May 2, 2022 • 41 mins
After an evening out with friends in Holden, MO, high school sweethearts Bill and Patty Prewitt kissed their children goodnight and went to bed. Patty was soon awakened by a man trying to rape her. She ran to a neighbor’s house and called the police. When the police arrived, Bill was found dead in his bedroom from 2 gunshots to the head. The police quickly set their sights on Patty and neglected to lift a single fingerprint from the entire house. Nevertheless, after a trial riddled with sexism and questionable forensics, Patty was sentenced to life in prison where she has been for 36 years.
Maggie speaks to Patty Prewitt at the Women’s Correctional Center in Missouri, Brian Reichart Esq., Patty’s attorney, and Jane Prewitt Watkins, Patty’s daughter.
To learn more and get involved, visit:
https://www.change.org/p/missouri-governor-mike-parson-free-patty-prewitt
https://www.facebook.com/pattyprewitt/
https://twitter.com/justiceforpatty
Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freleng is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So as as you and I both know, Jason, the
majority of the people we talked to are men wrongfully incarcerated.
But when we do talk to women, I actually I
haven't talked to many women who were mothers. They were
locked up before being mothers. Have you experienced a lot
of women you've talked to trying to navigate motherhood through prison? Yeah,
(00:24):
I mean, that's that's a rough one. I can't even
begin to imagine severing that bond between mother and child
and taking that caregiver away from the child that they love,
that they birth, that they have a primal need to
care for. Honestly, don't know how any mother goes through
(00:46):
that and doesn't lose her mind. Yeah, crap from the
same places over and over. That's a that's ad drink, honestly,
I could say for that is who had the set?
Where are they? What's going on with them? From love
(01:09):
of for good, I'm Maggie Freeling and this is wrongful
conviction with Maggie Freeling today. Patty Pruett. In the early
hours of February, Patty Pruitt was awakened by a loud noise.
(01:31):
Someone then pulled her hair to drag her out of bed,
and she was raped in the dark. After the intruder left,
she heard her husband, Bill, making gurgling noises as if
he were struggling to breathe. She was unable to turn
on the lights in the house, so she grabbed her
kids and ran to a neighbor's to call nine one one.
(01:52):
She would later learn Bill had been shot in the
head and died. When the police arrived at their home,
they over looked critical evidence from the scene. Instead, the
police paid attention to Patty's collection of murder mystery novels
and Bill's life insurance policy. Patty, not wanting to draw
attention to herself in the face of her husband's death,
(02:15):
never mentioned she was raped. By nine a m. That morning,
neighbors were already getting calls about Bill's murder, and word
was his wife, Patty had killed him. Police found out
that she was the beneficiary of Bill's life insurance policy
(02:35):
and that years earlier, she had some sexual relationships outside
of her marriage. These discoveries became the motive for the
police and prosecution, and Patty was arrested, charged and convicted
of capital murder, but key evidence about Patty's innocence never
came out during the trial, and decades later, Patty, who
(02:57):
is now a great grandmother, feels her chance at edom
is quickly dwindling. I'm an old lady. I set two.
I've been in prisoned way too long. I'm the oldest
of my siblings and I'm the only one alive. I
was just looking out the window of there's us bused
(03:18):
out there circling, and I was wondering if the circling
because I'm getting ready to die. I'm Patty Poot and
I'm a prisoner in Missouri and have been for nearly
thirty six years. I did not show my husband. Patricia
(03:47):
Pruitt was born on July three to Frank and Anne Slaughter.
She grew up on a six hundred and forty acre
farm in Lone Jack, Missouri, thirty miles from Kansas City.
It was like a cattle ranch. We all we had horses.
It was multi generational, my grandparents, our family, my uncle
(04:12):
and his kids, and it was it was wonderful. It
was absolutely wonderful. And how about your parents, They were
so in love. Daddy saw my mama when he was
in eighth grade and he saw her somewhere downtown in
this little town, and he told his brother that when
(04:32):
that girl glows up, I'm their barrier. Patty and Bill
met when they were in middle school, but at that
time they were polar opposites. He was one of the
jocks and cool kids, and my best friend Nancy and
I were complete nerds, she says. It wasn't until senior
year of high school, when they had a class together
(04:54):
that they became close and hit it off and never
looked back. Tell me what it was about him that
you loved. It was so sweet, just very great, quickly
is handsome, that's always a plus in time, and smart
(05:14):
as a whip, and came from good people, as my
mom and dad would say. That was always a prerequisite family,
and so her family accepted him, she says, and Bill
loved coming out to the country to visit, despite what
would happen when we were evil to him. We put
him on the worst force we had, and we did
all kinds of oral things, but he still stuck it out.
(05:36):
So in nineteen sixty eight, at just nineteen, Patty and
Bill got married. It was the height of the Vietnam
War and the draft was active, although the special exemption
for married men was no longer in place at the time.
Patty says she and Bill got married in hopes that
it could still keep him from going off to war.
(05:57):
They tried to use every exemption that existed so he
could stay, including college and kids. After they married, Patty's
father gave them a small house on three acres of
land in loan Jack, Missouri, and they opened a lumber
yard business. In nineteen sixty nine, they welcomed their first child, Jane.
(06:17):
Life with my parents was great, you know, her and
dad were both very involved parents, both of them. I
remember that they were really hard working but really quick
to laugh. That they were both really funny people, and
that they loved music, they loved dancing. Like we we
just had a lot of fun together all the time.
(06:39):
You know. You remember things as a kid like that
my dad would pat my mom on the bottom when
she would be cooking dinner. You could say they were
living the American dream. That is until nineteen seventy four.
That's when Patty was raped for the first time, a
decade before Bill's murder. He says she was walking to
(07:01):
the park and was grabbed by three men. They dragged
her behind some bushes where they all raped her. When
a woman walked by, The men quickly ran away. Patty
and the woman agreed not to call the police. Because
of the stigma in those days, nobody had coundling and
nobody told you kept it to yourself, just did not
(07:23):
tell because I do only get there. It's just awful.
Who wants to talk about a horrible thing, you know?
So again decided not to talk about it. But Patty
did tell Bill. She says he was helpful and sweet
at first, but then things changed. Bill became standoffish. I
(07:45):
take from bill point of view. He was supposed to
protect the pet jas and really and the kids, and
they had something horrible happened. I said he felt guilt.
I felt guilt because I would want a little sun dress.
It's a horrible thing that you don't want to talk
about it. Nobody wants to talk about what happened. And
(08:08):
then you just get farther and farther and farther away
from each other, and then it gets work and work,
and then how do you reach back? Their happy marriage
crumbled under the weight of what had happened, and so
Patty and Bill decided to separate. And so it was
kind of convenient as far as not happen to tell
(08:30):
the family what was going on for us to be separated,
because they had just bought a new farm, Patty says,
so now they had two places to live and they'll
live at the original place and the kids and I
moved to the new place. And uh, everybody thought he
was just working on the house, but we were actually
(08:53):
separated and kind of discussing may be divorced during this
time by mutual consent, they were both seeing other people.
When you're living apart and you're not part of each
other's life, it just seems like the natural thing too,
(09:14):
you're not sleeping together. So you guys agreed, you know
we're separated, we're living apart. We can see other people.
