Abandoned Prayers (47 page)

Though Eli Stutzman is in prison, the story of the former Amishman’s dark descent continues. Some wonder if it will ever end.

In 1990 Stutzman emerged as a key suspect in the Colorado murders of David Tyler and Dennis Slaeter. Durango detective Tony Archuleta plowed through the files of the stalled investigation, launched a relentless series of interviews, and uncovered more information linking Stutzman and Tyler. He also faced the same frustrating problem that had dogged others working Stutzman-related cases. Many witnesses were reluctant or outright refused to come forward because they were gay and feared being labeled homosexual.

That conspiracy of fear and silence helped lead Danny Stutzman to the Nebraska cornfield.

From their pastoral settlements, the Amish still wonder and talk among themselves about Ida Stutzman’s death.
They refuse to pass final judgment—only God can—and many decline to make definitive statements about her death. Most are diplomatic and simply say they “fear Eli killed Ida.”

Stutzman is a diabolical star in a community that abhors media attention. Murder committed by an Amishman has but a single precedent in the history of the religious order.

Former Wayne County sheriff Jim Frost offers no help in sorting out the truth. He told a journalist in 1989 that he couldn’t recall any details of the night the pregnant woman died.

Wayne County coroner J. T. Questel has told several reporters that he “blew” the case at the time of the original investigation.

Gary Young remains Thayer County’s sheriff, with plans to run for another, possibly final, term. He looks back on his most famous case with frustration and the regret that he might have missed something during the investigation. When he looks at Eli Stutzman he sees the eyes of a killer.

The Reverend Jean Samuelson, now pastor of a huge church in Aurora, still prays for the wayward Amishman.

“I think he’s kind of naive and innocent. Certainly he got into some bad stuff,” she said in 1990. “He’s got a vulnerability.”

But vulnerability is a trait Stutzman has practiced. Today he fine-tunes the charade from prison. His letters open with prolonged passages from Scripture and words about his love for God, though some recipients get the impression that the words are copied from a Sunday schoolbook. He is studying drafting and algebra, with his eye on earning a college degree.

And as has been his habit at least since he was 21, Stutzman continues to walk the tightrope of two worlds, excluding people from both sides. He paints the picture he wants people to see—innocent Amishman, sexual maniac, good father, religious scholar. Even after all he’s been through, Eli Stutzman still thinks no one will catch on. But he is wrong.

“He told me he was offered thousands of dollars for movie rights and he flushed the letter down the toilet,” said a Mennonite man who visited Stutzman at the prison in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Another’s experience was the converse.

“Stutzman now tells me he wants $100,000 for the rights! I keep telling him I can’t come up with that kind of money. No one can,” complained a Hollywood-based producer who corresponded with Stutzman in an effort to put together a deal.

The father also persists with easily disproved fabrications about his son’s death. Now he no longer talks about the Gremlin’s faulty exhaust system, but rather hints of a conspiracy.

“Court records about Danny’s death have been sealed in Nebraska. I want to know how my son died,” he wrote to New Order Amishwoman Liz Chupp in June 1990. “Five children died in Wyoming of a rare disease the same year Danny died.”

Both statements are untrue.

Questions remain and continue to haunt. Did Danny die at the hands of his father? Investigators affirm the idea with conviction and authority—though the allegation can’t be proved. Stutzman’s actions and statements point to foul play. Why didn’t he seek help from a farmhouse, or from others in the truck stop cafe where he might have stopped for coffee and composure? It would seem to be the natural reaction for a father with a sick child. The idea that his Amish upbringing left him with no basis for dealing with the outside world is ludicrous and insulting. Eli Stutzman was far from naive. One reason for his inaction might be that Stutzman knew that hospital authorities would want to know who he was, and would possibly learn that he was wanted in Texas for questioning. Stutzman couldn’t risk that. If Danny had to die, so be it. Eli Stutzman wasn’t going to jail for anything or anyone.

Just how did Danny die? Of course, a natural death is plausible, and no medical evidence exists that doesn’t support
that possibility. Murder is also a possibility. Pathologists concede that suffocation could have caused Danny to die. Stutzman himself suggested the scenario of Danny suffocating in the back as the boy lay pressed up against the luggage with a sleeping bag or blanket wrapped around his head. If there had been a struggle and the boy had suffered some trauma to his face when and if he were smothered, such evidence, of course, had been lost by the time the body was found. Half of Danny’s face, including the mouth and nose, had been gnawed away by field mice.

Freezing to death is the scenario favored by state patrol investigator Jack Wyant. He feels that Stutzman left the boy outside in the subzero temperature to die. Danny might have been weakened or unconscious, or Stutzman could have just
told
the boy to lie down until he told him to get up. The boy had been abused so much and for so long that it is likely he would have been compliant.

The freezing scenario makes sense. Stutzman’s Gremlin was seen by a Thayer County sheriff’s deputy at Foote’s early the morning Danny was dumped. Was Stutzman passing time with plans to return to the field to make sure Danny had succumbed? If he wasn’t, then why the stop at Foote’s? One would have thought he’d want to get the hell out of Thayer County. Did he need the time to pull himself together to run through the skiing story? Not likely, as there was plenty of time for that on the way to his lover’s place near Salina, Kansas.

There is also the matter of the letter Stutzman sent to the Missouri man while on his way to Wyoming to pick up the boy.
“My son may not be coming with me . . .”

