Abandoned Prayers (24 page)

A few weeks before Christmas, Eli and Danny brought Gertie Paton a Christmas present—a piece of glass with a rose etched on it, and Paton hung it in her kitchen. Stutzman told her that he and his son were going on a trip.

“We’re going to Wyoming. Friends sent us tickets, so we’re going up to ski.”

Stutzman and Danny flew into Salt Lake City during a snowstorm on Christmas Eve with little more than a couple
of bags and some Christmas gifts for each other and their hosts, Dean and Margie Barlow.

One can only wonder what Margie Barlow made of all of this—particularly sending tickets to a man her husband supposedly met just once at a Halloween party.

The Barlows met Eli and Danny at the airport and snapped photos, for which Stutzman seemed grateful. He claimed to be worried that his grandfather was about to pass away, and said that he wanted to send photographs to him right away.

If Barlow had thought for a minute, it might have occurred to him that an old Swartzentruber Amishman like Stutzman’s grandfather would be offended by photographs.

The Barlows drove east on Interstate 80, headed for their home in Lyman, in Uinta County.

The area might have reminded Danny Stutzman of the Four Corners ranch—rugged mountains and rocky enclaves. A few dormant oil wells dotted the landscape.

For Christmas, Stutzman gave his son a pair of roller skates.

Later, Barlow drove Stutzman out to the family ranch in Kemmerer, a town northwest of Lyman, in Lincoln County. While driving he asked Stutzman about the barn fire, and Stutzman explained that the Amish don’t put lightning rods on rooftops—it tampers with God’s will.

“What was it like to deal with your wife’s death?” Barlow asked.

Stutzman, silent at first, grew angry.

“It was terrible,” he said, refusing to elaborate.

When it came time to leave, Dean Barlow must have been hooked. He must have wanted the relationship more than Stutzman did. When Barlow phoned Stutzman later in 1984 and left a message on his answering machine, it got no response.

Around Valentine’s Day 1984, Gertie Paton was invited to the Stutzmans’ for dinner. Stutzman said he wanted to
thank her for all she had done for him. Paton noticed the trophies and ribbons won by the stallion, and the Amish clothing Stutzman kept for Danny.

Stutzman increased his involvement in the local gay community, even serving as an officer for the Texas Gay Rodeo Association’s Austin chapter. He spent evenings picking up tricks at the Round-up, which was at the time a gay western bar.

In the spring of 1984, Stutzman shocked local gays when he ran a classified ad in the
Austin American-Statesman
, saying that he was a country boy new to the city and looking for companionship. Stutzman told 34-year-old landscaper
Clint Skinner
that he had received more than two hundred responses to the ad. Stutzman invited Skinner to dinner and they had sex. Stutzman gave Skinner the impression that he was sexually naive and a homebody.

“He was a little too much country for my taste . . . he was raising chickens in the city!” Skinner recalled. “On the other hand, if I had known he was a ‘bottom’ things might have been different.”

Skinner introduced Stutzman to a friend of his,
Jim Donovan
, an international banker and urbane opposite of most of the men Stutzman associated with. He liked Stutzman, who claimed he was looking for a permanent lover.

“I got the idea that Eli’s opinion was, ‘There’s no shortage of finding someone to suck your cock, but a relationship, that’s something else,” Donovan remembered.

There were other ways to meet gay men, and Eli Stutzman tried them.

Compucopia was the gay world’s answer to computer dating. Men input sexual vitals, likes, and dislikes and let the computer match them up with the perfect date.

San Francisco transplant
Willie Paynter
was member number 240. He was a six-foot-plus, blue-eyed man with a sexual appetite for uncircumcised—“uncut”—men. When he first landed in San Francisco he took a job as the office manager for a charitable foundation. Later he found his true
calling as an electrician when a gay man taught him the trade.

Paynter had his first sexual encounters as a teen with men at bus stations in South Carolina, where he grew up as the scion of a fairly well-to-do family.

“My first time with a man,” he later said, “was when I changed buses in Charlottesville and met a man in the restroom who took me to a near-deserted office building next door. I licked him off in a locked bathroom stall. I still remember his come on my wrist.”

