Abandoned Prayers: An Incredible True Story of Murder, Obsession, And Page 6

  Stutzman lost so much blood that he nearly died. Many said it was a miracle that Ed Stoll happened to be there to find him before it was too late.

  The focus of the incident was immediately on the sheriff’s department and not on Stutzman, the poor victim of their botched investigation. Ed Stoll, for one, was incensed and let the sheriff know about it.

  “This man was coming to you for help. He told you someone was after him. You were supposed to protect him. You let this happen.”

  Rumors were confused and rampant. The story that emerged was that the sheriff’s department had told Stutzman to buy the marijuana and had assured him that they would not go after the Millers for at least a week. Instead, within a few hours of the drug deal, the sheriff’s department was at the Millers’ farm with a warrant.

  “That’s how the Millers knew it was me,” Stutzman told friends.

  When Abe went to see his cousin at the hospital, he felt like Eli’s big, protective brother.

  Sheriff Frost, looking puffed up and important, stood in the hallway outside Stutzman’s room.

  “You aren’t doing enough to catch the guys who hurt Eli!” Abe said, raising his voice. “You are just using him and throwing him out to the wolves. You’re doing a lousy job of protecting your people.”

  Frost said nothing.

  Some things didn’t seem to fit. Those who saw the cuts on Stutzman’s arms noticed that the wounds were clean, not jagged, as might be expected from a violent attack. Deep needle marks also marked his thin, white arms.

  Chores were done and things were quiet at the Miller farm. Earl Miller noticed headlights flash in the lane at about 8:00 P.M. Sheriff Frost was back, this time poking around the Millers’ cars, touching the hoods to see if the engines were still warm.

  “Where have you guys been out to all night?” the sheriff asked.

  They had just finished milking and were settling in for the night. “What’s going on?” Levi Miller asked.

  “We’ve got an attempted homicide. We’re not fooling around here. Eli Stutzman was found up at Stoll’s bleeding to death.” Frost added that Stutzman had received death threats and was sure the Millers were behind it.

  “So, like I said, where have you been tonight?” he asked again.

  The Chupps saw Eli Stutzman at the hospital the day after the stabbing. Like a weakened, crumpled ball of a person, Stutzman said two tall, long-haired men had attacked him. “They drove a Dodge Swinger,” he added.

  Liz Chupp asked about the bandages on Stutzman’s wrists.

  “I put up my arms to fend them off and they sliced me,” Stutzman explained.

  The following day, Mose Keim—the man who had nursed Stutzman through his nervous breakdown in 1972—called the Chupps with a vague warning. “Don’t be too sure that what Eli Stutzman is saying to you is the truth. There were some strange things that went on when he lived with me,” he said. “A lot of what he told me was not the truth.”

  Next, word came to Stoll’s that Stutzman had had a mental collapse and was tied to the bed by hospital personnel. Strong tranquilizers were being administered to try to calm him. The ordeal had been too much. Liz Chupp said a prayer.

  On November 22, when the truth came out, it shook everyone who had been sucked into Stutzman’s carefully orchestrated tale of betrayal and brutality. Sheriff Frost went out to Stoll Farms, carrying the stack of threatening letters.

  “Eli did this to himself,” Frost said, seeming satisfied in cracking a difficult case. “He even wrote the letters.”

  Ed Stoll found the scenario hard to believe, but Frost compared the letters to some other writings made by Stutzman. The typed letters also matched a typewriter found in Stutzman’s bedroom at Maryjane and Walter Stoll’s house.

  What kind of a man would do something like this? Ed thought at the time.

  Beyond Stutzman’s confession, there was more proof that it had all been a set-up. Investigators recovered a single-edge razor blade from the barn. In addition, they found a large IV needle used for cows. The needle had human blood on it.

  Stoll felt used. The whole thing made him sick. “While I was hauling my last load, Eli was running around the barn messing it up and squirting his own blood on the walls,” he said.

