Part 1Cold Open: The Empty Pew
Monday, the twenty-sixth of November, two thousand and one. The Monday after Thanksgiving. Oklahoma City. There's a funeral this morning at Crossings Community Church, and the man they're saying goodbye to is thirty-nine years old. An advertising executive. A deacon at his church. A father of two. His name is Rob Andrew. Six days ago, somebody killed him. His family has come down from Enid. His father. His mother. His brothers. Three ministers lead the service. And at one point, one of them tells the room about something he found. Rob kept a prayer journal. And written in it was Rob's favorite passage of scripture. Luke, chapter twelve.
For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light. At a funeral, that sounds like comfort. Whatever's hidden comes out. That morning, I think, that's exactly how it sounded.
But there are three people who should be in that church, and aren't. Rob's wife. And his two children. A ten-year-old girl and a seven-year-old boy. Nobody seems to know where they are. And while the man who lives next door to her sits through that service with his wife, detectives are back at his house, taking away something he found in a closet the night before. Something he'll only describe to a reporter as incriminating evidence. After the funeral, Rob's family asks the police to go check on the house. Officers drive out. Twice. Nothing. So the family hands them a key. And the police walk in, and nobody's home. And the van is gone.
Nothing covered, that shall not be revealed. Rob Andrew had spent the last two months of his life trying to tell people exactly what he was afraid of. He told his family. He told his journal. He told the police. To understand how his family ended up in that church with those seats empty, we have to go back about twenty years, to a swimming pool in Enid, Oklahoma, and a girl who kept asking one of the Andrew boys about his big brother.
Part 2Show Introduction
Hello everyone, and welcome to Okie Investigations, brought to you in partnership with Forgotten True Crime. If you're a true crime fan, make sure you subscribe, so when we have new episodes you'll be the first to know. You can also find us on YouTube and Facebook at Forgotten True Crime. And visit our blog, Section29.com, where we post the cool things we find for every episode. For this one, that includes the newspaper coverage from 2001, pages from Rob Andrew's own prayer journal, and the court records. The links are all in the description below. Parts of this story may contain opinions and speculation, and should be taken as such. What I'm going to do today is tell you this story the way I've come to understand it, built out of the newspaper record, the trial testimony, and the court rulings. Where I'm reading between the lines, I'll tell you I'm doing it. These stories depict violent crimes and may be a trigger for some listeners. Listener discretion is advised. And a word about this one. It's a shooting, in a family's garage, with children inside the house. I won't linger on it more than I have to. Some of you may have heard me cover this case before, back in 2020. A lot has happened since then. So I went back to the very beginning, pulled the records, and started over. And this one isn't over. As of October 2026, when I'm recording this, it is still being fought in the courts. I'll tell you exactly where it stands at the end. And let me tell you, this story has everything. Two Sunday school teachers at a Baptist church. An eight-hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. Brake lines cut in the middle of the night. A cassette tape handed to the police the day before he died. A pew with nobody in it. And a fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. All of this happened in Oklahoma City, in the fall of two thousand and one. So let's start at the beginning.
Part 3Act One: The Boy From the Pool
Enid, Oklahoma. The early nineteen-eighties. Enid is wheat country. Grain elevators you can see from ten miles out, and in the summer, the one place every kid in town ends up is the swimming pool. That's where this story really starts. Not in a garage. At a swimming pool. Tom Andrew was the youngest of four brothers. And that summer, there was a girl at the pool who kept coming up and asking him about one of them. His older brother, Rob.
Tom told a reporter about it years later, and I love the way he tells it, so I'm going to let him. "She went to the same swimming pool we did. She always asked me about him. I went back and told him, 'This chick at the pool's been asking about you.' That's how they met. He came to pick me up in his car, and there she was."
Her name was Brenda Evers. She was a student at Chisholm High School, the same school Rob had graduated from in nineteen-eighty. Rob was up the road at Oklahoma State, working on a degree in advertising. He finished that degree in the spring of nineteen eighty-four. And on the second of June, nineteen eighty-four, Rob Andrew married Brenda Evers. He was twenty-one. Now, I want to tell you something Rob's father said, a long time after all of this, because it's going to sit in the back of this whole story. "Almost from the start," E.R. Andrew said, "there were problems." He didn't know what they were. Nobody in the family did. Not for years. Because Rob wasn't the kind of man who brought that sort of thing home. He was a man of deep faith, and he believed, strongly, that a marriage was not something you walk away from. Remember that. It's going to matter.
So, what was Rob Andrew like? By 1988 he was working at Jordan Associates, one of the advertising agencies in Oklahoma City, and he stayed there the rest of his life. He worked his way up to senior vice president, running the agency's telecommunications accounts. He won industry awards. People asked him to come and speak. He sat on the board of Junior Achievement, and on the board of Positive Tomorrows, a school in Oklahoma City for children without a home. That's the résumé. Here's the man. A woman named Barb Murcer-Green worked just across the hall from him at Jordan for thirteen years. And she remembered that one year Rob decided the eleventh of July ought to be a holiday. Seven-eleven. Seven Eleven Day. So he went out and came back with slushes for the whole office. I mean, that's a man who's fun to work with. When his daughter was born, two days before Christmas, nineteen-ninety, Rob named her Tricity. And Barb said the reason he gave was that if she ever ran for public office, she'd already have her slogan. Elect Tricity. Four years or so later came a son, Parker. And Rob's family, when they wrote his obituary, put in a line I can't get out of my head. They wrote that he was a devoted father, "who felt letting his children win at Nintendo to be among life's greatest pleasures." A cousin of his, Dave Parker, put it like this. "He had good things to say about everybody. He would have found the good in Saddam Hussein."
And there's one more thing Barb said, and I want you to hold onto it. She said Rob didn't want to talk to his parents about some of what was going on in his life. "But he could talk to me." So for a long time, the people who loved Rob most were the people who knew the least.
By the late nineties, the Andrews had settled in northwest Oklahoma City, in a house on Shaftsbury Drive in the Lansbrook addition, up near Britton Road and MacArthur. Brenda stayed home with the kids. Rob went to work, and on Sundays the whole family went to church. The church was North Pointe Baptist. The Andrews did mission work through it. And Rob became a deacon there, one of the men the congregation trusts to look after the rest of it. And that's where they met a man named Jim Pavatt.
