight she tried to fix Ruston and Miller some breakfast, but Miller refused. He just wanted to get the hell out of Austin.

When Ruston returned from the bus station, he asked Weaver if he could stay with her until he finished the pay period and got his final check. Against her better judgment, she agreed.

On Thursday, June 20, Ruston and Weaver went out to Banton Road. When they arrived, they found an angry Cal Hunter. Hunter told them he planned to put a labor lien on Stutzman for back wages. It seemed a little odd to Weaver that Hunter had somehow decided that Stutzman had stiffed him and was never coming back to town. They listened to him rant for a moment before going inside.

Ruston showed Weaver the furniture that Stutzman said he had made back in Ohio. She was awestruck by its workmanship. She admired the dry sink, hutch, rocker, chest, and furniture in the living room.

The scene was strange. It was as if whoever owned the contents of the house had simply gotten up from one of the chairs and walked away.

Ruston took the television and an antique mantel clock that had belonged to Ida and Eli and put them in his car while Hunter started to close up the place.

“I’m not leaving this stuff here for someone to just walk in and take,” Ruston told Weaver.

Weaver was glad to leave. She felt nervous, as though someone had been looking over her shoulder.

The next day Ruston and Weaver made a second trip to the house. Ruston was scared and refused to go without Weaver. Her sister loaned her a truck, and they went after the sofa Stutzman had told Ruston that Weaver could have, several weeks before.

The place had been ransacked and most of the furniture
was missing. Paper littered the floor like the remnants of a parade. It appeared that looters had come and helped themselves to whatever they pleased.

Weaver and her sister aimlessly wandered from room to room. In the dining room, the shelving running the length of the wall was still full of the glassware and crystal that they presumed had belonged to Stutzman’s dead wife. In Danny’s room, they discovered that someone had opened the trunk of Amish clothes.

Who did this?
Weaver wondered.
What were they looking for?

The Amish trunk had been placed up against the wall, with a toy chest sitting on top of it. Both had been moved with no regard for their contents.

Weaver knew Eli Stutzman wasn’t coming back.

Each time Weaver came upon something of Ida’s or Danny’s she felt an incredible wave of sadness. Her sister felt it, too. Both of the women were repeatedly drawn to the boy’s room, then to the dining room, and back again.

When she first saw the Amish clothes scattered in and out of the trunk, Weaver started to take them.

“I felt it was obscene to leave them there. I wanted to take them and take care of them. Her stuff. And the little boy’s stuff. What was going on in that house was like raping her. I couldn’t believe someone coming in there and taking her stuff,” she later said.

She also felt sad about the little boy. His father was involved in a big mess, and he was dragging the child through the mud with him. It seemed cruel.

When it was time to leave, Ruston gave Weaver a house-plant from his collection.

A few days later, Weaver and Ruston went out to Banton for the last time. Stutzman had kept a few chickens in a coop in the back, and Ruston thought they should feed and water them. The chickens were gone.

Everything in the house, except the desk, the kitchen table and chairs, and the refrigerator, was gone. The crystal was gone. The Amish clothes were missing.

Personal papers, meaningless to the two of them, covered the floor. Weaver picked some up, but tossed them down again.

The place had been gutted.

Over the next couple of weeks, Weaver watched as Ruston grew even more irresponsible and erratic than she had initially believed possible. He hit the bars every night, picking up strangers one right after the other. He was edgy and anxious. The only thing that kept him in Austin was the fact that he was broke and that he had to wait for his check from Pizza Hut. Everything he had—except the clothes he was wearing—was packed in his car, ready to go when the paycheck came.

Just before Ruston left he told Weaver that he had VD. She threw her hands up and told him he should get to a clinic immediately. Ruston said that he didn’t have time, that he’d take care of it in California once he got there.

“You’re crazy,” she told him. “That’s what you get for going around picking up people you don’t know. You don’t know what you’ve got.”

Weaver was relieved when Ruston finally left town. Even though this whole Eli Stutzman murder thing was intriguing and in a way had kept the summer interesting, she nonetheless hoped she’d heard the last of Eli Stutzman.

Leona Weaver was working at the back of the Pizza Hut, organizing and preparing the condiments for the salad bar, when the phone rang. The caller said he was Eli Stutzman. His voice, soft and tentative, filled her with so much fear that it surprised her.

“Do you know where I can find Denny?”

Weaver stammered and said that Ruston had left for California and that she didn’t have a number for him yet.

“Well, I need to talk to him really bad. I’ve got to get hold of him,” Stutzman said.

Weaver truly didn’t know exactly where Ruston was, but damn well knew that if she had known, she wouldn’t have given the information to Stutzman. Ruston had been emphatic when he left: “Don’t tell Eli where I’m going. Don’t tell him anything.”

She asked for Stutzman’s number—in case Ruston called her. Stutzman refused to leave one and said he’d call later.

Weaver went to her manager and told him, “It’s him! What am I gonna do? He’s gonna call me back!”

