Think No Evil: Inside the Story of the Amish Schoolhouse Shooting...and Beyond

by Jonas Beiler

  At some point during this process, Charlie placed his handgun on a desk. One of the boys was close enough to see the shiny handle, the ominous barrel, and the trigger that could change everything. He wanted to grab it and run, make for the door and never look back. Yet he remembered Charlie saying that no one would get hurt. And what if he reached for the gun and Charlie caught him? Maybe that would just upset him. This brave little boy was so torn over what to do, but Charlie never strayed far enough from the gun and soon picked it back up. After all the girls had been tied up, Charlie told the women they were free to leave, and they could take their toddlers and babies. He could not have known the visitors would be there that morning, and I’m sure their presence disrupted his plan significantly.

  The women didn’t know what to do. Listen, and no one will get hurt, they remembered him saying. If they insisted on staying, it might set Charlie off. They walked out the door, but as they left they felt a strange sense of peace in that small building. One of the women later said she could sense God there with them, with the children. Two others said they saw an angel above the school.

  “You boys can leave, too,” Charlie said shortly after the women left with the babies, motioning his gun toward the side door.

  At first they just looked at one another and at the girls tied up at the front of the room. The older boys didn’t feel right leaving. They wanted to stay. They wanted to protect the girls. But what can a twelve-year-old boy do in the face of an unstable man with a handgun? Reluctantly, they left. But once outside, they just scuffled about like lost children. They didn’t know where to go or what to do. Some of them still had sisters inside the building and didn’t want to leave. Soon they found themselves huddled behind the outhouses, a group of boys in black suspenders and straw hats, praying like they had never prayed before, wishing there were something they could do to help the girls in their schoolhouse.

  Inside, Charlie began preparing the room. The first step was to lower the shades, so he made his way around the room to each of the windows, pulling down the blinds. One of them spun back up, all the way to the top, so Charlie pulled a desk over; he clambered on top of it so he could reach the top of the blind, clumsily clinging to his handgun. He wanted to block out any view into the school. Preoccupied with the blinds, he didn’t see one of the girls move toward the door.

  Emma, whose older sisters, Marian and Barbie, were at the front of the room with her, heard the slightest whisper of a voice speak soft instructions.

  “Now would be a good time to run.”

  A fraction of a moment passed, Charlie still fumbling with the blind, then climbing down from on top of the desk and turning around. But Emma, whose feet had not been bound, was gone, barely breathing as her feet darted across a dusty field, leaving more and more distance between her and that small school on White Oak Road.

  Later, Emma would say she thought one of the women told her to run, but none of the women issued such an instruction. An angel, perhaps? Or maybe a suggestion from one of the girls who wouldn’t make it out of that small schoolhouse alive? Emma’s survival would be seen as one of the many miracles that took place that day.

  If Charlie had realized that a girl had escaped, he didn’t mention it. He continued barricading the room, which now held the final ten girls. Desks were pushed up against the doors. Two-by-fours were nailed in place, blocking off windows and further reinforcing the doors, darkening the room. Charlie had worked in construction, and the hammer moved quickly and efficiently in his hands. The nails slid skillfully into place. He fastened plastic ties around the door handles. Soon the room was completely sealed from the outside world. No one could come in or get out easily.

  It was then that Charlie heard the girls praying. Their eyes were closed and their voices were quiet, but I am sure there was a fervent resolve in those prayers. They must have prayed the way people do when they find themselves in a hopeless situation: begging to be spared, desperate for deliverance.

  Charlie had attended church, and his wife was a devout Christian. He obviously knew what they were doing. It’s safe to assume that, with his upbringing and the time he spent in church, he believed in heaven and hell. Maybe that’s why he asked a special request of the girls.

  “Pray for me,” Charlie muttered to the whispering girls as he nervously paced around the room, double- and triple-checking the boarded windows and tied doors.

  “Why don’t you pray for us?” one of the girls said to him, turning the tables, if only for a moment.

  “I don’t believe in praying,” he said firmly, then turned to resume his preparations. The time had come for the first part of Charlie’s plan: sexual assault.

  “If just one of you will let me do what I want, I won’t hurt the others,” he promised.

  Perhaps one of the older girls understood what Charlie was talking about, because one of them whispered quickly to the younger girls in Pennsylvania Dutch.

  “Duh’s net! Duh’s net!” (Don’t do it! Don’t do it!)

  When no one volunteered, Charlie walked forward and grabbed one of the girls by her legs. She kicked furiously at his hand. The tension that had been building in the room suddenly transformed into a desperate fear that things were about to start happening. Some of the girls screamed for help, others screamed at Charlie.

  But then, just as quickly as he had walked to the front of the room and resolved to do the unspeakable, he stopped. He could hear the sound of cars driving up the gravel lane and parking not too far away. The atmosphere of the morning went from a terrified silence to urgent action. He dropped the girl’s leg and ran to a door and peeked through one of the cracks.

  The police were stationing themselves outside the schoolhouse, guns drawn. Charlie was running out of time.

