Have you heard about the double murder of Mattie Catherine Restine and Patty Sue Pritz? I think this case is one of the most troubling unsolved crimes in the state. Not many people know about this double murder from 1961, but they should. So this is the story of Mattie and Patty, two innocent girls who were cruelly taken far too soon.
August 12, 1961
On a desolate stretch of dunes outside of Carlsbad on August 12, 1961, two rabbit hunters spotted something red off a dirt road. They drove close by cautiously and became sick at what they saw. Two girls lay there, shot in the head. They had been wearing matching sailor outfits; one girl’s sailor outfit was strewn in the mesquite bushes around her naked body. The other girl still had on her red shorts and white blouse.
The two men drove to the nearby Hamilton Station to call the police. Soon, State police and sheriffs were swarming the area near Rocky Arroyo, potentially trampling evidence and really making a mess of things. Now, six decades later, the case remains cold.
Let’s look at the facts and the ways the case went south.
The Crime
Patty was barely fourteen. Mattie was only thirteen. The two were new friends who had only known each other a short time. Mattie’s family was very protective of her, but they decided they could trust Patty. On August 11, 1961, they let Mattie and Patty go to the Carlsbad Municipal Beach. This Beach is a sandy area along the Pecos River, which had carnival rides at the time.
Patty’s mother assured Mattie’s parents that the girls would be accompanied by Patty’s older sister, Connie. But Connie was apparently unaware that she had been voluntold, so the girls went unattended. Mattie’s family also didn’t know that Patty had been dating for a few years already and was being taken advantage of and groomed by older boys. Had they known this, they probably would not have let their precious Mattie go without an adult chaperone.
The girls were seen at the Municipal Beach. They purchased tickets to a few of the rides from Ben Wade Gaines, Patty’s ex-boyfriend. Then they left the Beach to walk to Patty’s and some witnesses saw them at different locations. I include a timeline of witness statements in the next section.
The families became worried when the girls weren’t home by dark. They reported them missing at midnight. Volunteer firefighters and cops and family members, including some of the Restines, searched all over the area for the girls. State Police chief Dan McGrew was sent out to search for the girls when he reported for his shift at 10 am on August 12. As he searched for the girls around Carlsbad, he heard over his radio that they had been found by two rabbit hunters around 12:40 pm. He was one of the first on the scene.
While walking home the night of the 11, possibly in the vicinity of the Arrowhead Drive-in (a burger place), the two girls met whoever claimed their young lives. Multiple witnesses saw them get in a white Chevy car with a young man; one person thought he saw the man grab one girl’s arm and then the other girl willingly hopped into the car. Another witness reported that the man in the car had been tailing them down the street toward the Arrowhead Drive-In. What happened after that is a horrific mystery.
Mattie and Patty were both shot once in the head with a .38 handgun and then dumped at the location off Hwy 137 and 285 where they were later found. The scene was so horrific that responding officers apparently wept into their handkerchiefs, according to Eddy County Sheriff Deputy Ray Anaya. While it’s not clear exactly what happened, it is clear that Mattie and Patty died horrible deaths.
Patty had been completely undressed. Her outer clothes had been neatly folded with her purse and diary set on top; her underwear was strewn about, her bra hung from a mesquite bush, and her sailor cap lay several feet away. Meanwhile, Mattie was fully clothed, with even her underpants on.
Initial reports state that both girls were raped, but Anne Self, Mattie’s sister, says it actually is not clear if either of them were. However, Patty was sexually mutilated in some way that law enforcement won’t disclose. The autopsy noted “hymneal ring hemorrhaging” on Patty, which is consistent with sexual assault. Ann Self also says that Mattie was on her period according to the medical examiner – but she claims Mattie hadn’t even started her period yet. This could suggest blood from the trauma of sexual assault, but it could also suggest that Mattie had just started her first period that day, unbeknownst to her family.
Evidence at the Scene
There was a lot of evidence at the scene that could be used to solve this crime once and for all. However, law enforcement has not done much with this evidence to this day. They refuse to answer family’s questions about the case, they will not resubmit DNA found on Mattie’s clothes, or they especially will not enlist the help of the FBI or other agencies.
The murder weapon had never been found. There were also no shell casings in the vicinity of the girls’ bodies and no significant blood. Due to the size of the bullets, thought to be a .38, there should have been a lot of blood and brain matter at the murder site. This led investigators to believe the girls had been murdered elsewhere and then dumped in the location. That primary crime scene has never been found.
The investigators found some tire tracks in the area and made plaster casts of them. Interestingly, the tire treads came from bald tires. I think this could suggest a perpetrator with money troubles. Footprints were also found in the sand – from a 7.5 men’s work boot. That’s a pretty small foot size for a man. Casts were made of these prints also. This is an important clue as to how large the suspect was, since foot size often correlates to height and stature. It also raises some suspicion that maybe the killer was a female, or at least a female was present at the dump site. Some women like men’s work boots and a lot more women than men have such small feet.
There was a dried semen stain found on Mattie’s clothes. This suggests that even if the girls weren’t raped, the killer may have masturbated over Mattie. Some of Mattie’s clothing was tested by a private lab after the case was reopened in 2003, but the results indicated no male DNA. The other clothes have not been submitted for further testing. Though the semen sample is old, it likely still has usable DNA, especially with some of the advanced technology done by companies like Othram today.
Skin was found under Patty’s nails, indicating that she had fought for her life. This skin could also be tested for a DNA profile if Patty were to be exhumed. The perpetrator had to have scratches on his body. Interestingly, one of the suspects in the case (Earl Nichols) did have unexplained scratches on his face the day after the murder. More on him later.
Patty was nude and her undergarments were strewn around her and hanging in the mesquite brush. Some of her other clothes, like her shorts and shirt, appear to have been neatly folded. Her purse and diary were then set neatly on top of this pile. This would also suggest that she was dumped in the location and the killer staged the scene. The fact the killer left the diary there makes me think that he knew there wouldn’t be any mention of him in it. Patty’s stepsister thought that one of the pages of the diary was torn out.
