Worth More Dead

there was no caller ID in 1989, and the pen register was state of the art as it mechanically wrote down phone numbers.
    Hank Gruber went to Bremerton and met with Creg Darby and his fellow reporter Gene Yoachum. Darby thought it was strange that the caller had asked for him because it was Yoachum who was tracking Cheryl’s murder investigation. His byline had appeared above the Pitre article. Gruber asked if it might be possible to run another article, one designed to lure the caller out of the shadows. “Maybe it could be something like this,” he suggested. “You could write that you weren’t sure that the call wasn’t a hoax, and you needed something more to prove it was the real guy”
    The reporters were receptive to the idea, but they didn’t want to go so far as entrap the caller.
    “You wouldn’t have to,” Gruber explained. “You would write the truth and say that you had revealed his call to the police. He’d expect you to do that because you’d be obligated to report that kind of information.”
    Their editor agreed that an article would be appropriate as long as it was truthful and not misleading.
    It was decided that Darby would write a short piece about the stranger’s call that would run in the Bremerton Sun on February 16.
    In the meantime, the investigators decided to contact Cheryl’s associates and friends to see if they knew of any teenager or young man in her life who might have been obsessed with her. They didn’t have to do that because the article sparked the memory of one of Cheryl’s bosses at Bay Ford. He said that several of the dealer’s staff had read it and agreed that the younger man might be a former lot boy who had worked for them doing chores, washing cars, bringing cars around for prospective buyers.
    “His name is Alby Brotzweller,*” the caller said.
    The car dealer didn’t have an address for him. Jim Harris ran a background check on Brotzweller and found he was 20 years old, and had no prior record. He had a father, 43, and a brother, 17, in the area. Detective Ed Striedinger of the Seattle Police Department ran “Brotzweller” through records and found a woman named Patsy Brotzweller, 37, who lived in the north end of Seattle and had an old address in Bremerton.
    Hank Gruber and Jim Harris went to Bay Ford to ask Cheryl’s fellow employees about Brotzweller. They learned he was a loner.
    “He wasn’t very good at relating to women,” one salesman said. “The kind of kid you knew wanted to have a girlfriend but just didn’t seem to know how to start anything going with them.”
    Alby had talked about getting a job as a dental technician; he’d done that in the army. Cheryl had told him she would help him compose a short résumé. She had helped him once before when he had car trouble. “He called her for a ride and she picked him up, but she never mentioned anything about his asking her for a date or coming on to her.”
    Cheryl said she would help Alby, but she was firm with him, telling him that she would type his résumés, but only if he put some effort into it, too. He would have to find the names and locations of dentists and address the envelopes. “You have to show some effort,” she chided him. “To prove you really want to get this job.”
    Alby Brotzweller was showing more and more promise as a suspect. But the anonymous caller didn’t bite on the article about his call.
    Records at Bay Ford showed that Alby left work early on Friday, October 14—the day before Cheryl’s murder—and never came back. “He called in on Monday and said he was resigning from his job as a lot boy,” a representative said. “We ran into him later that week, and he had this big bandage on his hand covering a finger and part of his palm. It looked professionally done, like maybe a doctor had put it on.”
    When the detectives asked more about Brotzweller, his bosses said that he had a difficult time accepting criticism. “If he did something wrong or failed to get it done, he’d be really apologetic. He had a problem handling stress, like he wouldn’t know what to say, get very upset, almost to the point of trembling.”
    “Was he ever violent?” Gruber asked.
    “We never saw that, but everything in the article in the paper fit him perfectly.”
    In addition, Brotzweller’s father lived at Long Lake, which was only a short distance from PJ’s Market. Detectives Jim Harris and Hank Gruber drove the route between the father’s house and