Right in, Patty became pregnant with another man's child. Breaking
this news to Bill shattered her. It was horrible, I
(09:36):
mean really horrible. That really wasn't part of our agreement.
But he uh god, it was so creeply loved children,
and we certainly we're not going to not have the baby.
And uh, I totally might admitted to up to you
whether I do this single. Oh we did this together,
(10:00):
So how do we want to do this? And I
think it was kind of like this, Yeah, the breaking
point was started. We did love Eagether and we did
want to have our family together. That was when we
just kind of came too the agreement that we would
(10:22):
come back together as a family and worked this out.
And they did. Later that year June, baby Morgan was born,
and Bill didn't treat him like he was anything but
his own child. By now, Patty and Bill were raising
(10:43):
five kids. Having their family back together made Patty feel
like everything was right in the world. But I looked back,
I think we were so blithely fine. I mean, we
had balkings, we were coaching the kids, our business, who's
(11:03):
doing good? Oh? Our kids were smart, good looking, and yeah,
everything was good. Our problems were small problems, you know,
nothing serious, nothing. Patty and Bill had no idea what
(11:26):
was about to come crashing down on their family. We're
all goods, our kids were growing up with dayan and yeah,
then boom, it's all over. It's all over. This episode
is underwritten by A i G, a leading global insurance company.
(11:49):
A i G is committed to corporate social responsibility and
to making a positive difference in the lives of its employees.
And in the communities where we work and live. In
of the compelling need for pro bono legal assistance, and
in recognition of a i g's commitment to criminal and
social justice reform, the a i G pro Bono Program
(12:10):
provides free legal services and other support to underrepresented communities
and individuals. On February, Bill and Patty went out to
a barbecue at their friend's house, and then they all
(12:33):
went out to a bar for a little while, and
Patty and Bill got home around two am. Their oldest daughter, Jane,
was at a friend's house and the rest of the
kids were fast asleep in bed. Patty tidied up some
dishes the kids had left in the sink, and then
she joined Bill, who had already climbed into bed. Shortly after,
Patty was awakened by what she thought was thunder. She
(12:55):
says she was then pulled out of bed by her
hair and raped, but it was dark and she couldn't
see the man. After the intruder left, she heard Bill
making gurgling noises, struggling to breathe, but the lights wouldn't
turn on and the phone wasn't working. She couldn't see Bill,
and she couldn't call the police. She quickly woke the
kids up and ran with them to a neighbor's house
(13:17):
to call nine one one. Specifically, she headed for the
home of Cliff Gustum, a former police officer. When was
that to the neighbor's house, one of the bathroom and
I put on one of her cents during that because
because I was breathing. But after that, Patty says, she
(13:37):
quickly forgot about her attack and focused on Bill and
her children. It did where this rot going crazy, and
it seems like not a time for me to even
say anything about me, And I never even I never
(13:57):
even thought about me anymore. Well, I imagine you were,
you know, as a mother to five kids, you were
probably in survival mode. Definitely, Definitely. I was certainly the secondary.
When you have a mama, you're pretty much secondary. Quite what.
I didn't even explain how my brain didn't even work.
(14:21):
It's like there was a buzzing in my head and
nothing made except ah, that was the only thing that
maybe whatsoever. When the police arrived, they found that the
breaker panel to the entire house's power had been switched off.
(14:42):
They turned the power back on. However, police records show
they did not take any fingerprints from the breaker panel,
nor did they take any other fingerprint evidence from the
home or asked Patty if she had been hurt. They
instead took note of Patty's collection of murder mystery novels
and Bill's life insurance policy. They did find a box
(15:04):
of two caliber rounds in the house, the same kind
of bullets used to kill Bill, and Patty told police
that Bill actually had two guns in the house, but
the police could only find one. Eventually, the second gun two,
what they presumed was the murder weapon, would be recovered
in a shallow pond on the prove property. Later that night,
(15:27):
Patty was interrogated at the police station by Detective Kevin Hughes,
the lead investigator. Yeah, he said he wanted to slap
my hands for a night break. We see if you
fired firearms up gun, and I was like, oh yeah.
But as be slabbing my hands, I'm thinking, well, why
(15:51):
would you want to slap my hand? And that was
kind of when I went in my head. I was like,
oh my god, and listening to me about Bill's murder,
He's not any atention to me at all. The gun
residue test came back negative. By this time, standard procedure
(16:15):
would dictate that Patty should have had a rape kid
because she did tell the police the man in the
house who presumably killed Bill, had pulled down her pants
and was struggling with his belt. But remember she never
said she was actually raped. Detectives did, however, collect her
pajamas she was wearing. He started asking me about the
(16:37):
insurance and things like that. Then I was like, oh,
my dad, nobody pay any penstion to me for what
I have to say. Who went on and on and on.
It becomes to a point, well, you don't even know
(16:58):
what you're saying. Detective Hughes and whose investigators immediately started
digging into Patty's life after they found out about what
they called her quote affairs and quote infidelity. They seemed
set with this aspect of her personal life as a motive.
After less than a day of investigating, Detective Hughes announced
(17:22):
that Patty Pruett was the lead suspect and her husband
Bill's murder. Two days later, on February, Patty was again questioned,
this time for about sixteen hours. Only fifteen minutes of
the interview was actually recorded. It was like some kind
(17:44):
of quote things, nothing, the nothing, the drink. Oh I
could think of that is who has the kids? Where
are they? What's going on with them? And they got
asking me the same stupid questions, and I kept answering
(18:05):
the same questions over and over, and then they would
play places and they would scream at me, and then
they come in and go the nice You know, we
can make this okay. I have to do and stand
and they'll all go away. We'll understand. Did you know
that you could ask for a lawyer? No? No, I
had no idea. What was nobody? This may sound crazy,
(18:28):
nobody in my family had ever been so much as
pulled over, arrested, or anything. Ever, Patty was arrested that
day and charged with capital murder. She was released on
bond awaiting trial, and as she and the children struggled
(18:48):
to adjust to the loss of their husband and father,
things only got worse. Patty was harassed with anonymous phone calls, threats,
and robberies. She noticed strange people wandering on her property,
and she even found three of her dogs dead on
a nearby farm, apparently poisoned. When she got a new dog,
(19:08):
he was hung by his collar. Patty, it was virtually
branded with a scarlet letter by the community. Considered both
an adulteress and a murderer, Patty was offered a plea
(19:29):
deal that would reduce her charges to six or seven years,
but she refused it, saying she didn't want to be
taken from her children. She insisted she was innocent. The
trial started on April sixteenth, n Patty's family, children and friends,
as well as Bill's relatives all attended. Tom Williams was
(19:51):
the prosecutor, and due to the lack of evidence against Patty,
he instead emphasized that she was an adulteress and used
sexy tropes and gender biases to paint Patty out to
be a horrible woman and mother who would kill her husband.
The cornerstone of the case, the opening statement of the
of the prosecution, is you know this was a woman
(20:14):
motivated by lost and greed. This is Patty's attorney, Brian Reichart.
