A week after 26-year-old Jayne Warren McGowan was found shot dead, police raided the home of the future wife of one of McGowan’s alleged killers, William Douglas Gentry. The previous night, November 15, Jenna Critzer had appeared on NBC29 to offer a defense of her fiancé.
 Michael Pritchett, one of two charged with the murder of Jayne Warren McGowan, told police that McGowan said "No," and backed toward a couch just before she was shot by William Douglas Gentry. |
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"I’ve been over the scenario in my mind a million times, a million times," Critzer said, "and for someone, for Doug to go into an innocent person’s home and take their life for absolutely no reason, I cannot believe that."
As a result of their search of Critzer’s home, police took four items, including a box of .22 caliber ammunition and a glove with a red stain. That search followed another at the home that Gentry, 22, shared with 18-year-old Michael Stuart Pritchett. There, authorities retrieved a bloodstained blue and red jacket that Pritchett told authorities Gentry was wearing the night he shot McGowan.
All those facts and more were in a police search warrant affidavit that detailed a confession given by Pritchett to police. According to his statement, he and Gentry, armed with handguns, knocked on McGowan’s door.
"Michael [Pritchett] said that she said ‘No’ and backed up toward a couch," Detective Nicholas Rudman wrote in the affidavit. She was shot thrice by Gentry and once by Pritchett, and the two later sold the handguns, according to police, who have retrieved two weapons that fit Pritchett’s confession. Both men are currently being held in Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail on charges of capital murder, among others, and are scheduled to appear at a November 29 court hearing.
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