Ex-Apartment Manager Faces Murder Charge Woman’S Body Discovered Burned In Building’S Furnace

A former downtown apartment building manager was charged Thursday with killing a Spokane woman and burning her body in a basement furnace.

Prosecutors filed a single count of first-degree murder against Stanley L. Pietrzak, 45.

Pietrzak is accused of killing Kelly Conway, 24, and incinerating her body in an old furnace in the basement of the Helen Apartments, 123 S. Adams.

Conway was a mother with a history of mental problems who lived on disability checks. She was known to frequent the Spokane Transit Authority Plaza and hang out at low-income apartments downtown.

People who knew her described her as friendly and loving.

She disappeared in November.

Pietrzak, a former Air Force mechanic and convicted rapist, is in jail on an unrelated sex crime conviction. Earlier this year, he pleaded guilty to communicating with a minor for immoral purposes. Detectives were expected to serve a murder warrant on him in jail Thursday evening.

The murder charge culminated a four-month investigation that began with a gruesome discovery by Helen Apartments tenants.

Prompted by Pietrzak’s alleged boasts of killing Conway, residents Jeff Curran, Eric Westerlund and Corey Scott poked around in the furnace on April 15 and found a bone.

Curran told detectives that Pietrzak bragged of killing Conway a few hours before she was scheduled to take a bus to Seattle, burning her body in the furnace then hauling her remains to a Dumpster.

The furnace once heated the Helen but hasn’t been used for that purpose in years.

Detectives later pulled six large buckets of ash out of the furnace and turned them over to Sarah Keller, an Eastern Washington University anthropologist.

Keller told authorities she found more than 1,300 human bone fragments in the ash, all from the same body.

“There were bones from most body parts, except there were no bones from the skull or hands,” detectives wrote in a affidavit of probable cause filed in District Court.

Three of the bones - a cervical vertebra, part of a radius and a femur fragment - showed signs of cuts, Keller told detectives. The cuts probably occurred around the time of death, she said.

Detectives also found a clump of hair near the furnace. DNA from the hair matched a biological sample taken from Conway during a 1997 Pap smear, according to the affidavit.

Witnesses told investigators that Conway had been living at the Helen until November 1998 and had been hanging around with Pietrzak, who on more than one occasion had threatened to kill her.

Kasey Timmons said she saw Pietrzak slap or punch Conway several times in spring and summer 1998, according to the affidavit.

Pietrzak also threatened to lock Conway up in a “torture chamber” in the building’s basement, Timmons told detectives. Investigators later removed carpeting and other items from an old walk-in freezer in the Helen basement.

The defendant’s niece, Claire Seale, said Pietrzak once told her “the easiest way to get rid of somebody would be to chop them up and burn them in the furnace of the basement of the apartment building.”

That conversation took place prior to Conway’s disappearance, Seale said, while she and Pietrzak were discussing another woman he was suspected of killing.

Pietrzak was questioned in the 1993 disappearance of Michelle Wright but was never charged.

Wright is still missing.

WHAT’S NEXT Court appearance Stanley Pietrzak is scheduled to make an initial appearance on the murder charge today in Spokane County District Court.