Stutzman might have been planting the seed as he had with Ida’s death, when he told Amos Gingerich that Ida’s heart was giving her trouble when she did chores. Prosecutors and cops first saw the note in 1990 and immediately considered it the “best piece of evidence.” It’s the kind of document that Jack Wyant could have pushed into Stutzman’s face when he was being interrogated: “Why did you do it? You planned it!”

But Wyant didn’t know about the letter. And he didn’t know about the Kansas or Missouri men.

The wrestling T-shirt remains an intriguing piece of the puzzle. Found a mile from the dump site, it had on it blue paint particles—the same color as the interior of the so-called Levi’s-style Gremlin—that matched the particles on the sleeper. At the hearing, Stutzman denied that he had seen the shirt before. Why? Why was it left on the side of the road? He said he never got out of the car before he left Danny where “God could find him.” Yet it must be another lie. What happened at the side of the road that would have caused Stutzman to get out of the car, and the shirt to fall out?

The sleeper continues to baffle. The boy was too old, too sophisticated to wear such a babyish garment. Stutzman purchased it in New Mexico before he left to get Danny—after he knew that the boy wouldn’t be with him when he got to Missouri. If it was part of a plan, what role did it play? In Stutzman’s anxious state, had he felt compelled to return Danny to an earlier time, a time when the boy was younger and no threat to his father’s life-style? Besides Eli Stutzman, who knows?

Some non-Amish said they had heard that the boy was left in the sleeper because the Amish always bury their dead in a blue shroud. It makes for a nice theory, but it is untrue.

If, for the sake of argument, Danny was murdered, what was his father’s motive? Texas investigators feel that Danny had knowledge of the murder in Texas and that Stutzman had to shut him up. Sam Miller’s testimony before the grand jury validated that supposition when he said that the boy was in the truck as Eli and Sam returned from being questioned at the sheriff’s office. It was then that Stutzman admitted his guilt while Danny looked on, unfazed. Yet, if the motive was that Danny knew too much, why did Stutzman take the boy to Wyoming, where he could have told anyone?

If Danny hadn’t, in fact, talked about the murder, as Dean and Margie Barlow told Jack Wyant and Gary Young,
it wouldn’t be so extraordinary. Danny had been a victim of child abuse, and compliance to a parent’s demands or threats is routine in such cases.

The motive might have been simpler. Eli Stutzman didn’t want the boy, but he didn’t want the Amish to raise him. Stutzman, as evidenced by his personal letters back home to friends in Ohio, continued to play the game of a good, but misunderstood man. He couldn’t have Danny ruin him in the eyes of the people he believed still admired him. Danny had knowledge of the murder. At his father’s bidding, Danny had participated in and seen much of the gay life-style.

The renegade Amishman wasn’t exaggerating when he told Kenny Hankins that he’d rather see his son dead than be raised by the Amish.

Ida Stutzman’s death, though equally sinister, is easier for many to comprehend. Stutzman, a mentally unstable gay man trapped in the rigid world of the Amish
Ordnung
, might have seen only one way out of his marriage. His fabrications and embellishments of the story of the barn fire are as incriminating as the incredibly unlikely sequence of events the day the pregnant woman died.

Later, when he wrote to another Amish widower, he told the man that the police had determined that lightning caused the fire, and that a doctor had determined that she had suffered a heart attack. Both were stories that
he
originated. Both were part of a setup to get him away from Ida, and away from the Amish.

Was Stutzman mentally ill, or was he merely adept at manipulation? It’s interesting to speculate. From the time he left the notes for Mose Keim to find, or wrote the letters to himself at Stoll Farms, he found elaborate setups effective. He knew that such tactics made him the subject of sympathy rather than disdain. The night of his breakdown, one year after Ida’s death, smacks of a setup—it was perhaps Stutzman’s finest performance. If he had told the Gingeriches he wanted them to leave, he would be admitting
he no longer wanted an Amish life. Stutzman didn’t want to look bad. A breakdown was his answer.

Pathological liars often embellish falsehoods with unnecessary details to prove their words are the truth. Stutzman did this repeatedly and recklessly.

It was five years ago this Christmas season that Chuck Kleveland found the boy in the blue sleeper. Five years ago, amid darkness and the howls of wind and drifting snow, the nightmare of an abused child ended when his father’s car crossed the state line into Kansas.

Danny Stutzman has been dead half as long as he lived.

Toys and flowers still decorate his tiny grave and pay tribute to the victim of the dark and dangerous life ordained by his father. The dead boy’s spirit calls for the truth, and someday that spirit might even be answered.

As Jack Wyant once said, drawing on a cigarette and surveying the volumes of Little Boy Blue notebooks he keeps handy in his office, “Someone, somewhere, knows.”

Of all the subjects of my books, I probably have had more consistent interest from readers about Eli Stutzman and the crimes portrayed in
Abandoned Prayers
. In the fourteen years since the book was first released, I have received thousands of inquiries about the Amishman who dumped his son’s body in rural Nebraska. Most want to know if he died in prison, as if such a demise would be fitting retribution. They are uniformly disappointed when I tell them Stutzman is very much alive. Outrage follows when I report that in the spring of 2003 he made parole and was released by the Texas Department of Corrections.

For more on Stutzman and an update on other characters in the book, please visit my web site
www.greggolsen.com
.

—Gregg Olsen

Olalla, Wash.

2003