One death, two scenarios

By Jeff German

Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Three months ago, Stephanie Thomas sat on the living room sofa inside the two-story Henderson home she shares with her five children and tearfully talked about the April 2006 disappearance of her husband, Larry Thomas.

At her side was Shawn Pritchett, a 38-year-old painter who had lived with the Thomases. He moved back into the home a few days after his friend had gone missing, to help the family out, he said.

Pritchett and his friend’s wife suggested that whatever happened to Thomas might be connected to his stormy tenure as chairman of the College of Southern Nevada’s auto technology department.

The 47-year-old had resigned from the supervisory position and gone back to being an instructor in July 2005 following an internal audit that had uncovered financial mismanagement and oversight failures in the repair shop that put the program at “high risk for fraud, theft and personal gain.”

“He was going to make people pay for getting him to step down,” said Stephanie Thomas, 46.

Pritchett said that after Thomas resigned, he “went around telling everybody that he had dirt on everybody.”

He and Stephanie Thomas said they didn’t know what that dirt was, but, they added, her husband’s personal laptop, which contained his college files, had been missing since he disappeared.

Henderson police, however, said they’d interviewed CSN officials and did not find that the irregularities in the auto technology program rose to the level of someone wanting to kill Thomas.

Police thought Thomas’ death was tied to something that had happened in his home. Homicide detectives and their forensics experts tore apart much of the living room and the rest of the ground floor looking for evidence. Pritchett pointed out damage he said was done by police during the court-approved search. Windows were broken. The front door had been unhinged with explosives. Drywall had been torn down. And carpeting and the kitchen floor had been ripped up.

Pritchett said they planned to file a homeowners insurance claim to cover the cost of repairs.

He and Stephanie Thomas denied having anything to do with Thomas’ disappearance. Stephanie Thomas wouldn’t even acknowledge that her husband was dead because authorities had not allowed her to see the body they’d found, she said.

Police had made her life a nightmare since her husband disappeared, coming in and out of her house as if they owned it, she complained. She said she was forced to declare bankruptcy and was working 60 to 70 hours a week at a pizza parlor to support her children, ages 9 to 16.

She tried to collect her husband’s $240,000 in life insurance benefits, but that money is being withheld by the insurance company until the case is sorted out.

“This is hard,” she said. “I’m broke. The kids don’t deserve to live like this. They’re afraid all the time. They never know what’s going to happen.”

They know at least some of what’s going to happen now.

Police last week served subpoenas on Thomas, all five of her children and other relatives and friends, ordering them to appear March 4 before a Clark County grand jury.

And on Monday morning, while Pritchett was driving Thomas to work, police pulled him over and arrested him on a charge of murder with a deadly weapon. He was to remain in jail pending arraignment Wednesday, and police are recommending no bail.

In the days just before his arrest, Pritchett continued to profess his innocence, calling the police “morons.”

“This is a joke,” he said Saturday. “I didn’t do anything wrong. They can’t find any evidence, but they’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars investigating this.”

Henderson homicide detectives acknowledge they did not find much physical evidence at the house. They don’t even have a murder weapon.

“This is not going to be a ‘CSI’ case,” one of them said.

What police say they do have are witnesses who place Pritchett at the home the night Larry Thomas disappeared.

Detectives allege that Pritchett, with the help of friends, attacked Thomas in his home sometime between 10:50 p.m. April 13, 2006, and 1 a.m. April 14 while Stephanie Thomas and the children were away.

One month after his disappearance, Thomas’ severely beaten and decomposed body, in a CSN mechanic’s uniform bearing his name, was discovered by hikers in the desert under a pile of debris at an adobe ruin near Baker, Calif. There were massive injuries to his head and chest. San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies later identified him through fingerprints and turned the case over to Henderson police.

Using a search warrant in November, detectives obtained the steering column to Thomas’ missing 2004 Silverado truck from Stephanie Thomas’ brother-in-law, Albert McCue.

Police said McCue, who worked at the pizza parlor with Stephanie Thomas, told them during the search that Pritchett had given him the steering column.

The truck has never been found. Police think Pritchett and his friends disassembled it and sold its parts.

Thomas was first reported missing April 21, 2006 — not by his wife of 20 years but by his brother-in-law, William Peters, who lives in New York. She didn’t report him missing until the following day.

Peters told Henderson police that Thomas was last seen at the Cheyenne campus of the College of Southern Nevada the evening of April 13, 2006.

Peters said he knew that his sister and his brother-in-law had been having marital problems, and he found it odd that his sister had not yet reported him missing.

Peters also said there had been an “incident” between Larry Thomas and Pritchett, whom he described as Stephanie Thomas’ boyfriend. Peters was not convinced his sister was telling him the truth about Larry Thomas’ disappearance.

Police say Thomas was ready to divorce his wife because he had discovered that she and Pritchett were having an affair.

At their home in November, Stephanie Thomas acknowledged that she and her husband had fought a lot, mostly over finances and raising their children, and she had threatened to leave him.

“He was physically and verbally abusive,” she said. “I spoke to him a couple of times about leaving, and his reply was that if I ever did leave him, he would find me and the kids and kill us.”

Her husband was on a variety of blood pressure and other medications that made his behavior erratic in the weeks before his disappearance, she said.

The couple had a fight in their bedroom the night before his disappearance, she said.

“He got on top of me and was choking me,” she said. “I had my cell phone by my side. I picked it up to call the cops. I couldn’t breathe. He took the cell phone from me and threw it down and told me that before they’d actually get here, he’d make sure I was dead. I never called the police.”

The next day, she said, her husband apologized.

“His excuse for hitting me was that he had demons inside his body, and the demons every now and then would come out and tell him what to do,” she said.

That evening, she said, she took her kids, who were on spring break, to her mother’s house so they could relax and paint Easter eggs.

An angry Thomas called her cell phone sometime after 10 p.m. and said he was leaving work at the college. He telephoned a little later asking whether there was anything to eat at home and wanted to know when the kids were coming home.

Stephanie Thomas said she then went to Wal-Mart to do some Easter shopping and on the way home stopped at a Del Taco restaurant to get the kids something to eat. By that time it was after midnight.

When they got home, she said, Thomas’ truck wasn’t in the driveway.

“This wasn’t the first time Larry would leave in the middle of the night,” she said. “I figured it was a holiday weekend, and he was going to ruin the whole holiday because this is what he does ... I figured he’d be back when he’s back.”

Jeff German is the Sun’s senior investigative reporter.