Abandoned Prayers: An Incredible True Story of Murder, Obsession, And Read online

  Dear Reader:

  The book you are about to read is the latest bestseller from the St. Martin’s True Crime Library, the imprint the New York Times calls “the leader in true crime!” Each month, we offer you a fascinating account of the latest, most sensational crime that has captured the national attention. St. Martin’s is the publisher of perennial bestselling true crime author Jack Olsen, whose SALT OF THE EARTH is the true story of how one woman fought and triumphed over life-shattering violence; Joseph Wambaugh called it “powerful and absorbing.” Fannie Weinstein and Melinda Wilson tell the story of a beautiful honors student who was lured into the dark world of sex for hire in THE COED CALL GIRL MURDER. St. Martin’s is also proud to publish two-time Edgar Award-winning author Carlton Stowers, whose TO THE LAST BREATH recounts a two-year-old girl’s mysterious death, and the dogged investigation that led loved ones to the most unlikely murderer: her own father. The book you now hold, ABANDONED PRAYERS, by acclaimed writer Gregg Olsen, takes you on an odyssey from a man’s humble beginnings through a bizarre cross–country journey to a conviction for murder.

  St. Martin’s True Crime Library gives you the stories behind the headlines. Our authors take you right to the scene of the crime and into the minds of the most notorious murderers to show you what really makes them tick. St. Martin’s True Crime Library paperbacks are better than the most terrifying thriller, because it’s all true! The next time you want a crackling good read, make sure it’s got the St. Martin’s True Crime Library logo on the spine—you’ll be up all night!

  Charles E. Spicer, Jr.

  Executive Editor, St. Martin’s True Crime Library

  “A tough new voice rises in the ranks of true crime writers. Even the reigning giants of the genre are taking notice and offering praise.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  ACCLAIM FOR THE TRUE CRIME CLASSICS OF

  GREGG OLSEN

  ABANDONED PRAYERS

  “An absorbing, sobering, disturbing book.”

  —Omaha World-Herald

  BITTER ALMONDS

  “Absolutely fascinating . . . One of the most devious female minds in crime history. Stella Nickell has won her dubious spot in the annals of crime—thanks to Gregg Olsen’s research and reporting.”

  —Ann Rule

  “[A] truly remarkable book. The trailer-park babes of Bitter Almonds leap off the page, fingernails sharpened and aimed for your eyes . . . meticulous reporting and engrossing, vivid detail plunges the reader into a world of schemes and dreams. This is one of the best true crime books of the ’90s.”

  —Jack Olsen, author of Son: A Psychopath and His

  Victims and “I”: The Creation of a Serial Killer

  “A real page-turner . . . a compelling and fascinating tale of family psychopathology taken to the extreme.”

  —Jonathan Kellerman

  “Masterfully written . . . a tale of intricate suspense.”

  —Rod Colvin, author of Evil Harvest

  THE CONFESSIONS OF AN AMERICAN BLACK WIDOW

  “More interesting than the crime itself is Olsen’s portrait of Nelson as a brash, trashy, manipulative sexpot . . . watching Nelson as she almost gets away with murder will fascinate long after the last page.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This time Gregg Olsen has given us a very sexy book that is as disturbing as it is seductive. One reads it compulsively and wonders afterwards, ‘Why did I like this so much?’, as if one had not so much read it as had a very destructive affair with it. A dangerous and informative book, as irresistible as its painfully, wonderfully vicious heroine—or villain, whichever she is. This book might make some moralists more humble.”

  —Darcy O’Brien, bestselling author of Two of a Kind:

  The Hillside Stranglers and Murder in Little Egypt

  “Gregg Olsen’s standing as one of America’s finest crime journalists will rise even higher with The Confessions of an American Black Widow. Here are all the ingredients of a great crime story—murder, infidelity, greed, nymphomania. But the main element is Olsen’s skill at describing and explicating human misbehavior. A must read!”

  —Jack Olsen, bestselling author of Doc and Predator

  “What a combination! God, Mammon, carnality, all rendered vividly under Olsen’s assured touch.”

  —Stephen Michand, bestselling author of

  The Only Living Witness and Murderers Among Us

  “Gregg Olsen introduces the reader to a character so mesmerizing, so frightening and so evil that one has to keep reminding himself that this amazing fast-paced story is true.”

  —Carlton Stowers, bestselling author of Careless Whispers

  “This brilliant true crime story deserves acclaim and thunderous applause.”

  —Elizabeth Loftus, co-author, The Myth of Repressed Memory

  and 1998 President of American Psychological Society

  “That rare book that is at once a page-turner and an important chronicle of true crime. An enlightening and devastating read.”

  —Steve A. Eggar, PhD., author of Killers Among Us:

  An Examination of Serial Murder and Its Investigation

  “This is probably Gregg’s best work yet. Sharon Lynn is the kind of woman—and this is the kind of book—that people will talk about. Gregg Olsen shows us just how chilling it is to realize what might be going on in the house next door.”

