Worth More Dead

wasn’t there; he had moved again. “He’s back at his dad’s place, and he don’t want to take that lie detector test anymore.”
    Jim Harris spoke with Alby’s friend Jer. To Harris’s surprise, Jer said that Alby had indeed cut his hand on a very sharp fish knife. He himself had taken him to a hospital emergency room to get it sewed up. His mother said she was there when it happened. “He was new to fishing, and that was his first clumsy try at cleaning fish.”
    Her description of the incident was identical in detail to what Alby told the detectives.
     
    Beginning on March 13, 1989, Hank Gruber and Rudy Sutlovich literally moved to Kitsap County to begin an intensive probe of Cheryl Pitre’s murder. They intended to talk to every suspect and every witness and to join in searches of homes and vehicles, anything that might tip the scales and cause a single suspect to emerge as Cheryl’s killer.
    Detectives Harris and Hudson searched Alby Brotzweller’s car, which had been wrecked on the afternoon of October 14 and stored in an impound lot ever since. The front window was broken out, and there was a lot of interior water damage caused by winter snowstorms. They removed a tire iron and the steering wheel cover and had them tested for signs of blood. There were none.
    Interestingly, they found a professionally typed résumé for Brotzweller in the car. This seemed to war with his statement that he had never gotten a résumé from Cheryl. They checked the tape of his statement, and their memories were correct. They had asked him: “Was Cheryl going to do a work résumé for you?”
    “She was. She was going to help me out with a job or work résumé for the dental field but due to my procrastination, we never got around to completing that or even getting started on it.”
    Yet here was a complete résumé! Had they caught Alby in a lie? They compared the font on the papers in Brotzweller’s car with all the typewriters at Bay Ford. None of them matched.
    Now they checked again with the Source at the dealer who told them that Cheryl had picked the young lot boy up when his car broke down. Rumors were like the childhood game of “telephone.” They changed slightly when each person repeated them. Cheryl had told a friend of a friend about receiving a call at three AM from someone who needed help, but it hadn’t been from Alby Brotzweller at all. Rather, she said it was a friend of Roland’s who called. And Roland’s statement that his car had broken down the day before Cheryl was killed might even mean that he was the one who had attempted to lure her out of her house.
    Jim Harris received an angry phone call from Alby Brotzweller. He was upset because the investigators were still asking questions about him. “I didn’t kill the bitch!” he said vehemently.
    “Then why didn’t you take your polygraph?”
    “It was snowing and I couldn’t make it. I talked to people who told me not to take a lie detector test in a police station. They said the police would just hold me there and pin that murder on me because you don’t know who did it. Those police lie detector guys can make the test come out any way they want them to.”
    Asked about the résumés found in his car at the impound yard, Alby Brotzweller said he’d had that done four or five days after he quit Bay Ford. “They did it for me at the JPTA job training place in Bremerton. Cheryl didn’t have anything to do with those.”
    It was the truth. The youth employment agency put detectives in touch with the typist who prepared the résumés. Alby Brotzweller caused himself a lot of trouble with his attitude, and he could have been cleared of suspicion a lot sooner. The investigators now believed he had nothing to do with Cheryl’s murder.
     
    Jack Short was the next suspect for the detectives either to close in on or to eliminate. It was quite likely that he had at least seen Cheryl working at PJ’s Market since he had been friends with the store’s owner. Whether he knew her as anyone beyond a clerk no one knew. And there was his record of violence against women to consider. At the investigators’ invitation, he sauntered into the Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office. He explained to Jim Harris and Hank Gruber that his official address was with his brother, but he was presently staying with a “female friend” in Port Orchard.
    He was a very relaxed interviewee, apparently not in the least upset to be questioned about a brutal murder.