Jim Pavatt was a deacon too. He was older than Rob, in his mid-forties, a veteran of the Air Force, where he'd served as a military policeman. He and Brenda both taught Sunday school at North Pointe. By the summer of two thousand and one, he was spending time with the whole Andrew family, Rob and Brenda and the two kids. He and Rob were friends. That's the word the family used. Friends.
Jim Pavatt also sold life insurance. He was an agent for Prudential. And at some point, Pavatt helped his friend Rob set up a life insurance policy. It was worth about eight hundred thousand dollars. I'll tell you how forgettable Jim Pavatt seemed to the Andrews. Later, one of Rob's brothers would admit he couldn't even remember meeting the man. And they'd been on a hunting trip together about a year before. That's who Jim Pavatt was, as far as the Andrew family knew. A quiet man from church. A friend. The insurance guy.
So here's the world on the morning of the first of September, two thousand and one. A man with a good job, two kids who adore him, a church he believes in, and a friend who sold him his life insurance. Rob Andrew has eighty-one days left. And over the next eighty-one days, he is going to tell anyone who will listen exactly what he's afraid of.
Part 4Act Two: He Told Them Twice
September, two thousand and one. On the sixth of that month, Jim Pavatt's own marriage ended. The court granted his divorce. And near the end of September, something happened at North Pointe Baptist that Rob's family would later point to as the moment the fear started. Brenda and Jim Pavatt were asked to step down from teaching Sunday school. People at the church suspected the two of them were, in the words a friend of Rob's later gave the police, "involved in an inappropriate relationship." Now here's a detail that tells you a lot about Rob. Pavatt's own lawyer said it later, so take it from the other side: when the church asked Pavatt to stop teaching, Rob Andrew defended him. He stood up for his friend.
That same month, Rob moved out of the house on Shaftsbury Drive and into an apartment. And on the third of October, Brenda filed for divorce. Remember what I told you. Rob didn't believe in divorce. He wrote about it in his journal over and over. He kept hoping it would stop. And one more thing, small, and I want you to just file it away. Sometime that October, Brenda and the kids took a trip to Texas. Jim Pavatt went too. And somebody took pictures.
The night of the twenty-fifth of October. Sometime between that night and the next morning, somebody got to Rob Andrew's car and cut the brake lines. And the next morning, Rob's phone started ringing. It was the same message every time. Your wife has been in a wreck. She's at Norman Regional Hospital. You need to get there. Fast. Norman is a half-hour drive south of Oklahoma City, down the interstate. In a car with no brakes. And Rob found the damage to his car before he ever drove it anywhere. So he rented a car. And he drove to Norman anyway, to find his wife.
She wasn't there. She hadn't been in any wreck. So he did exactly what you'd want him to do. He went to the police. And he brought the brake lines with him. Months later, a police captain who'd seen them said it plainly. "They were intentionally cut. It was not some sort of malfunction. This wasn't wear and tear." Rob's report from that day survives, at least in pieces, because the Oklahoman printed parts of it after he died. He told the officer he was going through a "very rough separation and potential divorce." And he told them that his wife and a man he named had, in his opinion, "developed a very close relationship," possibly "a romantic relationship." The man he suspected of cutting his brakes was his friend from church. Jim Pavatt. Around then, Rob went to see Barb, his friend across the hall at work. Barb told the story five years later. "He came in, and he cried to me about that. He said, 'Barb, you're right. She's trying to kill me.'" He told her that at night, going into his apartment, he felt like there was a gun pointed at his back. And here's where the family comes in. Because Rob did tell them, now. And his brother Tom later admitted they had a hard time believing it. He said the whole thing sounded "like the plot of a bad movie." I don't blame them for that. Think about it. Your brother tells you his wife and the deacon who sold him his life insurance are trying to kill him. Who believes that the first time they hear it? But Rob wasn't done. According to the trial record, the very next day, Brenda told Rob she had read in the newspaper that somebody had cut his brakes. There had been no story in the newspaper. Not one word. Now, think about what Rob had worth killing for. That life insurance policy. Eight hundred thousand dollars. And his wife was the beneficiary. So Rob decided to take her off it. He went to the man who sold him the policy. His friend. Jim Pavatt. And according to the appeals court's account of the trial evidence, Pavatt told him he couldn't. Rob didn't control that policy anymore, Pavatt said. Brenda was the owner now. Remember that sentence. Brenda is the owner. So Rob went over Pavatt's head. He called Pavatt's supervisor at Prudential. And the supervisor told him that wasn't true. Rob was still the owner of record. He could change anything he wanted. And then Rob told that supervisor why he was asking. He told him he thought Jim Pavatt and his wife were trying to kill him. According to the same court summary, when Pavatt found out about that call, he was furious, and he threatened Rob for putting his job in danger. On the first of November, the Andrews were in divorce court. Jim Pavatt had been subpoenaed to testify. He didn't show up, and the judge held him in contempt. The court's order that day did something Rob wanted. It made his two children the beneficiaries of his life insurance, with Brenda as their trustee. His lawyer believed the change went through before Rob died. The next day, the second of November, Rob went back to the police. This time he told them about the money. An eight-hundred-thousand-dollar policy. And the report from that day says Rob "stated that his wife… is possibly with SU, the suspect, in trying to kill him for the insurance money." He told them the only thing his wife fought him on, in the whole divorce, was his effort to take her off that policy. That's twice.
Twice in one week, Rob Andrew sat down with the Oklahoma City police and told them who he was afraid of, and why. And then he went home to his apartment and he wrote in his journal. His family let a reporter read some of those pages after he died. I want you to hear them in order.
The fifth of November. "I trust God. Therefore I should not fear. I am not afraid of being hurt physically by all that is going on right now. I am concerned with what is happening to my kids and my inability to shield them. I am afraid of what may happen." The seventh. "Life must go on. Divorce is consuming me. I love my wife and my kids. But it does not appear to be God's will to make the divorce stop." On a page with no date, three words.
"Cancel life insurance." The twelfth. "I am in great pain. I keep asking for encouragement from my friends." The sixteenth. "God has forgiven me. Can I forgive myself?" The nineteenth. "My suffering seems to be growing." That same day, the nineteenth of November, Rob met with the police a third time. And he handed them a cassette tape. On it were two of those phone calls. The ones telling him to hurry to the hospital in Norman. And that same day, over at the courthouse, the contempt citation against Jim Pavatt was dismissed.