There were cuts on Patty’s back and around her nipples. These could have been injuries sustained for the surface she was raped on, if she was raped. They could also be from bite marks but law enforcement didn’t identify them as such.
Meanwhile, Mattie was fully clothed. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut, as if she was bracing for the lethal bullet that she knew was coming. Early accounts share that Mattie’s head had been crushed in from blows, but later accounts say that the bullet size she was shot with led to skull fractures. Mattie otherwise had not suffered to the extent that Patty had. The fact she was not nude makes it seem that she was not the intended victim – at least, not for a sexual motive. She may have just been a witness, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Mattie and Patty were both buried in Carlsbad. Shortly after the murders, Patty’s grave was horribly vandalized. Someone drove all over her grave and backed into the headstone. It seems likely that the killer did this – and he had a lot of hatred for the girl he had so brutally killed.
To protect Mattie from the same treatment, her family didn’t mark her grave. But someone knew where it was because they laid a ring of pink roses on it every year on Memorial Day for years. The family attempted to track down the person responsible for the roses but with no luck. Since many people in Carlsbad were deeply troubled by the crime, it seems that someone from the town may have been doing this to honor Mattie. But it might have been her killer expressing remorse.
Witnesses
Here are a series of witness statements that may be related to the case or may not. This timeline was posted on Websleuths by “Hurricane” in 2007. I am grateful to Hurricane for laying these details out in such a clear way. I have pretty much copied them word for word, just fixing grammar in a few places and adding my own notes in italics after some of the statements with research of my own.
Mid-July 1961. Jimmy Ray Funk, a friend of Patty’s boyfriend Ronnie Rice, asked permission from his mother to allow Patty to spend the night at their house after Patty and Ronnie Rice claimed that Patty’s mother, Betty Jo Davidson, had gotten drunk and ran them off with a .22 caliber rifle because she did not like Rice. Patty spends the night sleeping in their car after being given a pillow and blanket. No word on where Rice spent the night. (Rice was also known to sleep in cars and you will see later that witnesses saw someone sleeping in a car near the road where the girls were found).
Late July. Jimmy Ray Funk claims that the last time he saw Patty was late July.
Wed., Aug. 9th. Patty is with Ronnie Rice when they both told their parents that they were going to church.
Time unknown, Aug. 11th. Margret Warble, a friend of Patty’s, saw the two girls as they were on their way to Patty’s aunt’s house to pick up a sailor hat.
2:30 p.m. Aug 11th. The girls stop by the McDonald’s Dry Goods Store to see Ronnie Rice who was working from 11:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
8:40 p.m. The girls are seen on the beach by Ben Wade Gaines (a former boyfriend of Patty’s) when he gave them tickets to the rides and offered to walk them home when he got off work at 9:00 p.m. Mattie was supposed to have been home by 8:00 p.m.
9:00 p.m. Keith Bunnel saw two girls get into a light-colored 1955 or 1956 Chevy car (with round taillights) at 603 N. Mesquite St. next door to his house and a block from Patty’s house. The male was described only as having a mature voice and wearing a white T-shirt.
From reading Bunnel’s police statement, I (Calliope) gleaned a few more details: Bunnel described the man as being rather small of stature which would jibe with the 7.5 size shoe prints at the crime scene. The car pulled over on the side of the street a few house lengths of the girls. The girls then walked up abreast of this car and he got out and met them. There was a slight scuffle as he grabbed the taller of the two girls by the arm. The taller of the girls would have been Patty Pritz. The girls were squealing and giggling, not in a scared way. Then both girls got into the car, likely the front seat based on the speed with which they got in. Bunnel said he thought they were kidding around and he didn’t suspect an abduction was taking place. Bunnel got the impression the girls knew the driver. He noted the driver had been holding something in his hand.
9:00 – 9:30 p.m. Geneva Smith and her daughter saw two girls at the Arrowhead Drive-In get into a white-colored car with a male described as being 27-30 yrs old wearing a yellow or tan shirt with the sleeves rolled up, possibly intoxicated. The car parked to the left side of Smith’s car giving her a good view of both the driver and the two girls as they got in. She estimated him at 6 ft, 170 pounds. An employee of the Arrowhead Drive-In named Christine also made note of seeing the girls with the man and noted that the man seemed to be following the girls down Mesquite St. (apparently on the way into the drive-in, but unclear or unknown for sure).
(This makes three sightings of the girls getting into a car around 9 pm with a young man but Christine and Geneva Smith place them in an entirely different area than where Bunnel saw them get into the car. Could these sightings have been of different girls? Or did the girls get into a car with a man, get out, and he followed them and then they got into his car yet again at the Arrowhead Drive-in? Did the girls get into two different cars with two different men, just half an hour apart? So many questions!).
9:00 p.m. Ms. Harold Groves and Ms. O.L. Utley return to Utley’s home at 405 N. Mesquite St. Ms. Utley notes a couple riding bicycles up and down the street; Ben Wade Gaines was sitting on the porch with Ms. Davidson. Utley stated that she did not see the girls nor did she see any vehicles leaving the area.
9:00 p.m. After getting off work at the beach Ben Wade Gaines runs all the way to Patty’s house at 403 N. Mesquite St. trying to catch up to the two girls. Arriving and not finding the girls there, he sits and waits about 45 minutes with Patty’s mother before going home.
9:00 p.m. Willie Dee and Artell Blair return home with friends from an evening of fishing. Willie Blair said that their friends stayed and visited with them until 10:00 p.m. at which time their friends left and the Blairs went to bed. (This conflicts with Bonnie Blair’s later statement that Willie Blair and Artell Blair drove their son, David Blair, to Monahans, TX after midnight that night. The friends who they were fishing with were Mr. and Mrs. Hughes, who previously provided alibis to help clear Willie Blair in a series of child molestation cases.)
10:00 – 10:30 P.M. Mr. & Mrs. A.W. Craft and Ms. Lewis were driving past the Artesia highway area where the bodies would later be found, on their way to the Craft home, when Ms. Lewis sees a car with bright lights turning around in a circle ¼ mi off the road.
