A Killing in Amish Country: Sex, Betrayal, and a Cold-blooded Murder Read online

  The men gathered at the Wagon Wheel to eat and talk. One had invited a pastor to join them.

  “The pastor wanted us to open up. He led a prayer. He wanted us to talk about how we felt,” Mark said later. They were still in shock and had more questions than answers. But most of them were beginning to think that Eli was up to something. Mark knew what the pastor was thinking. He was thinking that Eli had pulled the wool over their eyes, that he had deceived them.

  Despite their growing doubts, they decided that the right thing to do was to pay their respects to Eli’s family and Barbara’s family. Eli, his parents, his siblings, Barbara’s family, and an Amish minister had gathered at a neighbor’s house to accept condolences.

  In all, there were about forty people in the house. The men clustered in the living room, the women in the kitchen. There were children playing, including Eli’s.

  “We shook hands and I put an arm around Eli’s shoulder,” Mark said. “He cried and I cried.”

  “No one knew what to say,” Steve said. The men expressed their condolences, and left after about half an hour.

  10

  The Taxi Lady

  When he called me he didn’t seem upset. Not at all. Like it was normal conversation. “Somebody shot my wife.” He was at his dad’s and he’d call me later.

  —CHERIE LINDSTROM, ONE OF ELI’S GIRLFRIENDS, ON RECEIVING A PHONE CALL FROM ELI

  “Am I a suspect?” the woman on the other end of the line asked. Detective Chuhi told Barb Raber he didn’t think so, but he did want to meet with her to talk about Eli Weaver. It was the day after the murder. He had already heard a lot about Eli’s good friend, known to many in the Amish community as the woman who never seemed to be far from Eli, but he wanted to talk in person. They agreed to meet in the parking lot at the medical center north of Millersburg, where Barb, her husband Ed, and their three sons lived.

  If Eli looked younger than his twenty-nine years, with the face of a teenage boy framed by his chopped hair and long beard, Barb looked older than her age, thirty-nine. She had a small frame, shoulder-length brown hair beginning to gray, and oversized glasses. Her hangdog look aged her. Occasionally, with her hair in a ponytail, she looked like the young woman she once was.

  She told her life story to Chuhi, how she was adopted when she was six months old and was New Order Amish until the age of twenty-two. She and Ed had started attending a Mennonite church and stayed on after their children were born. Now she identified herself as Conservative Mennonite.

  Leaving the Amish to become Mennonite is not unusual. Sometimes the lure is a similar faith but a more modern lifestyle without all the restrictions. Mennonites are Christians descended from sixteenth-century Anabaptists, as are the Amish, but are not separated from the modern world like the Amish. Mennonites believe they are more spiritual than the Amish, and have a greater focus on scripture and sharing their faith. Old Order Amish might have a glass of wine with dinner. Some Mennonites drink a little wine. It all depends on the individual church and its rules. Some Mennonites drive horse-drawn buggies and dress similarly to the Amish. But some love their cars and cell phones and wear T-shirts with their skirts, and even shorts.

  * * *

  THERE WAS A lot Barb didn’t tell the detective. The story of her life was one wrought with tragedy. The smell of desperation clung to her wherever she went. The Amish knew her for two things—she was the lady taxi driver and she was the girl that came from the Sugarcreek family that had endured the devastating and mysterious loss of all their young sons.

  Like most Amish couples, Katie and Menno Miller, Barb’s parents, wanted children—as many as possible. For some, having a large number of children is a necessity. Milking, farming, and household chores take the effort of many hands when there are no gas- or electric-powered appliances or equipment to do the job. Exactly nine months after they married, Katie checked into Union Hospital in Dover and on February 16, 1959, Michael Allen Miller was born. He weighed seven pounds, seven ounces. His parents called him Mickie.