The next day was Tuesday. The twentieth of November. Thanksgiving week. And Rob Andrew was due to pick up his kids for the holiday.
Part 5Act Two (cont.): Thanksgiving Week
Tuesday, the twentieth of November, two thousand and one. That morning, Rob wrote in his journal. It's the last entry anybody would ever read. "I have faith in God," he wrote. "I should walk with assurance of the things I hope for. A relationship with my kids, a loving wife, a home that worships, laughs and plays and loves."
That's what he was still hoping for. On that morning. After the brake lines and the phone calls and the two police reports. A loving wife, and a home that laughs and plays. I don't know what to do with that, honestly. Except to tell you that it's the truest thing I know about him.
That evening, Rob drove to the house on Shaftsbury Drive to pick up Tricity and Parker for Thanksgiving. They'd done this before. And there was a routine to it. Brenda would bring the kids out to the car, and Rob would take them from there. He didn't have to go inside. He didn't have to get out of the car. But that night, the court record says, Brenda asked him to come into the garage. The pilot light on the furnace had gone out, she said. Could he light it? And Rob, being Rob, went into the garage.
It was sometime after six o'clock. The records don't agree on the exact minute. Next door to the Andrews, the neighbors on that side, the Gigstads, were out of town. Another neighbor was in his bathroom when he heard it. He told a reporter the next day. "I heard a shot and then I heard a scream. Then I heard another shot and a scream." He thought at least one of those screams was a woman's. Then Brenda Andrew called 911. And this is what she told them, and what she told the police afterward. Two men. Two men wearing masks came into the garage while Rob was bent over the furnace. Rob turned around to face them, and one of them shot him. Rob grabbed the nearest thing he could find, a bag of empty aluminum cans, and held it up in front of him. And they shot him again. And she was hit too, in that second shot, in her left arm. She got back into the house, called 911, then went back out to her husband.
That's her account. I want you to have it exactly, because it matters later. Two men. Masks. Two shots. Later that night, when police asked her to describe the men, she said she could describe only one of them. A dark mask, and a dark shirt.
When the paramedics got there, Rob Andrew was on the floor of his garage. He had been shot twice with a shotgun. They tried. They couldn't bring him back. Up on the roof of the family minivan parked in that garage, police found a single spent shotgun shell. Sixteen gauge. And the kids. Tricity and Parker were inside the house the whole time. They were in a bedroom, watching television, with the volume turned way up. They had no idea what had just happened on the other side of the wall. That's the one mercy in this whole night. I'll take it. A family friend took them in.
Brenda had a wound on her left arm. A bullet had gone through it. It wasn't serious. They took her to the hospital, treated it, and let her go about twenty after ten that night. And then she sat down with a homicide detective named Roland Garrett. That night, the police were treating her as a crime victim. A witness. Not a suspect.
Garrett talked to the Oklahoman about it a couple of weeks later. And I'll read you what he said, because it's his read on her, not mine. "I felt she was unemotional and showed no characteristics of being traumatized. I felt it was unusual. She had been married to this man for seventeen years. I think it would be normal for anyone to show emotion upon learning of this death and actually being present when this death occurred."
Now, I'll be careful here. People react to horror in all kinds of ways, and how someone looks in a police interview has been used against a lot of people over the years, and not always fairly. We're going to come back to that, in a big way, before this story's done. So hold it loosely. That's what one detective saw.
Here's what investigators could see for themselves in that garage, though. Brenda had said Rob was trying to light the pilot on the furnace when the men came in. Sources told the Oklahoman that the pilot light was, in fact, still out. And there were burnt matches on the floor nearby. And at least one person who was there that night told police something else. That Brenda was romantically involved with a man named Jim Pavatt. And that Rob had believed, for weeks, that the two of them were trying to kill him. The police had Rob's two reports. They had the cassette tape he'd handed them the day before. And that night, they let Brenda Andrew go home. The next morning, the police department told the city it was investigating a possible home invasion.
Up in Enid, the phone rang at the Andrews'. I don't know who made that call, or what time it came, or who picked up. That part of the record is the family's, and they've kept it. But I know what was waiting on the other side of it. Thanksgiving was two days away.
And for the next nine days, the Andrew family was about to find out how many things they didn't know.
Part 6Act Three: Nine Days
Wednesday, the twenty-first of November. The day after. The police are calling it a possible home invasion. Two masked men. Brenda Andrew is a key witness to a homicide. That's the phrase they used. And somewhere in that building, Rob Andrew's two police reports are sitting in a file.
Thursday was Thanksgiving. And on Thanksgiving morning, two days after he died, the Daily Oklahoman ran a story on the front page under the headline "Plot feared by victim of shooting." Reporters had found Rob's police reports. The brake lines. The phone calls. The eight-hundred-thousand-dollar policy. His suspicion that his wife and a man he named were trying to kill him for it. Picture Rob's family reading that on Thanksgiving. Everything he'd tried to tell them, and the police, right there in the paper. Too late to do him any good.
Saturday, nothing. Sunday, the twenty-fifth. Next door to the house on Shaftsbury Drive, Dean Gigstad and his wife pulled in from their vacation about seven o'clock that night. Brenda had a key to their place. She was supposed to be bringing in their mail and the newspapers while they were gone. So Dean called her, to come get the mail. No answer. He tried again. Still nothing. And then he started noticing things. Things in his house that were out of place. Things that didn't belong there. Somebody had been in his attic. And in a closet, he found something he would only ever describe to a reporter as "incriminating evidence." He called the police around midnight. They didn't send anybody that night.
Monday, the twenty-sixth of November. The funeral. You've already been inside that church with me. You know how it goes. Three ministers. Luke chapter twelve. The pew where Rob's wife and children should have been. But here's a detail I didn't give you at the top. Rob's cousin, Dave Parker, was there, and he remembered it like this. "It was weird, because you're waiting for her to show up with the kids. I think they waited forty-five minutes for her to show up. They didn't want to start the service, you know, without the family."