He first came across Patty's case in two thousand and
ten when he was in law school, and it's stuck
with him. You know, when I first read the trial transcript,
I was disturbed and I thought, you know, they're very
well could be a wrongful conviction here. But over the years,
(20:36):
as I've learned more about the case, as I've been
able to study the investigator's records, as I've I've been
able to read accounts from the prosecutor who prosecuted this case,
I've become convinced that this is indeed a wrongful conviction
and something that needs to be addressed. Brian says one
of the key facts to pay attention to in this
(20:56):
case is that Patty's sixteen hour in view with Detective
Hughes was not recorded again, only the first fifteen minutes were,
and he says this freed Hughes to be able to
put forth his version of what Patty supposedly told him.
Because it was unrecorded, the lead investigator is able to
(21:17):
take the stand and characterize the interview, and so he
says things like, oh, you know, I asked her about
why she had these affairs, and she says, oh, my
my sexual engine is hotter than most. Did you say that? Nobody,
no woman in the face of the earth, ever said that.
(21:41):
I mean, really, certainly, no woman who's being in d
of her husband. Everything like that exactly. He said that
a good romance novel, something that another thing detective Hughes
alleges Patty said, over the course of the instigation, did
(22:01):
you invite him to dinner before you went to prison?
Oh my god, it was no. I did not I
mean dinner. I just wanted to get home to my kids.
If I him again, I would have been more than happy.
According to the trial transcripts, here are some of the
(22:21):
phrases used by prosecutor Williams during the trial to attack
Patty's character. Quote the defendant was motivated by sheer greed
and sexual lust and had been for years. Quote. She
disregarded her marital vows and the noticeable obligations of motherhood.
Quote she pursued one sleazy affair after another, one two
(22:45):
at a time. Williams even called three of Patty's former
partners to testify against her. Two of them eventually said
that they were coerced by the police and prosecution to
do so, and these were partners she had while she
and Bill were stepped rated and knew that the other
person was seeing other people and agreed to it. Partners
(23:05):
she had five years before Bill's murder. I mean, if
you just take a step back. The state had to
argue that a mother of five was going to would
kill her husband and what kind of what kind of
person would do that. The States idd that the way
they were going to move the jury is to paint
(23:25):
this mother as a bad mother in an unfaithful life,
and so that was so much of their case. Patty's daughter, Sarah,
who was thirteen years old at the time, testified that
as she was leaving the house that night, she saw
a flashlight under the basement stairs and heard someone moving
around down there, but her testimony seemed to hold little
weight against Prosecutor Williams's case. He also called pathologist James
(23:49):
Bridges to review the autopsy. Bridgins and his testimonies would
later become discredited on multiple occasions. For example, in when
he had ruled in a case that a woman was
stabbed to death. Well later X ray showed that she
was actually shot four times. Patty's attorneys, meanwhile, never called
(24:13):
their own expert to refute his findings. Any potential evidence
from Patty's pajamas was never brought up. The defense also
did not acknowledge that her alleged affairs were in fact
known and agreed to by Bill at the time. Now
you might be wondering why Patty never screamed from the
roof that this was all consensual. Well, it was Patty's decision.
(24:36):
She insisted to her attorneys that she did not want
Bill criticized in front of their kids, whether it hurt
her or not. She did not want them to know
that Bill also had affairs and that they both knew
about each other's relationships. She figured it was bad enough
the whole town was already gossiping about their mom. I
(24:58):
haven't badly or bad him. I didn't want families. I
feel badly a bad him. It wasn't there to stand dision.
I don't know. I just didn't think it was anybody's
dog gone. It was such a good guy. I disturbed
(25:20):
to have black marks next and her own rape during
the murder was also never mentioned during the trial, because remember,
she never told the police about it. All she told
them was that the intruder held something to her throat,
tried to unbuckle his pants while her pants were down,
but fled. One of the things they argued against, you know,
(25:41):
Patty's account that she was attacked, and one of the
arguments the prosecutor made, you know in front of the
jury was this is a direct quote from the case,
why would you do this to enjoy Patty's oft enjoyed
sexual favors. Patty didn't tell the police about her rape
the night of Bill's murder, but she did tell her
needs about it. She also told them to keep it
(26:02):
out of court and out of earshot from her kids. However,
Patty's daughter Jane says she noticed evidence of the assault
days later when they were getting ready for Bill's funeral.
And that morning Mom didn't want me to come in
the bathroom, like she's kind of pushing against the door,
and I didn't understand what was happening, and I pushed
(26:23):
and then I saw her and she was so horribly bruised,
her hip bones, her thighs, the inside of her thighs,
and I assumed that the police knew this or saw
her body, or that her friends or our family, but
they didn't. A rape kit was never done, and that
crucial evidence is gone forever. And even though I was fourteen,
(26:48):
I thought of her as being much bigger than me,
and that morning I remember thinking, she's not that big,
like she seemed small to me, and she had been hurt.
Jane never testified, but her sister Sarah the one who
saw the light under the basement did. If you look
at the women's accounts, it's interesting how the voices of
(27:11):
women in this case were ignored and the voices of men,
even though when there was reason to to be suspicious
of those arguments, they were raised as truth. The trial
lasted four days. At the end the jury was deadlocked.
They were told to go back and try harder. They
eventually came back with a unanimous guilty verdict and Patty
(27:34):
was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole,
but after fifty years she's eligible in when she'll be
eighty six years old. When the verdict came, everybody just
lost it. I mean, the judge was telling us all
(27:55):
to be quiet. Nobody wanted to be quiet. My brother's
sisters were just scream mean, just screaming, and one of
my sisters ran out out of the courthouse into the
street like it was a really traumatic time. I don't
think that any of us could have been emotionally prepared
to be there for that, and here the verdict, and
(28:18):
and to hear fifty years life with no parole for
fifty years. That was just unbelievable. Was there anything in
their relationship or from your memory that would indicate to
you that your mother would murder your father. No, no,
(28:39):
not not at all. I they no, no, Like you know,
they were really good friends and they seemingly had a
lot of fun together. And I think that when things
were ten um, even when they were younger, when we
were all young, that they worked it out. And you know,
(29:02):
she was not that kind of person at all. The
lead investigator made a decision very early on that Patty
was the prime suspect, and that colored the way he
conducted the investigation, and he led the investigation. This is
(29:26):
Patty's Atorney Brian Reichard again talking about Detective Hughes. Even
before trial. He says, things went horribly wrong with Patty's investigation,
and one of the primary things we've seen is this
concept of tunnel vision, when the lead investigator gets it
in their head that somebody is the prime suspect and
(29:47):
focuses all of their energy on confirming that suspicion and
ignoring everything else. You know, if you knew there were
areas like the breaker box that cut off the electricity
of the house, you know, you know, whoever committed this
crime touched that you know, you would just set for
prints and lift prints. They didn't do that. You would
collect hair, they didn't do that. You would um, you
(30:08):
would follow leads. For example, you know, Patty's daughter shared
an account of seeing a light from the basement when
they were leaving the house, and so that would indicate
somebody's in the basement. There's no evidence that they followed
up on that report from from Patty's daughter. And also,
one of the neighbors had tried to issue a report
with the Sheriff's office stating she had seen a suspicious
(30:31):
vehicle parked on the wrong side of the road facing
the pru At home hours before the murder, but it
was ignored. So this information was never disclosed to the defense.