11:30 p.m. Bill Smith driving in the Artesia Highway area did not see anything unusual.
12:00 a.m. Aug 12, ex-wife of David Blair (Bonnie Blair) states that he comes home worried and agitated. He starts to pack a bag without explanation as to what has happened or where he is going. Shortly after that his parents arrive. His father, Willie D. Blair, claims that a friend in Monahans, TX has found a job for David. They leave immediately.
5:30 a.m. Aug 12th. Bill Smith driving back by the area sees a 1955 Chevy (pink over white) parked on Sitting Bull Falls Rd. with someone sleeping inside. LE believes that the colors may be somewhat off but that it is likely the same car that A.W. Craft saw that morning. (It was also revealed in other sources that the car had a broken front grill. This would mesh with a car having little to no tread on the tires.).
8:30 A.M. Aug. 12th. A.W. Craft drives back by the area and sees a 1955 Ford that was light colored, possibly a two-tone cream.
9:30 a.m. Aug 13th. Willie Dee Blair and Bill Melton leave to go fishing. Melton is driving a 1956 Ford.
10:00 a.m. Aug 13th. Officer called into work (W.C. Dan McGrew) to search for the missing girls.
12:40 p.m. (one report says 1:30 p.m.) Aug 13th. The bodies of the girls were reported to LE by Willie D. Blair and Bill Melton.
Time unknown. Ronnie Rice received a telephone call from Brad Lackey asking if it is true that Patty’s step-father, Cullen Davidson, had killed the girls.
Mid-September. David Blair returns to Carlsbad from Monahans, TX.
Not mentioned in this timeline is another witness statement from a Linda Lou Roberts, living on Church Street. Linda claims that she saw the girls walk by her house to the Beach around 3 or 3:30. Later, she saw an older man, husky with broad shoulders and dark hair, wearing a white T-shirt, cruising slowly by her house in a two-toned cream-colored 1956 Chevy with New Mexico plates. He drove by a total of three times. He also parked at the beach area where the girls were and never got out of his car. Later her friend, Nancy Mosley, corroborated her account and described a dark-haired older man slowly driving by her and Linda Roberts 3-4 times and staring at them, as they walked between Roberts’ house and the Beach.
Based on these witness reports, police believe that Mattie and Patty were killed between 9 and 10 pm that night.
The Botched Investigation
From day one, law enforcement made several mistakes that kept the case from being solved. Ann Self, Mattie’s little sister, used to believe that these mistakes were intentional as part of a cover-up. Now she states that she has slowly abandoned that theory and accepts that the department was just incompetent. The sheriffs in Eddy County at the time had poor training in forensics, as murders weren’t common in that town back then. Law enforcement did dedicate thousands of hours and many officers to this murder case, but sadly, their efforts were clouded by mishandled evidence and dropped leads.
For one thing, law enforcement failed to follow up on a lot of leads. They simply let suspects go because they didn’t match witness statements regarding height, age, hair color, etc. They didn’t seem to consider the fact that witness statements are sketchy, especially when witnesses aren’t paying attention to what they see and some time has elapsed before they give their statements. Human memory is very fickle and prone to inaccuracy.
Law enforcement also let two of the suspects dodge them and never tracked them down for polygraph exams. These witnesses are Bill Melton and Willie Blair, the rabbit hunters who found Mattie and Patty dead. In a little bit, I talk about why Willie Blair in particular is suspicious.
Law enforcement also did not compare footprints of suspects to the ones they made casts of at the crime scene. They never compared the cars of the suspects to the cars seen by witnesses on August 11. They never compared tire tracks to the casts they made.
Beyond the evidence listed above and the witnesses who all report a light-colored car, not much is known about what happened to these girls. With the years, the evidence has only gotten thinner and the case colder. People have largely forgotten the case, but at the time, it had Carlsbad residents terrified and overprotective of their daughters.
Now, evidence is missing. One crucial piece of evidence that is missing is Patty Pritz’s diary, which is mysteriously gone from evidence at the Eddy County Sheriff’s Office. Where the hell did it go? And how do you lose something so crucial? Cover-up or incompetence, that could be one of many things that have completely screwed this case. Who knows what vital clues may have been in that diary that the original investigation overlooked? We may never know now.
After the case was reopened in 2003, a lot more progress was made. But a lot of time had elapsed by then and many of the witnesses were dead or elderly with fuzzy memories. Investigators had to rely on recollections from the children of some of the witnesses or suspects, who often didn’t know or didn’t remember things.
Some of Mattie’s clothes and blood and hair from the girls were shipped off for storage with the FBI in 2003. A few samples were sent to a private lab for testing. Evidently the semen stain on Mattie’s clothes didn’t yield male DNA due to degradation, but some of the other samples (like the skin under Patty’s nails) could still offer viable DNA with modern extraction techniques. Then, the DNA could be compared to samples volunteered by family members of four of the prime suspects. Yet this has never been done.
Then there was the fiasco with Buddy Parsons.
The False Confession
In 1962, Jimmy “Buddy” Parsons was arrested for vagrancy in Monahans, TX by a cop named Charles Titus (remember Titus’s name). Parsons made some weird comments about the murders to Titus and claimed he knew who did it, so he was extradited to Eddy County, where he was held illegally and interrogated vigorously.
First, Buddy claimed that his brother and two other men had killed the girls. Law enforcement investigated this brother, but quickly cleared him. They also pursued the two other young men who were in Houston, but once again, they were frustrated. So they kept interrogating Buddy Parsons, until they finally got a confession out of him. He was charged with the murders and law enforcement refused to disclose how they had obtained the confession.
Everyone thought the case was solved, right around the one-year anniversary of the girls’ murders. Law enforcement was ecstatic. The paper praised them for jobs well-done.
Then Buddy Parsons recanted his confession. Due to lack of evidence, he couldn’t be convicted during trial. He was let go and the murders soon went cold. The families were understandably let down.
False confessions are a common nuisance in law enforcement and they are often not a true sign of guilt. Several other people falsely confessed to this murder over the years, including a young man bragging about the double murder in a bar in Roswell. All of these people were cleared and eventually Parsons was, too.