Forty-five minutes. A whole church, waiting. And while they waited, two of those mourners were Dean Gigstad and his wife. And that morning, while they were in that church, detectives went to their house and collected whatever he'd found. After the service, the family asked the police to check on Brenda. A police spokeswoman later walked a reporter through it. "Family members contacted us, and we go out to the house on a check-the-welfare call after the funeral. We go out there twice, but don't find anything. Then the family insists that we go inside. They provide us with a key. We don't find anything, but the van is gone." That night, it was on the TV news. Rob Andrew's widow and his two children had missed his funeral, and nobody knew where they were. And here's what a police sergeant told the paper that evening. "At this point she is free to go where she wants."
He was right. Legally, he was right. Nobody had charged her with anything. But read that sentence again, knowing what you know. Tuesday, the twenty-seventh. The kids hadn't been at school on Monday either. And since Monday, the police had been openly looking for someone else. The paper called him Brenda Andrew's boyfriend. Jim Pavatt hadn't been to work at Prudential in a week. His lawyer told the police he wasn't going to talk to them alone.
Then, late Monday or early Tuesday, the police announced they'd made contact with Brenda. She was fine, they said. They had access to her. That wasn't true. Someone in Brenda's family had told a detective she and the kids were fine and would be available. When the detectives followed up, it fell apart. "It was just bad information," the spokeswoman said. And that same Tuesday, according to police, they got a piece of information that changed everything.
Someone told them that Jim Pavatt had admitted to an affair with Brenda. That he'd said Brenda had asked him to kill her husband. And that he'd asked an acquaintance to delete things from his computer and take files out of his office. Then came something worse. According to an affidavit police filed with the court, five days after the shooting, Pavatt had tried to get a witness to notarize a document. A document, supposedly signed by Rob Andrew, that would allow his children to leave the country. Rob Andrew had been dead for five days.
Thursday, the twenty-ninth of November. Brenda Andrew, thirty-seven, and James Pavatt, forty-eight, were charged with first-degree murder. Warrants went out for both of them. And the next morning, the children's pictures were in the paper, with the police asking anyone who'd seen them to call. Tricity, ten. Parker, seven. That afternoon, Rob's father stood up in front of the cameras at Jordan Associates, the agency where his son had worked for thirteen years, and he read a statement. "Our first concern is for Rob's children. Tricity Andrew is ten years old, and Parker Andrew is seven. We believe they are with their mother, but at this time we do not know where they are. Our family is desperate to locate them and to know they are out of harm's way. We are praying for their safe return."
That same day, the Andrew family went to court in Garfield County and asked for guardianship of Rob's kids. Pavatt's lawyer, meanwhile, had something to say about the word "boyfriend." "My client is not dating her. He's not a boyfriend. He's not a lover." And the police were taking questions they couldn't really answer. Rob had told them. Twice. He'd handed them the brake lines, and a tape. And now his widow and the man he'd named were gone, with his kids. The spokeswoman said it herself. "A lot of people have asked, 'It was so obvious. How could this have happened?' Well, it may have seemed obvious, but that doesn't win a conviction in court. Evidence, testimony, witnesses. These are what win convictions, and that's what our detectives were trying to get."
Here's my read on that, for whatever it's worth, and I'll tell you it's my opinion. She's not wrong about the law. A man's fear isn't evidence, and a police report isn't a conviction. But Rob Andrew didn't need a conviction. He needed somebody to be worried.
There's one more thing from that week, and it's the one that stays with me. Rob's lawyer, John Gile, had only been working for him about ten days. And he told the paper he couldn't stop thinking about the funeral, and that verse. Nothing covered that shall not be revealed. "Ever since this happened, I've been praying for that," he said. "For everything to come out. It looks as if it is."
He had no idea how much was coming.
Part 7Act Three (cont.): Gone
They'd left on Sunday, the twenty-fifth of November. The day before the funeral. Nobody knew that yet. All the Andrew family knew, by the end of that week, was that Rob's kids were gone, and that the two people they were with were wanted for murder. On the thirtieth of November, the FBI got involved. Federal warrants went out for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. Tricity and Parker were entered into the national crime computer as missing and endangered. And wanted posters went out to police departments all over the country. Both of them, the posters said, should be considered armed and dangerous. And do you remember those pictures from October? The trip to Texas? The photographs on those wanted posters came from that trip. Taken on vacation, with Rob's kids, a few weeks before he died.
The police found Pavatt's pickup parked at an apartment complex in north Oklahoma City. They figured he was driving his ex-wife's car now, a red nineteen ninety-two Chevrolet Beretta. They searched his apartment, too. According to police, they found a document for a name change, and a little black book with a list of weapons and ammunition in it. And the FBI said the investigation showed that Brenda may have withdrawn a significant amount of money from her account after the murder. They believed the two of them may have been planning to leave the country.
Meanwhile, Rob's parents did the only thing they could. A judge gave E.R. and Lou Andrew emergency custody of their grandchildren, kids they couldn't find. And they went to every camera that would have them. Have you seen these children? On the fourth of December, they let the Oklahoman read pages from Rob's prayer journal. "I trust God," he'd written. "Therefore I should not fear." On the seventh, the FBI said for the first time that the two of them, and the kids, might be in Mexico. On the twenty-first, the FBI put up a fifteen-thousand-dollar reward. And Christmas came and went. Rob's kids spent it somewhere in Mexico.