And again, this is rural Missouri, so it's abnormal for
there to be a car in the middle of the
night that the neighbors don't know about. The lead investigator
did nothing about this. One of the most bizarre things
(30:53):
about Patty's case is that in decades after her conviction,
a book written by the lead prosecutor, Tom Williams, was
published called Practice to Deceive. Williams had died two years
before his book came out. After his death. Now, the
book does not say Patty is innocent, but it does
(31:15):
criticize what Williams acknowledges was a shoddy investigation, and Williams
boasts that if it were not for his own prosecutorial skills,
Patty would be free right now. He describes sloppy evidence management.
He describes a forensic expert who was a star Warsness
as a as a doctor cop. He describes how how
(31:37):
he gratuitously asked questions of Patty on the stand to
portray her as a bad mother to move the jury.
I mean he admits this. He's he's affirming everything we're
saying about tunnel vision. And Williams also discusses detective Hues.
He describes this investigator as an ambitious young I mean
you think he was twenty seven deputy sheriff who had
(31:59):
ambition is to move up and he needed a case
with a lot of interest where he could take the
lead and get publicity. That's the words of the prosecutor,
and he did. Hughes went on to become a private
detective in Wyoming. He later resigned following an internal investigation
into his conduct up until seen crucial evidence in this
(32:24):
case was presumed to be lost. This included Patty's pajamas,
and once this evidence was uncovered, Patty's team petitioned the
Chords to test her pajamas for DNA along with other evidence. Remember,
DNA testing was not available in nine four, the year
of the crime, a hearing was granted by Judge Robert L. Kaufman.
(32:45):
And it was an extraordinary moment because as as we're
making this argument, the judge, who was a different judge
than the trial judge didn't work on Patty's case, but
was still in the in the courtroom at the time
of the trial, says, oh, I remember this case because
I remember she testified that her sexual engine burns hotter
(33:07):
than others. I remember that. That's what makes this case unique.
And that was just an astounding moment for a number
of reasons. It goes to show the impact that misogyny
had on Patty's case even decades later. Judge Kaufman quickly
denied the request, writing quote, you cannot believe her story,
and DNA findings of any kind do not change that fact.
(33:29):
In other words, Kaufman believed that because of Patty's alleged promiscuity,
the presence of DNA on Patty's pajamas would not necessarily
confirm that she was raped or that she wasn't the murderer.
He also notes quote it should be kept in mind
there were numerous showings that Ms. Pruittt was not a
truth teller. Patty's legal team says there were other people
(33:53):
in the community who could have had motive, means, an opportunity,
and may have wanted Bill out of the picture. Bill
and Patty were active in their community and and what
we've heard from folks who lived in in Holden at
the time was there was concerns about drugs and uh,
(34:13):
Patty and Bill, as as parents of kids, were concerned
about their kids and started to look into what was
going on in their community with the drug trade. Police
did not thoroughly investigate this or other leads, including the
unknown car the Patty's neighbor had seen on the street.
DNA testing might have helped Patty's case, but by now
(34:34):
Patty has exhausted her appeals. Her only hope is clemency.
Patty has applied for clemency multiple times. Her petition from
December is still waiting a response from Missouri Governor Mike Parson.
It is one of more than three thousand clemency petitions
he has yet to review. While she waits, Patty and
(35:04):
her family have had thirty six years to process their losses,
including the death of Patty's son, Matt when he was
just eighteen. His death was ruled a suicide. And at
the same time Patty lost her kids when she was
sent to prison, they also lost their mother. You know,
when you're sixteen, you're going through the most formative time
(35:26):
of your life. You know, boyfriends or or girlfriends or whoever,
and periods and those kinds of things. I mean, who
did you go to for that? Mostly Mom's sister, my
aunt Mary, who has since passed. She was great about
all those kind of things, which was which was great,
but she was also you know young. Mom was only
(35:49):
thirty six when she left for prison, and Mary would
have been thirty three, and she was a single mom
with two little boys, so she had a lot on
her play also, right, right, absolutely, so you kind of, uh,
you know, even if you have people in your life,
you still kind of feel like you're a burden when
(36:10):
it's not your parents taking care of you. And since
Patty was unable to be a parent to her own kids.
She became a proxy mom for young women in prison. Well,
the prison matter is, I'm a mama at my core.
When I came to prison, I was most gives in
(36:32):
prison or much younger, So I came in as an adult.
And yeah, it's going to help people. What the used
to being alive? You know, she has every right to
be angry at the world. You know, she's lost so much.
(36:52):
She obviously lost her husband, she effectively lost her children.
Just in the last twelve years, I've seen her lose
her father, her mother, her sister, and her brother. And
obviously she lost her son years earlier. She hasn't been
able to go to any of those funerals. Um and
just the pain that she's been through. And as I said,
(37:14):
she has every right to be angry at the world.
And what is she doing. She's mothering and mentoring generations
of women behind bars and women who are doing well now.
And they credit Patty and it's it's really it's it's
all inspiring and it's um it's extraordinary. Many of the
women Patty has met in prison credit her with their
(37:35):
rehabilitation and ability to pursue their dreams. In a video
created by Patty's legal team, these women urge Governor Parson
to grant Patty clemency. Patty never stopped believing in me.
She always encouraged me to write, to improve myself, to exercise,
to just simply do the next right thing and believe
in myself. She changed my entire life, and I was
(37:58):
a repeat offender, not looking to be any But if
she could do that for me, imagine what she can
do for the world. So the only way these kids
are ever going to doe somebody and get out of
this in the sloop of incorporation is to believe in
(38:20):
themselves and realized said they're good people as they deserve
a good life. And if that's why I'm in this
damn place, then I will try to say that many
of these as I did. Who's your cheerleader, Patty, when
you're helping everybody and being the mama, who's there for you? Listen,
(38:42):
I'm a big girl. I'm gonna don't so, he told
to them. Is what helped me if I didn't have
these kids around me. Good lord, I'm an old lady.
I know all the new songs, I know the new dances.
I mean he didn't beat me young. Despite her circumstances,
(39:04):
Patty has made the best of it. I'm a student
in Washington University at a St. Louis That is still
is amazing for me that this opportunity has come to me.
Patty says she's committed to one day getting her bachelor's degree,
and if she gets out of prison, she also has
a lot more planned. And I've got all these kids
(39:25):
and grandkids, and I've got a book I'm writing. I
know they've lots of books out there by prisons, but
I would like two. But especially women know what prisons
are like. People keep adding money to a conference to
build prisons. It's not doing any good. It's just the opposite.
(39:49):
And I would love to lobby. They would hate the
capital because I would be such the pet. So yeah,
I'm going to cause some proble. That's what that's Michael.
There's nothing better than an old lady wreaking havoc. If
(40:15):
you have any information about this case or want to
help Patty, go to Patty Pruitt dot com. On our
next episode, how does a guy with nineteen alibi witnesses
get convicted for murder? It didn't matter what I had
to say, what type of evidence of alibis that I
had to present. It's just, it's just they matter already.
(40:36):
One it was to get in an arrest. Next time
un Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling Melvin Ortiz thank you
for listening to Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling. Please support
your local innocence organizations and go to the links in
our bio to see how you can help. I'd like
(40:58):
to thank executive producers Asin Flom Kevin Burtis, as well
as our senior producer Annie Chelsea, researcher Lila Robinson, and
story editor Sonya Paul, with additional production by Jeff Clyburn.