Paynter had met men through
The Advocate, RFD
—a rural gay men’s magazine—and finally, through Compucopia. Like many gay men, Paynter saved every letter he received and copies of the photographs of the men who wanted to date him. He kept them all in a file box, and when the need arose—to fight a depression, or just to have the rush of a happy memory—he could review them.

On his application, he detailed what he was and what he wanted. Paynter was the active partner in anal sex, and he wanted to be on the receiving end of “rimming,” the gay term for one man stimulating another anally with his tongue. The 36-year-old did not want a partner who was into sex toys, S&M, or “fisting”—shoving a fist inside a partner’s rectum.

Tall and lean, Paynter was a straight-looking, educated man who loved the symphony, gourmet cooking, reading, and, more than anything, sex with men. His preference was a lumberjack type or a farmer, but years on the make had left him a little more realistic about what he’d turn up.

He wrote in his “personal statement” for Compucopia: “I am looking mostly for casual sex—
I’m a good fucker
—but would also like to find an uncut outdoorsman to move with to my family farm in the south someday. Also looking for a hiking/camping buddy.”

Paynter paid his ten-dollar membership fee and sat back and waited for the perfect match.

On March 18, Eli Stutzman, also a member of the dating service, responded with a bare-chested photograph and a
letter in which he described the size of his penis and explicitly noted his preferences for anal and oral sex.

Stutzman added that he was the father of a 7-year-old named Danny. A rubber-stamped image of a unicorn decorated the envelope and its Austin, Texas, return address.

On March 23, Paynter struggled with three different versions of his response to Stutzman’s letter: he knew a good man when he saw one. He thanked Stutzman for the “very handsome picture,” and noted that his own penis was seven inches, cut, and that his balls were on the small side—“particularly in Texas’ cold weather.” He reaffirmed his enjoyment of casual sex.

They talked on the phone, and Stutzman filled him in on Danny. Though Paynter wasn’t particularly interested in meeting a man with children, he listened carefully. He wanted to know all he could in case he was to become the little boy’s “stepfather.”

On April 2, Stutzman wrote again, this time enclosing several more pictures of himself. One shot showed him clad in a bikini bottom and slung over Terry Palmer’s horse. Stutzman wrote that it was late and that he’d had a hard day, signing off with, “Danny’s in bed asleep and I should be, too.”

Paynter caught a United Airlines flight to Austin on April 13. Stutzman had told him that he’d be working and that Paynter should walk to Banton Road—just a few blocks from the airport—and wait for Stutzman and Danny to return at the end of the day. Chickens in the backyard fueled fantasies that Stutzman might be the one to take back to South Carolina with him.

“I could envision that he would be a real good person to settle down with,” he later said.

Danny, Paynter, and Stutzman had dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and the two men topped the evening off with sex. For Paynter it was as good as good got.

The following day, Paynter ran an electrical line to the clothes dryer. As the hours passed, it seemed that Stutzman
was exactly what he had been looking for and Eli seemed to feel affectionate toward Paynter as well.

On Monday morning Stutzman and Danny dropped the love-struck man at the airport. Paynter cried all the way back to San Francisco.

Why do I have to go back to that horrible city? he thought. I could be here with this wonderful man in Texas, where it is warm and green and moist . . . and he’s so wellhung
.

In the spring of 1984, Stutzman told Austin banker Jim Donovan that he had met someone new. In fact, the new man—a porno star, no less—had moved into the Banton Road address with Eli and Danny.

“I’m not sure if he was a porno star or not, but from what I saw one night he could have been,” Donovan later recalled. “If he made any movies, I doubt it was more than one.”

Like all of Stutzman’s other relationships, the one with the porno star didn’t last long.

Three weeks after they met, Willie Paynter called Stutzman to let him know that Paynter was going to take a vacation. He planned to travel through Colorado and make a side trip to Austin.

“I have a new lover now,” Stutzman said, his words crushing Paynter. “We have a monogamous relationship. It would be great for you to come, and you could stay with us, but we couldn’t sleep together.”

Paynter, who had been sure that Stutzman was Mr. Wonderful, fought back tears.