A number of things make me believe that Parsons was not quite right and his confessions were meaningless. For one thing, in the newspaper, Parsons is seen grinning at the camera as Sheriff’s deputies lead him to jail. He said he liked having his picture taken for the newspaper. This indicates he had no idea the gravity of the situation he was in. Officers also noted that he was “speech-impaired” in some way. This paints a picture of someone who was possibly intellectually challenged.
It was also discovered that Parsons could not drive. Whoever killed Mattie and Patty had driven their bodies out to the remote Rocky Arroyo location. So this means Parsons could not have been the killer, or at least not the person driving the car. Police officers started trying to teach Parsons to drive while he was detained in order to pin the crime on him. Clearly they knew he didn’t do it by that point but they were determined to pin the crime on him.
By that point, law enforcement really, really wanted these murders solved. I believe they coerced a confession from Parsons. I find it interesting that he was arrested for vagrancy and then held and repeatedly questioned for five months. Vagrancy usually doesn’t result in five months of jail time. Supposedly he made some suspicious statements when he was first arrested – but even that isn’t enough to legally hold someone for months. He didn’t know his rights and cops exploited that.
No one else was ever charged with the murders.
W.C. Dan McGrew and T.E. Gene Lusk
The fate of W.C. Dan McGrew is one of the many indications that this investigation was possibly rotten from the inside. McGrew was a former State Police chief and then he became an Eddy County Sheriff’s deputy. He was called “Dan McGrew” after a song that features the “dangerous Dan McGrew” who is shot in a bar. This is an eerie premonition of what would later happen to W.C. McGrew.
McGrew was a Navy veteran who was transferred to Eddy County from the New Mexico State Police in 1960. He worked the Mattie and Patty case from day one. The Restine family said he came by almost daily to update them on the case, to the point where he felt comfortable enough to make coffee in their kitchen. They viewed him as a friend more than an investigator.
In 1962, he left the State Police and returned his patrol car to Santa Fe headquarters. He had just gotten a new job as an Eddy County Sheriff’s Deputy. He worked there for about two years and people said he was a “model” and “polished” officer. He continued to dig into the Mattie and Patty case, doing more than anyone else on the case by that point. He now had better jurisdiction and more access to evidence in his new position.
So everyone was blown away when he was found dead in his office in the Eddy County Courthouse on January 4, 1965. He was found around midnight by two other officers in the office. He had a .38 bullet hole through his chest.
A suicide note was found in the office with his body. The note has never been published, but the Carlsbad Current-Argus released one line: “Hell could be no worse than this….I hate to let you down.”
No one understood why he did it. He was only 32 with a bright career ahead of him and a family. The month before he had fallen ill and gone to the hospital in Carlsbad for tests, and then he was told he needed to see a specialist in El Paso. But that shouldn’t have been cause for suicide with the emotional support he had from his family and the medical support he could have received.
However, the Restines don’t believe that McGrew committed suicide. His sister doesn’t believe it, either. McGrew had been on the Mattie and Patty case for three years and probably uncovered things he shouldn’t have. He had also been involved in the obviously coerced confession from Jimmy “Buddy” Parsons. Evidence or notes may have been taken from his office when he was murdered, and no one would know. The suicide note could have been faked. Did anyone compare it to his handwriting?
Rumors began to swirl among Carlsbad residents that Dan McGrew was actually the killer and that’s why he took his own life. This rumor started because McGrew was driving along Highway 285 near Rocky Arroyo around the time the girls were thought to have been killed. He was returning back from Santa Fe. His intense interest in the case could have also been taken as a sign of guilt. McGrew supposedly confessed to Jimmy Buddy Parsons, but I don’t know who said that.
The Restine family and other law enforcement officers don’t think he had anything to do with the crime. There is no hard evidence that he was involved, at least. And a police cruiser (which is what McGrew was driving at the time) probably wouldn’t have nearly bald tires.
Then, just 5 years after McGrew’s death, T.E. Gene Lusk shot himself in the head. Lusk was the attorney who represented Buddy Parsons. He advocated for Parsons to be declared mentally incompetent in court. His position in the case indicates that he had a lot of inside information about it.
On February 15, 1969, Lusk was visiting his wife at the hospital as she recovered from a heart attack. He went into the adjoining bathroom and shot himself in the head, by the ear, with a .32 gun. He died within two hours. No one knows why he killed himself. He had recently lost the 1966 gubernatorial election for the Democratic party, but he had good chances of winning if he ran again. His wife was also out of the woods for her heart attack. His life seemed good from the outside.
It is interesting that two people tied to the Mattie and Patty murders shot themselves mysteriously in the 60s. The two deaths beg the question, “Did both McGrew and Lusk know something so horrible that they lost all hope?” Or was this just a dark coincidence?
The 2003 Case Reopening
In 2003, Investigator Jim Estrada reopened the case. He was determined to pick up where the investigation had stalled decades prior. He reviewed a lot of evidence, re-interviewed suspects, and mentioned he wanted to complete the work that W.C. Dan McGrew had done before he died.
At the same time, through a series of coincidences, a reporter named Dawn Bowen at the Carlsbad Current-Argus became aware of the case. Bowen found the picture of the girls captivating and so she became determined to help solve their case. In March 2003, she published an article detailing information that had recently come to light, as well as Jim Estrada’s plans to reopen the case that year. Bowen had contact with the former District Attorney prosecuting the case, J. Lee Cathey, and Mattie Restine’s sister, Ann Self (nee Restine). She was able to find out a lot of things from these two people that helped fuel the renewed investigation.
On top of that, Ann Self never gave up. She is still trying to push Eddy County sheriffs to test DNA from the scene against family members of four strong suspects. These family members apparently have volunteered their DNA – but the Eddy County Sheriff’s Office won’t run the tests for an unknown reason.
Self has written extensively about the murders on Websleuths, pointing out clues, connections, and incidents where law enforcement appear to be stalling the investigation. With Patty’s family largely uninterested in getting involved, and Mattie’s parents and brother now deceased, Self is the only family member left to advocate for the little girls who were cruelly murdered in 1961.
