Glenn Puit - Witch: The True Story of Las Vegas’ Most Notorious Female Killer

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Table of Contents

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
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(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
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(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,
South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

WITCH

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley mass-market edition / December 2005

Copyright 2005 by Glenn Puit

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

eISBN : 978-0-425-20719-2

BERKLEY
Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The B design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

http://us.penguingroup.com

This book is dedicated to my late grandfather, Glenn Edick, and my mother, Dolores Hicks, who currently lives in upstate New York. Without you two, who knows where Id be.

Authors Note

In the spring of 2001, I was assigned to cover the criminal case of Brookey Lee West for Nevadas largest newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal. I had no inkling at the time that the assignment would prompt a tumultuous, three-year personal odysseysome would say obsessionto document the most remarkable criminal case Ive ever come across in my journalism career.

West was a successful technical writer who seemed to have it all when she was arrested in Vegas on charges she killed her own mother. Following her arrest, authorities detailed a suspected crime spree spanning two decades and two states, and when it was over, two were dead, one was missing and at least two others were victimized in frightening acts of violence.

The seeds of the mayhem, according to Las Vegas authorities, can be traced to the occult, and more specifically, witchcraft and Satanism.

In 2003, I met with Brookey Lee West at the Southern Nevada Womens Correctional Center in North Las Vegas, and despite an avalanche of evidence against her, she denies all of the accusations. For the record, she denies being a witch, a Satanist or a killer. Ill let you decide on each of those issues.

In 2004, I spent nearly two days with West discussing her life in tape-recorded interviews, and she is an enigma of a human being. To this day, after three years of researching her life, I still havent quite figured her out, and many of the police officers who investigated her for a decade in California and Las Vegas will tell you the same thing.

But there are three things I can say about West with absolute certainty. First, she is extremely intelligent. She is not your typical criminal defendant. Second, West has a history of mental illnessshe herself will tell you as much. And third, she had a truly horrible childhood. In my humble opinion, it was her mental illness and her upbringing that played a huge role in determining why she ended up where she is today.

Before we get to Wests story, however, I need to give you a primer for what is coming. For you to fully comprehend the contents of this book, you have to understand Brookey Lee Wests family, and to do that, you must familiarize yourself with the basic players in the West clan.

Wests mother is Christine Smith. Her father is Leroy Smith. Her brother is Travis Smith, and her stepmother is Chloe Smith,* i.e., Leroy Smiths second wife. If you can keep West and these four family members straight in your mind, you should have no problems following the complex series of events documented in this book.

I used the standard news-gathering principles in putting together Witch. The book is based on two years of interviews with dozens of witnesses and approximately 3,000 pages of law enforcement and court documents gathered in Nevada and California through open-record laws. Unlike other true-crime books, you will find no re-created conversations in Witch. The quotes in this book came either from my interviews with witnesses or from the police reports, although I have edited some quotes for the sake of clarity and brevity.

For a handful of witnesses in the book, I was obligated to use false names, or pseudonyms, to protect their privacy. Each pseudonym is noted by an asterisk. However, I used false names very, very sparingly. I used them only for witnesses who were the victims of a violent crime and who requested anonymity, or for those who are the subject of allegations made by West herself, and the veracity of those allegations could not be verified in any other independent way.

Otherwise, if someone gave a statement to the police in the Brookey Lee West case, then their name is in this book. Their comments are, by law, a matter of public record.

It is also important for you to understand that the contents of this book are not meant to demean the legitimate Wiccan following in the United States. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the United States who identify themselves as Wiccans or witches, and they do not use the craft for evil.

Special thanks go to: Brookey Lee West, who was kind enough to meet with me so her side of the story could be told; literary agent Jim Cypher, who helped make all this possible; Samantha Mandor, my editor at Berkley Books; the Las Vegas Review-Journals editors, who gave me my chance at the big time in the news business nearly a decade ago; former Clark County, Nevada, district attorney Stewart Bell, who granted my massive records requests; Nevada prosecutor Frank Coumou, who guided me through the mass of paperwork; Clark County deputy public defender Scott Coffee, who is a true professional and a hell of an attorney; former Tulare County, California, homicide detective Daniel Haynes, who was kind enough to meet with me although he still cannot discuss facts surrounding the slaying of Wests husband; Las Vegas homicide detective Dave Mesinar; the Indiana State University journalism program in Terre Haute, Indiana; and all the other witnesses who gave their valuable time. I especially want to thank my wife, Tina. Only she knows what Ive been through in making this dream a reality.

Give me your blessing; truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long.

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

The downtown corridor of Las Vegas is a sinners paradise.

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