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

  Shelley seemed ecstatic and confident that they were building a life together.

  I wish you knew what kind of job you were gonna get so I can move my schedule to match yours. I just want to be with you … you are the greatest thing in my life. You are what I asked God for.

  Eli found a job, working for a trucker.

  Eli, good luck with your new job. I am so proud of you. I know you will do very well.

  By August, when he left Shelley for good, his wife and children had moved to Apple Creek, so that’s where he went. Barbara Weaver found the incriminating letters from Shelley among his things after he returned.

  Shelley told detectives she’d never heard Eli wish his wife dead. But sometime in May 2009, nearly three years after he had come and gone from her life, he contacted her. He texted, saying he wanted to see her. She said no.

  It was about the time Eli was going through the Rolodex in his mind, looking for someone to kill his wife.

  * * *

  BARB RABER FONDLED the bottle of pills before handing them over to Eli. He’d promised her the moon if she’d help him with the murder of his wife. He was anxious. Out of sorts. Barb gave him the pills she had acquired. Then she went home to wait. She expected a text would come telling her that everything was just as Eli wanted. His wife would be gone and Barb would be rewarded with his attention. His devotion.

  As the inhabitants of the big white house on Harrison Road settled down for the evening, Eli dissolved all of the pills in a glass of Sierra Mist soda. He set the glass on the kitchen counter. A trap. A snare. Barbara saw the soda and smiled. She loved Sierra Mist. How thoughtful of Eli to leave it out for her.

  Thoughtful indeed.

  Barbara took a sip, made a face, and spit it out into the sink.

  She turned to him. His face gave away that there was something wrong.

  “What was in this, Eli?”

  The wheels in his brain spun. He needed an answer. “Sleeping pills. I was going to kill myself,” he said.

  Barbara started to cry. She retreated to the bedroom and he followed.

  She searched for words as she’d done countless times. There seemed no reaching him. His purported angst and depression were endless. She assumed it was caused by his yo-yoing between the Amish and English worlds.

  “Eli,” she said, “what will it take for you to change your ways? To give yourself under the church?”

  He stayed mute, but she went on and made him an offer that later some would wonder if Eli had seen as an invitation.

  “I’d give my life if I knew it would keep your soul from hell,” she said.

  The incident gave Barbara a sense of dread. She told a friend that she was suspicious of the drink that Eli had “just happened” to let her taste. Barbara didn’t say she thought Eli was trying to poison her. Saying something like that aloud even to a trusted friend would be giving voice to something so horrible, so ungodly, that she doubted she could carry on as if nothing had happened.

  Barbara was concerned. Scared.

  Turns out she had every reason to be.

  Eli continued to wrestle with his demons. Later, he wrote to a family member:

  My heart was still bitter and by then I should have learned my lesson, but I didn’t and a couple days later I was really down and in my mind everybody was working against me.

  That’s when his plan went to the next level.

  * * *

  TABITHA MILTON NEEDED a diversion. She was single, the mother of three, and dog tired from her job at an Ohio frozen-food company.

  Tabitha was in her thirties with long hair that was black and straight—thanks to the intervention of hair dye and a flatiron that had been her go-to styling routine since she was fifteen. Her arms were inked with the story of the loves and heartaches of her life. Though she was tough when she had to be, she was known for her joyful spirit. When she laughed, her gray-green eyes would widen to take in the joy of whoever was with her. She was energetic and blessed with the kind of personality that drew people in.

  She was a beautiful young woman, but being beautiful hadn’t made her life an easy one. She struggled with relationships like so many of her friends. Men seemed to come and go. The only constant was her children, whom she loved more than anything. Men? Take ’em or leave ’em. It hurt to be close to them. It was also lonely without them.

  Until Eli Weaver showed up, that is. He came with the promise of friendship and maybe something more. He’d never hurt her.

  Or so she thought.