With all of this renewed interest, it seemed that this case might finally be solved. Mattie was even exhumed in 2003 and reexamined by a forensic pathologist before being re-buried in Oklahoma, near her mother and her baby sister who had died of heart complications at six months old. As I mentioned before, DNA was sent to a private lab and other DNA was sent to the FBI for storage at this time.
Estrada triumphantly announced that the case was almost solved in 2003. But then he suddenly announced that he was retiring in 2004, without mentioning the case again. He abandoned the case thereafter and no one knows why. Little has been done with the case since and it is, once again, cold.
Now let’s delve into the suspects. They are all deceased now. But I think there is still the possibility of matching evidence to one of them – the car’s description, the shoe size, DNA compared to family members. Why hasn’t any of this been done already? That’s what everyone interested in the case wants to know.
Willard Melton and Willie Blair
Willard (Bill) Melton and Willie Blair were the two rabbit hunters who found the bodies of Mattie and Patty. But a lot of suspicion swirled around Blair, who is now deceased. Blair allegedly had been fishing and hunting the day before and had spent many hours in the area where the bodies would be found the next day. He also had a prior history of sexual assault against a few ten-year-old girls and he only got off due to an alibi given by Mr. and Mrs. Hughes. Interestingly, Mr. and Mrs. Hughes also provided him an alibi for August 11, saying he was fishing on their land.
Police tried to get him in for a polygraph. Blair said he might consider it, but he didn’t want to take the day off work just to take a test. Later on, police tried to track him down to get him to submit to the test, but he dodged them successfully. Ultimately he never did come in for the test.
Bill Melton worked at a local potash mine. He told his co-workers that he suspected Willie Blair. He said that Blair had suggested the two hunt rabbits in the Rocky Arroyo location on August 12. This seemed strange to him, as the two men were not close friends and had never been hunting together before. Blair was the one who picked the spot, which conveniently was where the two girls were. During the hunt, Blair seemed distracted and didn’t bag any rabbits, as if he had another motive for being out there. Melton said that he couldn’t see the bodies at all from where they were hunting; Blair was the one who spotted the red shorts and led Melton to the bodies – almost as if he already knew they were there.
When talking to police, Willie Blair straight up lied about his activities on August 12. He claimed that he fished at a friend’s place with his wife, Artell Blair. They then returned home with the friends, who stayed for a little while. After the friends left, the Blairs supposedly turned in at about 10. What he failed to mention was that he drove his son David Blair to Monahans, TX, around midnight that night. That seems like a weird thing to just “forget.” Blair frequently mixed up dates so his statements were an ever-shifting mess of contradictions.
On top of that, guess Willie Blair’s shoe size? Yep, 7.5! He was known to wear work boots because he was a potash miner. I can’t imagine too many other men in Carlsbad had such small feet. It’s a rare foot size for men.
His wife, Artell Blair, staunchly refuses to talk about the case with anyone. Why would his wife be so reluctant to speak? Does she know more than she has let on? There were rumors that she had been having an affair with a local judge and may have helped cover up the crime for her husband and son.
Ann Self strongly suspects Willie Blair knew about the bodies because he helped his son, David Blair, dispose of the girls. This is compounded by the fact that Willie Blair helped David move to Monahans, TX, on a whim that same night. All of this evidence does make him look bad, but unfortunately, it’s all circumstantial.
David Blair
Willie Blair’s son was named David Blair. He may have had some kind of romantic liaison with Patty Pritz, despite being 22 when she was only 14, and despite having a wife named Bonnie with whom he shared small children. Patty wrote in her journal that “David called” shortly before she died. So David Blair is suspected to have been her suitor.
There were also rumors that Patty was pregnant with David Blair’s child when she died. But the autopsy did not find evidence of pregnancy. However, David did get charged with indecent conduct for impregnating a sixteen-year-old girl after the murders, indicating he did have an affinity for underage girls.
The night of the murders, David’s wife Bonnie reported that David came home at midnight, clearly agitated. He began packing, refusing to tell her where he was going or what had happened. Then his parents came home from fishing (recall they told police that they had arrived home well before midnight) and Willie Blair told Bonnie that David had just gotten a job in Monahans, TX. His parents then promptly drove him to Monahans, 126 miles away, in the wee hours of August 12, leaving Bonnie and the kids behind.
It seems really unusual to get a job at midnight and leave right away with such urgency. This sounds like his parents were trying to give him an alibi and get him out of town. However, there is the possibility that David’s new job was on a drill rig where a worker had just been maimed or fired. In this case, it would have been an emergency to fill the position to keep the rig running. David’s car was getting worked on so that may be why his parents escorted him to Monahans.
David Blair fits the description of the man in the car that picked up the girls. He was about twenty at the time of the murders. He had black hair and was husky and about six feet tall. It is unknown what his shoe size was and law enforcement never properly looked into that. He apparently bore a resemblance to Elvis and often wore white T-shirts. Remember the descriptions of the man trying to get the girls into his car that night?
Blair had beaten his wife in the past, causing two miscarriages. Years after the girls were killed, Blair was convicted of raping a teacher’s daughter and spent 9 months in Santa Fe Correctional Facility for this. This demonstrates that he was capable of violence against women.
Bonnie also stated that David Blair drove a cream 1959 Mercury car that his dad had been working on for him. This would jibe with a car having bald tires – the car was a few years old and Blair was often unemployed so he didn’t have much money for tires. However, a 1959 Mercury looks quite different from a 55 or 56 Chevy, so it doesn’t match witness reports of the car that had been seen picking up the girls or the one seen near Rocky Arroyo by the Crafts. Since his dad was working on the car, maybe he borrowed a car from someone? What kind of car did his dad drive? Police never documented that information.
I am troubled that law enforcement didn’t seem to really look into David Blair. They could have easily found his new place of employment and confirmed if he had been called in at midnight on August 12. They also could have found out his shoe size and the type of car his dad drove. In a small town like Carlsbad where people don’t have anything better to do than gossip, they surely could have found out if he was dating Patty Pritz. Everything about David Blair seems really suspicious and yet he was never really investigated.