  Then came the one moment of wavering that could have changed the events of the day. For a few brief seconds, Charlie stood there in the barricaded schoolhouse and looked down at the ten girls lined up on the floor across the front of the room. The blinds were drawn, the doors nailed shut. He most likely knew that more policemen were now creeping around outside the building, looking for a way to rescue the girls. Police radios barked just twenty or thirty yards away.

  He turned and took a few steps toward the front door, mumbling something about giving up. For that one short moment he may have considered walking out the door and into that beautiful fall day, hands in the air. Just walk away from it all. He knew he would have been shoved to the ground and handcuffed. He knew he would be in a lot of trouble, and there would be questions. He knew he would have all kinds of explaining to do, probably serve jail time or be forced to receive psychiatric examinations. But he could still back out. He could still be a father to his children, a husband to his loving wife.

  Ten sets of innocent eyes watched him as he walked toward the door. They could feel how close it was to ending. Dare they hope that he would leave them? Some of them wanted to cry out for help.

  Then Charlie stopped, shoulders hunched over. He turned around, away from the door and away from the girls’ last shred of hope.

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I have to do this.”

  He took his cell phone out of his pocket. He called his wife’s cell phone but didn’t get an answer, so he left her a message. It scared her when she received it, something about what he was about to do and how sorry he was. She called the police, even though she didn’t know where her husband had gone.

  What had he actually planned to do in the first place? Had his initial expectation been to get into the school, sexually assault the girls, and then escape? If so, why did he barricade the doors and windows in a way that made a quick getaway nearly impossible? Had he only barricaded the doors and windows because someone had gone for help? Yet if he hadn’t been planning on a long, drawn-out affair, why had he come to the schoolhouse so well equipped to board up the school and so heavily armed?

  In any case, he had to get rid of them, those police setting up operations outside the schoolhouse.
He needed some peace and quiet. His plan was falling to pieces. He called 911.

  “I just took, uh, ten girls hostage and I want everybody off the property or, or else,” he said.

  “Okay,” the emergency responder replied in a calm voice.

  “Now!” he demanded.

  “Sir, I want you to stay on the phone with me, okay? I’m going to get the state police down there on the phone. I need to let you talk to them, okay? Can I transfer you to them?”

  “No, you tell them what I said and that’s it. Right now or they’re dead, in two seconds. Two seconds, that’s it!”1

  He hung up on the call center. He knew he couldn’t back down now.

  Charlie turned and looked at the girls, determination in his voice. There was a change in him at that moment. He was no longer the quiet Charlie who mumbled instructions when he first arrived. The hate and the anger that had smoldered inside of him for ten years began to rise, to burn out of control, to rage in all of its dreadful bitterness.

  “I’m going to make you pay for my daughter,” one of the girls recalled him saying in a firm voice.

  OUTSIDE, AN Amish man stood leaning against the white fence, struggling to catch his breath. Police officers swarmed around the building, biding their time, keeping their distance, assuming that Charles Roberts would not hesitate to fire shots at anyone who left themselves in the open. A few other emergency vehicles were waiting off in the distance, but the Amish man wasn’t worried about anything except the children inside the school. Seven of his relatives were there that morning, and, as far as he knew, only his daughter Emma, the teacher, had escaped. His friends and neighbors were gathering along the fence as well, as news had spread quickly from farm to farm, as neighbors alerted neighbors of the emergency at the schoolhouse.

  About fifty years old, the Amish man wore a straw hat with a narrow black band. His work clothes were worn but well made. He wore black shoes, and his trousers had black suspenders that wrapped around his shoulders. A small pin, barely visible, in each of the suspenders held them in place. His eyes were kind, like the eyes of a grandfather, and his hands were cracked and calloused from years of hard work.

  He could hear police officers shouting into their radios, begging their superiors to let them raid the school, but the same answer was repeated, “Wait, wait.” No one knew how serious Charles Roberts was about shooting anyone—any quick motion on their part might scare him into doing something he wouldn’t otherwise do. So they all waited.

  Now that they had his cell number, the officers tried to reach Charles Roberts on his phone. Over and over they dialed. If they could only talk to him, or if one of his loved ones could have a word with him, maybe then he would change course. Come outside. Turn himself in.

  INSIDE, THE girls waited, the older ones looking to one another for strength. Charlie walked toward the front of the room and that line of ten little girls, and as he approached, he raised one of the guns to his shoulder and pointed it.

  “Shoot me first,” thirteen-year-old Marian blurted out quickly, perhaps thinking of her younger sister Barbie, still in the room.

  “Shoot me next,” said her eleven-year-old sister, Barbie.

  Gunshots rang out.

  Charlie had listened. He shot Marian first.

  THE AMISH father of the teacher heard shots in quick succession: one, two, three shotgun blasts, then four, five, six gunshots, and they continued. The police ran for the front door. A shotgun round blasted through the boarded window on the front door, shattering glass and splintering wood, implanting shards of shot in the windshield of the truck Charles Roberts had been driving, pushing the police back

  The Amish man standing by the fence collapsed to his knees. All along the fence his neighbors, who had made their way to the school, stood in shock, then, like him, fell to their knees in prayer, or horror, holding the wooden rails for support. Certainly this was all a dream. Surely someone would shake them and they would rise up through that blue sky, beyond the clouds, and find their heads on pillows, the sun rising, the morning not yet begun.

