Abandoned Prayers (23 page)

After Danny went to bed, the two men stayed up talking. Stansfield wanted to find out as much as he could about growing up as a gay Amishman.

Stutzman showed him a photograph of himself, posed in a buggy and dressed in his Amish clothes. He told Stansfield the photo was taken when he and some other Amish boys were racing buggies. From the way Stutzman described himself, in conversation at the ranch and in his letters, Stansfield assumed that Stutzman had left the Amish only recently—within the last year.

The friendly mood changed when Stutzman recounted the story of his wife’s death in the fire. He said they had been sleeping, when she woke him and then left to save some animals, only to collapse in the milk house. The story was chilling.

“As he was telling me the story, the hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood up. All I could think was,
This man murdered his wife. He killed her to get away from the Amish community
. He didn’t say it in so many words, but I knew it. I didn’t
think
it. I
knew
it.”

The sleeping arrangement that night also disturbed Stansfield. Eli’s and Danny’s bedrooms were connected by a bathroom, and Stutzman deliberately left the connecting doors open. Further, Stutzman’s room was illuminated by a night-light.

“If we had sex and Danny got up, he would have seen us. He surely would have
heard
us.”

Stansfield left the next day. He felt sorry for Stutzman and the sheltered Amish world he had been compelled to leave. Yet Stansfield couldn’t forget the thought that Stutzman had killed his wife. He considered calling the police.

“What could the police do now?” he thought as he drove back to El Paso. “His wife was burned up and buried somewhere in Ohio. Calling the police was a silly idea. I didn’t have anything to go on. It was all a suspicion.”

In the end, he figured Stutzman’s motive for killing his wife was to get his son out of the Amish community. He couldn’t have just left Ohio and his wife—if he had the Amish would have taken his son.

“He must have loved his son an awful lot to do that,” Haynes later said.

In spite of financial pressures, throughout the summer Stutzman continued his wild spree of pickups at the Strater and the Holiday Inn—even at the shopping mall in Farmington. He delighted in picking up the inexperienced married tourists or younger men—“chickens”—who came through the area. The parties turned into orgies, and summer 1983 drifted to fall.

Stutzman must have raced about the house, concealing any evidence of the gay life, when he learned his old friends Eli and Gail Byler were coming to see him while on a vacation trip to Ohio. The timing couldn’t have been better. The Bylers arrived in time to celebrate Danny’s birthday on September 9.

In the basement of the ranch house, the Bylers noticed all of the ribbons and trophies won by the stallion. Stutzman told them he had purchased the horse and intended to use it for stud. He made no mention of Terry Palmer.

Stutzman drove the Bylers around, showing off the spectacular
Colorado landscape. His car was old, and he quickly apologized for its condition.

“A friend of mine borrowed my truck, because they were going to drive across country to New York and didn’t think this one would make it,” he explained.

The Bylers marveled at the size and beauty of the ranch, but Stutzman claimed that problems had just surfaced and that he might lose it.

“There’s an Indian reservation near here, and the Indians are trying to get this land back,” he told them. “Someday they might try to take the ranch from me. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

Stutzman said he and Danny had settled into a wonderful new life. They had both taken up skiing and were attending the Brethren Church in Durango.

Even better for the man who had suffered such tragedy when Ida had died, Stutzman said he now had a girlfriend. He even showed the Bylers a photograph of an attractive woman with long, dark-blond hair. When they left Colorado after a week with their old friend, the Bylers felt that Stutzman had finally found happiness and peace.

Of course, everything he’d said had been a lie.

In September, Palmer began to receive strange phone calls. Two or three times per week for several months, Palmer was awakened at 2:00 or 3:00
A.M
. by the ringing of his telephone. When he picked up the receiver, he would hear the noise of someone hanging up—or worse, heavy breathing and gay sexual slurs. It didn’t take him too long to figure out who the caller probably was—the biggest mistake of his life: Eli Stutzman.

While Palmer fretted about the horse, Stutzman continued to do as he pleased. On October 8, 1983, he threw a party with Michael Harris playing DJ. The small group of gay men and lesbian women danced and partied until 2:00
A.M
.