  Outwardly, the Millers seemed overjoyed with God’s gift of a little boy. But that joy was muted. Katie told people that she thought something might be wrong with the baby—though the doctors at the hospital had said he was perfectly healthy. In time, the young mother became fixated, obsessed with the possibility that something would go wrong. Was it a premonition, she wondered, or was she preparing herself for a worst-case scenario? She saw something wrong, something that others couldn’t see. She wondered if her boy was developmentally disabled.

  Ten years later she wrote about the experience for the readers of an Amish magazine, Family Life:

  How such fathers and mothers must feel! What if it should happen to us—to Menno and to me and little Michael? I did not want to think about it, but I just couldn’t shake the thought from my mind. It was as if someone were telling me I was to have such children. “Oh, no!” I said to myself. “Not me.” Sometimes I would walk to his baby bed when he was sound asleep and look at him and whisper to myself, “Oh, what would I do if he was retarded?” But, no, the doctor said everything is all right.

  As the weeks and months flew by, it was apparent to Katie that something was terribly wrong with her baby. At five months, Michael was unable to hold his head up. When she tried to get him to respond to her with a toy or the sweet words of a mother, he didn’t react.

  Beside themselves with worry, the Millers sought the help of a doctor, who told them Michael was just “slow.” Another blamed the boy’s diet for his below-average development. Finally, a chiropractor conceded that Katie’s worst fear had been correct. The boy was “mentally retarded.”

  She wrote in Family Life:

  Retarded! Mentally retarded, oh no, not that! No, not my baby. I tried to make myself believe something could help him.

  At seven months, Michael became violently ill with spinal meningitis. He survived but was forever sickly and “very nervous.” He had bouts of endless crying. He’d pull hair from his head, and he’d hit his head against the crib until he bled. And now there was a consensus that he was intellectually disabled.

  “It was sad,” a friend of the Millers’ recalled. “They were heartbroken.”

  And yet life went on. Michael had special needs—and always would—but he’d be loved just as any child would be. The next year, the couple was blessed with a second son, Timothy Ray. When he was three weeks old, joy over the newborn shifted to worry. Timmie was an exceedingly fussy baby, crying and spitting up all the time. No matter what Katie did, she was unable to calm him. She worried that he, too, might have physical or mental deficiencies.

  And she was right a second time. Doctors did X-rays at the hospital and examined him very carefully. The prognosis was not good. He, like his brother, was developmentally disabled.

  To go through that trial once was a very heavy burden. A second time was more than many could take. Amish friends of the Millers did what they could to help, babysitting to relieve the parents once in a while, bringing over meals, and even helping with doctor bills. They encouraged the parents to bring the children to church.

  The circle of love and attention around the Millers was of some comfort, but it could only do so much to ease the pain that permeated their Sugarcreek farm. They were desperate for a solution, and when they read about a clinic in Denver that “cured” developmentally challenged children, they accepted money from the members of their order and got on a train for a long trip with two sick children. Once at the clinic, the Millers were instructed to leave the boys for three months of treatment. And while it broke their hearts, they did and went back to Ohio empty-handed.

  When they eventually returned to Denver, Timmie had flourished, but Mickie had lost weight and looked “white as a sheet.”

  They were advised to continue in Ohio with a chiropractor, a medical practitioner favored by the Amish. For a while they did, but when there was no progress, they ended all treatments.

  Breakthroughs in genetic testing we
re a decade and a half away. Still, many doctors knew a little about inherited problems and chromosomal abnormalities. Katie and Menno could have been warned about having other children and the probability of a genetic problem they were passing on.

  They weren’t.

  On August 2, 1961, Katie gave birth to a third little boy, Rudy Jay. Doctors said they couldn’t see anything wrong, but by now her fears were her constant friends. The baby was fussy and colicky, then at six weeks, his body was swollen. Doctors said it was “something serious.” He was taken to a hospital in Columbus.

  “Your baby has a very serious disease,” a doctor told them, though he was unable to diagnose the infant. Genetic testing had not progressed to that point. “I’m afraid we cannot help your baby. The disease may be fatal, but we’ll do all we can.”