Her boss urged her to call the Travis County sheriff. With a little reluctance, she dialed their main number.

Detective Cutler, dressed in the “plain” clothes of a homicide investigator, yet looking every bit like a cop—Weaver figured it was his attitude that gave him away—came to the Pizza Hut and plunked himself down in a booth. Armed with his nice and easy Texas voice, Cutler was as casual as a sweatshirt. With a few pleasantries to break the ice and soften his potential informant, he hit Weaver with a proposition that stunned her.

“If you could get Stutzman to give you a phone number so that you can call him back, would you be interested in taping him? He might talk. Maybe he’ll tell you something.”

Say what?
Weaver thought.
You want me to tape some probable killer’s confession?

Weaver’s initial reaction was to say no, but for some reason—no doubt the would-be mystery writer and the detective in her—she agreed with one stipulation.

“As long as you keep my name out of it, I’ll do it. I don’t see how I could get hurt. I’ll do it for you,” she said.

Cutler smiled and told her he would be over to the Reinli Arms with the recorder and the tape in a day or so. Weaver smiled nervously and warned Cutler not to make too much of a show of being a cop when he came over.

“I have neighbors that wouldn’t be too crazy about the law coming around, you know.”

A day or so later, Stutzman made another call to Weaver at the Pizza Hut. Weaver was determined to get him to leave his telephone number this time.

“Listen, I can’t talk to you on this phone,” she told him in a half-whisper, hoping he would infer that the line had been bugged by the sheriff’s office. “They’ve been coming around looking for Denny, and maybe we shouldn’t talk on
this
phone.”

Stutzman said he understood and gave her a number. The area code was 505—New Mexico.

Weaver called Cutler, and the following day he brought the recorder to her apartment to show her how the set worked—though they had to improvise, since Weaver couldn’t afford a telephone of her own at the time.

As if Gary Cutler’s presence had been broadcast via megaphone, word got around that the police were talking with some lady in the apartments. A few bikers even moved out of the Reinli Arms when they heard that a Travis County sheriff’s detective was visiting Leona Weaver.

Cutler, who did not want to have the taped conversations blow up in his face later in court, was careful and did not offer Weaver any tips on how to get Stutzman to talk. He made no suggestions on what she should say. It was up to her. His only advice: “Keep him talking and get him to say something.”

June 27, 1985

After a first attempt yielded nothing but frazzled nerves, Weaver took Gary Cutler’s mini tape recorder over to Evelyn Martel’s apartment at Cameron Green. The women waited on the steps of the complex’s laundry room for it to clear out. When it did, Weaver went inside and dialed the telephone number Stutzman had left at Pizza Hut.

So nervous she could scarcely breathe, Weaver started the conversation by saying that she had recently talked with Ruston, but that he wouldn’t tell her where he was because he was scared.

Stutzman wanted to know why.

“I don’t know,” Weaver said. “I thought he was more or less off the hook because they confirmed that he was in Iowa the weekend Glen left.”

“Tell him it’s important that he calls me. And tell him to make sure and not to give out my phone number,” he said.

The next few minutes were spent on the status of the Amish furniture. Stutzman wanted to know where it was, and Weaver offered little help. Her uncertainty seemed to annoy Stutzman. She did confirm, however, that she and Ruston had taken the clock, TV, and couch.

“What about the papers, ah, and stuff—the mail, papers, and stuff I had in my furniture?”

“I don’t have any idea about that. I didn’t see any of that,” she said.

Stutzman thought the Travis County Sheriff’s Department had taken his personal things. The idea was absurd, but Weaver played along with him to keep him talking.

“Well,” said Stutzman, “everybody keeps telling me that they can’t legally do that, but my attorney says, knowing Travis County Homicide, they’ll do anything . . . they’ll have to give it back once it’s straightened out.”

“What are you going to do, Eli? Are you gonna stay gone, are you gonna come back or what?”

“Well he keeps—my attorney—keeps telling me to hold off and wait. But, see, Cal had told me all of my furniture was gone. I’m getting to be confused.”

Stutzman admitted he hadn’t been able to reach Hunter for several days.

“I don’t know,” Weaver said, trying to keep the conversation on track. “It looks pretty bad to me. I mean, you know.”

“Right.”

“I mean your situation looks pretty bad to me.”

“Talking about a mixed-up mess,” Stutzman offered, as though none of what had transpired was his doing. He was a helpless victim.

“I’m telling you. I don’t under—” Weaver stopped and tried again. “You know, Denny was real freaked out about it and everything, and so we talked a lot about it, and he’s really . . . still freaked out.”

She wanted Stutzman to think she knew everything, as if Ruston had told her the truth—whatever the truth was.

Stutzman indicated that Denny could have come with him to New Mexico and that “nobody would have known.”

“. . . That’s what I told him earlier,” he said. “But then he must have left the . . . but he did tell me the last time I talked to him, he can’t stay in the house no more, he can’t take it. . . . I said ‘Well, I understand that.’ But he didn’t tell me he was leaving town.”