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

by Gregg Olsen

  When Barbara and the children moved to Apple Creek Township, Eli said he’d live with her again if she moved back to his parents’, but she refused. Duane Troyer tried to reach out to Eli and offered to speak with him, too, but Eli would never take his calls.

  Troyer summarized the Weaver marriage this way: they had “very serious marital problems.”

  No one knew why Eli finally left Shelley and went home to Barbara and the children in Apple Creek. He blabbed about a lot of things to his friends, but he didn’t talk about that.

  Neighbors learned that Eli had moved back. One woman told Barbara she was glad her husband was home. Barbara answered that Satan still had a hold on Eli.

  Betty Stolfus drove Eli to a local sporting goods store so he could talk with people about how to set up his own store. She waited for a few hours. A few weeks later, Eli opened Maysville Outfitters. He may have moved home to his family, but he remained an absent husband and father.

  Except for Eli, there was a lot of joy in Barbara’s life. The taxi driver remembers one time driving Barbara to Fannie’s. Barbara and her sister laughed a lot when they realized they had both made a Jell-O cake. “Barbara just seemed so happy at that time that I would never have suspected all the heartache she was holding inside,” Betty said. “I also can hear so clearly in my mind Barbara saying in a bright, cheerful voice, ‘Okay, kidders, let’s go!’ whenever I would take her and the children somewhere.”

  According to Betty, Barbara’s way of quieting or comforting her children was to pull them close and show her love. Eli’s way was to give them a candy bar or a snack from his store. He didn’t like them bothering him. On the rare evenings he was home, he didn’t sit down with his family for dinner. Barbara would prepare a plate of food for him and Harley would take it to him in the shop.

  Eli had another getaway. He would ask Betty to take him to a high hill south of Fredericksburg, west of Maysville, in the evening. He said he wanted to be alone to watch for deer. At least that’s what he said he was doing. Betty would pick him up later.

  Eli seemed polite—but odd. One day he took the children to Barbara’s sister’s house, but he forgot the baby. So Barbara asked Betty when she returned to take the baby and she did. “It made me wonder how he could forget his own child,” Betty said.

  For a time Eli raised dogs to sell. A neighbor remembers the caged dogs howling late at night. She also recalls lighting sparklers in her yard after dark and how much Eli’s children loved playing with the sparklers.

  In January 2007 Eli was reinstated in the church, but life didn’t get better for Barbara. Eli was still away a lot—“with an English taxi driver,” Barbara told Duane Troyer. And Barbara suspected there were other women.

  The detectives heard back from Tabitha. She was remembering more details that might be important. Not only had Barb Raber called her the afternoon of the murder to tell her about it, she’d also contacted Tabitha two days after the murder, on June 4.

  Tabitha told her she had been questioned by the police. Barb seemed distracted, nervous, and denied mentioning Barbara Weaver’s autopsy and cause of death to Tabitha during their earlier conversation.

  “She told me she had to go, and called me right back from a different number. She said she had to call me from that number from now on and was short and said good-bye quick.”

  Tabitha also told John Chuhi about a text Eli had sent her two months before the murder. He wanted to find someone who would kill his wife in the early morning, maybe when she was outside doing laundry.

  “I said something like ‘Are you serious?’ and we joked about it,” she said. Eli also talked about putting rat poison in his wife’s Tang. He wanted Tabitha to research it.

  “I never did,” she said.

  16

  The Go-To Attorney for Wayward Amish

  He told me $300 is the limit for groceries each month, and that sounded okay, but by the time you get coffee, Pampers, milk, and eggs, etc. once a week there’s barely enough. I’ve asked him to please get the groceries but he doesn’t have time.

  —BARBARA WEAVER, ON HER ABSENT HUSBAND’S CONTROLLING NATURE

  It was early Wednesday morning, two days after Barbara’s body was found, when lawyer Andy Hyde pulled into the driveway of Eli’s father’s house. Hyde looked over the scene. It was a checklist for what visitors expect to see in Amish country. Immaculate white house. Pristine limestone walkway and driveway. White aluminum and steel barn that reflected brightly in the sunshine. Buggy tracks toward the barn.

