A Killing in Amish Country: Sex, Betrayal, and a Cold-blooded Murder Page 9

  14

  Dancing in the Rain

  He can look into my eyes and lie.

  —BARBARA WEAVER, ON HER HUSBAND’S CONTINUING DECEPTIONS

  MocoSpace was very good to Eli. He made lots of new friends and exchanged nude photos with some. He met Cherie Lindstrom online in April 2008 and they eventually met in person at Eli’s store.

  Cherie was like a lot of young people whose lives hadn’t gone exactly as they’d planned. In her twenties, she was working at a job and trying to care for her daughter. Alone. Sure, family members were helpful. She also had a decent place to raise her child in Canton, about half an hour away from Amish Country. Things could have been much, much worse. Once her daughter was in bed, though, the evenings passed slowly. She logged on to MocoSpace to chat and—if she was lucky enough—maybe meet someone.

  The name on her screen intrigued her.

  Amish Stud.

  This can’t be real, she thought, as she typed out a message. She’d always been intrigued by the Amish. Curious about them. Her great-grandfather had been a livestock dealer and she’d been around the Amish when she rode along as he made sales. She thought of them in that romanticized way many people do.

  “They were from an innocent culture,” she said long after the relationship ended. “It appealed to me. I never thought that I’d meet an Amish guy online. They don’t even have phones.”

  This one did.

  Over the next few weeks, Eli and Cherie exchanged text messages. Eli hid in the basement late at night to text. When they finally talked on the phone, they talked about hunting and fishing and how much they both loved the outdoors.

  “We’d laugh and carry on,” she said years later. “I liked him. His personality was fun. He was always telling me the dumb stuff the other Amish did and how the rumors were flying. Everyone had something to say about everyone else.”

  When she thought about it later, she wondered what they’d been saying about her and her visits to Eli’s shop.

  “Probably wasn’t good,” she said.

  He told Cherie that the world of the Amish was nothing like she thought it was. Eli complained about his family and the ironfisted rule held over him by his older brother, a minister in the church.

  “Eli told me he hated his brother. Hated the Amish. They expected him to be socially acceptable in their culture, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t be.”

  When they first met in person, it was as friends only. She brought her daughter along and Eli gave her a fishing pole.

  Eventually it turned to romance, then sex.

  “He tried to teach me Dutch. He joked. I knew he was married, but he wasn’t happy. He told me how he’d left the Amish before and he was thinking about doing it again. I didn’t expect to, but I fell for him. I cared about him. I never thought he was capable of anything like murder.”

  * * *

  THE FIRST PLACE they had sex was Eli’s store. When Eli couldn’t get away from the ball and chain that was his life among the Amish, they had no choice but to make do.

  During those encounters, Eli would lock the door and they’d duck down behind the counter.

  One day he forgot to lock the door.

  Cherie heard the door open and saw a man stop and back away. She watched him leave.

  “Eli, there was a man here,” she said. “He was Amish. He saw us.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  The man went right to the bishop, who later chastised Eli but provided no further punishment.

  The affair was exciting because it was forbidden. Initially, Cherie and Eli traded nude photos on MocoSpace. It was a diversion for the young mother dealing with lonely nights. While Eli was a good-looking guy, it wasn’t until they met that she was won over by his eyes.

  “His soft, gentle eyes,” she remembered. “And I normally hate brown eyes.”

  She found herself falling for him. It was a relationship built on sex and promises. On her day off from work, Cherie would pick up Eli at his house or store and they would spend the whole day together at her house having sex. They each told the other they were in love. Cherie fulfilled Eli’s craving for oral sex—something he complained his wife refused to do. He satisfied her, too. They would talk for hours, about her childhood, her daughter, and—increasingly—Eli’s problems.

  All of a sudden Eli began wanting more of her: more time, more attention, more of her listening to his complaints. It began to feel uncomfortable. Even dark. It went way beyond what Cherie had signed up for when she contacted the Amish Stud.

  Eli was always making plans—plans for a life without his wife and children. Cherie wasn’t exactly sure how she fit into things, but he kept asking her to be there for him when he left. He asked her to help find him a job so he could start over. She knew he had those little kids at home and it made her sick inside.

  Yet he always managed to spin things around so that whatever it was that he wanted was the righteous thing.

  “He was capable of making me feel guilty,” Cherie said. “I knew I was his out. I feel bad about that now, but at the time I didn’t see he was playing on sympathy to get what he wanted.”

  She remembered Eli as very childlike—or very good at playing the part. When Cherie would pick him up for a drive out of Amish Country, Eli would beg for her to take him to McDonald’s.

  “It was funny. Weird. He was always excited to go to McDonald’s. If it was morning, he’d want an Egg McMuffin and coffee and if it was lunchtime, he’d want a Quarter Pounder with cheese and a coffee. It was always such a big deal to him. He had a kind of playful arrogance about him. He was so naïve, but he was just playing the part.”

  Cherie would come down from Canton to sit in Eli’s shop at a little table next to the door. Mostly they’d be there chatting between customers. Some days were very slow and they had more idle time than what conversation could fill. In addition to the Amish man who reported them to the bishop, one of Eli’s children had also entered the shop at an inconvenient moment, and they’d had to quickly get themselves together.

