Brother marks murder anniversary

By Jeanne Starmack

Mike Pratt fought to keep those involved in his brother’s death in prison.

GREENVILLE, Pa. — A card table next to a bench in Central Park on Tuesday told the story of 20 years of mourning.

On it was a small, careful display of memorabilia of a loved one taken away before he lived most of his life.

There was a fraternity shirt and a varsity jacket draped across the table. From framed photos crowded on and around them, Roger “Butch” Pratt smiled up, frozen in happy times before 20 years ago Tuesday, when he was murdered at 22.

Sporting buttons with Butch’s photo and one that said “We remember Butch,” his brother Mike Pratt greeted people who stopped by to pay their respects. They had been there at that park, some of them from the beginning, supporting Mike and signing petitions to keep those convicted in Butch’s killing in prison until their sentences were over.

“I’ve been a supporter ever since he was found,” said Jane Cooper of Adamsville, referring to the discovery of Butch’s body in a grave on a farm near Jamestown, 16 months after he was killed. She often drives by the farm on her way home.

“I look at that farm and I think, ‘Who would even want to live there,’” she said, crying. She had become a pen pal to the Pratt brothers’ mother, Rose, over the years.

Plenty has been written about Butch’s murder, and a television movie was even made about the case — “Whatever Happened to Bobby Earl,” also called “Murder in a College Town.”

He was slain after a kidnapping plot by five people, at least two of whom were likely afraid he would tell police about their involvement in the arson of a furniture store in Greenville.

After graduating from Thiel College in May 1988, he was lured up from his family’s home in Pittsburgh to Akron by two women he knew with the promise of a party, beaten to death in Ohio by his college roommate and buried on the farm, where the roommate’s girlfriend lived. The roommate’s brother helped transport and bury his body, though he denies involvement in the beating.

The roommate, Ed Swiger, his brother, Michael, and the girlfriend, an older woman named Linda Karlen, were all convicted in connection with the killing. Ed Swiger is still in prison for aggravated murder.

Karlen served 15 years for kidnap conspiracy in Ohio and is now in a Pennsylvania prison for the store arson, while Michael Swiger is free after serving 16 years for involuntary manslaughter and kidnapping.

The two women were given suspended sentences.

Michael Swiger, who says he regrets the pain he caused the Pratt family, is a minister in the Cleveland area. He has a wife and a 10-month-old baby.

What Mike Pratt had, for 20 years, was a determination to keep the Swigers and Karlen in prison. He and his mother circulated petitions with thousands of signatures for the state parole board. Mike also suffered depression over the loss of his only brother that never seemed to lift.

Patty Frey of Greenville, his friend since before Butch was murdered, said she can see a difference in him in the last five years.

“I’ve seen Mike doing better,” she said. “He’s putting things behind him and living his life.”

“I haven’t had to fight the parole board,” Mike said. “I hopefully won’t have to go for another 20 years,” he said, referring to 2029 when Ed Swiger will be eligible to go before the board.

Mike now tries to help other victims, he says, through the organization Parents of Murdered Children and by going to the courthouse to sit with others whose loved ones were murdered.

“I help them understand the court system.”

These days, he said, “I don’t feel like I’m on hold.”

His life before, said Frey, had “totally revolved around his brother’s murder.”

Twenty years later, as he stood in the park and looked back on it all, he said he could also see “the beginning of something new.”