  The reason Hyde was there was diametrically opposed to the scene.

  A call from an English friend of Eli’s had sounded the alarm that an Amish man, Eli Weaver, needed an attorney.

  “His wife just got killed,” Gary Schrock had explained to Hyde.

  Hyde—all lanky six feet, six inches of him—watched a man hitch up a team of horses, then lead it right past Hyde and his prospective client without a word or a glance.

  Eli leaned toward the lawyer and mumbled, “Don’t pay any attention to him.”

  The man who passed by without a word to anyone was Eli’s father.

  “He walked right by us without saying anything,” Hyde later said, still trying to come to grips with the cold slight. “I put out my hand to shake his,” he said. “He didn’t acknowledge me. No handshake, no invitation to come into the house.”

  Eli was staying at his parents’ house east of Millersburg. His parents were not happy he was there. They were even less happy that Eli had hired a lawyer. It was a very non-Amish thing to do.

  With his long hair and even longer beard, Andy Hyde could easily be mistaken for Amish.

  He isn’t. His appearance is less about looking at home around the Amish than it is about his hobby: reenacting battles of the French and Indian War on historic battlefields in Ohio. Hyde describes himself as an “Amish family lawyer” and has been involved in controversial crimes in the Amish community before and since the murder of Barbara Weaver.

  When he met Eli, Hyde was forty-three years old and the father of four children. He couldn’t stop thinking about Eli’s children, who were now without a mother.

  Hyde, Eli, and Gary stood in the driveway and talked. Wayne County Sheriff’s Office detectives were due any minute to pick up Eli and take him for a polygraph test.

  Andy thought Eli was strange—especially for a husband who had just lost his wife.

  “He was happy to see me,” he recalled. “But he was sending off very weird signals for an Amish guy. Usually when you’re talking to a suspect, they really listen and focus on you. Their lives are in your hands. But Eli was not focused. It was clear his mind was somewhere else.”

  When Eli’s phone rang, he didn’t say a word before answering. Instead he walked off, then squatted on the driveway and turned his body away from Hyde.

  “Here’s a man whose life you’re there to save and taking a phone call is more important,” Hyde recalled. “Anyone else would have said, ‘I’m talking to my attorney; let me call you back.’ Not Eli.”

  When Eli finished talking, he turned back to his lawyer. They began to talk about the day of the murder.

  “He said he had been fishing up at Lake Erie and that his wife had been seen by someone after he left that morning.”

  Hyde learned later that Eli had lied. No one had seen his wife the morning of the murder.

  He tried to prepare Eli for the scrutiny that was to come.

  “I told him, ‘They’re looking at you. Ninety-nine percent of the time they’ll look at the husband as a suspect. Understand they’re going to look at you.’”

  Eli didn’t ask many questions about the case but focused on the costs associated with his defense if he should be arrested.

  “I told him it would cost a lot of money for me to represent him,” the lawyer said later, “and he said ‘fine.’”

  About a half hour later, Detective John Chuhi and Lieutenant Kurt Garrison drove up to the property. Hyde and the detectives w
ere on friendly terms. Holmes and Wayne Counties were rural and crime rates were low. Lawyers and deputies were busy, but not so busy that they didn’t know who everyone was. Hyde told them he was representing Eli and needed time to talk to him.

  “Eli will take a polygraph,” he said, “just not right now.”

  A moment later, Chuhi and Garrison shook hands with the lawyer and drove away.

  Standing outside in the morning sunlight while the blue sky stretched as far as they could see, Hyde talked privately with Eli for a few more minutes. The attorney known by many as “the go-to attorney for wayward Amish” was once more surprised by Eli’s attitude. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t ask about what would happen next. Eli Weaver didn’t seem overly concerned with the investigation.

  Or that his wife had been murdered.

  Later when he replayed that first meeting with his client in his head, Hyde conjured images of a circus performer trying to keep objects upright, to keep them from falling.