  One time Eli’s wife came in to hand her husband some coffee while Cherie was sitting at the little table by the door.

  “That’s my wife,” Eli said to Cherie.

  Cherie felt a pang of guilt, but Eli had made it so very clear that his wife was cold to him and that his needs weren’t being met. It was easy to forget that there was a wife and mother of five kids in the mix.

  Barbara had been marginalized so much that Cherie was unable to recall anything specific about her.

  If love is blind, it can also be selfish.

  “I can’t even picture her in my mind,” Cherie said later. “All those Amish women look alike.”

  It’s hard to say exactly how Eli moved from flirting, to sex, to asking a woman if she would kill his wife, but he did. Often.

  Two months after they met, Eli started talking about leaving his marriage. That got old, and although they continued their sexual relationship, Cherie encouraged him to remain committed to his wife and children.

  But he could be oh so charming.

  * * *

  IT WAS THE plot of a romance novel. One full of clichés. They were from two worlds—Amish and English. They were in love. There were obstacles. And like the frenzied reader of a sexy novel, Cherie Lindstrom could not stop herself.

  There was even the day they danced in the rain.

  Cherie and her Amish lover both liked the outdoors. She would drive them to the Wilderness Center, a nature preserve near Wilmot. They would walk the ten miles of hiking trails, passing by old-growth forest, prairie, and lakes and ponds. It wasn’t about the nature, of course; it was all about finding a place to be alone, a place to have sex.

  During one of their walks, the skies opened and it began raining. She begged him to dance with her. He resisted, saying he didn’t know how to dance, but Cherie could be persuasive and he finally gave in.

  “It was romantic,” she said later. “It was perfect. Walk
ing, holding hands, ducking raindrops.”

  While she loved the Eli Weaver who was passionate but also “giggly” and “goofy,” she pulled back when he turned moody.

  They had known each other long enough, about a year, that he could no longer hide his fallback behavior, which was manipulation.

  “I’m going to leave my family. I really am,” he told her on the walk.

  “Sure, Eli,” she said. “You always say that.”

  He stared at her with those brown eyes she’d grown to love.

  “No,” he said. “I really mean it.”

  Cherie was unsure.

  “You need to stay and fix things with your wife, and be there for your kids,” she said.

  She had told him that before. Now she was insistent. But his whining was getting on her nerves. He didn’t catch on.

  “I’m bored,” he said. “I don’t like the control the church has over me. I want out. I want a different job.”

  That was a sore spot with Cherie. She’d tried to help him out by connecting him with other job prospects.

  “Eli, I opened a door for you,” she said. “You said you wanted to work at one of the big outdoor stores. You wanted to work with archery equipment. I called some stores for you, I told them about you. You were supposed to go in for interviews and you didn’t!”

  “Well…” Eli knew there was no way to defend himself.

  “I said, ‘Here’s the phone number of the store. I’ll even drive you,’ but you never followed up.”

  Eli shrugged.

  She called Eli out.

  “You want me to feel sorry for you,” she said, letting him have it. “You say, ‘I’m bored, I’m under my brother’s thumb in the church.’ I don’t have time to feel sorry for you, Eli. Deal with this. This is the life you chose when you were baptized. Why did you get baptized in the first place if you didn’t want to be Amish?”

  Eli looked down at the ground. “It was expected of me.”

  Cherie, who’d done all that she could to make something of herself, grew angry. “There are a million things expected of me, too. That’s the way life is.”

  She’d reached her breaking point. Cherie knew it and Eli knew it. They didn’t talk for a couple of weeks. It had happened before. Then one of them would call or text a smiley face and they would make contact again, meet for sex, then reach another impasse.

  “He was trying to get me to rescue him,” Cherie said later.

  But I’m the princess, she thought. Someone is supposed to rescue me.

  Cherie chose to see less of Eli.

  * * *

  “HIS WIFE WAS murdered!” Cherie couldn’t believe her ears. She asked the friend who worked at a mill with the Amish to repeat what he was saying as she slumped into a chair in her Canton area home.

  “They found Eli’s wife dead this morning!” he told her.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “There’s a rumor going around that someone shot her!”

  Cherie started to cry. She lost it completely.

  She thought back to a photo Eli had sent her just two weeks before. It was a photograph of the chair that she sat in when she was at Maysville Outfitters.

  “Something’s missing here,” he wrote. “You.”

  She hadn’t seen him for a while so after getting his note she dialed his number and good old Eli had her laughing and missing him all over again. He also played the sympathy card again, telling her that his wife was colder than ever.

  “If you see her in a parking lot, run her over,” he said.

  “Are you serious?” she asked, feeling a slight chill at his request.

  “Just kidding,” he said after a beat of silence.

  Reeling from the news that Barbara Weaver was dead, Cherie dropped everything and went to her cousin’s house three doors down. The cousin had a relative who was a lawyer. Cherie called the lawyer. He told her to call the sheriff.

  She did.