  Several weeks later, Katie’s prayers—that her child’s suffering would end—were answered.

  God did send an angel to gather little Rudy into the fold. Loneliness crept over us and we prayed for added grace and strength. Life never seemed quite the same as before, but God gave us courage to bear it.

  Timothy and Michael were sick a lot, prone to pneumonia. Certain foods didn’t agree with either little boy, so their parents were careful about their diets.

  As he neared three years of age, Michael began to experience swelling on the tops of his feet and around his eyes.

  There was no help for him for he had the same sickness little Rudy had. Again we prayed, Please, God, if it is Thy will, come and take Mickie from his suffering.

  Mickie died when he was five years old.

  “They loved all those boys so much,” a longtime friend said. “We went to a lot of viewings and funerals.”

  Not long after, Timmie began to get weaker. The Millers took him to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore in October 1964. For the first time, they sought an explanation more than treatment. The specialists were puzzled. All the symptoms seemed to point to PKU, or phenylketonuria, a condition in which the body can’t break down an amino acid called phenylalanine. Without treatment, phenylalanine builds up in the blood and causes health problems, including seizures, intellectual disabilities, skin rashes, and swelling. PKU is inherited.

  However, Katie understood the doctors at Johns Hopkins to say that they had tested for PKU, but that the boys didn’t have it. Her sons, they explained, had a “new” sickness.

  “We’re going to work on it,” one doctor reportedly told her, “and in years to come we may be able to help such children. We do not even have a name for this rare disease yet.”

  Still, no one told the family how to cope—or to stop having children in the hopes that one would be normal.

  “They always thought the next child would be healthy,” a family friend said.

  In August 1965 a fourth boy, Matthew, was born. Within weeks, he was having convulsions. One doctor said Matthew was not developmentally disabled. One said he was.

  Timmie’s condition was worsening. The Millers did not hospitalize him but cared for him at home.

  Rudy died in 1961. He was six weeks old.

  Michael died in 1964. He was five years old.

  Timothy died in 1967. He was seven.

  Matthew died in 1969. He was four.

  Today, Katie and Menno’s sons would have newborn screening that likely would find a rare genetic condition called an inborn error of metabolism. They would immediately be fed a low- protein diet and, depending on the specific diagnosis, could be candidates for a liver transplant. They likely would not have cognitive impairment, they would not die at such a young age, and they would live a close to normal life span.

  * * *

  NO FARM IN Sugarcreek knew as much sadness as had the one owned by the Millers. The dark pall of the little boys’ tragic deaths hung over the farm like the blackness that comes before a thunderstorm. Four boys gone.

  Katie and Menno Miller adopted a baby girl shortly before Matthew’s death.

  During the next few years, they would adopt two more. Barbara, or Barbarann as she is listed in Amish records, was the middle one. Her adoptive mother made a lovely home, though the specter of a family tragedy hung over the household in the way that unimaginable family tragedies sometimes do. Her father, kind but strict, worked in a brickyard and was a New Order Amish bishop.

  By all accounts, the oldest girl was an answer to the Millers’ prayers. She appeared to be the healthy, caring child they had always wanted. But something was “off” with the other two from the start. The youngest got into scrapes and disobeyed her parents. The greater problem was the middle daughter’s lying.

  “Barb lied; her stories just didn’t make sense,” a family friend said. “She exaggerated. She fibbed. And her mother knew she lied and didn’t know what to do about it. It was a big problem.”

  A family friend witnessed the three girls grow up in the shadow of the boys who had died.

  “I don’t know how it affected the girls,” she said. “I think it had to; Katie and Menno knew they couldn’t have their own children. They had loved those four who died. Maybe the girls could never quite make up for what had been lost.”

  Katie and Menno Miller still live in Sugarcreek and their farm remains a place where those who know them pass by, remembering the tragedies that visited the couple there.

