Abandoned Prayers: An Incredible True Story of Murder, Obsession, And

by Gregg Olsen

  Young Eli remained in bed until Sunday evening, seeming to drift in and out of consciousness. Although his father had wanted him returned to his farm, Dr. Lehman recommended that he stay put until his condition improved.

  As the weeks passed, Keim doubted that Stutzman would recover; his nerves seemed shot. He called in a woman who did foot reflexology, a technique some Amish favor over traditional medicine. The woman gasped when she tried to work on Stutzman’s feet. “They are so sore, I cannot touch them. There is nothing I can do,” she said.

  Keim next took Stutzman to chiropractor Morton Bissell in Brewster, Ohio. Bissell showed the Amishman how his nerve pressure had tightened the “plates of his skull and caused them to shift abnormally.” He prescribed some pills and arranged for a number of treatments.

  At his Apple Creek farm, Keim did what he could do to help, at times even bathing the man. When he massaged his neck, it felt as taut and rigid as 8-gauge wire. He wondered how Stutzman could survive with such tense muscles and nerves.

  But there was more. One day shortly after the collapse on the stairs, Keim found Stutzman crying in the barn. When he asked him what was wrong, Stutzman told him that ever since the breakdown he had had a constant erection that was both painful and embarrassing. Keim didn’t know what to do to help the young man. He considered asking Dr. Lehman about it, but dismissed it as too private a matter.

  “It seemed to go on for months,” Keim later recalled. “Somehow that breakdown affected his sex.”

  It was at about that time that Keim and his wife discovered several notes that Stutzman had written on scraps of paper and left in his bedroom. The words, written in English, included references to Satan and Hell. Keim and his wife wondered if he had left them for their benefit, and if so, why?

  One morning Keim found Stutzman downstairs, dressed and standing in the kitchen, his long Swartzentruber hair cut shorter and crudely. This was particularly disturbing to the farmer. “Eli, what in the world did you do to yourself?” Keim asked.

  Stutzman ignored the question and said he wanted to go to Keim’s church. That was fine with Keim, yet still he wondered why Stutzman hadn’t had someone else cut his hair.

  Next, Stutzman had his Swartzentruber-style buggy outfitted with a more sophisticated dash than the conservative Swartzentrubers permitted.

  Even though Stutzman never went across the road to tell his family what he was up to, his father got wind of the changes.

  The rumors ran wildly through the Amish community. Word was out that trouble still plagued the Stutzman family on Welty Road.

  While out on the house call three months before, Dr. Lehman had seen that the young man was a time bomb waiting to explode, so it was no real surprise when One-Hand Eli came to his office for help in mid-May 1972.

  The Amishman’s concern was obvious and, to the doctor, seemed genuine.

  “My son is no better,” the old man said. “What can I do to control him?”

  Dr. Lehman weighed the solutions. He told the Amishman that he could call Fallsview Hospital in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. If his son would go for treatment voluntarily, arrangements could be made quickly.

  There was one alternative. The doctor hesitated slightly before suggesting it.

  “If he resists, however, we could have the sheriff pick him up and go through probate.”

  The Amishman showed little emotion. He nodded to Dr. Lehman and left the office.

  The day was warm and the field was dusty as Eli Stutzman and his mammoth horse-drawn harrow broke and smoothed Keim’s field for planting. Mental problems had forced him to give up his teaching position, although occasionally he seemed well enough to do farm work. Stutzman seemed best after his appointments with Bissell, the chiropractor.

  Keim watched from the yard as a sheriff’s car pulled up the lane and two deputies approached him.

  “Is Eli Stutzman working for you?” one of the deputies asked.

  “He is over in the field.”

  “We have to talk with him now.”

  The officers left and a few minutes later returned with Stutzman, who was frantic.

  “They’re going to take me away!” Stutzman told Keim.

  “Why?” Keim asked the deputies.

  “We can’t say, but we’ve got orders,” one of them replied.