  She also called her father and when the two of them arrived at the offices of the Wayne County Sheriff, Cherie was composed but shaking inside. When the detectives told her that Eli had mentioned her name to them as a potential suspect, she crumbled.

  She started sobbing.

  “Really?” she asked.

  “I know where I was,” she said. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  They asked her for the names of the people she’d been with the night of the murder and she provided them. Phone numbers, too.

  The detectives asked her to make a controlled phone call to Eli in their presence. She called his cell and got a recording saying the number had been changed. The detectives sat her down at a computer in the sheriff’s office. She no longer had a MocoSpace account, but she created a new one and sent a message to Eli asking him to call her.

  “He will call me back,” she said.

  But he didn’t. She waited. The detectives waited. Nothing. An hour later, they gave her a small recorder and some audio equipment so she could capture everything he said if and when he called back.

  Fifteen minutes later, just outside of Dalton, her phone rang. She pushed the Record button and answered. Eli was “real nonchalant” when he spoke.“Somebody shot my wife,” he said.

  “What?” she asked, pretending to be surprised.

  “I can’t talk right now,” he said. “I’m at my dad’s. I’ll call you later.”

  She immediately dialed the detectives and told them of the call.

  “He sounded so cold. He didn’t seem upset,” she said. “It was like a normal conversation. ‘Somebody shot my wife.’”

  She was so done with him.

  * * *

  AT HER HOME in a village in Holmes County, Tabitha Milton was struggling with something only she knew. It niggled at her. It was a scab that kept falling off. Tabitha couldn’t shake the thought from her brain. Barb Raber had said something to her that she hadn’t heard on the news. It was during the first phone call.

  She was specific about the weapon used to kill Eli’s wife.

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

  It was something only the killer or killers could have known.

  15

  Friends

  Your dad and probably whole family says something is wrong with you. Well they are sorta right. You are too full of life to be controlled. You doing what makes you happy isn’t wrong.

  —SHELLEY CASEY, THE WOMAN HE DATED IN 2006, ASSESSING ELI AND OFFERING HERSELF TO HIM

  The work of sifting through Eli’s life—and the lives of others who might be suspects in the murder of his wife—was well under way. Barbara Weaver’s death wasn’t suicide—there was no firearm by the bed. It wasn’t burglary—there was cash sitting out in at least two places in the house. Someone had wanted to murder the thirty-year-old Amish wife and mother of five.

  Detectives interviewed friends, neighbors, family, and the ever-growing number of women Eli had known. Who was this guy?

  Not everyone disliked Eli. He had charisma; he could be entertaining and even polite. A Mennonite woman who was also a taxi driver (not Barb Raber) said he was always “a perfect gentleman” when he came to her door looking for a ride. “He was so apologetic for interrupting me when he saw I was in my pajamas,” Betty Stolfus said. “I assured him that it was no problem.” One time when Barbara Weaver was caring for her handicapped uncle, Eli carried the man gently down the steps and placed him in Betty’s van for the ride home.

  Later, Betty spoke of the irony. “I have to wonder in retrospect how he could show compassion for a handicapped person and have none for his wife,” she said.

  Tips were coming in to the sheriff’s office. Word had gotten around that someone in Barbara’s family didn’t want people to talk to the police. But the Amish proceeded to talk and talk—to each other and to their English and Mennonite friends.

  A few called the sheriff’s office. They wanted detectives
to know that a man had been overheard at a gas station talking about a “hit list” of people he intended to kill; that Barb Raber never reined in her foul mouth or sexual overtones even when others were present; that Eli was a womanizer; that one of Eli’s girlfriends was an exotic dancer. The staff of a pizza parlor in the nearby town of Kidron called to say Eli was “sly,” and either committed the murder or was involved. There were other leads phoned in: Eli physically abused his wife; Eli liked drugs, alcohol, and pornography; Barbara Weaver had been seen through a window of her house the night before she was murdered, pacing the floor. And there was information they already knew: that the dead woman had been seeing a counselor and that Eli had fathered a baby with a girlfriend.

  Ed Raber—not Barb’s husband but another Ed Raber, the one whose route emptying Porta-Potties took him to Eli’s store—said that Eli had asked him, “Why don’t you kill my wife, my bitch for me?” Then, he said, Eli laughed and said he was kidding. Eli wasn’t kidding when he told Ed that if it weren’t for his children, no way would he be married.

  Several people told investigators about the day, almost exactly one year before the murder, Eli was caught in his store with “an English lady in his arms”—and he wasn’t selling her fishing tackle. A witness went to Eli’s bishop, who confronted him. At first Eli denied it, but he finally admitted the public indiscretion and even claimed he had been praying he would be caught and had made peace with God.

  Barbara’s counselor, Duane Troyer, shared with investigators some of what Barbara had confided over the previous three years. Her first appointment at Hoffnung Heim, the Christian counseling practice, was in April 2006. Barbara and Eli were living in Millersburg in a house on his parents’ property. She saw Troyer every other week for several months. It was probably the worst time for Barbara and her children. During that time, Eli left his family, living as English with Shelley, driving a pickup, wearing English clothes, and even shaving off his beard, occasionally returning home for brief stays.