27 Years Under Suspicion End for Anguished Spouse

Nearly 30 years had passed, but Gilbert Peppin knew the rumors would not die, the talk would not fade away and he might never clear his name--and prove he did not kill his wife.

No one dared accuse him to his face. But every now and then, friends would tell him they had heard others gossiping about how Gib, the barber, had gotten away with murder.

Phyllis Peppin was killed in June 1972. There was no sign of forced entry, and nothing was taken from her home. So even her husband understood how, at first, the cloud of suspicion would hang over him.

Police questioned him. They watched his barbershop. They played good cop-bad cop, with one investigator befriending him and the other needling him to come clean and confess because they were onto him.

Peppin protested his innocence. And since police had no evidence, he was never charged. But he was never cleared, either.

Like so many other unsolved crimes, the murder of Phyllis Peppin faded from the news. Investigators moved on to new cases; police reports were filed away, then eventually lost.

Peppin married again, had two children and resigned himself to believing Phyllis’ murder would remain unsolved and doubts about him would linger.

“I had given up hope,” he says. “After 10, 15 years, I never thought they’d find anyone.”

Then, last spring, Peppin got a call while cutting hair in the same barbershop he was working in when his wife was murdered.

“Are you the same Gilbert Peppin who lived in Arden Hills 27 years ago?” the police officer asked.

“Yes,” he said warily. Then came the thunderbolt of news:

“We’ve got new information that may solve your wife’s homicide.”

*

Sgt. Lucienne Mann had never worked a “cold case” before.

Tenacious and methodical, the Ramsey County sheriff’s investigator knew unsolved murders were puzzles and now, all of a sudden, there was a new piece for an old case: An unidentified person wanted to talk to police about a 1972 homicide.

That person was represented by Deborah Ellis, a lawyer, who told Mann and the county attorney’s office that her client had been 17 at the time and the victim was Phyllis Peppin. Ellis wanted to talk about a deal.

“Obviously the case was ice cold for them,” she says. “On the other hand, there was no upside for my client to come forward. I was looking for a way to give everyone some peace.”

So at first she didn’t reveal her client’s name, whereabouts or even if it was a man or woman.

As the talks dragged on, Mann and her colleague, Dave Watson, began trying to identify the anonymous person, figuring if any deal fell through, there might be a different way to approach this case.

The investigators assumed the mystery suspect was in prison, and with help from the county attorney’s office, they searched records for inmates between ages 40 and 45 who had committed heinous crimes and lived in the area.

After compiling a list of about 350 names, they showed it to Peppin. He didn’t recognize anyone.

Mann prodded him, hoping to jar his memory: Had he had any trouble with any kids in the neighborhood? Had they baby-sat for anyone? Had any kid come to look at Phyllis’ car, which was for sale? And what about the paperboy?

Peppin said he didn’t receive the newspaper at home, but at work.

Because police reports had been lost, Mann also met with Charles Zacharias, one of the first investigators on the scene that day--and someone who always believed in Peppin’s innocence.

“He’s got a memory like an elephant,” Mann says of Zacharias. “We could sit down with the crime photos and it would open up a floodgate of memories.”

“I can remember 95% of the details,” confirms Zacharias, now a U.S. marshal.

By early July, authorities had zeroed in on a promising suspect. His name was Charles LaTourelle.

He was in prison for raping and murdering a college student in St. Cloud in 1980. And in 1972 he was 17, living two blocks away from Gilbert and Phyllis Peppin.

Mann visited Moundsview High School in Arden Hills and collected photos of LaTourelle--including one from the track team--from the 1971-1973 yearbooks.

She showed them to Peppin.

Again, nothing.

Mann then pulled off a photo of LaTourelle from the state corrections department Web site and tacked it to her bulletin board. It was her inspiration.

What once was cold now seemed very hot.

Investigation Cools, but Not Innuendo

Gilbert Peppin balances a faded white leather photo album on his lap, thumbing through wedding pictures of a radiant couple walking arm in arm down a church aisle.

Only seven years later, Peppin buried his wife at age 26.

Peppin had met Phyllis Brouillard while he was attending barber school; she was studying to be a beautician. They settled in Arden Hills, a Minneapolis suburb. She worked at an insurance company, he at his dad’s barbershop.

On June 14, 1972, after a car-shopping expedition, Phyllis went home and Peppin returned to work.

Shortly before 7 p.m., Peppin arrived home, saw the front door open and hollered Phyllis’ name.

He saw a smear on the hallway wall, grabbed a sponge from the kitchen and cleaned it off. He called again for his wife, walked to the back bedroom and discovered her lying on the floor, fully clothed.

Peppin saw no sign of blood, so at first he thought Phyllis was ill and he called for help.

When police arrived, Peppin agreed to a test to determine if there was gunpowder residue on his hands. There was none. A lie detector test was inconclusive.

For the next few weeks, police turned the heat on Peppin. The good cop-bad cop routine was more than strategy; Zacharias’ supervisor thought all signs pointed to the husband. He disagreed.

“He had to be one hell of an actor if he had done it,” Zacharias says. “You get a gut feeling, a sixth sense. He gave a statement willingly. He didn’t run for a lawyer.”

Eventually the investigation cooled, but the whispers never died.

About a dozen years ago, Peppin spent a night behind bars after a fistfight with another barber who had been spreading stories that he had killed his wife.

He walked out determined to ignore the rumors. “After so many hurtful things, I just thought, you can’t put out all the fires,” he says.