I want to be fair here, because there's another family in this story. Brenda's family saw all of it very differently. Family members told reporters that Brenda was a Girl Scout leader and a homeroom mom, and that she wasn't capable of a violent crime. They said they were afraid she'd been abducted. That's what they believed. I'm not going to argue with a family's fear. I'm just going to tell you what investigators were finding, while everyone waited. Here's what they had, by the time this case got to a courtroom. And I want to be clear, this is the State's evidence. It's what the prosecutors said, and what their witnesses testified to. About a week before the murder, Jim Pavatt bought a twenty-two caliber handgun from a gun shop in town. That gun has never been found. On the day of the murder, Pavatt borrowed his daughter's car. He told her he'd get it serviced for her. When he brought it back the next morning, it hadn't been serviced. And on the floorboard, she found a single, unfired twenty-two caliber round. Her father told her to throw it away. Rob's own shotgun, a sixteen gauge, the one his friends said Brenda wouldn't let him take when he moved out, was missing from the house. It's never been found either. A witness testified he saw Brenda at a spot used for target shooting near her family's place out in Garfield County, eight days before the murder. He went back later and found sixteen-gauge shotgun shells on the ground. And then there's the house next door. Dean Gigstad's house. The one Brenda had a key to. Remember that closet? Here's what police found when they went through it. Someone had gone up into the attic through an opening in a bedroom closet. On the bedroom floor, there was a spent sixteen-gauge shotgun shell, the same brand as the one on the roof of Rob's minivan. Up in the attic, there were three twenty-two caliber rounds, the same brand as the one in Pavatt's daughter's car. There was no sign anybody had broken in. I'm not going to tell you who was up in that attic. Nobody saw them. But you can sit with the key, and the closet, and the shell, as long as you want to. There was more. According to the court's summary of the trial evidence, after the murder Pavatt had gone online looking up Argentina, because he'd heard it had no extradition agreement with the United States. And his daughter testified that the two of them asked her to help make a document, with Rob's forged signature, giving permission for his children to travel out of the country. Rob had been dead for days. And from Mexico, Pavatt kept calling his daughter. He wanted money. What he didn't know was that Janna Larson was working with the FBI. They'd given her a phone so they could track his calls. And most of those calls, an FBI agent later testified, came from somewhere near Cancun. Then, on the seventh of February, two thousand and two, something strange happened back in Oklahoma City. Brenda's lawyers went to the district attorney. They told him they had a letter. A letter, they said, that showed Brenda had nothing to do with her husband's death. And they offered him a deal. The letter, in exchange for dropping the charges against her. The DA didn't take it. Keep that letter in the back of your mind. It's going to come back.
Three weeks later. Thursday, the twenty-eighth of February, two thousand and two. The border crossing at Hidalgo, Texas, just across the Rio Grande from Mexico. They were coming home. Out of money, according to the court. In two vehicles. Just before noon, U.S. Customs agents ran the license plate on one of those cars, and it came back with a federal warrant. Brenda Andrew and Jim Pavatt were arrested right there. They asked for a lawyer, immediately, and didn't say much else. "From what I understand, they were fairly calm," the FBI spokesman said. "James Pavatt did mention the FBI wanted to talk to him." And in a van nearby, driven by a relative of Brenda's, were Tricity and Parker. Safe. That afternoon, at Jordan Associates, where Rob had worked for thirteen years, a spokeswoman picked up the phone to talk to a reporter. "Oh my God. I can't even talk. We are just thrilled beyond belief." The lead detective, Roland Garrett, said, "It's a good feeling. Justice can be served." And Brenda's lawyer said he believed she'd been on her way to turn herself in. Late that night, Rob's mother, Lou Andrew, got on a plane to Texas to bring her grandchildren home. "We know that they have had a confusing time and they're upset," she said. "We love them very much and we know that our support and love for them will see them through. We're just going to have to take each day at a time and one step after another."
The next day, in a county courtroom in Texas, Brenda Andrew and Jim Pavatt stood in orange jail jumpsuits, shackled at the hands and feet, and waived extradition. They'd go back to Oklahoma without a fight. The reporter in the room wrote down one more thing. "Pavatt smiled."
And Tricity and Parker went home with their grandparents. Home to Enid. Back to the town with the swimming pool, where this whole story started. Now it was going to go in front of a jury. Two juries, actually. Two separate trials. Same judge. Same prosecutors. And that letter.
Part 8Act Four: Into the Light
The trial was never going to be moved. In January of two thousand and three, a judge turned down the request to move it out of Oklahoma County, even though, when it came time to pick a jury, almost everybody in the pool had already heard about the case. Of the first thirty people questioned for Jim Pavatt's jury, two had never heard of it. Two. One woman in that jury pool was asked if she could set aside what she already thought and judge only on the evidence. And she said, "After looking at him in this room, I don't think so."
Pavatt's trial was supposed to start in June of two thousand and three. It got pushed back to August. And the reason it got pushed back was that letter. In June, an investigator from the district attorney's office and a handwriting examiner went to a bank and took it out of a safe-deposit box. It was undated. It was addressed to Rob's daughter, Tricity. And the people who'd examined it said it was in Jim Pavatt's handwriting.
I'm still not going to open it for you. Not yet. The State of Oklahoma versus James Dwight Pavatt began on the twenty-fifth of August, two thousand and three, in front of District Judge Susan Bragg. The prosecutors were two assistant district attorneys, Fern Smith and Gayland Gieger. They'd planned to call about sixty witnesses. One of them was Pavatt's own daughter. The jury convicted him of murder and of conspiracy. And on Tuesday the sixteenth of September, after five hours of deliberating, they sentenced him to death. The Associated Press summed it up that afternoon in a single sentence. The jury had sentenced him to death, the AP wrote, "for gunning down his lover's estranged husband."
Remember how they put that. A month later, Pavatt stood in front of Judge Bragg in chains at the ankles, and she formally sentenced him to die by lethal injection. His stepfather wiped his eyes. And as the deputies walked him out, his daughter called out, "I love you, daddy."
Afterward, she told reporters, "We're still counting and waiting on him to come home and be with us." His lawyer, Mike Arnett, said, "This isn't the first time an innocent man has been convicted and sentenced to death in Oklahoma County." And the prosecutor, Gayland Gieger, said, "As far as justice can be done in this courtroom, it has been done."
Brenda Andrew's trial began the next summer. June of two thousand and four. Same courthouse. Same judge. Same two prosecutors. It took a hundred and twenty-five people to find twelve who could sit on that jury. Her lawyer counted a hundred front-page stories and two thousand television reports since the night Rob died. And I want to tell you about this trial carefully. Because a lot of it was about the garage, and the brake lines, and the money. And a lot of it was not.