Music in this production is by three time OSCAR nominated
composer j Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram
at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and
(41:21):
on Twitter at Wrongful Conviction as well as Lava for
Good on all three platforms. You can also follow me
on both Instagram and Twitter at Maggie Freeling. Wrongful Conviction
with Maggie Freeling is a production of Lava for Good
Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one
So as as you and I both know, Jason, the
majority of the people we talked to are men wrongfully incarcerated.
But when we do talk to women, I actually I
haven't talked to many women who were mothers. They were
locked up before being mothers. Have you experienced a lot
of women you've talked to trying to navigate motherhood through prison? Yeah,
(00:24):
I mean, that's that's a rough one. I can't even
begin to imagine severing that bond between mother and child
and taking that caregiver away from the child that they love,
that they birth, that they have a primal need to
care for. Honestly, don't know how any mother goes through
(00:46):
that and doesn't lose her mind. Yeah, crap from the
same places over and over. That's a that's ad drink, honestly,
I could say for that is who had the set?
Where are they? What's going on with them? From love
(01:09):
of for good, I'm Maggie Freeling and this is wrongful
conviction with Maggie Freeling today. Patty Pruett. In the early
hours of February, Patty Pruitt was awakened by a loud noise.
(01:31):
Someone then pulled her hair to drag her out of bed,
and she was raped in the dark. After the intruder left,
she heard her husband, Bill, making gurgling noises as if
he were struggling to breathe. She was unable to turn
on the lights in the house, so she grabbed her
kids and ran to a neighbor's to call nine one one.
(01:52):
She would later learn Bill had been shot in the
head and died. When the police arrived at their home,
they over looked critical evidence from the scene. Instead, the
police paid attention to Patty's collection of murder mystery novels
and Bill's life insurance policy. Patty, not wanting to draw
attention to herself in the face of her husband's death,
(02:15):
never mentioned she was raped. By nine a m. That morning,
neighbors were already getting calls about Bill's murder, and word
was his wife, Patty had killed him. Police found out
that she was the beneficiary of Bill's life insurance policy
(02:35):
and that years earlier, she had some sexual relationships outside
of her marriage. These discoveries became the motive for the
police and prosecution, and Patty was arrested, charged and convicted
of capital murder, but key evidence about Patty's innocence never
came out during the trial, and decades later, Patty, who
(02:57):
is now a great grandmother, feels her chance at edom
is quickly dwindling. I'm an old lady. I set two.
I've been in prisoned way too long. I'm the oldest
of my siblings and I'm the only one alive. I
was just looking out the window of there's us bused
(03:18):
out there circling, and I was wondering if the circling
because I'm getting ready to die. I'm Patty Poot and
I'm a prisoner in Missouri and have been for nearly
thirty six years. I did not show my husband. Patricia
(03:47):
Pruitt was born on July three to Frank and Anne Slaughter.
She grew up on a six hundred and forty acre
farm in Lone Jack, Missouri, thirty miles from Kansas City.
It was like a cattle ranch. We all we had horses.
It was multi generational, my grandparents, our family, my uncle
(04:12):
and his kids, and it was it was wonderful. It
was absolutely wonderful. And how about your parents, They were
so in love. Daddy saw my mama when he was
in eighth grade and he saw her somewhere downtown in
this little town, and he told his brother that when
(04:32):
that girl glows up, I'm their barrier. Patty and Bill
met when they were in middle school, but at that
time they were polar opposites. He was one of the
jocks and cool kids, and my best friend Nancy and
I were complete nerds, she says. It wasn't until senior
year of high school, when they had a class together
(04:54):
that they became close and hit it off and never
looked back. Tell me what it was about him that
you loved. It was so sweet, just very great, quickly
is handsome, that's always a plus in time, and smart
(05:14):
as a whip, and came from good people, as my
mom and dad would say. That was always a prerequisite family,
and so her family accepted him, she says, and Bill
loved coming out to the country to visit, despite what
would happen when we were evil to him. We put
him on the worst force we had, and we did
all kinds of oral things, but he still stuck it out.
(05:36):
So in nineteen sixty eight, at just nineteen, Patty and
Bill got married. It was the height of the Vietnam
War and the draft was active, although the special exemption
for married men was no longer in place at the time.
Patty says she and Bill got married in hopes that
it could still keep him from going off to war.
(05:57):
They tried to use every exemption that existed so he
could stay, including college and kids. After they married, Patty's
father gave them a small house on three acres of
land in loan Jack, Missouri, and they opened a lumber
yard business. In nineteen sixty nine, they welcomed their first child, Jane.
(06:17):
Life with my parents was great, you know, her and
dad were both very involved parents, both of them. I
remember that they were really hard working but really quick
to laugh. That they were both really funny people, and
that they loved music, they loved dancing. Like we we
just had a lot of fun together all the time.
(06:39):
You know. You remember things as a kid like that
my dad would pat my mom on the bottom when
she would be cooking dinner. You could say they were
living the American dream. That is until nineteen seventy four.
That's when Patty was raped for the first time, a
decade before Bill's murder. He says she was walking to
(07:01):
the park and was grabbed by three men. They dragged
her behind some bushes where they all raped her. When
a woman walked by, The men quickly ran away. Patty
and the woman agreed not to call the police. Because
of the stigma in those days, nobody had coundling and
nobody told you kept it to yourself, just did not
(07:23):
tell because I do only get there. It's just awful.
Who wants to talk about a horrible thing, you know?
So again decided not to talk about it. But Patty
did tell Bill. She says he was helpful and sweet
at first, but then things changed. Bill became standoffish. I
(07:45):
take from bill point of view. He was supposed to
protect the pet jas and really and the kids, and
they had something horrible happened. I said he felt guilt.
I felt guilt because I would want a little sun dress.
It's a horrible thing that you don't want to talk
about it. Nobody wants to talk about what happened. And
(08:08):
then you just get farther and farther and farther away
from each other, and then it gets work and work,
and then how do you reach back? Their happy marriage
crumbled under the weight of what had happened, and so
Patty and Bill decided to separate. And so it was
kind of convenient as far as not happen to tell
(08:30):
the family what was going on for us to be separated,
because they had just bought a new farm, Patty says,
so now they had two places to live and they'll
live at the original place and the kids and I
moved to the new place. And uh, everybody thought he
was just working on the house, but we were actually
(08:53):
separated and kind of discussing may be divorced during this
time by mutual consent, they were both seeing other people.
When you're living apart and you're not part of each
other's life, it just seems like the natural thing too,
(09:14):
you're not sleeping together. So you guys agreed, you know
we're separated, we're living apart. We can see other people.
Right in, Patty became pregnant with another man's child. Breaking
this news to Bill shattered her. It was horrible, I
(09:36):
mean really horrible. That really wasn't part of our agreement.
But he uh god, it was so creeply loved children,
and we certainly we're not going to not have the baby.
And uh, I totally might admitted to up to you
whether I do this single. Oh we did this together,
(10:00):
So how do we want to do this? And I
think it was kind of like this, Yeah, the breaking
point was started. We did love Eagether and we did
want to have our family together. That was when we
just kind of came too the agreement that we would
(10:22):
come back together as a family and worked this out.