By then Peppin had remarried. His wife, Adrienne, says he told her about his wife’s death, but she didn’t know he was a suspect.

“I never thought for a second he would have been capable of something like that,” she says. “If I ever did, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

Peppin also remained close to Phyllis’ family, including her brother, Tom, who lived with him briefly after his sister’s death.

But any suspicions Tom Brouillard had were dispelled by Peppin’s behavior.

“He came around our family for years and still does today,” he says. “That just led me to believe he was innocent. One disappears after a while. He’s never done that.”

Over the years, Peppin exchanged hundreds of letters with Phyllis’ father, Don Brouillard, who never stopped mourning.

“If we just knew who killed Phyllis . . . I just know that somehow this person is in hell . . .” he wrote.

Don Brouillard called police faithfully on the anniversary of his daughter’s murder to check for possible new leads.

“The hard part was not to be able to encourage him,” Zacharias says. “It was pretty much at a dead end after a year or two. He’d really be distraught. It really preyed on him.”

Peppin moved on, but he remained haunted by the same questions:

“Who could have hated me so much to do this to me? Who could have hated my wife so much? I just couldn’t come up with any enemies.”

*

On an October day, Sgt. Mann sat in a prison visiting room in Stillwater, interviewing a man she had been waiting to meet for months. Her hunch about his identity had been confirmed by his lawyer just days before the meeting.

Charles LaTourelle’s hairline had receded, but his face, almost cherubic, was familiar from his high school photos.

“He looked kind of mousy,” Mann says. “I expected someone to be more aggressive. He was very calm, very soft-spoken, very deliberate.”

For more than an hour, LaTourelle, speaking in a monotone, described the events of June 14, 1972: He had been stalking Phyllis, and that day, he came to rape her. He wore gloves and carried a .22-caliber handgun in a brown paper bag.

He entered an unlocked screen door and, as she tried to flee down the hall, he shot her four times, continuing to fire as she lay dying.

“He was hung up on dark-haired women,” Mann says. “He’d look you in the eye. He was obsessed with them. He had to have them, and he’d do anything to have them.”

LaTourelle knew details only the killer would know: The keys were in the door; the Peppins’ Lhasa Apso puppy, Tuffy, scurried out of the house; Phyllis’ hair was in pigtails; there was a “for sale” sign on her car.

Mann and Watson scribbled notes as he talked.

“Some things,” she says, “were quite practiced--his regrets, his need to come forward, to help him with some rehabilitation.”

Ellis, the lawyer, says LaTourelle confessed because “he had sort of a religious experience where he felt this [secret] was something he needed to let go of. He had buried it a long time within himself.”

She also says he wants to participate in a prison sex-offenders program and “recognized that he couldn’t sit on that information” if he wanted to be totally honest.

Leaving the prison that fall day, Mann breathed a sigh of relief.

“It felt good for me after six months,” she says. “I can only imagine what it felt like for Gib after 27 years.”

Not only was there a confession, but Mann was able to solve one more mystery.

It turned out LaTourelle delivered the Sunday St. Paul Pioneer Press and collected the money from Phyllis Peppin, knowing she came home at 4 p.m., two hours before her husband.

Mann dialed Peppin’s number from her car with the news: “Gib,” she said, “it’s the paperboy.”

A Family’s Decades of Grief

Weeks earlier, Peppin had driven to a Minneapolis nursing home to visit Phyllis’ father.

A widower for many years, Don Brouillard has been ill, and Peppin wasn’t sure he would recognize him. So he carried his 34-year-old wedding album--along with some Juicy Fruit gum, his father-in-law’s favorite--and checked with the nurses to make sure he was strong enough for the news.

The two men and two nurses pored over the old photos as Peppin broached the subject.

“Don,” he said gently, “I got a very important call. . . .”

Then he told him about the impending confession.

“This is what we waited for and prayed for,” Peppin said, comforting the elderly man and wrapping his arm around his shoulder.

Brouillard gasped for a moment, then began sobbing.

*

On Nov. 4, Peppin stood in a St. Paul courtroom with Charles LaTourelle just six feet away.

Peppin barely glanced at him. He avoids using his name.

Peppin could hardly sleep the night before, wondering how to sum up a family’s decades of anguish--Phyllis’ mother, who died heartbroken; his parents, who died not seeing their son cleared; a father and a brother who lived with grief for 27 years.

A plain-spoken man, Peppin, now 55, decided to keep his speech short and simple.

“As happy as I am this came about . . . I just hope this person is in prison for the rest of his life,” he said, his right hand trembling in the grasp of his wife.

LaTourelle was sentenced to up to 25 years in prison, with the possibility of parole, as part of a plea bargain for his cooperation; he will serve the time concurrently with his life term for the 1980 murder.

Afterward, Tom Brouillard hugged Peppin.

“I’m just glad it was finished for him and us,” he says. “It’s the biggest relief to him because he was the only suspect for 27 years.”

Zacharias was happy as well.

“The cloud has been lifted,” he says. “I’m sure there had been doubt if not total suspicion. He’s been truly vindicated. Now everyone knows.”

*

Every year, when it starts getting cold, Peppin has a ritual: He carries a wreath to Phyllis’ grave.

When the weather changed recently, Peppin, accompanied by his 13-year-old son, Gibb, made the trip once again.

He set down the wreath, prayed and whispered some special words for the young wife he had buried so many years ago:

“Phyllis, we have gone a long time without knowing what happened,” he said softly, his head bowed. “Now we all know the truth down here.”

Tears rolled down his cheeks. Then he walked to his car in the bright sunlight.