  “He was spinning plates on sticks,” he recalled.

  Though Eli didn’t know it at the time, some were already shattering on the ground.

  * * *

  MARK WEAVER WAS having a tough time. He was a loyal husband and father. A hard worker. A good friend and a good neighbor. He asked himself over and over how it was possible that his friend was somehow involved in a murder.

  Steve Chupp knew Mark had a lot of questions. He did, too. When he had an appointment to meet with Detective Chuhi, Steve asked Mark to come, too.

  The trio met over Cokes at Wendy’s in Dover.

  “I don’t usually do this,” the detective said, “but I wanted you to have a clear picture of what we know and what we think happened.”

  Mark and Steve listened as Chuhi laid out what he believed connected Eli to the murder.

  “Eli had a friend of his call an attorney right away,” he went on. “Some people would do that, but it’s not usually the first thing a grieving husband does. We know you, Steve, had trouble waking him up to go fishing. We know he had left his wife twice. He was meeting women online and having affairs.”

  Some of this was news. Mark and Steve didn’t know the extent of Eli’s affairs or that he’d advertised himself online as Amish Stud.

  But the biggest shock was yet to come.

  “I’m going to tell you something I shouldn’t tell you,” the detective said. “We also know that Eli talked to people about poisoning his wife or killing her in an explosion. He was trying to find someone to kill his wife.”

  The two men sat there speechless. It was worse than they thought.

  Chuhi told the men that he hoped to get Eli’s phone records—if Eli had a phone. Mark had some welcome news for the detective. He shoved his Coke to one side.

  “Detective, I have Eli’s phone number,” Mark said. “And I have another phone number for you—Barb Raber’s. And I have phone messages from her. You need to look at her. She and Eli were talking about something Monday. She is asking way too many questions about the murder.”

  Mark played Barb’s voice-mail messages and Chuhi recorded them. He also copied the many text messages she had sent Mark.

  Mark left Wendy’s with a realization that felt like pain to his soul.

  Eli had killed his wife, or found someone to do it for him.

  17

  The Viewing

  Sun. eve. Kinner [children] in bed. Once again Eli lies on floor, eyes closed. So often, eyes closed.

  —BARBARA WEAVER, ON THE WIDENING DISTANCE IN HER MARRIAGE TO ELI

  The community’s first chance to get more than a glimpse of Eli came at Barbara’s viewing and funeral. Amish and Mennonite friends and neighbors were already suspicious of him. Eli’s reputation for running around and being shunned by the church was well known. Samuel Miller—an Amish acquaintance of the Weavers—said that even on June 2, as word spread of the murder, many Amish had one of two reactions.

  “Men asked ‘Where was Eli?’” Samuel said. “Women asked ‘Was it Eli?’”

  A neighbor overheard Eli’s bishop question him about the murder. “What happened, Eli? Who did this?”

  Eli replied defiantly, “I’m telling you sincerely from my heart that I don’t know!”

  Despite the horrific nature of her death, funeral services for Barbara Weaver adhered to Amish customs as much as possible. Burial is usually within three days of death, the time needed for one man to build a coffin and four men to dig a grave.

  The autopsy was conducted at 8:30 a.m. on June 3, the day after she was murdered. Because Wayne County didn’t have a forensic pathologist, the autopsy was performed in Akron by Summit County’s chief medical examiner, Lisa Kohler. It was observed, as usual, by police, in this case Detective Chuhi and Lieutenant Garrison, plus Dr. Kohler’s investigator, Jason Grom, and Tom Uhler of the Wayne County Coroner’s Office. The autopsy confirmed that Barbara Weaver died from a single gunshot wound at close range to the right chest, depositing pellets to her right lung and her heart. Also injured by the shot were her diaphragm and spine. Her unexplained injuries, including contusions on her legs, scratches on one finger, and bruising on both palms, were noted. The autopsy report did not mention the bruising on Barbara Weaver’s neck, but it was visible in the photos.

