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

  Kleveland had seen enough. He did not move closer to the small corpse, which lay only fifteen feet from the roadside. He didn’t want to mess up any footprints or other evidence, and he sure as hell didn’t want to be part of any evidence. He studied the field, then looked down the length of the dirt road. He wondered if whoever had left the child was still around, watching, as he walked back to his still-running pickup. Picking up the mike of his commercial two-way radio, installed to communicate with his truck-stop fleet of tank wagons, he called his bookkeeper in the office at Foote’s.

  “Joyce?” His voice was steady. “I think I found a dead body out here. Call the sheriff.” He stopped short of giving the exact location. There were plenty of police scanners in the small, neatly painted homes in Thayer County. Kleveland knew that if word got out—and in Chester and Hebron one could bank on that—bystanders would be out at the scene in five minutes.

  “I’ll be on the highway, a mile north of town,” he said.

  Kleveland stared at the corpse. He had seen dead bodies before; he had picked them up when he worked as a volunteer for the local ambulance service, and he had found his mother when she died at home. But this was different, and unsettling in a different way.

  You don’t put a child’s body out in a ditch, he thought, unless you’ve got something to hide.

  Kleveland drove back to the highway and waited for the sheriff on the northwest corner of the square-mile grid where he had found the body.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Wayne and Holmes counties, in the Ohio Amish Country, are aligned vertically, with Wayne to the north. The landscape is pastoral, with steel and wood buggy wheels slicing through the rich earth like cleavers through paraffin. Whitewashed picket fences and farmhouses mark the line where nature ends and man’s influence takes over. Yet, in Amish Country the demarcation is subtle. Fields are still plowed with horses; oat, corn, and hay crops are rotated; the land is cared for with the love and respect that outsiders reserve for humankind. No telephone poles, electric power lines, or television antennae clutter the sky.

  Although adult Amish dress in black and white, their world is one of vivid color. Farms are planted in a quilt of green. Amish girls are allowed the deep hues of aqua, purple, and celery for their long dresses, secured by neat rows of straight pins instead of buttons. The men, however, are allowed hooks and eyes as clothing fasteners. Buttons are considered worldly, even militaristic.

  Since draft horses are used for plowing, farms are appropriately small, with few topping eighty acres. The twicedaily milkings are done by hand. Most Amish farmers own fewer than ten dairy cows. Due to the antiquated milking methods, and the people’s refusal to pasteurize, Amish milk is sold solely for cheese-making.

  The Amish, descendants of Dutch and Swiss Anabaptists—“rebaptisers”—might have drowned in their own blood, so much had been spilled during the Protestant Reformation. The first Amish came to Penn’s Woods in America in the 1730s; a century later, they migrated across the Alleghenies to Ohio, where the world’s largest settlement continues to thrive.

  Tourism bureaus would have people believe that all Amish people are the same, cut from the same nondescript pattern, but that is not the case. However, all do live by strict interpretation of the Bible. The Amish believe in adult baptism, nonresistance, and separatism from the world. Many of the forty different sects are named for their founding bishops—Troyer, Beachy, Swartzentruber, and so on. Different groups have their own ways, their own quirks. Yet, nearly all resist change. “Where is it written in the Bible that we should change?” they ask.

  The Swartzentruber Order founded settlements in the Ohio villages of Apple Creek, Kidron, and Fredericksburg. This ultraconservative group took the most rigid stance against change, curling up like potato bugs to shut out the modern world.

  While the rules of Scripture never changed, the Ordnung—the rules of the Order as set by the church’s district bishop and its members—did. The Ordnung accounted for some of the differences among Amish church districts; for example, the fact that some men are allowed only three-inch hat brims while others are allowed four or even five inches, and the fact that some could use farm machinery with rubber tires while other were permitted only wooden or steel ones.

  As other Amish orders slowly made concessions to some modern ways and methods, the Swartzentrubers remained true to centuries-old traditions. They were considered “low Amish.” Those who used some modern conveniences were considered the antithesis; when an Amishman left for the modern world, others said he “went high.”