Here's the part that was. Pavatt's daughter, Janna Larson, took the stand. She said she'd found out about the affair that summer. And she said her father had told her this: "He had told me that Brenda had asked him to kill her husband or if he knew someone who could do it." And she testified to something else, about herself. That her father asked her to call Rob Andrew, and tell him to hurry to Norman Regional Hospital to pick up his wife. Police testified she made those calls the same day Rob found his brakes cut. A woman named Teresa Sullivan testified. She'd shared a jail pod with Brenda for about three months. She was serving a federal drug sentence. "She told me that her and Mr. Pavatt killed her husband for the money and the house," Sullivan said. "She told me she was assured she would get away with it." Sullivan said Brenda told her Pavatt shot her in the arm, that night, to make her look like a victim. Brenda's lawyer went right at her. "Isn't it true that you'll do anything or say anything to get your sentence reduced?" "No, sir," she said. The State's handwriting expert, a man named David Parrett, had gone through a hundred and thirty-six of Rob's signatures, from thirteen years of his life. And he noticed something. Starting in February of nineteen ninety-nine, Rob started drawing a little symbol next to his name. A fish. "It looked like one of those fish on a bumper sticker," Parrett said. "It's a Christian symbol." After that date, out of a hundred and twenty signatures, all but one had the fish. The signature on the form that would have handed Brenda ownership of that eight-hundred-thousand-dollar policy, backdated to March of two thousand and one, did not have the fish. Parrett said that signature wasn't Rob's at all. He called it "a drawing of an older model of Robert Andrew's signature."
Remember what Pavatt told Rob? He couldn't change the policy. Brenda was the owner. The jury saw ten suitcases. The luggage from Mexico, carried up to the witness stand by the prosecutor and identified by Detective Garrett. And in it, two Agatha Christie novels. One of them was called "Murder Is Easy." Brenda's lawyer said she'd bought the books so her kids could practice their reading and writing, and they might have been the only books in English she could find in Mexico.
Brenda didn't testify. Her lawyers argued that Jim Pavatt did this on his own. A crime-scene expert told the jury he saw no evidence that Brenda had staged anything, and that the blood and the bullet holes were consistent with what she'd told police about the masked men. On cross-examination, he agreed that staging was still possible.
Now. The part that wasn't about the garage. I'm not going to read you the testimony. I'll tell you why in a minute. I'm going to let the Supreme Court of the United States describe it, because twenty years later, that's exactly what it did. The Court wrote that the State, quote, "spent significant time at trial introducing evidence about Andrew's sex life and about her failings as a mother and wife, much of which it later conceded was irrelevant." Testimony about her sexual partners, going back two decades. About the outfits she wore out to dinner, and to the grocery store. Witnesses were asked whether a good mother would dress, or behave, the way she did. In its opening statement, the State told the jury it would hear about her "extracurricular activities." One witness remembered sitting at a bar, waiting for her to arrive, and said the comment that was made was, "Who is the hoochie." And the trial judge let that kind of evidence in, quote, "only as it relate to her ability to manipulate men."
Then came closing arguments. The twelfth of July, two thousand and four. Fern Smith went first. And she told the jury who she believed had pulled the trigger. "I submit to you that Brenda Andrew was the one who actually shot Rob Andrew and killed him. It doesn't matter whether she did it or whether James Pavatt did it. If they were acting as principals then they are equally guilty thereof."
And then, later: "She shot him twice to be sure he was dead." Gayland Gieger had the last word for the State. He talked about the blood spatter, and he said the physical evidence, quote, "tells ya who did the second one." So, notice that. Smith said both shots. Gieger said, at least, the second one. And both of them said it didn't matter which of them pulled the trigger.
And then Gieger held something up in front of the jury. A thong, from the luggage Brenda took to Mexico. "The grieving widow packs this to run off with her boyfriend," he said. "The grieving widow packs this to go sleep in a hotel room with her children and her boyfriend. The grieving widow packs this in her appropriate act of grief."
Here's my read. And I'm telling you it's mine. Think about everything the State had. The brake lines. The two police reports. The policy, and the forged form with no fish on it. The neighbor's attic. The bullet in the borrowed car. The run to Mexico with Rob's kids, the day before his funeral. That's a case. That's a lot of case. So why did it need the underwear? I don't have a clean answer to that. But I can tell you it's the question that would follow this trial for the next twenty years.
Do you remember the verse they read at Rob's funeral? Nothing covered, that shall not be revealed. Everything spoken in darkness heard in the light. At that trial, everything came out. All of it. Including a lot of things that had nothing to do with what happened in that garage.
On the thirteenth of July, two thousand and four, the jury found Brenda Andrew guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy. Two days later, at one minute past five in the afternoon, seven men and five women came back with their sentence. Death. Afterward, Gieger told reporters that the jurors had told him the evidence against her was overwhelming. Her lawyer said her family was extremely disappointed. They were taken out a side door of the courthouse, and they didn't say anything. Rob's parents were there. And while their son Tom spoke for the family, they smiled.
"Rob's friends and family would like to say thank you for everyone's thoughts and prayers," Tom said. "We are ready now to get back to our daily lives and go about the task of raising his two children, Parker and Tricity." On the twenty-second of September, Judge Bragg made it formal. Brenda Andrew became the only woman on Oklahoma's death row. And when she was given the chance to speak, this is what she said.
"God knows my heart. He will deliver me out of this situation." Two trials. Two convictions. Two death sentences. And one letter that both juries heard about, written to Rob's daughter, that I still haven't read to you. It's time.
Part 9Act Five: The Letter
Jim Pavatt's appeals ran out years ago. In May of two thousand and seven, Oklahoma's highest criminal court upheld his conviction and his death sentence. Every judge on that court agreed. Ten years later, in two thousand seventeen, a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Denver threw out his death sentence. Not his conviction, just the sentence. They said the jury had been wrong to find the killing especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel. Two years after that, the full court took the case back. Thirteen judges. And ten of them voted to put the death sentence back. In January of two thousand twenty, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case. And Jim Pavatt became eligible for execution. Oklahoma actually set a date once. July eleventh, two thousand twenty-four. It was pushed back, when the state slowed down the pace of its executions.
On the nineteenth of August, two thousand twenty-six, Rob's father, E.R. Andrew, died at home in Enid. He was ninety. Eight days later, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals set a new date for Jim Pavatt's execution. November the twelfth. The day after Veterans Day. Two days after his birthday.