“Eli,” he said, “I’m so attracted to you and I so much want to go to bed with you . . . it would hurt too much to see you. I won’t come to Austin.”

Stutzman said that he was sorry and that he hoped Paynter understood the situation. Then, even though he had just dumped the man, Stutzman still asked for a favor. He wondered if Paynter could stop by the Colorado ranch and
check on a few things. Paynter, not wanting to shut the door on the relationship—after all, things might not work out with the new lover—agreed.

The harassing calls continued to frighten Terry Palmer, yet he refused to do anything about them.

Finally, Ryan Bloom answered a call one morning at 4:00
A.M
. and asked the caller: “Where are you calling from?”

The crackly response Bloom thought he heard was
“Boston . . . We’re having a hell of a party . . .”
He knew Eli Stutzman lived in Austin, and he became convinced that he had misheard—that the caller must have said
Austin
.

On May 3, Bloom went to the local sheriff, and the Austin police eventually notified him that the calls were indeed coming from Stutzman’s address. Stutzman was told that such calls were a criminal offense, and the calls stopped.

“To this day, I can’t figure out why he was harassing me,” Palmer said later, still skirting the issue of their relationship.

Chuck Freeman and his foreman, Byron Larson, thought they knew, based on what Eli Stutzman had told them.

“Maybe Eli was jealous because Terry had taken a younger lover?” Freeman suggested, referring to Bloom’s appearance on the Colorado ranch.

On May 28, Willie Paynter called Stutzman from Durango and reported that the ranch seemed fine.

During the last school conference, Stutzman told Janis Bradley that he wouldn’t be able to be with his boy this summer and was looking for a summer camp.

“Do you know of any place I can take Danny?” he asked. She suggested seeing the counselor. Stutzman never did.

W
anda Sawyer
was fed up with her husband. And who could blame her?
Mac Sawyer
drank too much, laughed too loud, and had a smile so gap-toothed a drunk driver could have parallel parked in the spaces between his teeth. He irritated her, and she wanted a divorce. Wanda Sawyer, who had left Michigan at 19 and had married an air force transportation airman in 1962, dared to want something new.

They had moved to Austin when Mac Sawyer was stationed at Bergstrom Air Force Base. After Austin, they had lived in Hawaii for twelve years. Wanda Sawyer had quickly become the kind of woman who could wear a floral-splattered muumuu without a trace of reservation. She reveled in it.

If one thing could be said of her, it was that she wasn’t shy. She had a warm sense of humor that was frequently so bawdy as to make even a police detective blush.

Once she had cut loose from her unhappy marriage, she would stretch all boundaries to their limits.

Her hair was a halo of red, her eyes as wide apart as the towns on a map of southern Travis County. Best of all was her voice, which had a kind of cartoonish timbre that embued every word with personality and mischief. Wanda smoked like Mauna Kea, but never drank. Mac had done enough of that for both of them.

She returned to Austin, the town that held her best and
happiest memories, on June 27, 1984. She was sure her husband thought that if he bought her a house she would stay with him.

She left Honolulu planning to “kick Mac out on the street, right on his ass.” The thought of it brought a smile to her face. Twenty-two and a half years and a kick out the door.

Before returning to Austin, Wanda stopped off in Iowa to visit her sister,
Susan Ruston
. The reunion was marred by her sister’s problems with her son,
Denny
. Susan showed Wanda letters Denny had written while he had been away in the Marine Corps. The letters were disturbing. They may have come from the heart, but they were puffed-up, overblown sonnets to a woman—and the woman he directed the words of love to was Susan, his mother.

“They aren’t letters a normal son would write to his mother. He wrote about love—mainly to his mother. He acted like—to me—like a husband would, writing these mushy letters to his mom,” Wanda remembered.

Susan was very troubled. Something was bothering her son, and she didn’t know what to do about it. Worse, there seemed to be evidence to back up her concern: Denny had recently and suddenly been discharged from the Marine Corps.

Wanda, the older of the two, tried to calm and counsel Susan.

“Well, you know, there’s something wrong in it, the fact of him getting out of the service. No one goes into the Marines and gets out as early as Denny got out. Plus he was discharged on other than honorable conditions,” she said.