David Blair died in 1998 at only 57. So he can’t be questioned anymore. But DNA could still be obtained from his surviving relatives.
Earl Nichols
When Dawn Bowen started writing about Mattie and Patty in 2003, she triggered an influx of tips. And one of those tips seemed like paydirt. The elderly daughter of a man named Earl Nichols called in, implicating her father.
Earl Nichols was in Carlsbad at the time of the murders. He was visiting family for a week. On August 11, he was seen hanging around the municipal office, across from the Beach. He also drove a white 53 Chevrolet, which may have been the suspicious car Linda Lou Roberts and Nancy Moseley saw near the Beach. It is not known if this car had a broken front grill or worn tires.
The day after the murders, Earl was seen with scratches on his face. This jibes with the skin found under Patty’s nails from defending herself. Nichols also apparently had details about the crime that only a person who had personally been there would know. What these details are has never been disclosed to the public.
Earl was supposed to stay in Carlsbad for a week. But he cut his visit short quite suddenly on August 12. He packed up his things and left in his car in a hurry. That looks pretty suspicious, right?
The worst thing about Earl was that he had a history of crimes against children. He had been abusive to his daughter and to other girls in the past. Earl drifted around New Mexico and Texas, staying with family while working odd jobs in construction, restaurants, and railroads. At one time, he worked at a restaurant and attempted to rape a young girl in the back room. The girl got away and Earl Nichols was never charged.
Earl Nichols died about 3 years after the murders and he was buried in Big Spring, TX. Some Websleuths point out that he was 73 at the time of the murders and probably not in great health due to the fact he died just 3 years later. So that casts doubt on whether or not he had the strength to carry the girls from his car to the dump site. Furthermore, Nichols was in Carlsbad visiting, not living, so his car would have had Texas plates. A few of the witness sightings of the suspicious cream-colored Chevy mentioned New Mexico plates.
Cullen Davidson
Cullen Davidson was Patty Pritz’s stepfather. Her mother, Betty Jo Davidson, had married 4 or 5 times and was with Cullen at the time the girls were killed. They divorced not long after the murders. Rumors implicated him in the crimes. A friend of Ronnie Rice’s even called Ronnie Rice and asked if Cullen had done it.
Enough abuse and homicide happens between stepfathers and stepdaughters that Davidson is a viable suspect for that reason alone. Yet it is unclear if detectives even really investigated him. They seemed to let him be after he passed a lie detector test.
The Davidson family did not treat Patty very well. They did not give her much love. Her mother refused to let her biological father see her and Patty was not allowed to know her half-siblings on her father’s side. Her mother also pulled a gun on Patty once. Patty’s half-sister later said that their mother was “the devil incarnate” and she did not care for the children well. This explains why Patty started dating so young – she was seeking external validation to make up for the lack of love she experienced at home.
There were also apparently guns in the home. It’s not known if the guns were ever tested against the weapon that had killed the girls. If a .38 was in the home, it definitely should have been tested.
In the years since the murders, Cullen Davidson has been particularly adamant about leaving the case alone. This seems strange. If my stepchild was killed, I would maintain an active interest in the case being solved.
Ronnie Rice
Ronnie Rice was Patty’s boyfriend at the time she was murdered. He was 17 and worked at McDonald’s Dry Goods. He has never been officially tied to the crime, but there is some circumstantial evidence that makes people wonder about him.
Whoever killed Patty clearly had a deep hatred of her. This is evidenced by the violence inflicted on her, the degrading way her body had been mutilated and left naked, and the way her grave had been desecrated. The investigation indicated she may have been cheating on Ronnie Rice with David Blair and possibly other boys, too. If Rice had found out she was cheating, this may have given him motive to kill her.
Ronnie Rice was one of the last few people to see Patty and Mattie alive. They allegedly visited him at the dry goods store before they disappeared that night. If he saw them after they stopped by his work, he did not admit to it.
Patty’s mother did not like Ronnie Rice for some reason. She had even threatened him and Patty with a shotgun when they came to Patty’s house.
Rice was also known for sleeping in a car. It is thought he could have been the person witnessed sleeping in the car near the bodies.
Bob Rabe
One lead Dawn Bowen shared in her article came from J. Lee Cathey’s contact with a witness named Bob Rabe. Rabe had started calling Cathey with tips starting the same day Cathey entered the DA role. Rabe claimed that in 1961, he had been staying at a hotel in Carlsbad, doing insurance adjustments. That’s when he met two men working at a gas station, whom he partied with. These two men were young at the time and later went on to become professionals in other cities. Rabe strongly insinuated that these two mysterious men had committed the murders. He also claimed he was still good friends with them. Cathey interviewed them and they were incredulous at Rabe’s claims and had no idea what he was talking about.
As Rabe talked more and more with Cathey, he became increasingly suspicious. He began to get belligerent, often yelling at Cathey for accusing him of the crimes, though Cathey never accused Rabe of anything. Cathey administered a polygraph to Rabe, and the results were inconclusive – in other words, worthless. Rabe called Cathey the day after the polygraph, demanding to know the results, as if he were nervous about them.
When Cathey lost an election and vacated the DA position, Rabe called his predecessor, McCormick, claiming that he had told Cathey who committed the murders but Cathey did nothing about it. Cathey calmly explained to the new DA that Rabe had simply led him on and played games with him for years, never actually revealing anything useful.
I think this seems highly suspicious. Why was Bob Rabe injecting himself into the case so much? Why did he get so emotional and defensive, believing he was being accused of the crimes? Why did he call immediately after the polygraph, as if he was nervous about the results? Rabe was in the area at the time of the crimes and he was not known to locals, which would have helped him evade later witness statements. I wonder if he drove a white or cream-colored Chevy?
A research group formed by Jim Estrada in the 2003 reopening concluded that Bob Rabe was the strongest suspect. I could not find their research but it seems that they combed the case files thoroughly.
Rabe died in 1999. So whatever he really knew has gone to the grave with him. I think that Cathey suspected him, though he never outright said it. It is unfortunate that more can’t be done at this point to investigate Rabe. Does he have any living relatives to volunteer DNA?