And Pavatt's lawyers came out swinging. His lawyer, Hunter Labovitz, put it like this. "Never in trouble in his life previously, Jim was a highly decorated Air Force master sergeant, a Baptist church deacon and Sunday school teacher, who has been a trusted law clerk while incarcerated and a model prisoner." And then he said this. "Jim Pavatt was convicted by a rogue prosecutor who repeatedly lied and later admitted that a confession from Jim was bogus." His clemency petition goes even further. "The reality is that Jim Pavatt has never killed anyone." It says the State "has never credibly shown" he was even at the crime scene. His lawyers say the police generated something like eight thousand pages of records in this case, and not one hair, not one fingerprint, not one drop of blood placing Pavatt in that garage. And they point out that a kind of bullet analysis the FBI did in this case is a technique the FBI itself stopped using, in two thousand five. That's his side. I want you to hear it in full, because it's his life on the line. No court has accepted those arguments. And here's the State's answer, from Oklahoma's Attorney General, Gentner Drummond. "Rob Andrew was gunned down in his own garage, feet from the children he loved, by the man he had trusted as a friend and insurance agent. Twenty-five years later, Pavatt still won't tell the truth about what he did."
Still won't tell the truth. So what is the truth? What did Jim Pavatt ever actually say? To answer that, I finally have to open the letter. It was handwritten. It wasn't dated. And it was addressed to Rob's daughter. She was eleven. It starts out as an apology. Pavatt tells her he loves her, and that he's sorry for what his actions have cost her. And then he tells her what he says happened. He says he couldn't stand the thought of losing her mother. He says he got a friend to help him. And then, these two sentences.
"We came into the garage and my friend shot your dad and I shot your mother. We then ran to the house next door and stayed until the police left your house." The letter says Brenda had nothing to do with any of it. It says he told her what he'd done while they were away on the trip, and that she was shocked, and angry. And it's signed, Love, Jim. Now I want you to notice a couple of things about that. First. Two men came into the garage. That's what Brenda told the 911 dispatcher that night, remember? Two men. The letter tells the same story she did, except that one of the men is Jim Pavatt. Second. The house next door. The attic. The closet. The key. And third, look at when this letter shows up. Brenda's lawyers walked it into the district attorney's office on the seventh of February, two thousand and two. Three weeks before anybody was arrested. Oklahoma's appeals court later described it as a letter Pavatt wrote from jail. But he wasn't in jail yet. The letter itself says he told Brenda "on this trip." So as best I can tell, it was written in Mexico.
So who believed it? Here's the strange life of this one piece of paper. At Jim Pavatt's trial, in two thousand three, the jury heard it. A handwriting expert testified that Pavatt wrote it. To the State, it was a confession. Proof he was in that garage. Pavatt's own lawyers told the jury he never wrote it at all. At Brenda's trial, a year later, her lawyers argued that Pavatt did this alone. And there was the letter again. The same handwriting expert said Pavatt wrote it. But the prosecutor asked him one more question. Had he made any determination about whether what the letter said was true? "No." And this time, the State called the letter concocted. A lie Pavatt made up to protect her. Now, to be fair to the State, that's not as contradictory as it sounds. The State's position was that Pavatt wrote it, which put him in the plot, and that the part where he takes the blame and clears Brenda was the lie. But sit with what that means. The only written confession Jim Pavatt ever gave says his friend fired the shotgun. Pavatt's own lawyers have always said he didn't write it. The State says the most important part of it is false. And the friend has never been named. Not in twenty-five years. Nobody in this case says that letter is true. And there's still the question it was supposed to answer. Who pulled the trigger? Pavatt's lawyers say his jury was told it was him. On the day his jury sentenced him to death, the Associated Press wrote that it was "for gunning down his lover's estranged husband." Brenda's jury heard the prosecutor say, "I submit to you that Brenda Andrew was the one who actually shot Rob Andrew." Even the Supreme Court couldn't say. When Justice Clarence Thomas wrote out the facts of this murder in two thousand twenty-five, he described the second shot as fired by "the perpetrator (or an accomplice)." Two juries. Two death sentences. And twenty-five years later, nobody can tell you for certain whose hands were on that shotgun. Both of them were convicted of murder either way. The law didn't need an answer. But I think the people who loved Rob Andrew might have wanted one. And there was one more letter in this case, by the way. A man in jail, being held on charges he killed a teenager in Montana, wrote that he was the one who killed Rob Andrew. Pavatt's jury never heard about it. The judge decided it wasn't reliable, and a reporter at the time noted that everything in it had already been in the papers. So that's two written confessions to this murder. And the State doesn't take either one at its word. So when the Attorney General says Jim Pavatt still won't tell the truth about what he did, he may be exactly right. I just don't know which truth he means.
Part 10The Reckoning
Brenda Andrew's appeal took a different road. And it's the reason this case is still in the news. In June of two thousand and seven, Oklahoma's Court of Criminal Appeals upheld her conviction, four to one, and her death sentence, three to two. One of the judges who dissented was Judge Arlene Johnson. And what she wrote has followed this case ever since. "The first stage of this capital murder trial is rife with error. That error, at its most egregious, includes a pattern of introducing evidence that has no purpose other than to hammer home that Brenda Andrew is a bad wife, a bad mother, and a bad woman." She'd have given Brenda a new sentencing hearing. She was outvoted.
Then the federal courts. And in March of two thousand twenty-three, the federal appeals court in Denver ruled against her, two to one. Judge Gregory Phillips wrote for the majority. "It is evident that Ms. Andrew's trial was not perfect. But it is just as evident that her trial was fundamentally fair, and that is all she was entitled to." The judge who disagreed, Robert Bacharach, wrote fifty-five pages. And in them, he said the prosecution's focus on her sex life "portrayed Ms. Andrew as a scarlet woman, a modern Jezebel, sparking distrust based on her loose morals."
And then, in January of two thousand twenty-five, the Supreme Court of the United States took the case. It didn't hold an argument. It decided on the papers, in an unsigned opinion. Seven justices to two. The question wasn't whether Brenda Andrew was guilty. The question was narrower than that. Is there a rule, clearly established, that a trial can be so poisoned by irrelevant evidence that it violates the Constitution?
And the Court said yes. "Clearly established law provided that the Due Process Clause forbids the introduction of evidence so unduly prejudicial as to render a criminal trial fundamentally unfair." The lower court had said there was no such rule. So the Supreme Court sent the case back and told them to look again. And in answering Justice Thomas, who dissented, the majority wrote one more line I keep coming back to. About the State's story of what happened in that garage, the Court said, "That narrative, of course, was hotly contested then and remains so now." So the case went back to Denver. Back, in fact, to Judge Bacharach. The same judge who'd written about the scarlet woman and the modern Jezebel. And in January of this year, two thousand twenty-six, he wrote the opinion. And it went against her. Now, I want to explain this, because it sounds like a contradiction and it isn't, quite. A federal court reviewing a state conviction isn't allowed to just ask, was this fair? It has to ask whether the state court's decision was so wrong that no reasonable judge could have reached it. That's a very high wall. And this time, the panel decided the Oklahoma court's ruling was reasonable, in part because of how strong the rest of the evidence was. And on remand, Brenda's lawyers didn't challenge how strong that evidence was. Three judges. No dissent.