  —Clark Howard, bestselling author of Love’s Blood

  IF LOVING YOU IS WRONG

  “Gregg Olsen’s If Loving You is Wrong is a wonderfully researched book that makes the tabloid stories about Mary Kay Letourneau and her forbidden love sound like comicbook stuff. Everyone who wants to understand the back-story of the child-woman and her overwhelming passion for a man-child must read If Loving You is Wrong. Olsen’s book is both gossipy and sympathetic, searing and brilliant. If Mary Kay is the Humbert Humbert of the female sex—and she is—this book is her Lolita. A must-read for both true crime aficionados and students of abnormal psychology! I read until 3 a.m.!”

  —Ann Rule

  ALSO BY GREGG OLSEN

  Bitter Almonds

  Mockingbird

  Starvation Heights

  The Confessions of an American Black Widow

  If Loving You is Wrong

  ABANDONED

  PRAYERS

  GREGG OLSEN

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  ABANDONED PRAYERS

  Copyright © 1990 by Gregg Olsen.

  Cover photograph of Eli Stutzman by John Mikolaskek, Lifetouch National School Studios Inc.; photograph of barn by Helen D. Gunderson.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  ISBN: 0-312-98201-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Popular Library edition / December 1990

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / June 2003

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Gary and Danny

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Amish do not wish to be involved with the mo
dern world—yet many helped me because of their desire to see the truth come to light. I thank the many whose names do not appear in this book, but who were vital to the development of this story.

  I owe considerable thanks to the Gingerich family, whose courage and love for their daughter and grandson were strong enough to allow them to open their homes and hearts to an outsider looking for the truth. In addition, I am exceedingly grateful to Liz Chupp, who made her personal diaries available, thus clearing up much of the haziness of Stutzman’s past.

  After a little more than two years of work, there are many others to whom I owe a debt of appreciation:

  Ohio: Dennis Webb, the Canton Repository reporter, for his enthusiasm for the story; Lyndon Spigelmire, who provided much background from the archives of the Wayne County Public Library; Wayne County sheriff Captain Jim Gasser for his encouragement; and researcher Suzanne Myers for her help and interest.

  Nebraska: Thayer County sheriff Gary Young, the Reverend Jean Samuelson, and state patrol investigator Jack Wyant, who shared personal observations and details of the investigation; court reporter Don McIntyre for his precise hearing transcript; and the people of Thayer County—all of whom are a part of this story.

  Colorado: detectives Tony Archuleta and Bill Perreira of the Durango Police Department for the information they shared on their murder investigations; and Louise Hanson, for her courage in telling what she knew about Stutzman and his relationship with Danny.

  Texas: David Alvarado, supervisor of criminal courts, Travis County District Clerk’s office; reporter Kellye Norris; and Travis County assistant district attorneys Marianne Powers and Carla Garcia and defense counsels Connie Moore and Debra Hunt.

  I am also indebted to my perceptive editor, Charles Conrad, whose guidance with the book’s structure and content was invaluable; and literary agent David Black and his associate David Means for the support and encouragement they gave a first-time author.

  Closer to home, much gratitude to Tim Burns and Karen Palmer and others at Trailblazer; and Rudy Yuly, whose support in 1988 kept this story alive.

  As for Eli Stutzman, who declined my many requests for interviews, I still ask the question muttered by Gary Young and others countless times: Why?

  Gregg Olsen

  July 1990

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have attempted in this book to reconstruct actual events by relying on police reports, grand jury testimony, court transcripts and trial evidence, as well as more than three hundred interviews conducted over a two-year period.

  To protect the privacy of many people who played a part in this story, I have used pseudonyms. All names which appear in italics when first used in the book are pseudonyms. All other names are real.

  PROLOGUE

  The early morning was as dark and arctic as the inside of a locked freezer as Eli Stutzman’s AMC Gremlin came down U.S. 81 through Thayer County, Nebraska. Wind cut through the car and snow scuttled across the road.

  The season was frigid. Indeed, winters in southeast Nebraska can be exceedingly cold and drawn out, with snowfall often lasting into March. Forecasters had predicted an especially cold winter that year, but Eli Stutzman didn’t care. He had no intention of staying in that region, which locals boast is the exact geographic center of America.

  Stutzman was on his way to the home of a Kansas man he had met through a magazine’s personal ads. The man was someone he could suck off, lie to, use for a place to crash and a meal. He might even be able to get some of his money. But, most important, the man was someone he could practice his story on. He was someone Stutzman didn’t know.

  The smoky, sweet taste of chewing tobacco filled his mouth; country music, coming over the radio, filled the car. Having driven all the way from western Wyoming, where he had stopped to pick up his son, Stutzman was tired and his eyelids drooped. However, the cold air leaking in from a broken window, plus the business at hand, kept him wired.

  He had business in Thayer County. He needed a place to get rid of Danny. He knew the kind of place he was looking for—the same kind of place he had dumped the other body: off the main highway, in a roadside ditch. Remoteness and no ID had been his protector then.

  Would it work again?