  With that, they shoved Stutzman into the backseat of the sheriff’s car.

  Keim, both frightened and outraged, ran across Welty Road to the Stutzman farm, only to find that the old man and his son Andy had gone to Wooster, the county seat.

  To Keim, it was all too clear who had set Stutzman up with the sheriff’s department.

  “Tell your husband I don’t think much of what he has done!” Keim told Susan Stutzman, whose shocked expression indicated that she had not known of the sheriff’s visit.

  Later that day, Keim learned that Stutzman had been taken to Fallsview Hospital and One-Hand Eli had rushed up to Cuyahoga Falls on the bus with a suitcase of clothes.

  Keim had the feeling that Stutzman’s father planned to commit his son and then go pick him up to bring him back home, where he could control him. What kind of a father could do that to his son? he wondered.

  After three days in the hospital, Stutzman returned to Keim’s farm, saying he was disgusted with his father and brother for having put him in a mental ward. He reasserted that he wanted to leave the Swartzentrubers and join Keim’s Old Order Amish district.

  Eli attended church a few times, then his interest seemed to wane. To Mose Keim, it was becoming more apparent that the young man had severe mental problems.

  At that time Keim caught Stutzman in a number of lies, most of them pertaining to his whereabouts when he left the farm. Stutzman claimed he had Amish friends in Ashland—yet no one in Ashland had seen him there. Even worse, some whispered that they had seen Stutzman in a car, driving through the community with some friends who obviously weren’t Amish. One Sunday, Stutzman entertained several Englischers at Keim’s place when Mose and his wife were away. On August 12, 1972, Keim’s barn burned to the ground a half hour after Stutzman had caught the bus for Ashland. Although Keim never believed that Stutzman had set the fire, others did.

  When Stutzman told him he had sold his buggy and bought a bicycle and planned to leave the Amish, Keim was sorry about the young man’s decision to leave the faith. However, he was not sad to see Stutzman leave the farm. Too many things had happened, and Keim had three children of his own to care for. Besides, he reasoned, there was nothing more he could do for Eli Stutzman. He had tried everything.

  Others tried to help. To 24-year-old Amishman Joe Slabaugh, an occasional visitor to Mose Keim’s farm after Stutzman’s breakdown, Eli Stutzman was the kind of rowdy young troublemaker who became angry, even belligerent, whenever he was caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to do—especially if going to the bishop was threatened. Stutzman tested the limits of the Ordnung at every opportunity, or so it seemed. When Slabaugh heard that Stutzman was having trouble with the Swartzentrubers, he figured that in time he would cool off and return to the fold.

  Slabaugh, who was working as a carpenter in Apple Creek, searched for the right words to comfort Stutzman, yet let him see that he should come back to the Swartzentrubers. Stutzman insisted that he was happier without the rules of the Order and especially without his father, but it didn’t show on his face. When Slabaugh left after a visit, he felt that what he had heard about Stutzman was true: he was crazy.

  The Old Order Amish had two sanctions that were effective in keeping renegade members in the church. One was to bann, or excommunicate, a sinful member from the church body; the other, called Meidnung, was the practice of shunning or avoiding members who had been banned. Members could not accept services or goods from a banned Amishman. The measures were harsh, but they often worked and brought back the wayward.

  The summer of 1972 was sweltering, and the confines of the Amish church meeting only intensified the heat. Amish men, women, and their
obedient children sat lined up on wooden benches and listened respectfully to the preachers and bishop, although many of them could not understand the words of the sermon spoken in High German.

  Joe Slabaugh was in church the day Stutzman was expelled and put under the bann. The church took council and asked the members whether Stutzman should be excommunicated for his disobedience and desire to leave the Order.

  Slabaugh wanted to say something on his troubled friend’s behalf, but he feared that if he did, he too might be put under the bann. So he sat quietly while it was done.

  Slabaugh felt Stutzman had left the church because of something he wanted out of life, not to cause hardship for his parents, as some gossiped. Other boys were making peace with the church, and Slabaugh hoped his friend would also.