  Strips of deep purple and blue fabric used as wicks float loosely in the base of the gas mantle lanterns Amish use to illuminate their homes. Kerosene burns fast, and its smoky vapors discolor and stain walls and ceilings. The smell of the burning fuel, along with the aroma of hearty foods cooking, fill Amish homes.

  Many Amishwomen use pressure cookers to preserve chicken and beef, although some of the more progressive rent freezers in town for storage. This practice is less common among the Swartzentrubers than higher Amish. Still, at the end of winter, many wonder where all the food has gone. “A whole cow should last us the winter, but with nine kids it doesn’t,” they say.

  Photographs are banned, and Amish girls play with dolls that have no faces. Such representations are in conflict with the commandment forbidding graven images. Small boys play farmer, sometimes using old batteries to mimic milk cans. The batteries are for flashlights, a convenience the Ordnung allows.

  At home, the Amish family speaks a dialect of German and Swiss with a little English mixed in—outsiders call it Pennsylvania Dutch, or Deutsch. It is only during dealings with the outside world that the Amish speak English to Englischers, or non-Amish.

  The Amish seem nearly communal, with several branches of a family often sharing a farm. The Grossdaadi, or “grandpa house,” is a smaller dwelling, often attached by a breezeway, where the grandparents live. In Amishland, grandparents never suffer the humiliation of a rest home.

  Church is held every other Sunday in the homes of the congregation members. It is an all-day affair, starting about 9 A.M. and going into the afternoon. The words of the preacher, spoken not in Deutsch but in “high German,” are often unintelligible. The Amish hymnal, the Ausbund, is better known for its bloody recounting of the lives of the martyrs than for its melodies. Hymns are long and dirgelike and, to children, tedious.

  On Sundays no work is done, no money exchanged. The only chores permitted are those involving the care of animals.

  The “in-between Sundays” are for visiting, a favorite pastime in a world without telephones.

  Like a collection of scattered, great white boxes, the Eli H. Stutzman farm sits on a grassy hill above Welty Road in Apple Creek. The ruts of buggy wheels reveal that the home is Amish. No power lines mar the clear Ohio sky. The middle initial on the mailbox is an essential clue in discerning who resides there—the H stands for Harvey, Eli H. Stutzman’s father. With families sometimes having a dozen or more children, such initials are a necessary kind of brand. Stutzman’s roots were in the Amish settlement outside of Berne, Indiana, although his father moved the family to a farm a mile or so from Kidron in 1929.

  When Eli H. Stutzman was 18 years old his hand got caught in an antiquated sorghum press. Infection set in and he lost some fingers. He was fitted with a hook and thereafter was known as One-Hand Eli. Such a nickname is essential in a world with so many named Eli, Levi, and Amos and a proliferation of the last names Miller, Swartzentruber, and Yoder.

  Stutzman married Susan Miller, and in exhausting succession that left her with a stooped back and a stretched belly, the Amishwoman bore him thirteen children. The fourth child, a son named Eli, was born on September 28, 1950.

  Eli E. (to avoid confusion with his father, the family called him Eli Ali) was a bright child with a slight stutter. He showed an early interest in horses and a disdain for farm-work, and he enjoyed being the center of attention.

  Said a co
usin: “Eli always thought he was a little too good for the rest of us.”

  School friends remembered Stutzman as a boy who could break the rules and convincingly place the blame elsewhere. By 6 or 7, it was apparent that the Amish boy was a habitual liar.

  Years later, Susan Stutzman would clutch her hands to her breast and shake her head. Try as she could, she could not find a reason why her son was untruthful. “If I could understand . . . he was always that way . . .” she said.

  Once, Eli and his brother Andy played with a cart to which they had attached a small gasoline motor, taking turns riding the contraption down the hill by the barn. When the engine fell off and broke a pulley, they had to come up with a story for their father. It was Eli who covered it up.

  “Eli learned how to lie then,” Andy later said.

  When the boys hooked up a couple of heifers to the same little cart, their father found out about it and confronted them. Eli again came up with a tale. “I think he lied too good,” Andy said.

