Disappearance Turns Into Murder Case

GLENROCK, Wyo. — When Martin Trusky first disappeared from his family’s isolated ranch in central Wyoming, his wife’s suggestion to neighbors that he’d run off with another woman seemed reasonable.

Moody with friends, violent toward his wife, jobless and uncomfortable with being alone to the point that friends said he’d keep his kids home from school now and then, Trusky was the kind of guy who just did quirky things.

“It wasn’t strange for him to take off and go and do something, whether it be with the family or without the family,” said Patti Kambestad, a neighbor and family friend. “It was never a strange thing for him to do.”

But now suspicion in this town has shifted toward Trusky’s wife, who police say crumbled sleeping tablets into her longtime husband’s mashed potatoes one snowy night, shot him with a .22-caliber rifle and stuffed his body behind a barn on their wind-swept farm.

Wendy Trusky turned 40 in Converse County jail last month, charged with first-degree murder and held on $100,000 bond. She has pleaded not guilty to the killing, though her lawyer filed court papers emblematic of a battered-woman defense; in one filing, he described her and their two young sons as being “systematically and routinely verbally, emotionally and physically abused.”

Her attorney, Quentin Richardson, declined a reporter’s requests to discuss the case.

The filing echoes a complaint that Wendy Trusky filed against her husband in June 1995. In it, she says that he drove her car through a gate in a fit of rage and that he kicked and choked her and threatened to break her legs on several occasions. She won a 90-day restraining order to keep him away, though he returned three days later and took the whole family to his mother’s until the order expired.

After finding Trusky’s decomposing body, wrapped in blankets and baling twine, beneath a tire pile, prosecutors believe they can prove that his wife, 5-foot-4 and 189 pounds, killed her 6-foot-3-inch, 300-pound husband, then dragged his body outside in a snowstorm.

Their strongest piece of evidence appears to be from Wendy Trusky’s own son, 15-year-old Eric. In an affidavit, the boy told investigators that he saw his mother crumble the medication into his father’s food. The boy said his mother told him that after the father fell asleep, she shot him.

Eric is charged in Juvenile Court with conspiracy to commit murder and is undergoing counseling at a children’s center. Another son, 12-year-old Jesse, is staying with relatives. The couple also has two older sons.

Friends describe a complex picture of the Truskys, who had been together more than 22 years and lived on a 64-acre subsistence ranch 13 miles from the nearest town--Glenrock, a town of 2,000 mainly populated by workers at the nearby power plant.

Unemployed, he spent a chunk of his time searching junkyards for parts for the variety of old heaps he kept on the ranch. Wendy Trusky mainly worked as a nurse. Kambestad describes Trusky as “a bear,” who was fun, intelligent, interesting and helpful.

“He was a likable person, but it was like a switch. If he was not in a good mood, you knew it,” she said.