  After the autopsy, Barbara Weaver’s body was taken to Spidell Funeral Home in Mount Eaton. Sometimes the Amish are embalmed—at a funeral home or even at home—sometimes not. Barbara Weaver was. The body is often washed and dressed by friends and family. In this case, an Amish woman who often performs the ritual for the funeral home dressed Barbara. A woman can be buried in her wedding dress, but Barbara was dressed more traditionally in her good black dress, with a starched white cape pinned over her back and chest, a white apron, and a white bonnet, or Kapp, the same clothes she might have worn to church.

  An obituary in the local newspaper said only that she died “at her home.”

  People can view the body on three occasions: at a viewing in the home, at the funeral, and at graveside.

  The Amish don’t have churches—they hold services every two weeks in homes and barns. Men sit on one side and women on the other, facing each other. Because a large group was expected, the two-day viewing was held in the upper level of the barn on the Weaver property. Although the house had recently been the scene of a crime, it wasn’t off-limits and friends and neighbors could enter the house to use the bathroom.

  In many respects, it was a typical Amish viewing, with several hundred people attending throughout the course of the day, the majority coming in the evening. They were somberly dressed: the men in dark suits and white or pale blue shirts and the women in black or navy-blue dresses with starched white Kapps. Many arrived by horse and buggy or on foot, but there were also many taxi drivers bringing van loads of friends or relatives from a distance. A long line of mourners stretched from the barn to the road.

  In certain conservative communities, a body would be laid out on a cooling board, or a viewing bed. In the summer, ice is placed beneath the perforated wooden platform to keep the body chilled. Barbara Weaver’s body was displayed in its casket.

  The casket was in a partitioned corner of the barn and the top was open so that friends, neighbors, and family could walk close and take one last look at the young woman. “There was more emotion than we often see,” Samuel said. “Maybe not outward weeping, but a lot of emotion looking at pretty, kind, young Barbara in death and everyone suspecting her husband.”

  Samuel and his wife followed the line of mourners into the barn and after viewing Barbara, they threaded their way through the backless benches that had been set up for the family to sit on and greet the people attending. As the mourners made their way through the benches, they shook hands with the relatives seated there.

  “I’ve been to hundreds of viewings, but this was the only silent one,” Samuel said later. “Hundreds of people but none of the usual talking. No one knew what to say.”

  Eli didn’t either, and
he didn’t seem to try. “Eli looked very pale, sweaty, and unlike [the bereaved at] all other Amish viewings I’ve been to, he was not looking up or making any eye contact with everyone who spoke to him.

  “As I shook his hand, I thought, ‘Oh my word, I’m shaking hands with a murderer!’” Samuel said. He thought Eli’s reactions screamed “guilty.”

  Conversation was very subdued. “It was eerie,” he said. “Eventually we saw Eli come out and head for either the Porta-John or the watercooler, leading two of his sons by the hands. An Amish man standing in the crowd whispered, “Now there is something that has not been seen often before—Eli showing attention to his children.”

  A Mennonite neighbor, Pearl Wyse, said that at one point Eli was helped to his feet and wailed as he walked past the coffin. “But there were no tears and it was very obvious he was faking,” she said. “He kept his head down the rest of the time I was there. The next day, the second day of the viewing, he was sitting in the yard on a bench with the visitors and his manner was very casual. He was drinking coffee and had his shirt unbuttoned.” She found his behavior inappropriate.

  Eli’s parents were protective of him at the viewing.

  Steve Chupp and Mark Weaver went to the viewing and spoke briefly to Eli. By then they were convinced Eli had been involved with the murder. Both decided to keep their distance from him.

  The funeral, on Saturday, June 6, was also held in Eli’s barn. The two-hour service was led by Bishop Leroy Keim in Pennsylvania Dutch and attended by hundreds of black-clad friends and relatives. There are no eulogies at Amish funerals. The focus is on giving thanks and praising God, not on speaking of the deceased. A meal prepared by the women of the community was served after the funeral.