Man charged with murder after body found in freezer

Heather Rawlyk

Friday, July 9, 2004 | 11:06 a.m.

Metro Police arrested a 64-year-old Las Vegas man on murder charges Thursday after a body was found in a padlocked freezer outside a double-wide trailer near Lake Mead and Nellis boulevards.

Lawrence Pruett was being held without bail this morning at the Clark County Detention Center.

A man called police Thursday afternoon and said that his wife had seen a dead body inside their neighbor's freezer, Metro Homicide Lt. Tom Monahan said.

The freezer was unplugged and was in Pruett's driveway.

The man told police his wife first told him around 8:30 a.m. that the body of someone she knew was in the freezer, but that she had been drinking at the time and he didn't think anything of it.

Later in the day the man grew concerned and decided to call police, Monahan said.

Police arrived at the trailer in the 6000 block of Casa Loma Avenue around 6 p.m. and questioned Pruett, the home's only resident, who said his neighbors were correct -- a body was in the freezer, Monahan said.

It took several hours for police to secure a search warrant. Once clearance was given, police crowded around the white freezer, with flashlights and pliers in hand, and broke the gold lock dangling from the freezer door to find what they suspected was inside, the body of a fully clothed adult man.

The man apparently died as a result of a gunshot wound, police said. Investigators with the coroner's office had not detemined his identity as of this morning.

Neighbors lined the chain-link fence that surrounded the home to try and catch a glimpse of the corpse. One neighbor even invited onlookers to her sun deck to get an up-close look through a pair of binoculars.

Pruett was described by neighbors as a friendly man who kept to himself and liked to drink beer in his front yard.

"He certainly had nothing to do with it," said a neighbor, who identified herself as Sam.

Kristen Allyn, who lives fours houses down from Pruett, said she walked her dog past the house several times Thursday and didn't "notice anything funny."

"It's crazy. I walked past that freezer and all along there was a dead man inside," she said. "Isn't that scary?"

April Joien, who lives nearby, said she was not surprised such a "gruesome crime could happen" in her neighborhood.

"There are break-ins and all sorts of stuff happening here every day," she said. "I'm not surprised. That's just the way this neighborhood is."

The most recent case of a body being found in a freezer was in 1998, but in that case the freezer was plugged in.

Wilman Oslund, 68, was sentenced in 2001 to 10 years in prison for beating his handicapped sister-in-law to death, then freezing her body.