  Some of the policemen approaching the school ducked instinctively behind their shields, but they all kept moving toward the front door, then faster when the shots continued.

  For an entire minute the police battered at every door and window trying to gain entrance, but the doors had been nailed together, the handles tied with plastic ties, the windows boarded over. Eventually the lead officer used his shield to smash in what remained of the window on the front door and, just before diving through, quickly told the officer behind him to be ready to take Charlie out. Fortunately for him, as he crashed through the window and into the school, the shooting had stopped.

  Charles Roberts had already taken his own life with a single shot. He was dead on the scene. Around him lay ten girls, all shot and bleeding. The room was covered in blood and broken pieces of desks and glass. The smell of gunfire hung in the room, a dark, smoky, burning scent.

  FOR THOSE brief moments outside the school, the teacher’s father couldn’t move. He was on his knees beside the fence as the state troopers around the school rushed toward the door and then inside. Then, out of nowhere, as if in a dream or from a great distance, he heard a voice yelling his name with news he never thought he would hear.

  “Your family is okay—they’re over at the farm!”

  He wanted to run straight to the farm, but, knowing his own family was safe, his concern immediately turned to those in the school. He slipped through the fence and walked toward the school. The police were still too concerned with the girls to take time blocking off access, so he made his way toward the scene without being stopped.

  When he got to the front door of the school he didn’t want to look inside. He knew he shouldn’t look through that door. But he did—he quickly glanced into the shadows. And what he saw—the chaos, the bullet casings lying all over the floor, the blood everywhere—was something he wished he had never seen.

  The officers quickly began carrying the girls from the school. Normally they wouldn’t move victims so soon after an incident without performing first aid immediately, but the conditions inside the room made it impossible to do any work there. Due to the barred windows, there was no light. The desks were pushed here and there, debris covered everything, and there were ten girls needing treatment. The state policemen knew they would have to move the girls just so the paramedics could get to them. So they carried them outside, laid them gently on the ground. Many of them were talking to the girls, whispering words of encouragement.

  “Hang in there.”

  “You can make it.”

  “We’ve got you now, you’ll be okay.” Some of them started tearing up their coats to make tourniquets in an attempt to stop the girls from bleeding to death.

  By the end of it they would be covered in the girls’ blood.

  Emergency scene at the schoolhouse

  CHAPTER SIX

  My Heavenly Home Is Bright and Fair

  IT IS EASY to see how Gap, a small town in Lancaster County, got its name. It sits literally in the “gap” between two neighboring hills that spread gently down into a rolling valley covered with alfalfa and cornfields. It’s only a few miles from where I grew up, and it’s where the Family Resource and Counseling Center is located. Gap is also about five miles from Nickel Mines, and the two towns are separated by trees, more cornfields, and a few twisting backcountry lanes.

  A large clock tower, built in 1892, stands at the gap between those two hills, looking down over the community. Time has done little to change this place: the people still know each other well, much as they did fifty years ago, and the Amish still drive through the streets in their horse and buggies, the sound of their clip-clopping hooves nearly as common as the sound of eighteen wheelers with their Jake brakes screeching as they rumble to a stop at the bottom of Gap Hill.

  The small town of a few thousand people is formed, as many small towns are, by the intersection of two major roads: U.S. 30
, a highway running east and west, connecting Atlantic City, New Jersey, with Astoria, Oregon; and Route 41, which runs south to Wilmington, Delaware. Houses line both highways, and Gap sits mostly to the south of Route 30. Neither highway is very straight, and both have many hills and winding streams to cross before the roads even out closer to the larger cities.

  On that particular October 2, one of the non-Amish volunteer firemen, Rob Beiler (no relation to me), sat quietly at his desk in a small office in Gap. Rob is built like a football player, tall and broad-shouldered, but his voice sometimes surprises people with just how relaxed it sounds. He could never be accused of wasting words—they come out in measured, even tones.

  Monday morning promised to be the beginning of another busy week for Rob. He sat at his desk, surrounded by all the things one would expect to find in the office of an insurance agent: file folders, a stack of mail, various notes, and framed pictures of his family. Not just any salesman, though, Rob owned the successful business and sold insurance to a large portion of the community. But on the corner of his desk there was something not commonly found on the desk of an insurance agent: a police scanner.

  Rob grew up carrying a pager on his belt. His father was a volunteer fireman, serving as assistant chief of the Gap Fire Department for more than twenty years. In 1977, when Rob was fourteen years old, his father was the chairman of the first Gap Fire Company sale, a fund-raiser that has since become an annual event. Rob missed only one of those sales, when he was off at Bible college, and he makes it a habit to attend the two ham-and-oyster dinners held every year to raise money for the fire company. Having been raised around the fire hall, Rob grew up chasing sirens and joined the department as soon as he was old enough, in November 1977. If there was anything more natural to him than the instinct to help people, it would be difficult to pinpoint.