  It was true that Stutzman had worked in a hospital and boasted about his expansive medical knowledge. He had given plenty of IVs and he knew which vein would give the best show of blood. He had foreshadowed all of it by sending the notes to himself.

  One thing Stutzman hadn’t planned on was Ed Stoll taking such a long time with the last haul. The delay almost cost him his life.

  “What took you so long?” Stutzman had said when Stoll found him on the floor. Now, to Stoll, the statement had a whole new meaning.

  The Millers were never brought to trial because the prosecution’s star witness was mentally disturbed—exactly as Stutzman had planned.

  Before he was discharged, Stutzman sent for Rebecca Yost and asked her if she would come out to Stoll Farms and take care of him when he was released. Yost agreed.

  On November 28, the Orrville Courier published a cryptic item on page 13:

  To clarify rumors in the Marshallville area, Wayne County Sheriff James M. Frost released information concerning an alleged aggravated assault Tuesday, November 19, at 6:45 P.M. The incident occurred in a barn on Co. Rd. 95 (Coal Bank Road) in Baughman Township. It is rumored that a 24-year-old man was assaulted and that the incident was drug related, Sheriff Frost stated.

  An intensive investigation by the sheriff’s department revealed that the injuries to the male were self-inflicted. “There was no assault,” Frost said. “This is a completely false complaint and was confirmed by the victim that it was his own doing,” he continued.

  The sheriff’s department normally does not release information on incidents which involve self-inflicted wounds. However, the release was made because of the department’s concern about rumors in the Marshallville Community.

  That statement was only part of the story. The truth of a former Amishman with mental problems being used as an undercover agent by the Wayne County sheriff’s office would have been scandalous.

  If Stutzman was ashamed or bothered by the whole business, it didn’t seem so to others. From the day he came home he acted as though nothing had happened.

  Maryjane Stoll felt sorry for the mixed-up young man and tried to get Stutzman to see a Christian counselor, but he refused, saying he wanted no part of any religion. Ed Stoll arranged for Stutzman to see a psychiatrist at the Wayne County Mental Health Department in Wooster.

  Shortly after Stutzman was released from Dunlap, his father made the considerable buggy trip out to Marshallville. Stutzman told the Stolls to get rid of the old man, which they did. If One-Hand Eli had planned to bring his son home, he was mistaken.

  Over the next few weeks Stutzman seemed to make progress, but Maryjane Stoll worried when he sometimes left for a day or two without saying where he was going. On occasion the time away stretched to several days.

  Stutzman received an inordinate amount of mail at this time. Several letters—sometimes stacks of letters—arrived daily. Maryjane Stoll put them in his desk. Once, she found some things so disturbing and so strange that she didn’t even know exactly what they were. She did know, however, that they had to do with sex.

  She told her son Ed about the discovery. From her description he figured that his mother had run across a cache of vibrators and ticklers.

  But that was not all.

  Later, Mrs. Stoll found several magazines tucked under Stutzman’s mattress. The publications shocked and puzzled her. They contained graphic pictures of men having sex with each other. She burned them.

  She never told anyone other than her son. Later, she might have wished she had.

  On February 10, 1975, Ed Stoll fired Stutzman. Stutzman told the Chupps he had seen Stoll steal some parts from a farm equipment store and he had been fired because Stoll didn’t want him around.


  Of course, it was a lie.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A straight shot north from Hebron via U.S. 81, U.S. 80 is Nebraska’s main east-west route, stretching from Omaha to Scottsbluff. Gary Young punched the pedal on his ’85 Crown Victoria patrol car, en route to the autopsy in Lincoln. Pushing 70 mph is easy in Nebraska, even for drivers who don’t have the advantage of a badge. Highways are long, wide, and traffic-free.

  Young was headed east on 80 to Lincoln to confirm what had seemed unequivocal back at the funeral home in Hebron: the little boy had been beaten and strangled before he was dumped in the field. He parked and found his way to the basement of Lincoln General Hospital.