And they did. Later that year June, baby Morgan was born,
and Bill didn't treat him like he was anything but
his own child. By now, Patty and Bill were raising
(10:43):
five kids. Having their family back together made Patty feel
like everything was right in the world. But I looked back,
I think we were so blithely fine. I mean, we
had balkings, we were coaching the kids, our business, who's
(11:03):
doing good? Oh? Our kids were smart, good looking, and yeah,
everything was good. Our problems were small problems, you know,
nothing serious, nothing. Patty and Bill had no idea what
(11:26):
was about to come crashing down on their family. We're
all goods, our kids were growing up with dayan and yeah,
then boom, it's all over. It's all over. This episode
is underwritten by A i G, a leading global insurance company.
(11:49):
A i G is committed to corporate social responsibility and
to making a positive difference in the lives of its employees.
And in the communities where we work and live. In
of the compelling need for pro bono legal assistance, and
in recognition of a i g's commitment to criminal and
social justice reform, the a i G pro Bono Program
(12:10):
provides free legal services and other support to underrepresented communities
and individuals. On February, Bill and Patty went out to
a barbecue at their friend's house, and then they all
(12:33):
went out to a bar for a little while, and
Patty and Bill got home around two am. Their oldest daughter, Jane,
was at a friend's house and the rest of the
kids were fast asleep in bed. Patty tidied up some
dishes the kids had left in the sink, and then
she joined Bill, who had already climbed into bed. Shortly after,
Patty was awakened by what she thought was thunder. She
(12:55):
says she was then pulled out of bed by her
hair and raped, but it was dark and she couldn't
see the man. After the intruder left, she heard Bill
making gurgling noises, struggling to breathe, but the lights wouldn't
turn on and the phone wasn't working. She couldn't see Bill,
and she couldn't call the police. She quickly woke the
kids up and ran with them to a neighbor's house
(13:17):
to call nine one one. Specifically, she headed for the
home of Cliff Gustum, a former police officer. When was
that to the neighbor's house, one of the bathroom and
I put on one of her cents during that because
because I was breathing. But after that, Patty says, she
(13:37):
quickly forgot about her attack and focused on Bill and
her children. It did where this rot going crazy, and
it seems like not a time for me to even
say anything about me, And I never even I never
(13:57):
even thought about me anymore. Well, I imagine you were,
you know, as a mother to five kids, you were
probably in survival mode. Definitely, Definitely. I was certainly the secondary.
When you have a mama, you're pretty much secondary. Quite what.
I didn't even explain how my brain didn't even work.
(14:21):
It's like there was a buzzing in my head and
nothing made except ah, that was the only thing that
maybe whatsoever. When the police arrived, they found that the
breaker panel to the entire house's power had been switched off.
(14:42):
They turned the power back on. However, police records show
they did not take any fingerprints from the breaker panel,
nor did they take any other fingerprint evidence from the
home or asked Patty if she had been hurt. They
instead took note of Patty's collection of murder mystery novels
and Bill's life insurance policy. They did find a box
(15:04):
of two caliber rounds in the house, the same kind
of bullets used to kill Bill, and Patty told police
that Bill actually had two guns in the house, but
the police could only find one. Eventually, the second gun two,
what they presumed was the murder weapon, would be recovered
in a shallow pond on the prove property. Later that night,
(15:27):
Patty was interrogated at the police station by Detective Kevin Hughes,
the lead investigator. Yeah, he said he wanted to slap
my hands for a night break. We see if you
fired firearms up gun, and I was like, oh yeah.
But as be slabbing my hands, I'm thinking, well, why
(15:51):
would you want to slap my hand? And that was
kind of when I went in my head. I was like,
oh my god, and listening to me about Bill's murder,
He's not any atention to me at all. The gun
residue test came back negative. By this time, standard procedure
(16:15):
would dictate that Patty should have had a rape kid
because she did tell the police the man in the
house who presumably killed Bill, had pulled down her pants
and was struggling with his belt. But remember she never
said she was actually raped. Detectives did, however, collect her
pajamas she was wearing. He started asking me about the
(16:37):
insurance and things like that. Then I was like, oh,
my dad, nobody pay any penstion to me for what
I have to say. Who went on and on and on.
It becomes to a point, well, you don't even know
(16:58):
what you're saying. Detective Hughes and whose investigators immediately started
digging into Patty's life after they found out about what
they called her quote affairs and quote infidelity. They seemed
set with this aspect of her personal life as a motive.
After less than a day of investigating, Detective Hughes announced
(17:22):
that Patty Pruett was the lead suspect and her husband
Bill's murder. Two days later, on February, Patty was again questioned,
this time for about sixteen hours. Only fifteen minutes of
the interview was actually recorded. It was like some kind
(17:44):
of quote things, nothing, the nothing, the drink. Oh I
could think of that is who has the kids? Where
are they? What's going on with them? And they got
asking me the same stupid questions, and I kept answering
(18:05):
the same questions over and over, and then they would
play places and they would scream at me, and then
they come in and go the nice You know, we
can make this okay. I have to do and stand
and they'll all go away. We'll understand. Did you know
that you could ask for a lawyer? No? No, I
had no idea. What was nobody? This may sound crazy,
(18:28):
nobody in my family had ever been so much as
pulled over, arrested, or anything. Ever, Patty was arrested that
day and charged with capital murder. She was released on
bond awaiting trial, and as she and the children struggled
(18:48):
to adjust to the loss of their husband and father,
things only got worse. Patty was harassed with anonymous phone calls, threats,
and robberies. She noticed strange people wandering on her property,
and she even found three of her dogs dead on
a nearby farm, apparently poisoned. When she got a new dog,
(19:08):
he was hung by his collar. Patty, it was virtually
branded with a scarlet letter by the community. Considered both
an adulteress and a murderer, Patty was offered a plea
(19:29):
deal that would reduce her charges to six or seven years,
but she refused it, saying she didn't want to be
taken from her children. She insisted she was innocent. The
trial started on April sixteenth, n Patty's family, children and friends,
as well as Bill's relatives all attended. Tom Williams was
(19:51):
the prosecutor, and due to the lack of evidence against Patty,
he instead emphasized that she was an adulteress and used
sexy tropes and gender biases to paint Patty out to
be a horrible woman and mother who would kill her husband.
The cornerstone of the case, the opening statement of the
of the prosecution, is you know this was a woman
(20:14):
motivated by lost and greed. This is Patty's attorney, Brian Reichart.
He first came across Patty's case in two thousand and
ten when he was in law school, and it's stuck
with him. You know, when I first read the trial transcript,
I was disturbed and I thought, you know, they're very
well could be a wrongful conviction here. But over the years,
(20:36):
as I've learned more about the case, as I've been
able to study the investigator's records, as I've I've been
able to read accounts from the prosecutor who prosecuted this case,
I've become convinced that this is indeed a wrongful conviction
and something that needs to be addressed. Brian says one
of the key facts to pay attention to in this
(20:56):
case is that Patty's sixteen hour in view with Detective
Hughes was not recorded again, only the first fifteen minutes were,
and he says this freed Hughes to be able to
put forth his version of what Patty supposedly told him.