The Unnamed Twenty-Year-Old
An unnamed young man came under suspicion because he had been attempting to pick up young girls in Carlsbad in his car prior to and just after the Mattie and Patty murders. He was about twenty but his physical description was not in the papers. He passed a lie detector test so he was released to his parents. His parents were instructed to take him to psychiatric testing at the Lovelace Hospital in Albuquerque.
Nothing else was written about him – not even his name or the results of his psychiatric testing. But the fact he was preying on young girls in the weeks surrounding August 11, 1961, is definitely disturbing. I can’t believe he was released on lie detector results alone. I guess in the 1960s, they still thought polygraphs were accurate enough. Now they aren’t even admissible in court.
Charles Titus
Though not a true suspect, some people suspect Charles Titus of having something to do with the cover-up over the deaths. There are many interesting things that tie him to the case from Day One.
First off, Charles Titus was a cop in Monahans, TX. Yet for some reason, he showed up at the scene of Mattie and Patty’s bodies. He had no jurisdiction and no business being there. Of course, he could have just been bored that day and decided to join in the stampede at the crime scene. This isn’t necessarily incriminating.
What is incriminating is his dogged and persistent interest in the case thereafter. He was always calling the police in Carlsbad for updates and nosing around in the case even though it wasn’t in his jurisdiction.
A year later, Titus arrested “Buddy” Parsons for vagrancy and then took him to Eddy County for questioning in relation to the murders. It is odd that Titus was knowledgeable about in the murders and then found a suspect who happened to be mentally incapacitated.
Then, he was present the night Dan McGrew supposedly committed suicide in 1964. Titus had called Dan McGrew when he supposedly killed himself. He thought the sound of the gunshot was a door slamming shut. The other two officers in the building with McGrew definitely knew the sound was a gunshot.
Websleuths also found a connection was found between Charles Titus and Artell Blair. Titus apparently knew her and their families came from the same small town in Texas. It is unclear if they are related, however. Titus refused to talk to police about what he knew without Artell Blair present, which seems really weird. It just seems to implicate the Blairs more.
Furthermore, David Blair briefly moved to Monahans the very night of the crimes, which happened to be under Titus’s jurisdiction. This could be a total coincidence, but given Titus’s closeness to Artell Blair, it raises the question: Was Titus the one who offered David Blair his surprise job at midnight August 11? And did he have interest in protecting David Blair? Could it be that he was trying to cover up David Blair’s involvement, and so he misdirected law enforcement toward Buddy Parsons?
Connections to Other Crimes
Police thought that the Mattie and Patty murders might be related to the Lea County Triple Murder of 1957. The two intended victims of the Lea County triple murder, Barbara Lemmons and Dorothy Gibson, were both women. They were taken out into the desert and shot with a .22. The same MO was used in the murders of Mattie and Patty, though they were shot with .38. Maybe there was a local predator – or predators – who liked to prey on vulnerable females?
Early in the investigation, detectives also thought that Mattie and Patty’s murders might be related to the murder and dismemberment of Charles Cox and the headless torso found in the Rio Grande. This lead was abandoned, but I wonder what made them see a connection in the first place?
Just a few months prior to the deaths, police had investigated a sexually mutilated doll or mannequin, found buried in a shallow grave 2.5 miles south of Carlsbad. This doll spooked a lot of people. Once the girls were murdered, locals panicked about a sexual deviant on the loose. People worried that the cases were related. No connection was ever established, however.
My Thoughts on the Case
From this crime scene, I sense a lot of revenge and hatred toward Patty. Mattie was killed because she was a witness, in the wrong place at the wrong time. The murder and the way Patty was left naked in the desert was an attempt to hurt, demoralize, and dehumanize her. In other words, it was a very personal crime. The semen on Mattie’s clothes may have gotten there while the murderer raped Patty.
I also think Patty was killed by someone she knew. This is because she and Mattie willingly got into a car with a guy. I also think this because of how her grave was desecrated later on. The grave desecration really indicates a level of deep personal hatred for Patty.
Patty’s clothes really confuse me. Why were some neatly folded, yet her undergarments and cap were thrown every which way? I wonder if Patty may have folded the clothes herself. The killer ordered her to disrobe and she sensed death was coming, so she gingerly folded her clothes to buy herself time. Then the killer got impatient and ripped her underwear off, hurling them around.
But then, what about the fact the girls didn’t appear to have been killed at that desert spot? That just makes the mixture of thrown and folded clothes even more puzzling. I seriously wonder if the killer was dumping the bodies and setting out Patty’s clothes methodically when he got spooked (maybe by the Crafts driving by) and flung the remaining items out in a hurry before fleeing the area.
I also wonder where they were killed if not in the desert. There had to have been a very messy crime scene. That crime scene was cleaned up so well that it was never found, and nobody heard gunshots or saw anything amiss. I wonder if they were shot inside the car?
The Blairs seem like the most problematic suspects to me. So many suspicious circumstances swirl around them. Of all the suspects, I think David Blair is the strongest. I think this because of the type of creep David Blair was, preying on underage girls and beating women, and because of the suspicious way he fled town that night. I think his dad helped him dispose of the bodies because of the 7.5 shoe prints at the scene and the way Willie Blair lied about helping his son leave town and the way he knew where to find the bodies the next day.
I also wonder about Bonnie Blair. Out of all the people mentioned in connection with this case, she would have the most reason to hate Patty Pritz. Patty was possibly fooling around with her husband and she was young and pretty. Patty may also have been with David Blair that night. This would explain why Patty was left naked, to humiliate her, but probably not raped. It would also explain the small shoe size. Bonnie Blair was very sure to implicate her husband, but nobody has corroborated her story about David Blair leaving town that night. The neat way Patty’s clothes were folded seems like a female thing to do, and the way her diary was left on top, containing a reference to David, seems like a clue planted to further implicate him.
Just pure speculation here, of course. If it were a woman, then the presence of semen on Mattie’s clothes wouldn’t make sense. Maybe there was a woman at the scene, but it was Artell Blair, helping her husband cover up her son’s crime?