  In 2009. she logged on to Lavalife—“Where Singles Click”—and scrolled through the photos and profiles of men looking for the same thing she was: friendship, maybe more. One profile in particular caught her eye. It featured a bearded man with the distinctive cut of the Amish. He didn’t say he was Amish. Tabitha didn’t ask. But, like other Ohio women, she was curious about the Amish. The two flirted for a while and engaged in sexting.

  “Are you Amish?” she asked.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You’re not supposed to have a cell phone, are you?”

  “No. But I do. I keep it in the barn and charge it there too.”

  He didn’t say that he was married, and she didn’t ask. He told her about how he had a sports supply store and wondered if she was tech savvy enough to help build him a website.

  “Sure,” she said.

  A short time later she drove down to Apple Creek to meet him face-to-face. And yes, he was Amish. He admitted that he was married, too.

  Tabitha was lonely and looking for love, but she was not about to get involved with a married man. Especially an Amish one.

  “You could get divorced,” she said.

  “No. I can’t. The Amish won’t allow it,” he said.

  “If you wanted to, you could.”

  “I’d lose everything. My house. My business.”

  She told him that he could start over.

  He looked at her and shook his head. “I can’t. I have no education. I can’t do it.”

  Tabitha said she could help him get his GED.

  Eli Weaver brightened a little at the prospect.

  “It was like there was a little bit of hope,” she said later.

  * * *

  TABITHA KNEW HER way around a computer. She told Eli that one pathway out of his bad marriage was to learn how to use technology for his business. He could create an e-commerce site to sell items that could easily be shipped—bows and arrows, for example.

  He kept telling her that he wasn’t smart enough, that he couldn’t manage all that. Would she show him how? Would she be his teacher?

  “All I know is Amish,” he said. “Farming and hunting, that kind of work.”

  “You can do more,” she said, cheerleading a bit.

  She liked Eli so much. Feelings stirred. Not romantic, but a kind of deep friendship that made her want to do more for him.

  Later, after so much had happened, Tabitha looked back on those early days of friendship.

  “I think he was a lot smarter than he said he was. He caught on too quick,” she said.

  Every now and then when Tabitha and Eli spent time together, the subject would veer to sex. He’d tell her about an Amish girl he’d been having sex with. Or a Mennonite girl who worked at an Amish restaurant. He’d complain that his wife didn’t give him the kind of sexual attention that he wanted.

  “I’ve never gone down on a woman,” he told Tabitha one afternoon.

  It was the kind of statement that Eli would make every now and then. It didn’t shock her. They were best friends and he was looking for someone who could help him.

  “What about with your wife?” she asked.

  “She won’t let me.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he told her. “What does it take for a woman to have an orgasm?”

  “Different things,” she answered, not sure what else to say. She wondered if the Amish didn’t talk about those things. If they didn’t have any framewor
k for understanding the way sex works. She figured they didn’t learn about it in school. She felt sorry for Eli, but she did her best to answer. They were only friends, so there absolutely was not going to be any show-and-tell.

  * * *

  TABITHA WAS IN a world of hurt. She been laid off from her factory job, had no source of income, and had a family to feed. When she told Eli the bad news, he comforted her, telling her not to worry. He’d help out. He also told her that for all her talk about how he should transform his life through education, she should, too.

  Eli gave Tabitha the laptop he’d purchased for the Web site, and told her to get off her butt and start taking classes. When her bank account was close to zero and she was late on her Saturn payment, it was Eli who gave her cash to stay current.

  “He really was my best friend,” she said later. “Maybe the best friend I’d ever had. He was there for us. He’d come over and we’d have pizza with the kids. Watch TV. He was just an all-around great guy. When my mom could no longer care for her beagle, Eli took the dog in. He was always so helpful to us.”

  13

  Amish Stud

  He used to tell me about all the rumors and dumb stuff the Amish did. We’d laugh and carry on about it.

  —ONE OF ELI’S GIRLFRIENDS, CHERIE LINDSTROM, ON ELI’S DISLIKE OF THE AMISH

  The Rolodex in Eli’s brain had many names in it.