Because it was unrecorded, the lead investigator is able to
(21:17):
take the stand and characterize the interview, and so he
says things like, oh, you know, I asked her about
why she had these affairs, and she says, oh, my
my sexual engine is hotter than most. Did you say that? Nobody,
no woman in the face of the earth, ever said that.
(21:41):
I mean, really, certainly, no woman who's being in d
of her husband. Everything like that exactly. He said that
a good romance novel, something that another thing detective Hughes
alleges Patty said, over the course of the instigation, did
(22:01):
you invite him to dinner before you went to prison?
Oh my god, it was no. I did not I
mean dinner. I just wanted to get home to my kids.
If I him again, I would have been more than happy.
According to the trial transcripts, here are some of the
(22:21):
phrases used by prosecutor Williams during the trial to attack
Patty's character. Quote the defendant was motivated by sheer greed
and sexual lust and had been for years. Quote. She
disregarded her marital vows and the noticeable obligations of motherhood.
Quote she pursued one sleazy affair after another, one two
(22:45):
at a time. Williams even called three of Patty's former
partners to testify against her. Two of them eventually said
that they were coerced by the police and prosecution to
do so, and these were partners she had while she
and Bill were stepped rated and knew that the other
person was seeing other people and agreed to it. Partners
(23:05):
she had five years before Bill's murder. I mean, if
you just take a step back. The state had to
argue that a mother of five was going to would
kill her husband and what kind of what kind of
person would do that. The States idd that the way
they were going to move the jury is to paint
(23:25):
this mother as a bad mother in an unfaithful life,
and so that was so much of their case. Patty's daughter, Sarah,
who was thirteen years old at the time, testified that
as she was leaving the house that night, she saw
a flashlight under the basement stairs and heard someone moving
around down there, but her testimony seemed to hold little
weight against Prosecutor Williams's case. He also called pathologist James
(23:49):
Bridges to review the autopsy. Bridgins and his testimonies would
later become discredited on multiple occasions. For example, in when
he had ruled in a case that a woman was
stabbed to death. Well later X ray showed that she
was actually shot four times. Patty's attorneys, meanwhile, never called
(24:13):
their own expert to refute his findings. Any potential evidence
from Patty's pajamas was never brought up. The defense also
did not acknowledge that her alleged affairs were in fact
known and agreed to by Bill at the time. Now
you might be wondering why Patty never screamed from the
roof that this was all consensual. Well, it was Patty's decision.
(24:36):
She insisted to her attorneys that she did not want
Bill criticized in front of their kids, whether it hurt
her or not. She did not want them to know
that Bill also had affairs and that they both knew
about each other's relationships. She figured it was bad enough
the whole town was already gossiping about their mom. I
(24:58):
haven't badly or bad him. I didn't want families. I
feel badly a bad him. It wasn't there to stand dision.
I don't know. I just didn't think it was anybody's
dog gone. It was such a good guy. I disturbed
(25:20):
to have black marks next and her own rape during
the murder was also never mentioned during the trial, because remember,
she never told the police about it. All she told
them was that the intruder held something to her throat,
tried to unbuckle his pants while her pants were down,
but fled. One of the things they argued against, you know,
(25:41):
Patty's account that she was attacked, and one of the
arguments the prosecutor made, you know in front of the
jury was this is a direct quote from the case,
why would you do this to enjoy Patty's oft enjoyed
sexual favors. Patty didn't tell the police about her rape
the night of Bill's murder, but she did tell her
needs about it. She also told them to keep it
(26:02):
out of court and out of earshot from her kids. However,
Patty's daughter Jane says she noticed evidence of the assault
days later when they were getting ready for Bill's funeral.
And that morning Mom didn't want me to come in
the bathroom, like she's kind of pushing against the door,
and I didn't understand what was happening, and I pushed
(26:23):
and then I saw her and she was so horribly bruised,
her hip bones, her thighs, the inside of her thighs,
and I assumed that the police knew this or saw
her body, or that her friends or our family, but
they didn't. A rape kit was never done, and that
crucial evidence is gone forever. And even though I was fourteen,
(26:48):
I thought of her as being much bigger than me,
and that morning I remember thinking, she's not that big,
like she seemed small to me, and she had been hurt.
Jane never testified, but her sister Sarah the one who
saw the light under the basement did. If you look
at the women's accounts, it's interesting how the voices of
(27:11):
women in this case were ignored and the voices of men,
even though when there was reason to to be suspicious
of those arguments, they were raised as truth. The trial
lasted four days. At the end the jury was deadlocked.
They were told to go back and try harder. They
eventually came back with a unanimous guilty verdict and Patty
(27:34):
was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole,
but after fifty years she's eligible in when she'll be
eighty six years old. When the verdict came, everybody just
lost it. I mean, the judge was telling us all
(27:55):
to be quiet. Nobody wanted to be quiet. My brother's
sisters were just scream mean, just screaming, and one of
my sisters ran out out of the courthouse into the
street like it was a really traumatic time. I don't
think that any of us could have been emotionally prepared
to be there for that, and here the verdict, and
(28:18):
and to hear fifty years life with no parole for
fifty years. That was just unbelievable. Was there anything in
their relationship or from your memory that would indicate to
you that your mother would murder your father. No, no,
(28:39):
not not at all. I they no, no, Like you know,
they were really good friends and they seemingly had a
lot of fun together. And I think that when things
were ten um, even when they were younger, when we
were all young, that they worked it out. And you know,
(29:02):
she was not that kind of person at all. The
lead investigator made a decision very early on that Patty
was the prime suspect, and that colored the way he
conducted the investigation, and he led the investigation. This is
(29:26):
Patty's Atorney Brian Reichard again talking about Detective Hughes. Even
before trial. He says, things went horribly wrong with Patty's investigation,
and one of the primary things we've seen is this
concept of tunnel vision, when the lead investigator gets it
in their head that somebody is the prime suspect and
(29:47):
focuses all of their energy on confirming that suspicion and
ignoring everything else. You know, if you knew there were
areas like the breaker box that cut off the electricity
of the house, you know, you know, whoever committed this
crime touched that you know, you would just set for
prints and lift prints. They didn't do that. You would
collect hair, they didn't do that. You would um, you
(30:08):
would follow leads. For example, you know, Patty's daughter shared
an account of seeing a light from the basement when
they were leaving the house, and so that would indicate
somebody's in the basement. There's no evidence that they followed
up on that report from from Patty's daughter. And also,
one of the neighbors had tried to issue a report
with the Sheriff's office stating she had seen a suspicious
(30:31):
vehicle parked on the wrong side of the road facing
the pru At home hours before the murder, but it
was ignored. So this information was never disclosed to the defense.
And again, this is rural Missouri, so it's abnormal for
there to be a car in the middle of the
night that the neighbors don't know about. The lead investigator
did nothing about this. One of the most bizarre things
(30:53):
about Patty's case is that in decades after her conviction,
a book written by the lead prosecutor, Tom Williams, was
published called Practice to Deceive. Williams had died two years
before his book came out. After his death. Now, the
book does not say Patty is innocent, but it does
(31:15):
criticize what Williams acknowledges was a shoddy investigation, and Williams
boasts that if it were not for his own prosecutorial skills,
Patty would be free right now. He describes sloppy evidence management.