As the party cooled down, Stutzman took Harris into his
bedroom and showed him some photographs of men he had met through
The Advocate
, and some shots of horses he said he owned.

“Eli was real proud of his place,” Harris said later. “He told me that he wanted to make it into a gay dude ranch—if he could get the right backing.”

Halloween in Durango is the town’s Big Party. People fly in from Albuquerque and drive in from Salt Lake City to dress up and join in the unruly celebration—Colorado’s answer to Mardi Gras. Though Stutzman told everyone he loathed the Amish, he wore his plain clothes as his costume. It was the ultimate put-down when he dropped his broadfall pants for sex with men.

Whatever happened between Wyoming teacher Dean Barlow and Eli Stutzman when they met in 1983 was something the Lyman, Wyoming, man deemed “kind of private” and refused to discuss with law enforcement officers when they knocked on his door years later. Married to a schoolteacher also from Lyman, Barlow, an excitable and nervous man, was given to odd and inappropriate bursts of laughter. Stutzman presented a smooth and controlled image, which he apparently found appealing.

Chuck Freeman also attended the party.

“One man showed up as a ‘jolly green giant,’ holding a can of corn and wearing only tennis shoes. Two ranchers wore only spurs and chaps, no shorts. Men paired off and went to the barn for sex. I think everyone in the country but the police department knew about the party,” Freeman later said.

Barlow later told police investigators that he came down to the Four Corners to see his ill grandfather and a teacher friend. Yet somehow Dean Barlow ended up at a Four Corners gay party with Stutzman.

At the time, Stutzman told Barlow he was in the process of finding a buyer for the ranch. Barlow toyed with the idea of purchasing the place, though the $150,000 price was
steep and his wife didn’t seem interested. After the party, the two men went out to the mall to look at a costume contest. Stutzman, who said he could feel the beginnings of a cold coming on, gargled with whiskey in the parking lot.

“He didn’t even drink it,” Barlow later said, as if talking about some great character trait indicating abstinence from alcohol.

Barlow spent the night and the following day with Stutzman and Danny at the ranch, taking photographs of father and son. Stutzman presented his sweet, naive side, and Dean Barlow fell for it.

“Eli is a real religious person. I think he prays—it’s a part of his daily practice,” the Wyoming teacher later said.

Barlow encouraged Stutzman to look for work in Wyoming. “Our area is in a real boom,” he explained.

In November Stutzman disappeared from the Four Corners, leaving without notice. Michael Harris, who had seen him in mid-October at a party, was amazed and sorry at the same time.

“David Tyler liked Eli so much that I wished I had gotten to know Eli better. None of us knew Eli was leaving. I thought he was trying to start the dude ranch.”

November 8, 1983

G
ertie Paton
wore her gray hair swept up off her face in the kind of minibouffant that required more hairspray than trouble. For more than forty years she had made her home in a tidy stucco house on the outskirts of downtown Austin, Texas. In the years since her husband’s death, she had lived alone with her cat Missy.

Though she wore the kind of cat’s-eye-shaped lenses favored by her generation, she missed nothing. And while her vision was not 20/20, she had no difficulty seeing the good in people. She put her “live and let live” philosophy into practice when she found out the “nice boys” across the street were more than just roommates.

Ray Watson
and
Tom Agnello
were gay lovers, and though the Bible told her homosexuality was wrong, Paton set judgment aside. After all, they had been so kind, helping her with her yard work.

She was sorry to see them leave when they moved to San Antonio in 1981. The old neighbors kept in touch, and in 1983 Paton learned that Watson had had what Agnello called a heart attack, and died.

It was during the summer of that same year that Paton first heard of Eli and Danny Stutzman. Agnello brought over a batch of letters from Danny—including several school pictures. The boy had written to Agnello about his
school in Colorado and signed them, “Love, Danny.” Agnello was charmed by the boy’s affectionate letters. He told Paton that he had found Stutzman through an advertisement and that, having corresponded, he planned to go to Colorado to get the Stutzmans. The three of them were going to live as a family.