  Eli first went online in 2006, soon after returning to his wife and children. It was three years before he would meet Tabitha. Some women he met for sex. One relationship went farther than he planned. The police learned from an Amish friend of Eli’s that he had fathered a child with one of his girlfriends.

  After receiving a tip from one of Eli’s friends about how to find her, Deputy Alex Abel interviewed Misty Stevens in his unmarked patrol car in front of her parents’ house. Misty and her young daughter lived with her parents.

  Misty’s relationship with Eli began with a text message from someone she didn’t recognize, the equivalent of a wrong number. But she responded and they stayed in touch.

  At first, Eli didn’t tell Misty that he was married and had children. And she didn’t ask. It wasn’t until after two months of texting that she asked if he had children and if he had been married. He finally told her the truth. Yes, he was married. Yes, he had children—four at that time (soon to be five). She continued the relationship anyway.

  Misty began seeing Eli “romantically.” She would pick him up at the store or his house early, at 3:30 or 4:00 a.m., so Barbara would think he had gone fishing or hunting. Then they would go to a motel and out to eat. One time she went out of town with him to a gun show.

  Eli told her he wasn’t happy with his marriage and that he wasn’t receiving the love and attention that he deserved and liked. He told her that should his wife “happen” to pass away, he would leave the Amish community and be with her.

  In November, about two months after the sexual part of their friendship began, she learned she was pregnant. “Pretty much after that we were no longer romantically involved,” she told detectives. Misty knew he wasn’t going to leave his family. He kept giving her excuses about having to sell the store and move. So she said she didn’t want to see him anymore. “I pretty much told him I couldn’t be with someone who was married.”

  Misty gave birth to a girl in July 2008. Eli never saw the child, but each month he sent a check for $350, written on the store’s bank account, to Misty. The week of Barbara Weaver’s murder, Misty received and cashed what would be the last check.

  * * *

  WHEN WAYNE COUNTY detective Michael Maxwell and lieutenant Kurt Garrison showed up at Tabitha’s place a couple of days after the shooting, they pressed her hard for whatever it was that they thought she knew. The three sat outside at her picnic table.

  They were insistent, but Tabitha was no wallflower. She pushed right back.

  “Fuck,” she said, “I don’t know anything.”

  She could see the detectives switch tactics and try to win her over, by disclosing a few details and watching her reaction.

  “The Weavers’ home was invaded and Mrs. Weaver was murdered. Eli was out fishing,” Detective Chuhi said.

  She pushed back again.

  “Like I said, I don’t know a thing about it.”

  There was a lot she didn’t tell the detectives. As he did with many other women, Eli confided in Tabitha. “He never said he hated his wife, just hated his marriage to her,” Tabitha said later. “Said he needs to get out. He was very unhappy … she was mean to him.”

  At least a dozen times, Tabitha heard Eli talk about killing his wife, but she never took him seriously. Eli would say things like, “I could just choke her—she yells at me all the time” and “What could I use to poison her? I wish she would just go away. We should do it together. Could you get rid of her?”

  Not long after the two officers left, Tabitha finally heard from the one person she knew would tell her what had happened.

  Eli phoned.

  “Tabitha,” he said, “I’m so sorry. Someone killed my wife! My children found her!”

  Tabitha’s head started spinning.

  She told him how the detectives had come over. She knew they were insinuating that Eli had been involved and she knew him far better than they did. He was not the kind of man who would kill his wife. Certainly, he was unhappy. Unhappy doesn’t mean murderous.

  “I’m not working with these guys,” she told him. “I know you didn’t do this.”

  After Tabitha hung up, she sat down and collected herself. Her mind raced to a conversation she and Eli had had about a month prior. They were at her grandmother’s house, just kicking back talking. The subject turned to his wife once more. Eli talked about how hateful and mean she was.

  “She hates me,” he said. “She never lies in bed with me. She’s turned everyone in church against me.”

  As Tabitha saw it, Barbara Weaver was the “meanest” Amish woman who ever walked the earth. She practically abused her husband by doing everything she could to hurt him.