  When the news about Stutzman reached Ida, she curled up on her bed and cried. Ida’s sisters and mother tried to comfort her, but nothing worked. Eli was going to be her husband. What would happen to her now?

  Since Stutzman could get work outside of the Swartzentrubers, he didn’t have to suffer the financial hardship that forced some to return.

  The breakdown and the lies had been worth it to Stutzman. He wanted out of the Amish and was glad to leave. If he couldn’t take meals with his father, so what? He was free.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Thayer County Sheriff’s Department is housed in an ugly, squat cinder-block building in the considerable shadow of the massive limestone courthouse. The department’s name, however, is painted on the front door in the kind of golden swash usually reserved for boutiques or cafes. On the morning of December 24, 1985, hot mulled cider simmered in a pot next to the coffeemaker in the back room. Paper plates heaped with homemade Christmas cookies covered the counter. Sheriff Gary Young and his chief deputy, Bill McPherson, expected an easy day that Christmas Eve. After all, most days were easy in the Thayer County Sheriff’s Department; a few traffic violations and occasional burglaries and drunk-and-disorderlies were the only offenses that occupied their time. There hadn’t been a murder in the county since a Chester woman shot her husband and dumped his body in a hog pen more than a decade ago.

  At 9:30 A.M. a call came in from Ortman’s Cafe. Some “crazy lady” had been at the restaurant all night. She was upset, “talking strange,” and they wanted her out. Young told McPherson to respond. It wasn’t so much an order as a reminder that it was McPherson’s turn to respond to a call. Although Gary Young was the sheriff and the ultimate authority of law and order in Thayer County, he ran his operation with an easy, team-oriented approach. He and the dark-haired, mustachioed McPherson were the nucleus of the team.

  Bill McPherson and the Reverend “Whistling” Bill Anderson, a self-appointed jail chaplain, were “smokin’ and jokin’ ” in the office by the dispatcher’s desk when the call came in. Anderson, a Methodist minister who had made a second, albeit small, congregation of the drunks and hotheads who drifted through the four cramped cells in the sheriff’s office, had come in to see if anyone was in need of special prayer or, better, needed to be saved on Christmas Eve morning.

  “Why don’t you come with me out to Ortman’s? We’ve got a crazy out there and you can talk to her,” McPherson suggested. The minister agreed and they left to answer the call.

  Gary Young had finished a twenty-one-year career in the Air Force before starting his law-enforcement career in Thayer County in 1978. Elected sheriff in 1981, he was a round man with a round face. His head was topped with a swirl of dark brown hair. Soft-spoken, yet tough when duty called, Young, age 47, left his office to pick up some last-minute Christmas presents for his three children. He munched on a cookie as he headed out the back door.

  At a few minutes after 10:00, a more unsettling call was dispatched to Young’s car radio: Chuck Kleveland had found a body—a child’s body.

  Young shook his head, refusing to believe it for a second. Then he reached for the radio and instructed the dispatcher to call Dan Werner, the county attorney and coroner. Young picked Werner up at his office in the small building south of the station, and together they drove to Chester.

  The stocky, middle-aged woman with bleached, black-rooted hair was certifiable, a conclusion that took McPherson and the Reverend Anderson only a moment to reach. Patience and gentle questioning brought out her story. A truckdriver had dropped her off in Hebron after picking her up on the interstate and “messing” with her.

  And, she said, she had killed someone.

  She said she had been traveling for some time. Yet, her pink sweatpants and white top were clean, suggesting that she hadn’t been on the road very long. The Reverend Anderson did his best to calm the woman, while McPherson talked with the Ortmans, who had made the complaint.

  A call from the dispatcher interrupted the scene. Sheriff Young was 1097 with the coroner. He wanted 9321 to meet them.

  The police code 1097 meant that Young was at the crime scene. “With the coroner” wasn’t code, but it indicated to McPherson that someone was dead. The code 9321 was McPherson’s radio number. Another deputy was en route to handle the crazy lady. The Reverend Anderson stayed behind.