  The Clinical Evaluation Room—investigators called it simply the “autopsy room”—is a surprisingly bright and cheerful room at the end of a long, white corridor. By the time Young arrived, a crowd had assembled: Jack Wyant and a team of state patrol investigators, a forensic odontologist, a University of Nebraska anthropologist, and coroner’s physician John Porterfield and his assistants Bill Cassel and Sue Carlson. The group’s objective was twofold: first, to determine cause of death; second, to collect evidence that might assist in the identification process.

  At nearly six feet six inches tall, the gray-haired Dr. Porterfield, age 58, was an imposing figure, yet his demeanor was far from intimidating. His voice carried the trace of an accent he had developed growing up in the hills of Missouri, although Nebraska had been his home for better than twenty years.

  The evidence seal was cut, and the small, pajama-clad corpse was lifted from the 40-degree cooler where it had been slowly warmed. After a day and a half in the cooler, the dead boy had defrosted to the extent that his limbs were slightly flexible and his body tissues were no longer rock-hard.

  In the bright light, it was obvious that the child’s hair was blond, not dark brown or black as it had seemed in the field. The freckles on his face were also more distinct. The skin on the boy’s hands looked wrinkled and wet, as though he had stayed in a bathtub too long.

  The marks on the neck and head were darker and even more horrifying than they had seemed when Gary Young first set eyes on the body.

  “Poor kid,” someone said softly.

  Wyant took a series of pictures, and over the course of the hour-long procedure, the staccato strobe of the investigator’s camera never let up.

  Gary Young stayed a bit to the side of the group and drew a deep breath. Young had observed other autopsies, so he knew the rules: stay out of the way—and listen to the doctor as he does the grisly job. Wyant took a decidedly converse approach. He liked to be in the thick of it. Wyant was a participant, not an observer.

  The basics emerged quickly. With bone development as a primary guideline, Dr. Porterfield fixed the age of the victim at approximately 10 years.

  “What would a 10-year-old be doing wearing pajamas with feet?” Wyant wondered aloud.

  Sue Carlson stretched a tape measure the length of the boy and noted 131 centimeters (51.5 inches) for his height. The corpse’s weight was estimated at fifty to sixty pounds. Porterfield told the investigators that the boy appeared to have been in good health and was well nourished and clean.

  Wyant speculated that perhaps the boy’s mother had abandoned him because she could no longer provide for him. Desperate circumstances might have forced the mother into doing the unthinkable.

  Credible or not, at least it was a story and it was better than nothing. Sometimes a story leads to the truth, Wyant thought.

  Next, the doctor and his assistants measured and documented the animal activity that had left the child without a nose, right cheek, and upper lip.

  “Field mice,” Wyant offered, not one to hold back a comment or a question. Porterfield’s staff knew to expect that from Wyant. There were investigators from the state patrol who never said a word during an autopsy. Then there was Jack Wyant, always at elbow’s length, looking for the answer, voicing his opinion. Porterfield had learned that he was worth listening to.

  Often he was right on the money.

  The only possible identifying marks discovered on the corpse were a circular scar the size of a cigarette burn on the boy’s right forearm and a small tan birthmark on the inside right calf.

  The doctor moved on in a quick and mechanical manner. Finger-, palm-, and footprints were inked onto paper. Full-body X rays were taken. Finally, fingernail scrapings were taken from each digit and put into an envelope for analysis at the crime lab.

  Bill Cassel made an incision through the child’s chest and Sheriff Young could see that the body was still partially frozen. Ice crystals caught the light.

  One by one, vital organs were removed, examined, and weighed. Porterfield noted some congestion in the lungs, which were still partially frozen. The stomach, he said, was contracted and empty. Fecal matter in the boy’s large bowel indicated that at the time of his death, it had been at least two hours since he had eaten—although it could have been up to ten or more hours. The heart and kidneys were healthy and unremarkable.

  Piece by piece, bit by bit, the little boy from Chester was dismantled as though his body were a jigsaw puzzle.

