Wendy Budde

She said, I'm scared of him, especially if he's been drinking.

I told her, you need to get a divorce. You need to be done with this, Angela.

I got on my phone.

And I looked, and it said Mississippi Ridge Boarding Kennels. Shots fired.

And I immediately was hysterical. because Angela Pritchard was my sister. Angie!

She was the sticky note queen.

Her words to me are, I'm done. This is it. We're not living in the same house.

I was like, you have a shadow now because I'm not leaving. You're stuck with me.

We actually got behind an ambulance on the way up there.

We walked in the front door. The house was destroyed. There was ink and paint thrown everywhere.

Furniture was destroyed. He had actually taken the mattress off her bed and rubbed it in dog feces.

I mean, we both just started crying.

The police said, there's nothing we can do. This is his house.

This is his house as well.

He had been driving by her house multiple times.

Yeah, pretty much, and that's what it felt like.

Yes. What do you do when nobody's willing to help you?

The fear, it consumed our life.

And I got out of the car. I went running. Down the hill. There was police officers there. And I remember walking up to them. And I said, is she alive? And they said no. I immediately fell to the ground. And I remember saying something like, I knew something like this was going to happen. I knew it was. I knew it was.

We were outside the courthouse just kind of stretching and, you know, the jury's back.

That's got to be a good sign that they're back in less than an hour.

When they said it, it was just a big sigh of relief.

It will never bring her back, but he's going to spend the rest of his life behind bars. I also gave a victim impact statement and I said to him, I hope while you're behind bars, you always have to look over your shoulder and be scared for everything you do. How she felt, I hope you just feel a tiny bit of that. The way you tortured her.

I still to this day have a lot of, I guess it's guilt, because I think in my mind, what if I would have went with her that day? Maybe I could have saved her. But part of me was so proud of her for being as strong as she was in that time. She, she named her killer. And she helped them bring him to justice.

He knew how to get in the front door.

100%.

100% I knew it was him.

I remember her saying, I don't know what else to do. I don't know where else to turn.

Every time she was out of my sight, I was so scared for her.

He knows the outdoors. I knew that he could probably survive out there for quite a while in hiding.

Yeah, yeah.

Everything I've been trying so hard to protect her and to keep her safe, and he got her. He got to her.

She left the house that day at 20 after 7. Ange was working at the kennels. I texted Ange a quick note. I didn't get a response. Then the sirens went off in town.

You hear a lot of people say people put their kids in front of themselves. That was truly her.

I would have trusted him with our children. He was nice, friendly, sincere, a hard worker, fun to be around.

To be a kennel owner, to do something with animals. I was thrilled for her. It really seemed like everything was falling into place.

I truly think that things started to change when he lost his job. He got fired.

She was just beside herself. What are we going to do now? We need that income back.

He wasn't looking for work. He was definitely drinking more. As the months went on, it just was like, wow, he's really kind of changing.

And then I knew that things are really getting bad.

She was crying. She was visibly shaking. She had a mark on her face, and she said, I'm so scared.

He's very, very, very messed up. Yeah. We've seen him change right in front of our eyes, haven't we?

even after it happened. She said, I don't want this. I want our marriage to work.

And living in a small town, you're always kind of nosy and you want to know what's going on.

I believe he said everything that needed to be said for her to drop that order. The drinking will stop. He will be home more.