  His faded gray car sped through the county’s biggest town and county seat, Hebron, situated in the center of the rural valley of the Little Blue River. Christmas lights glowed from condensation-streaked windows of storefronts. Leaving the Hebron city limits, the Gremlin continued south on 81.

  With what he had in mind, Stutzman hoped he wouldn’t be noticed, but he was. At 4:36 A.M., in a routine check of out-of-state cars, a Thayer County sheriff’s deputy ran the Gremlin’s New Mexico plate, HPG 183. Nothing came up and the deputy went home. He didn’t get close enough to see the glazed, soulless look of Stutzman’s eyes or the other passenger in the car.

  Stutzman knew what he’d say to people when they asked about his son. Skiing was the answer that had come to him the week before. “Danny wanted to stay in Wyoming skiing with friends.” The lie came easily. Lies always had. Questions could be answered with canned, pat responses as though all of his speech were programmed.

  “But missing Christmas with his father?”

  “He loved to ski.”

  “But, Eli, Danny hadn’t seen you all summer!”

  “You know kids. Danny wanted to ski.”

  Though his words were scripted and he practiced them in his head over and over, Stutzman usually failed with delivery. The expressions on his rigid face and in his blue eyes seldom tracked quite right with the words.

  Look sad now, Eli, you’ve got to get rid of the boy.

  Your wife is dead.

  Your roommate is dead.

  Don’t forget the story about your partner at the ranch. Don’t forget who you told which story. Most important, look sad—turn on the tears, if you can.

  Through darkness as black as truck-stop coffee, Stutzman went east off 81 and turned south on a farm road north of the village of Chester, just shy of the Kansas state line. He searched for a suitable place, headlights reflecting off white snowbanks. When he opened the door, the air bit him through his red plaid flannel shirt and down vest. Danny wore a thin blue sleeper Stutzman had picked up in a New Mexico K-Mart.

  The boy, of course, wouldn’t need extra clothing.

  PART ONE

  Heartland

  “What kind of a barbarian would do this to their kid?”

  —Thayer County Sheriff Gary Young

  CHAPTER ONE

  December 24, 1985

  It was time for a haircut. Chuck Kleveland felt the annoying fringe of sandy hair crowding his ears and knew that with the approaching holidays he couldn’t let it go much longer. He kissed his wife, Kathy, swallowed his last bit of coffee, and put his shotgun in the gun rack of his ’83 Ford pickup. He planned to do a little hunting on the way to the barber in Hebron.

  It was 10 A.M., Christmas Eve.

  Kleveland, age 44, pulled out of the driveway of his ranch-style home in Chester, a dozen miles due south of Hebron. Chester, a tiny town whose skyline consists of a pair of grain elevators, is within spitting distance of the Nebraska–Kansas state line. To nonresidents, the town doesn’t seem like much, except maybe a good place to gas up or pick up a pack of cigarettes.

  Hebron and Chester used to be the kind of nice, friendly prairie towns where people spend their entire lives. Now they are the kind of towns young people abandon for careers in Omaha—or, if they can bear to pull away from the heart and soul of their parents’ and grandparents’ birthright, they move away even farther, to one of the coasts. Family-owned farms have grown more scarce; a few are fallow.

  Kleveland was of the generation—the last generation, some claimed—that still envisioned a good life on the bleak prairie of rural Nebraska. Although he had studied business at the university in Lincoln and lived in New York for a couple of years, Kleveland had returned to Chester, where he owned and ran Foote’s Trucks
top in Chester and a similar business in Kearney, a couple of hours to the west.

  Kleveland drove east on Harlan Street before turning north on U.S. 81, a trace of snow mottling the road’s shoulder. He could have stayed on 81 and been in Hebron in fifteen minutes, but instead he made a quick right on a farm road bordering a local corn grower’s spread. Kleveland knew the field was a good place to find orange and gold ring-neck pheasants—stray grain kernels littered the ground and provided fodder for game fowl. His wife had another Christmas menu planned, but she would make room for the pheasants on the holiday table. Kathy Kleveland liked the way her husband fixed them.

  He took a left and drove north, squinting as he scanned the slightly hilly terrain. The icy earth bristled with hard, dead cornstalks, their frosty surfaces sparkling in the cold, even light. No birds were startled into flight by the noise or movement of the cherry-red pickup.

  The jangly sound of steel guitars from a country music radio station broke the bleakness of the morning.

  From the corner of his eye Kleveland saw a small bit of blue against the brown and gray field. The color was out of place in the dull winter landscape. He braked to a stop and backed up to get a closer look. When he stepped from the cab, the 30-below-zero wind chill slashed through his parka. Standing at the edge of the roadside drainage ditch, he looked into the field and immediately spotted what had attracted his attention. Partially hidden in a brambly nest, the spiky remnants of yard-tall prairie grass, was a dead body.

  It appeared to be a little girl dressed in a blue, one-piece blanket sleeper. Her hand was glazed over with ice and her body lay flat and stiff on the frozen ground. The child’s dark hair was clean and neatly parted, but her head was tilted back, so Kleveland couldn’t quite make out her face. From his vantage point on the roadside, it appeared that the child’s hand had been placed over her heart.