  Dr. Porterfield determined that the boy’s anus was slightly dilated, leading Young and Wyant immediately to theorize that the boy had been sexually abused before he had been dumped in Thayer County. Yet, the doctor saw no signs of trauma in or around the anus. A swab was taken to test for the presence of semen.

  Wyant was sure it would come back positive.

  As far as determining who the child was, even his teeth offered no clues. Although he could have used some dental work, the dead boy had never had any fillings. It was unlikely that there were any records that might provide his identity. Dr. Sprague, the odontologist, made notes, and dental X rays were taken, but nothing was expected to come from them.

  Wyant considered the prints from the child’s feet the best chance they had for identification. Such prints are frequently standard hospital procedure with newborns, so he optimistically assumed they existed somewhere. Of course, it was the “somewhere” that posed the problem.

  Dr. Porterfield examined the boy’s battered and flesheroded head. The investigators in Hebron had thought the large and grotesque bruises on the child’s forehead were caused by a savage beating.

  “No damage to the skull,” the doctor intoned, recording his findings on a chart.

  This remark stunned the sheriff. He asked about the bruises, and the doctor indicated that they were likely the result of the cold temperature. In places where little or no fat exists between bone and skin, skin discolors rapidly.

  Gary Young’s opinion was that if the boy hadn’t been beaten to death, strangulation had to be the answer. The pathologists pursued the option and looked for hemorrhaging in the neck muscles. The boy’s head was propped up and a few minutes passed while they waited for blood to drain from the neck into the body. This procedure yielded no clues. Dr. Porterfield examined the child’s hyoid bone—the small, wishbone-shaped bone on the neck that is frequently broken or cracked in cases of strangulation. It was intact. However, as he told Wyant and Young, that bone is extremely flexible in children.

  Again, Gary Young was incredulous. If he hadn’t been beaten or strangled, how in the hell had the child died?

  No one knew the answer. Dr. Porterfield had virtually nothing to go on. Not being one to speculate as some of his contemporaries readily did, he preferred to let the evidence speak for itself.

  But there isn’t any evidence this time, Young thought.

  Dr. Porterfield fixed the child’s death at thirty-six hours before Kleveland’s discovery.

  The doctor then ruled that the cause of death could not be determined. He could see the look of disappointment and frustration on Young’s face.

  The mouth and rectal swabs, blood and hair samples, fingernail scrapings, and the sleeper were gathered and sent to the state patrol crime lab.

  Young and Wyant left Lincoln General feeling cheated
and defeated by the doctor’s ruling. In his heart, the sheriff knew that a child just doesn’t die without a reason. He had to go back to his county and tell his shaken community that they had no more information about the boy than they had on Christmas Eve. No name. No cause.

  All they knew were some things that hadn’t happened to the boy. He hadn’t been beaten or strangled. Suffocation was still a possibility, but it was difficult to determine.

  Gut feelings told the investigators that they were dealing with a murder. Circumstances pointed that way, but they needed physical evidence.

  Porterfield was relatively new to the coroner’s physician post, having held the spot only since the fall, but he was by no means inexperienced. He had been doing that kind of work for better than two decades.

  But what had he missed? Had a clue passed him by?

  Normal procedure calls for interment right after the autopsy. However, troubled by the mysterious lack of evidence, Wyant insisted that embalming and burial be delayed. He kept thinking—or hoping—that something might come up and another doctor could take a look at the body and provide an answer.

  County Attorney Dan Werner agreed and arrangements were made to store the body at the funeral home in Hebron, although they did not have a cooler like the one in Lincoln and alternatives needed to be considered.

  When released later, the initial findings from the crime lab revealed no semen captured by the mouth or rectal swabs, presumably eliminating the possibility of the crime being sexual in nature. The child’s blood type was A, with a positive Rh factor. Finally, the lab indicated that the hairs found on the sleeper and on the T-shirt did not come from the dead child.