Clayton Butsch drove to Davin Kirk Thomas’ house near Lake Stevens in a borrowed car, saying he needed a hand.
“He said he had Santa Claus in the trunk of the car and needed help,” Thomas testified Tuesday in Snohomish County Superior Court.
Did Thomas help?
“Hell no, at first,” Thomas said.
But Butsch and his girlfriend, Shelley Holly, kept returning. Thomas finally relented.
That was part of what Thomas told a jury in the first-degree murder trial of Butsch, 40, of Lake Stevens.
Prosecutors say Butsch fired two .22-caliber gunshots into the head of Chad Vavricka, 30, on Jan. 24, 2004. They say Butsch is a delusional drug addict who told others his pet cat, Sam, had special powers.
Butsch apparently believed that the cat told him Vavricka was stealing from him. The cat indicated this by refusing to approach Vavricka, who was sleeping in a chair, prosecutors said.
“It’s sad I got dragged into this,” Thomas testified.
Earlier this year, Thomas pleaded guilty to rendering criminal assistance for helping Butsch. He is serving time in a work-release program.
Thomas drove Holly’s pickup to the Machias Cutoff road and signaled a place where the body and some garbage could be dumped near a construction site. Butsch was right behind him in the borrowed car.
Thomas said he saw Butsch pull a wrapped body out of the truck and set it on the ground. Thomas quickly dumped two garbage cans from the bed of the pickup and took off.
“He wanted to chop the body up in my garage,” Thomas testified. “There was no way.”
He told jurors it was several days before he found out the victim was Vavricka, a friend who went by the initials P.W.
“I had nothing bad to say about P.W.,” Thomas said. “I was stupid to touch this situation. I was stupid.”
The defense contends there is no physical evidence linking Butsch with the shooting, and it could have been Holly or one of two other people in the trailer who shot Vavricka.
At the end of Thomas’ testimony, he blurted out that he had taken a lie detector test in connection with the case, despite a court order telling him not to do so in front of the jury.
Mill Creek defense attorney Kelli Armstrong-Smith asked Judge Ellen Fair for a mistrial because the utterance might prejudice the jury against Butsch. Deputy prosecutor Janice Albert objected.
Fair said she will let both sides argue their points this morning before deciding whether to call a mistrial.
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