  However, Eli’s father wasn’t fooled by the boy’s lies. Although the stories were detailed enough and told with great sincerity, the elder Stutzman saw them for what they were.

  One-Hand Eli was a minister in his church district. He had been chosen by lot, as the Amish have done for centuries. (Copies of the Ausbund are arranged on a table. Selected men each choose a hymnal, one of which contains a slip of paper with a verse. The man who gets the piece of paper is the one they believe God has chosen to preach His word.)

  A small, gray-haired man whose hair was just a bit longer than that of some of his neighbors, the senior Stutzman held great faith and unyielding belief in the old ways. He would not accept any misbehavior by his children. A whipping was his swiftest and most effective remedy for disobedience.

  As a father, he had a responsibility to ensure that his children followed the Ordnung. As a minister, he was under tremendous pressure to see that his children, more so than others, toed the line.

  His problem was the son named for him, a bright but rebellious boy who had an eye for horses, money, and the modern world. At home or at school, Eli Ali found new ways to get into trouble. The incidents were small at first, but grew with age. The more his father held him down, the more he tried to break away.

  A neighbor of the Stutzmans remembered the young Eli: “He didn’t seem to work as hard as the others when we were out in the field or at a husking. Eli didn’t feel well or he had some excuse—or his mind was on something else.”

  As the boy grew toward manhood, it seemed the Amish neighbor was right.

  The Dog House, a rundown little Wayne County beer joint, was a popular hangout for Amish boys going through rumspringa, the equivalent of sowing wild oats. The fun was generally harmless—a couple of beers and a few laughs at the ways of the old folks. Young Eli Stutzman belonged to the Wild Westerns, a group of rowdy Amish youths who frequented the Dog House.

  The boys in Stutzman’s circle souped up their buggies with decals and bumper stickers. Radios were tucked out of view and country music blared from inside. Sometimes pranks were played. Buggies were torn up or trashed in a pond or a field. Once Eli stole a boy’s bicycle. Mostly, it was done in fun.

  However, Stutzman, whom many considered popular, later told friends that there were times when he had been treated as an outcast by some members of the Order. “Some boys who didn’t like me hung a dead, skinned cat in my buggy,” he claimed, although he had thrown out the carcass before anyone else saw it. “I don’t know why they didn’t like me,” he added.

  Rumspringa is also the time of dating, and the Amish girls liked Eli Stutzman—especially his eyes, which were as blue as new denim. He was small and slim, standing about five feet six inches and weighing 140 pounds. Dressed in his white shirt, black coat, and broadfall pants, he was perfectly proportioned—compact and solid. His brown hair hung over his ears in the kind of severe Prince Valiant that was the cut of the Swartzentruber Order. His wild and rebellious streak was his biggest plus. For the Amish, who value and insist on conformity, Eli Stutzman was fun to be around. He was different from the others.

  Among the higher Amish, bundling, the courtship custom of an unmarried couple’s occupying a bed without undressing, was seen as an archaic and dangerous invitation far too tempting for young people. The Swartzentrubers, however, held tight to the tradition, but not without a price. Out-of-wedlock pregnancies occurred occasionally. After all, birth control was not only against the Bible, it was in violation of the Ordnung.

  Gossip among the Swartzentrubers frequently targeted girls who bundled “too hard.” If such talk could be substantiated, the girl’s dating was curtailed and monitored by her parents.

  Amish adolescents learn little about sex from their parents, and there is no Amish school program to give even basic information. The teenagers learn by watching farm animals and by asking those whom they trust. Occasionally, boys get their hands on forbidden men’s magazines.

  Amish parents supervise “singings” for the youth. These co-ed gatherings take place in barns and include Amish songs and food. Sometimes they are wilder than that, with Amish boys smuggling in beer and transistor radios.

  It was at a singing that Eli Stutzman met 16-year-old Ida Gingerich. For Ida, the attraction was immediate. She got the feeling, she later told her sister, that Stutzman liked her, too.