Her lawyers asked the full court to rehear it. In August, the full court said no. One judge disagreed. His name is Richard Federico. And this is part of what he wrote. "These were not stray comments elicited in the heat of trial; they were part of a trial strategy to draw the jury's attention to Andrew's concededly irrelevant but, the state argued, unwomanly and unmotherly behavior." On the twenty-fifth of September, Brenda Andrew's lawyers went back to the Supreme Court.
And while all of that moved through the courts, the Andrew family did what they said they would. They raised Rob's kids. Rob's parents took Tricity and Parker home to Enid in two thousand and two, and they raised them there. Rob's mother, Lou, died in May of two thousand twenty-three. His father, E.R., died this past August, at home. In the Enid paper, his son Tom remembered how much his parents had loved to travel. "He and Mom would just get in the car and go." Neither one of their obituaries mentions what happened to their son. I think that says something, though I couldn't tell you exactly what. Maybe that they weren't going to let it be the headline of their lives.
This fall, before Jim Pavatt's clemency hearing, Rob's brothers wrote a letter to the Pardon and Parole Board. It hasn't been made public in full. But a reporter quoted from it. They wrote that their parents, the ones who raised Rob's children, are gone now. They wrote about the hole he left in their lives. And they wrote this. "We would let the laws of the State of Oklahoma decide their fate.
Vengeance is not ours. Our brother is gone and we cannot change that." I've told you about the last thing Rob wrote in his journal, that morning, the one about hoping for a home that laughs and plays and loves. But that wasn't quite the last thing. Hours before he drove to the house on Shaftsbury Drive, Rob Andrew went back to his favorite chapter of scripture. Luke, chapter twelve. And in neat handwriting, in ink, he wrote his own version of it. "Fear no one but God. Do not fear those who can only kill the body." Here's where things stand, as of the fourteenth of October, two thousand twenty-six.
That morning, Oklahoma's Pardon and Parole Board heard Jim Pavatt's case for clemency. His lawyers had asked the board to spare his life. The Attorney General's office had asked it not to. The board voted three to two against recommending clemency. Afterward, Attorney General Gentner Drummond put out a statement. "James Pavatt plotted Rob's murder and then, working with Brenda Andrew, gunned down the man who had once been his friend. Justice will be served when the death penalty is carried out on Nov. 12." In Oklahoma, the governor can't commute a death sentence without the board's recommendation. Unless a court steps in, or the governor grants a delay, Jim Pavatt is scheduled to be executed on the twelfth of November. Brenda Andrew is sixty-two years old. She is the only woman on Oklahoma's death row, at Mabel Bassett Correctional Center in McLoud. She still says she's innocent. Her petition is in front of the Supreme Court, and the State's answer is due by the end of this month. When either of those things changes, I'll tell you.
Part 11Closing Thoughts
So that's the story. On the twentieth of November, two thousand and one, Rob Andrew was shot to death in his own garage, with his children inside the house. Two juries convicted Brenda Andrew and Jim Pavatt of his murder. Both were sentenced to die. So where do I land? I'll tell you, and I'll tell you it's mine. I think those juries got the big thing right. Think about what they heard. The brake lines, cut in the night. The phone calls sending Rob to a hospital where nobody was waiting for him. The policy, and the form with no fish on it. The neighbor's attic. The bullet in the borrowed car. And the drive to Mexico with Rob's kids, the day before his funeral. I've turned that record over every way I know how. And I can't make it say anything else. But that's not the same as knowing what happened in that garage. I don't. And after twenty-five years, two trials, and a trip to the Supreme Court, I'm not sure anybody outside that garage does. So let me leave you with what I keep coming back to. Rob Andrew told the police. Twice, in one week. And on the nineteenth of November, he handed them a cassette tape. The next evening, he was dead. What were they supposed to do with it? And if the honest answer is, not much, if the law really had nothing to offer a man who could see it coming, what does that say to the next person sitting in that same chair? Who fired? Brenda's jury heard the prosecutor say it was her. Pavatt's lawyers say his jury was told it was him. Both were sentenced to die either way, so for the law, it didn't matter. Is that enough? Should it be? If this case was as strong as every court has said it was, why did the State need the rest? The old boyfriends. The clothes. The underwear, held up in front of the jury. Judges have argued over that for almost twenty years. They're still arguing. And the letter. The State's own handwriting expert said Jim Pavatt wrote it. The State says the part that matters is a lie. His own lawyers say he never wrote it at all. So if Jim Pavatt ever does sit down and tell the whole truth, after all these years, who's going to believe him?
I keep coming back to the verse they read at Rob's funeral. Nothing covered, that shall not be revealed. And most of it was. The brakes. The policy. The attic next door. Just about everything Rob was afraid of turned out to be true. But not all of it. Not whose hands were on that shotgun. Not what that letter really means. Not what happened in those few seconds in the garage.
Maybe Rob's brothers have made their peace with that. When they wrote to the Pardon and Parole Board this fall, they didn't ask for revenge. They said they'd leave it to the law. "Vengeance is not ours." And I think there's a version of that for the rest of us, too. Some of this isn't ours to settle. And some of it, maybe, isn't ours to know.
But here's what I want you to keep. Rob Andrew saw it coming. And he didn't keep it to himself. He told his family. He told a friend at work. He wrote it in his journal. He went to the police, and then he went back. He told them.
Thank you all for listening to this episode of Okie Investigations, in partnership with Forgotten True Crime. If it meant something to you, share it with somebody. That's how stories like this one stay alive. And if you'd like to support the show, subscribe and leave a review wherever you're listening. It helps more than you'd think.
Robert Dale Andrew. Born in Enid, Oklahoma, on the nineteenth of September, nineteen sixty-two. A son. A brother. A father. A deacon at his church. He was thirty-nine. Until next time, I'm Trevor with Okie Investigations. Stay safe out there. Just know you are unique, you are special, and you are loved.