  The conversation took a turn when he asked Tabitha how to poison someone.

  “You’re smart,” Eli said, carefully weighing her response. “Help me figure this out.”

  The question caught her completely off guard. She wasn’t sure what he was really getting at.

  “You can use rat poison to poison rats. I don’t know anything about poisoning people.”

  “What about putting it in Barbara’s Tang? She likes to drink it every night before bed. Would it kill her?”

  “I don’t know,” Tabitha said.

  “Make her sick?” he asked.

  She looked at him, measuring where he was coming from, then they laughed it off.

  Eli and Tabitha texted several times a day. Finally, there were so many conversations about his unhappy marriage that she began to ignore him—at least when he was ranting about his wife.

  “I love Eli as a friend. He’s been great to me. However, I only loved him as a friend. I think he loved me more than that,” she told detectives.

  Eli appears to have been a better friend than he was a husband. When Tabitha’s phone broke and she needed a new one, and a computer too, he got them for her. They belonged to Barb Raber, but he didn’t think that mattered. Tabitha became the third “family member” on Barb’s Verizon Friends & Family plan. Eli let Tabitha assume he was paying for the use of the phone. He wasn’t. Good old Barb was.

  Tabitha had never met her cell phone benefactor, Barb Raber, but they texted. It was Barb who told Tabitha that Eli’s wife had been “shot in the heart.” Barb said she’d heard that’s what the autopsy showed.

  Barb had phoned her at the tanning salon to tell her of the murder.

  Tabitha was beside herself when Barb said Eli’s wife was dead.

  “Tell me what the hell’s going on,” she pleaded. “This is a joke, right? It’s not real.”

  Barb coolly said, “No, it’s real.”
/>   “What happened?”

  “Someone broke into Eli and Barbara’s house and shot his wife with a .410 gauge shotgun.”

  The number .410 stuck in Tabitha’s head.

  After the murder, Tabitha texted her friend Brian about Eli.

  We joke about it, you know. People say things like “I’m going to kill her, blah, blah,” But I never took him serious.

  Later, she wrote:

  I guess he wasn’t joking. He said he wanted her dead and wanted me. How could he … put something like this on me and hurt his five kids.

  In a follow-up interview, Detective Chuhi and Lieutenant Garrison asked Tabitha the million-dollar question. Did she think Eli had killed his wife?

  “In my heart, no. In my gut, yes.”

  She was blunter in a text to Brian.

  Eli killed his wife and I knew about it. I just never thought he meant it.

  * * *

  WHILE TABITHA THOUGHT she was Eli Weaver’s best friend, another woman in another small Ohio town was hearing the same tune sung by the Amish Stud. And like Tabitha, Candy Denton had been pressed into service because she could help Eli with his Web site.

  In time, Eli and Candy traded photos. At first they were somewhat demure. His face. His smile. Over time the images veered to the sexual, including photographs of his penis. She drove out to Sugarcreek and the two of them shared an intimate moment talking at a local park.

  He said her loved her and wished that he was no longer Amish so they could be together.

  His wife was cold. She refused to sleep with him. Barbara even hurt him physically.

  “He told me about her clawing him,” Candy later told detectives.

  Candy’s heart went out to Eli. He played on her sympathies, telling her that he’d been abused as a child. He told her he was lonely. He offered to pay for Candy and her son to move to a better apartment. Eli was good at making women feel that they could heal him, make him happy.

  Eli told his girlfriends he couldn’t get divorced. It is almost unheard of among the Amish, but it was an option for Eli. If he had put the energy he spent plotting Barbara’s death into improving his marriage—or leaving it—his wife and children would have obviously been better for it. He would have been shunned and placed under a Bann and forced to leave the community. But he didn’t want to be Amish. He didn’t care what his neighbors and bishop thought of him. If Eli had left and sought a divorce, it would have affected Barbara’s future more than his. She would not have been allowed to remarry because it would have been considered adultery. But for whatever reason, Eli didn’t seem to see it this way. For him, the only way out was if his wife was gone.