  The daughter of Amos and Lizzie Gingerich, Ida was a beautiful girl with wide-set hazel eyes. When she laughed, dimples creased her cheeks. Her ash-blond hair was thick, with a slight wave—but no one outside her family knew that. She wore it like all the other Swartzentruber girls—rolled under, pulled back, and tucked under a bonnet. It was written in the Bible that only her husband could see the glory of her hair. And for Ida, that could only be Eli Stutzman.

  The Gingeriches, like the Stutzmans, were Swartzentrubers, although they lived in a different church district. The Gingeriches were a warmer family, with great concern for one another. It wasn’t that the Stutzmans didn’t love one another—they simply didn’t show it.

  Eli and Ida dated for the next four years. Everyone assumed that after they joined the church—a requirement for marriage among the Amish—they would marry. It was Ida who first confessed her sins and knelt before the church to join the Swartzentrubers. Stutzman followed her baptism with his own.

  In the fall of 1971 Stutzman, who only had a standard eighth-grade education, began work as a teacher at the one-room Maple Grove School.

  Although neighbors believed that One-Hand Eli was pleased with his son’s growth into adulthood—he was a member of the church, and he had a steady girl and a job as a schoolteacher—word came out that unease and rebellion continued at the Stutzman farm. Many who knew the family wondered why the minister couldn’t control his son. Some felt that the minister was not sufficiently loving to his boy and was too harsh a disciplinarian.

  When Eli was 21, he moved from his parents’ farm to a farm across the road, run by an Old Order Amishman named Mose Keim. Keim, whose church was less restrictive than the conservative Swartzentrubers’, knew that Stutzman had had some trouble at home.

  Keim and his wife, Ada, wanted to help, but neither wanted to be embroiled in the middle of Stutzman family trouble. “Everyone liked Eli,” Keim said later. “We didn’t know how he was going to turn out.”

  Soon word got out that Stutzman had gone to the school board for a raise. He told Keim he hadn’t named a figure, but he felt he needed more than the $140 a month he claimed he was earning. He also told Keim that his father thought he was trying to become more worldly by asking for more money.

  “The truth was, I feel, that his father could no longer control his son,” Keim said later. “But he still wanted to show who was boss.”

  Another neighbor shared similar feelings years later. “Old Eli tried to have his son’s salary go directly to him, instead of to his boy. That is not any way for a father to be. Eli was 21 and should have been allowed his own money.”


  One-Hand Eli visited his son several times at Keim’s, each time telling him he was wrong to leave home and must return immediately. The young man refused. He told Keim that his father had even gone to the school board to see that the raise was not given.

  For young Stutzman, the pressure was too much. On February 12, 1972, he collapsed, without warning, as he was on his way to his upstairs bedroom to dress for a Saturday-night date with Ida Gingerich.

  For Mennonite osteopath Elton Lehman, the tiny Ohio village of Mount Eaton was the perfect location for a family practice. There, although it was only a half-hour drive from Canton, he could still be a country doctor—the kind who knew all his patients’ and their children’s names and said hello in passing.

  When the Amish needed a doctor, they made the trip to town and tied their horses to the clinic’s hitching post. For patients too ill to travel, Dr. Lehman still made house calls. Even so, the doctor was often the last resort. Wary of modern medicine, the Swartzentrubers frequently employed home remedies before seeking the doctor’s opinion.

  Dr. Lehman had grown used to the Amish and their abrupt ways. The men dressed in black and white seldom said thank you. The women almost never spoke. Sometimes bare feet tracked mud and farm debris into his tidy office on Chestnut Street. But none of that mattered, since the Amish paid cash and on time. And they trusted him. A few Amish patients had even invited the doctor and his wife into their homes for dinner—a true indication of acceptance.

  Dr. Lehman had heard the rumors about Eli Stutzman and his mental problems, so he was not surprised when he was summoned to Keim’s farm that Saturday night. He found Stutzman in bed upstairs in a depressed and nervous state.

  One-Hand Eli was there also, looking troubled and concerned. “My son is having more nerve problems. He is out of control,” the senior Stutzman said in a hushed, concerned voice. “I don’t know what to do to help him.”