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Man Killer

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Patty told Hughes she had been awakened by what she thought was a clap of thunder. Soon after, she said a man pulled her onto the floor by her hair, yanked her pajama bottoms and panties off and held a knife to her throat as he got on top of her. She said she could not see the man because the room was dark.

At first, Patty told Hughes the attacker did not rape her. She now says she was sexually assaulted but didn't tell the police because she worried that her marriage would crumble again if Bill found out.

"I know it sounds crazy because Bill was dead, but he wasn't dead to me," Patty says. "I was in shock."

When the attacker left, Patty said, she tried to wake Bill but he didn't move. "He was breathing kind of ragged, kind of rattly like a kitty," she told Hughes during the taped interview the day of the murder.

She tried the lights and the phone but neither worked. After checking to make sure the kids were OK, she ran outside to the truck and grabbed a flashlight. "I shined it on Bill and there was blood down the mattress and on down the dust ruffle and I knew this was really bad," she related to Hughes.

That's when she woke her children and told them to get dressed because there was a small fire in the house. "The kids kept saying, 'Where's Daddy? Where's Daddy?' And I said, 'It's okay but we've got to get out,'" Patty told police.

She hurried her kids downstairs in the dark, helped them put on their coats and shoes, then rushed them outside and locked them in the car before running back inside to check on Bill one last time.

At the trial, Johnson County Prosecutor Tom Williams scoffed at the story Patty gave to police. "The defense would have us believe that she took the time to dress the children with Bill still hurt and alive and the rapist about..... I submit to you that is incredible."

At the Prewitt house, blood stained the white curtains and the ceiling above Bill's body. The shades were partially raised.

Hughes observed one gunshot wound above Bill's right ear. Officers later discovered two .22-caliber rifle rounds in Patty's jewelry box and a box of .22 shells in Bill's chest of drawers.

On Patty's nightstand Hughes discovered several Alfred Hitchcock mysteries and a novel called Murder in California, which he said was strikingly similar to the story he had just heard from Patty. Downstairs in the filing cabinet, he found Bill's life insurance policy.

Hughes later testified that he searched the carpet in the bedroom for hair because Patty said she had been yanked out of bed by her long brown hair. None was found.

But Patty's friend, Mary O'Roark Englert, testified she saw large amounts of hair when she dumped water out of the wet vacuum cleaner while cleaning blood from the carpet one week after the murder. If hair had been collected, it could have been analyzed for DNA using today's technology.

Englert says she also found a second shell casing that police had not recovered after a week of searching. On the afternoon following the murder, a deputy found one .22-caliber shell casing after he sat down on a wicker love seat in the bedroom and the evidence fell out.

Hours after the murder, officers also dusted -- unsuccessfully -- for fingerprints on several doorknobs. But they didn't look for fingerprints on the breaker box, a flat surface from which prints could have been more easily retrieved. The person who killed Bill would have touched the breaker box when he or she flipped the main switch at 3:19 a.m.

Hughes says officers found no signs of a stranger inside or outside the Prewitt house. "It was a rainy night, and usually, an intruder doesn't wipe their feet at the door," he says. "There were no muddy impressions."

Officers did find pry marks on the family room door and a piece of wood missing near the lock. But Sheriff Charles Norman later testified that the damage appeared old.

On the afternoon following the murder, Hughes interviewed twelve-year-old Sarah, who says she told the deputy about hearing noises in the basement and seeing a light beneath the basement door as they were fleeing the house.

Hughes says Sarah told him the story days after the murder. (None of the police reports obtained by the RFT detailed conversations investigators had with the Prewitt children.) "Patty was good about planting things into her kids' minds after the fact," Hughes says.

At 32, Sarah says her memory remains clear. Thinking the house was on fire, she had bolted into the living room to rescue her flute. "I saw this light under the basement door," Sarah recalls. "I thought Dad was down there. I remember driving to the neighbor's house thinking Dad was in the basement fighting the fire."

The basement door was closed when they left, she says.

A week after the murder, when Patty's friends were cleaning the house, they took pictures of man-size footprints on the dirt floor of the basement. "They led from the window to a little room behind the stairs," Mary O'Roark Englert says.

Police later said the footprints were not there when they arrived on the day of the murder and probably belonged to officers who searched the house.

When Deputy Hughes read Patty her Miranda rights on February 20, she didn't think she needed a lawyer. "I thought only guilty people needed lawyers," she says now.

She talked to investigators for the next seventeen hours; only the first fifteen minutes were taped. Hughes says he didn't record the full interrogation because "the sheriff's department was on a shoestring budget."

Patty claims Hughes would scream at her, then another deputy would try to calm Hughes down. At one point Patty remembers saying, "You know, I've seen Starsky and Hutch."

"Hughes had a reputation for being able to make a rock talk," Patty says. "I'm the one he couldn't break."

Hughes remembers it differently. "Patty has a lot of charm and she uses it well. She gave me the impression that she was used to manipulating men. She thought whatever she did, she was going to be believed."

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