I admit that I could be dead wrong and there are just too many unknowns in this case. And that brings me to some thoughts I have about the white or cream-colored 55 Chevy car. I almost wonder if this car is a a red herring. We actually don’t have any proof that the person in the car was involved in the deaths at all. It has been assumed this whole time, but never confirmed. If you don’t get myopic about the car, then you realize that the timeline crumbles and the picture widens to include other possibilities that have never been eliminated by evidence. The timeline is built entirely on sketchy witness accounts, with no hard evidence.
The girls were supposedly seen getting into a car around 9 pm and the description of the car is mostly the same across witnesses, but it varies a bit. Where they got into the car varies, too. Then the Crafts witnessed a car with a broken front grill near the site of the dead bodies around 10:00 pm. So this has caused investigators to assume the girls were killed between 9 and 10 and dumped in the area by the car seen by the Crafts.
But what if they weren’t killed by the man in the car along this timeframe? Maybe they got into the ’55 cream-colored Chevy and hung out with some young man, partying and having fun? Then he dropped them off somewhere and another person targeted them, maybe a jealous ex-boyfriend of Patty’s, or her boyfriend Ronnie Rice, or her stepfather, or a lurking predator.
Also, someone could have dumped them out in Rocky Arroyo later at night, long after the Crafts drove by. The car with round headlights and a broken front grill that we’ve been looking for all this time may not even be tied to the case. Or maybe it is tied to the case, but it’s not the same car that the girls were seen getting into earlier. See what I mean about how the car could be a red herring?
I’m also not convinced that there really was an extensive law enforcement cover-up. The suicide of Dan McGrew may have had to do with his recent ill health; Lusk’s suicide had something to do with his mental state over his wife’s health and his election loss; Charles Titus was just in the thick of things, being law enforcement with ties to both New Mexico and Texas. Parsons was an unfortunate victim of cops trying to solve a case and make themselves look competent when they really weren’t. Now, cops won’t return Ann Self’s calls because they are too busy with the influx of crime that the oil boom has brought to the area. Evidence hasn’t been properly tested due to a lack of funding and manpower. There are so many explanations for all the supposed signs of the cover-up.
One of the tenements of the cover-up theory is that Artell Blair had ties to law enforcement and some sort of tight connection with Charles Titus that enabled her to keep law enforcement from investigating her husband and son. That is pretty flimsy if you put it under a microscope. The Blairs were not rich people; Artell had been a nurse, Willie had worked in the potash mine, and David was largely unemployed. Willie also wasn’t particularly well-liked or well-respected. It doesn’t seem like this family would have the kind of political clout that people are giving them credit for. Even the possible kinship between Artell Blair and Charles Titus would not exert a strong influence on attorneys, judges, cops, and other key players in the case.
Honestly, it seems more likely to me that cops were just untrained, underfunded, and limited by the forensics of the time. Living in a small town also made them feel they knew their neighbors, which probably made pursuing suspects difficult. You don’t want your neighbor to hate you forever because you wrongly fingered him as a suspect, for instance. You also don’t want to believe that your buddy since kindergarten is a child murderer. So cops let things slide that they shouldn’t have. But this does not indicate a large-scale, elaborate cover-up.
Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter what I think or what anyone thinks. All the theories in the world won’t close this case. Only hard evidence can. There is plenty of that, but as time goes on, the likelihood of solving the case only grows smaller as police drag their feet on evidence that could be used now.
I do think there’s still hope this case will be solved, especially since there is DNA. But for now, this is just one of many cold cases in a pile that grows ever higher in New Mexico. The main suspects are already all dead. Memories have faded with time.
Will there ever be justice for Mattie and Patty?
The Aftermath
The Restines were never the same. Jackie Restine, Mattie’s mother, was broken after the double murder and never trusted anyone. She obsessively checked the door and window locks. She succumbed to a heart attack at 55, despite no history of cardiac problems prior. Her family says she grieved herself to death.
Mattie’s brother, Bill, searched for Mattie while she was missing and was at the scene of the bodies after they were located. He saw Mattie’s face in the ambulance window after she was loaded up. That image haunted him until he took his own life in 1999.
Her other little brother, John Restine, was only 5 when she was killed. He nurses anger against the killer for destroying his family.
Ann Self lives in Oklahoma and fights to keep her sister’s memory and case alive. Despite constant disappointment, she has persevered. She has amassed a lot of information on the case over the years that could be very useful to a detective or prosecutor. However, she has encountered resistance from law enforcement and they often won’t return her calls or follow up on leads for her. The pain will never end for her, either.
In addition to the horror of going through a child murder, the Restines also had to deal with harassing phone calls and people peeping in their windows for weeks after the murders. No one knows who made these calls. I don’t know if it was the killer or just cruel, cruel people with too much time on their hands. I can’t imagine what that must have felt like.
Patty’s half-sister recalls being traumatized by the crime, too. She said the family was broken after that. Her father (Patty’s bio dad) had not been kept from Patty and her sister Connie by their mother. He grieved the death horribly. The family never talked about the crime but the sister remembers a darkness hanging over everyone that she couldn’t shake in 35 years of therapy.
Only when she met Ann Self did she begin to learn about the truth about the case and heal. She advocated for the murder to be solved in a way that no one else in the Pritz family did. The Pritz family seemed to want to leave the crime alone. Of course, it is understandable why, with all the obfuscation nd frustration in the case. But more advocacy from the family could help goad police to finally solve this case.
It has now been 5 decades since Mattie and Patty died. Their case is no closer to being solved than it was back in 1961. Researching it only gave me more questions than answers. Whenever there is a glimmer of hope that the case will be solved, something dashes it. Without a doubt, these girls and their families deserve better. I can only imagine the pain and frustration that Ann Self and other survivors must feel. The double murder also traumatized all of Carlsbad, with playgrounds empty and parents anxious for their children for years afterward.
Rest in peace, Mattie and Patty. I’m so, so sorry for what you went through.
Sources
The Carlsbad Current-Argus