Two weeks later, on the evening of November 8, a giant U-Haul truck pulled up in front of Gertie Paton’s house, and Agnello knocked on the door. He asked if he and the Stutzmans could stay the night. The motel wouldn’t take their U-Haul. Paton invited them in.

The following morning the two men started looking for a place to live, and Paton watched Danny. Even though looking for a house, Stutzman found time to rake twenty sacks of leaves in Paton’s yard.

“I want to show my appreciation for what you’ve done for me and my son,” he told her.

On Friday, Paton, who was expecting her son and grandson for the weekend, told Stutzman and Agnello that they absolutely had to get a place of their own that day. By noon they had found a place by the railroad tracks, at 3408 Banton Road. The stucco house had two bedrooms and a den. The yard was ratty, and the grimy interior could have used a scraping with a putty knife.

Oddly enough, although they finally had a place to live, trouble seemed to develop between the two gay men.

On the afternoon of November 14, Stutzman and Paton took Danny up to Maplewood Elementary for registration.

When they returned, Agnello blasted the old woman.

“You shouldn’t have taken him! That’s my job!”

That night, around suppertime, Agnello returned to Paton’s and asked the old woman if she would mind watching Danny for the evening.

“Eli and I haven’t had the chance to be alone yet,” he explained.

Paton, who was tired, balked.

Agnello became angry again. “You’re breaking up me and Eli!”

“No. I haven’t got anything to do with that,” Paton shot back, more in self-defense than anything else.

“Gertie, I’m never going to set foot in this house again,” Agnello said as he left.

But the next morning, around eight, Agnello returned; he asked for Eli, who hadn’t been home that night.

Paton didn’t know what was going on. Later she learned that Stutzman and Agnello had had a big fight, and that during the night Stutzman and Danny had crawled through a window and walked to the Stop ’n Go convenience store on Thirty-eighth Street to wait for daylight.

The lovers who had met through the mail were finished before they had started.

The same thing had happened to Terry Palmer.

Stutzman’s Ohio friends Eli and Gail Byler were stunned by the news about Eli’s girlfriend, whom Stutzman said had followed him to Austin, where they had planned to marry.

“She took ill with cancer and died,” Stutzman said.

Later the Bylers and Liz and Leroy Chupp discussed the tragedy.

“First his wife dies in a terrible fire and now his girlfriend. Eli seemed to have the most rotten luck in the world,” Liz Chupp later said.

There was at least one bright spot in Stutzman’s life. He told them he had been hired for a position teaching horsemanship at a college in Austin.

“Here he was with just an eighth-grade education, and teaching college. Can you beat that?” an amazed Eli Byler told a friend.

Full, leafy trees have a way of making even the most bleak of buildings look better than they really are, framing them with green. Oak trees line the street fronting Maplewood Elementary School, a big sandstone-colored brick school built in 1951 when the neighborhood was newer and safer.

As a decaying neighborhood, it draws those who can’t afford to live anywhere else. A lot of the Anglos who live there are former counterculture types. Students from the University of Texas find cheap rentals with plenty of bedrooms suitable for lots of roommates. Poor blacks and illegal aliens also have found a home in the Northeast Austin area next to the airport.

Despite its diversity, the neighborhood is close-knit and tolerant. Gays have established an enclave in the area, and there is little violence directed toward them by straights.

The school itself is in the center of it all, abutted by railroad tracks and a creek bed that is a trickle most of the year. A hole in the fence running along the back of the school provides an invitation to transients.

At Maplewood, Danny was assigned to Janis Bradley, who quickly assessed the situation at the boy’s home.

“Danny talked about all the men that lived there,” she later said. “ ‘My dad’s boyfriends’ was the phrase he always used. I didn’t judge it . . . this was the situation we’ve got to work with.”

When Danny came to school one morning extremely tired, he told Bradley that his father had had a party, and that he hadn’t gotten much sleep.

Terry Palmer, who had learned Stutzman had moved to Texas, sent a Christmas card to Danny. A week later it came back with “Refused. Return to Sender” scrawled on the envelope. The handwriting, Palmer said, was Stutzman’s.