  And yet the focus is no longer on the little boys and the four small tombstones that mark their graves. Their tragedy has expanded to include the fact that of the three adopted girls, only one—Edna, the oldest, and presumably the most stable—has led an untroubled life.

  Now Barb, the middle daughter, was being questioned about a murder. The Millers stood by Barb. They’d always been true believers in the power of prayer—no matter what God handed them.

  Although New Order Amish are less restrictive than Andy Weaver or Old Amish, the order didn’t allow Barb any of the freedom she craved, and as soon as she could, she left home. During the more than fifteen years since she’d left the Amish, Barb had built a new life—marriage with Ed Raber, membership in the Conservative Mennonite church, and three sons whom she loved but tended to neglect. And despite all that, Barb still felt trapped. To fill whatever hole was inside her broken spirit, she engaged in several extramarital affairs with local Amish men.

  “If she’d had any confidence in herself or her ability to be more than just a vessel for some man’s pleasure, she might have made different choices,” a sympathetic friend said many years later.

  Beyond the sex and the skulking around the community, there was also the matter of her house in Millersburg. It was the home of a woman who was overwhelmed, depressed, anxious, and utterly compulsive. The two-story brick house on Township Road 310 was years beyond messy or cluttered. Those who visited left shaking their heads and wondering how Ed or the children could find anything at all. Stacks of stuff—toys, computers, piles of clothes that would never see an iron—filled every available space.

  “If that woman’s home life had been a cable TV show, it would have been something along the lines of Amish Hoarders,” said a friend familiar with the conditions inside the house. Her relationship with Eli was like the state of her trashed house—completely out of control.

  It wouldn’t have been difficult for Detective Chuhi to learn anything about Barb Raber’s situation and what had turned her from wife and mother to lover and possible murder suspect.

  All he had to do was ask someone.

  “The Amish are the biggest gossips and rumormongers on the planet,” said one of the women who was involved with Eli. “They know everything about everyone.”

  But the detective wasn’t interested in understanding Barb. His job was to bring whomever was guilty of murder to justice. It didn’t matter one bit to anyone that the woman had come undone long before Eli Weaver coaxed her into the back of a barn for sex.

  * * *

  MOST OFTEN THE weakest is culled from the litter. Occasionally, however, the weakest inspires pity. Amish children sometimes beg for the safet
y of the runt in a litter of piglets, but their fathers seldom listen. It’s a waste of time and effort. Resources must be devoted to the ones that will bring a profit at the Kidron auction.

  Barb Raber was the weak, the vulnerable. She was the perfect target for Eli Weaver’s bidding. In that way, she had real value.

  Times when they sat in her Explorer, Eli pushed Barb for the solution he needed. He wanted his wife gone. He wanted to be free to live a life that he desired—not one encumbered by the rules of the Amish or a wife who would not submit to his needs.

  “I want her dead,” Eli repeated.

  Barb was at the ready. She loved Eli. She knew that while circumstances would prevent her from leaving her husband and boys, getting rid of Eli’s wife would make her trysts with Eli less of an issue. She could come over and give him oral sex at his house. Maybe in his bedroom. Maybe more often.

  Definitely without his wife around.

  As she stared out the window of the Explorer, she ran down a list of ways she and Eli could kill his wife. Living on a farm as she had, she knew that poisons were readily available. Nothing was worse than having a crop decimated by insects. Tempo, for example, was an insecticide used by veterinarians to get rid of insects around barns, horse stables, and livestock. Golden Malrin was another insecticide beloved by farmers and ranchers for its deadly effect on raccoons. Some farmers mixed it with peanut butter, milk, or grape soda.

  The same thing could be done to Barbara Weaver.

  And yet poison had its risks. While Eli thought that killing his wife with poison could be a solution, it was possible that she’d die slowly. He was in a hurry to get on with his life.

  “Maybe you could blow up the house?” Eli suggested.

  Barb Raber blinked. “What about your kids?” she asked.

  Eli appeared to shrug it off. “The kids will go to heaven because they’re innocent.”