He describes a forensic expert who was a star Warsness
as a as a doctor cop. He describes how how
(31:37):
he gratuitously asked questions of Patty on the stand to
portray her as a bad mother to move the jury.
I mean he admits this. He's he's affirming everything we're
saying about tunnel vision. And Williams also discusses detective Hues.
He describes this investigator as an ambitious young I mean
you think he was twenty seven deputy sheriff who had
(31:59):
ambition is to move up and he needed a case
with a lot of interest where he could take the
lead and get publicity. That's the words of the prosecutor,
and he did. Hughes went on to become a private
detective in Wyoming. He later resigned following an internal investigation
into his conduct up until seen crucial evidence in this
(32:24):
case was presumed to be lost. This included Patty's pajamas,
and once this evidence was uncovered, Patty's team petitioned the
Chords to test her pajamas for DNA along with other evidence. Remember,
DNA testing was not available in nine four, the year
of the crime, a hearing was granted by Judge Robert L. Kaufman.
(32:45):
And it was an extraordinary moment because as as we're
making this argument, the judge, who was a different judge
than the trial judge didn't work on Patty's case, but
was still in the in the courtroom at the time
of the trial, says, oh, I remember this case because
I remember she testified that her sexual engine burns hotter
(33:07):
than others. I remember that. That's what makes this case unique.
And that was just an astounding moment for a number
of reasons. It goes to show the impact that misogyny
had on Patty's case even decades later. Judge Kaufman quickly
denied the request, writing quote, you cannot believe her story,
and DNA findings of any kind do not change that fact.
(33:29):
In other words, Kaufman believed that because of Patty's alleged promiscuity,
the presence of DNA on Patty's pajamas would not necessarily
confirm that she was raped or that she wasn't the murderer.
He also notes quote it should be kept in mind
there were numerous showings that Ms. Pruittt was not a
truth teller. Patty's legal team says there were other people
(33:53):
in the community who could have had motive, means, an opportunity,
and may have wanted Bill out of the picture. Bill
and Patty were active in their community and and what
we've heard from folks who lived in in Holden at
the time was there was concerns about drugs and uh,
(34:13):
Patty and Bill, as as parents of kids, were concerned
about their kids and started to look into what was
going on in their community with the drug trade. Police
did not thoroughly investigate this or other leads, including the
unknown car the Patty's neighbor had seen on the street.
DNA testing might have helped Patty's case, but by now
(34:34):
Patty has exhausted her appeals. Her only hope is clemency.
Patty has applied for clemency multiple times. Her petition from
December is still waiting a response from Missouri Governor Mike Parson.
It is one of more than three thousand clemency petitions
he has yet to review. While she waits, Patty and
(35:04):
her family have had thirty six years to process their losses,
including the death of Patty's son, Matt when he was
just eighteen. His death was ruled a suicide. And at
the same time Patty lost her kids when she was
sent to prison, they also lost their mother. You know,
when you're sixteen, you're going through the most formative time
(35:26):
of your life. You know, boyfriends or or girlfriends or whoever,
and periods and those kinds of things. I mean, who
did you go to for that? Mostly Mom's sister, my
aunt Mary, who has since passed. She was great about
all those kind of things, which was which was great,
but she was also you know young. Mom was only
(35:49):
thirty six when she left for prison, and Mary would
have been thirty three, and she was a single mom
with two little boys, so she had a lot on
her play also, right, right, absolutely, so you kind of, uh,
you know, even if you have people in your life,
you still kind of feel like you're a burden when
(36:10):
it's not your parents taking care of you. And since
Patty was unable to be a parent to her own kids.
She became a proxy mom for young women in prison. Well,
the prison matter is, I'm a mama at my core.
When I came to prison, I was most gives in
(36:32):
prison or much younger, So I came in as an adult.
And yeah, it's going to help people. What the used
to being alive? You know, she has every right to
be angry at the world. You know, she's lost so much.
(36:52):
She obviously lost her husband, she effectively lost her children.
Just in the last twelve years, I've seen her lose
her father, her mother, her sister, and her brother. And
obviously she lost her son years earlier. She hasn't been
able to go to any of those funerals. Um and
just the pain that she's been through. And as I said,
(37:14):
she has every right to be angry at the world.
And what is she doing. She's mothering and mentoring generations
of women behind bars and women who are doing well now.
And they credit Patty and it's it's really it's it's
all inspiring and it's um it's extraordinary. Many of the
women Patty has met in prison credit her with their
(37:35):
rehabilitation and ability to pursue their dreams. In a video
created by Patty's legal team, these women urge Governor Parson
to grant Patty clemency. Patty never stopped believing in me.
She always encouraged me to write, to improve myself, to exercise,
to just simply do the next right thing and believe
in myself. She changed my entire life, and I was
(37:58):
a repeat offender, not looking to be any But if
she could do that for me, imagine what she can
do for the world. So the only way these kids
are ever going to doe somebody and get out of
this in the sloop of incorporation is to believe in
(38:20):
themselves and realized said they're good people as they deserve
a good life. And if that's why I'm in this
damn place, then I will try to say that many
of these as I did. Who's your cheerleader, Patty, when
you're helping everybody and being the mama, who's there for you? Listen,
(38:42):
I'm a big girl. I'm gonna don't so, he told
to them. Is what helped me if I didn't have
these kids around me. Good lord, I'm an old lady.
I know all the new songs, I know the new dances.
I mean he didn't beat me young. Despite her circumstances,
(39:04):
Patty has made the best of it. I'm a student
in Washington University at a St. Louis That is still
is amazing for me that this opportunity has come to me.
Patty says she's committed to one day getting her bachelor's degree,
and if she gets out of prison, she also has
a lot more planned. And I've got all these kids
(39:25):
and grandkids, and I've got a book I'm writing. I
know they've lots of books out there by prisons, but
I would like two. But especially women know what prisons
are like. People keep adding money to a conference to
build prisons. It's not doing any good. It's just the opposite.
(39:49):
And I would love to lobby. They would hate the
capital because I would be such the pet. So yeah,
I'm going to cause some proble. That's what that's Michael.
There's nothing better than an old lady wreaking havoc. If
(40:15):
you have any information about this case or want to
help Patty, go to Patty Pruitt dot com. On our
next episode, how does a guy with nineteen alibi witnesses
get convicted for murder? It didn't matter what I had
to say, what type of evidence of alibis that I
had to present. It's just, it's just they matter already.
(40:36):
One it was to get in an arrest. Next time
un Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling Melvin Ortiz thank you
for listening to Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling. Please support
your local innocence organizations and go to the links in
our bio to see how you can help. I'd like
(40:58):
to thank executive producers Asin Flom Kevin Burtis, as well
as our senior producer Annie Chelsea, researcher Lila Robinson, and
story editor Sonya Paul, with additional production by Jeff Clyburn.
Music in this production is by three time OSCAR nominated
composer j Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram
at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and
(41:21):
on Twitter at Wrongful Conviction as well as Lava for
Good on all three platforms. You can also follow me
on both Instagram and Twitter at Maggie Freeling. Wrongful Conviction
with Maggie Freeling is a production of Lava for Good
Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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