As executions decline in Texas, a small-town prosecutor decides whether to seek the death penalty.
One morning in August 2011, Matagorda County District Attorney Steven Reis drove out to a crime scene at a remote, secluded farmhouse. A 78-year-old man named Glen Sam Prinzing had been found dead at his property on the edge of Markham, a town of a thousand residents 30 miles from the Gulf of Mexico and about 90 miles southwest of Houston.
The barn was several hundred yards off the main road. Reis drove with sheriff’s deputies over a bumpy dirt path, across an empty field, and past where yellow police tape cut through thick brush. It was a hot, sticky day, and Reis saw that the vegetation had tangled over all manner of rusting old junk: cars, a tractor, a refrigerator. They crossed a plank of wood placed as a makeshift walkway over a pool of muddy water. Reis, wandering into the farmhouse, saw several vintage motorcycles, some dating to World War II. They had mostly fallen into disrepair. The word “hoarder” came to mind.
Known to his friends as Sammy, Prinzing was a reclusive collector and avid Bible reader keeping up his family’s old rice farm. The day before, a neighbor had realized he hadn’t seen Sammy in several days and walked over to the farmhouse, where he found the body. At Prinzing’s age, natural causes would have been a plausible theory, but there was no doubt that something else was responsible: Prinzing’s head showed signs of blunt force trauma. Someone had beaten him to death.
Reis was called because he prosecutes murder cases in this area of southeast Texas, and he likes to see the crime scene firsthand. Seeing the scene helps him ask witnesses more informed questions if the case goes to trial. The sheriff’s deputies said that the motive appeared to be robbery. They deduced that someone had taken a metal rod and hit Prinzing in the head while he lay sleeping and then made off with some of the farm’s more valuable items. If that conjecture proved correct, the death penalty—eligible only for defendants who commit murder in conjunction with another crime such as robbery or sexual assault—would be an option.
But who even knew that Prinzing, living on his remote farm, had items to steal? The murder of a man with few friends and fewer enemies left little for law enforcement to investigate. Over the next few weeks, local deputies, Texas Rangers and Department of Public Safety investigators looked for clues and chased down leads. They found bloody fingerprints on the barn door but couldn’t match them to anyone. After a while, the case went cold.
Nearly two years later, in July 2013, a drifter named Robert Kotlar, while strung out on drugs, admitted to an acquaintance—who would become an anonymous tipster—that the authorities might be looking for him because he and two accomplices had broken into a farmhouse several years before and killed its owner. Kotlar was arrested for a parole violation at his home in El Campo, about 25 miles from Markham. His fingerprints matched the ones found on Prinzing’s barn door.
Nearly two years later, in July 2013, a drifter named Robert Kotlar, while strung out on drugs, admitted to an acquaintance—who would become an anonymous tipster—that the authorities might be looking for him because he and two accomplices had broken into a farmhouse several years before and killed its owner. Kotlar was arrested for a parole violation at his home in El Campo, about 25 miles from Markham. His fingerprints matched the ones found on Prinzing’s barn door.
Source: Texas Observer, Maurice Chammah, April 23, 2014