  McPherson turned on the red lights and peeled south to Chester. When he approached the scene, Young instructed him to park his car on the county-road intersection a mile from the junction of 81 and 8.

  “This is a security area. Don’t let anyone come down that road.” Young said little else. Department policy was such that homicides—and at this point Young could only guess that this was the case—were never discussed over the radio.

  McPherson waited. He knew it had to be bad, but he didn’t know what it was all about. He wondered about the woman back at Ortman’s. Whom had she killed in Chester?

  “It’s over there.”

  Kleveland pushed Gary Young toward the child’s body; the sheriff just couldn’t see it amid the brambles. While the wind blew air cold enough to freeze nose hairs, Young moved closer and saw the child’s hand—the same clue that had given Kleveland the unmistakable impression that it was for real.

  The child’s head was tilted back, to the west, so Young couldn’t make out her face. Her legs were stiff and parted like the cold blades of an open pair of scissors, and though there had been three or four inches of snow three days earlier, most of it had melted. A few snowflakes clung to the pale blue garment.

  “Jesus,” Kleveland said. “What in the hell happened to the kid?” Kleveland half-expected an immediate answer from either the sheriff or the county coroner.

  Young shook his head and walked around the body to get a look at the child’s face, or what was left of it. The soft tissues of the nose and the mouth had been scraped away. Exposed nasal cartilage centered the face with a chalky triangle. The eyes—perhaps blue, although they were cloudy and dark—were closed to thin slits. The child’s left hand wasn’t really over her heart, as Kleveland thought he had seen. It was resting over her lower abdomen. The child’s right hand was tucked under her body. Sharp violet lines marked her neck and bruises discolored her forehead. Young wondered if the girl had been beaten and strangled. Yet, the girl had been placed carefully. Young figured that whoever had left her wanted her to be found.

  Carefully watching each step before his feet touched the stone-hard ground, Young climbed back to the roadside to where Dan Werner was waiting.

  “Well, is it?” Werner asked.

  Young, still watching where his feet landed, nodded.

  “Shit,” Werner said, surprising the sheriff. Dan Werner, as straight as his sandy hair, a regular churchgoing family man, never cursed.

  Young had the dispatcher call the state patrol and send for the crime van up in Lincoln. He had never before handled a murder case and wasn’t too proud to call for immediate help. He told the dispatcher to relay the information that they had a probable homicide—grotesque purple marks circled the little girl’s throat.

  “Advise the patrol that no one has touched the body at this point,” he said, signing off.r />
  Finally, Young told Kleveland he could leave. The truck-stop owner was none too happy to oblige. He promised he wouldn’t say anything. “I’ll keep my mouth shut, you can count on it.”

  “Whoever did this could still be here,” Young told him as Kleveland pulled away.

  By noon, locals were cruising the area. From where McPherson sat in his car, he couldn’t see anything and it irritated him that so many people had come to take a look. It was Christmas Eve, for God’s sake.

  Finally, Young radioed McPherson to come. The deputy braced himself against the wind and climbed over the ditch to where Young and state-patrol investigator Dan Scott huddled.

  “Do you recognize her?” Young asked.

  McPherson edged closer. At six feet two inches, and standing three or four feet above the body as it lay in the ditch, he wasn’t close enough to see much. He bent over. The child’s body, which from the roadside had seemed larger, appeared smaller when he stood next to it. The child’s size troubled him.

  “Must be something wrong with the kid. Retarded or something,” he offered.

  “Why?” Werner asked.

  “The one-piece sleeper. This kid is too big for jammies with feet. My girls wouldn’t wear a sleeper like that past age three or four. She could be retarded or abused.” Looking at the dead kid, McPherson felt like someone had punched him in the stomach. It was the first time in eleven years as a cop that McPherson had had to deal with a dead child as young as the one in the blue sleeper. When he was a policeman in Lincoln he had investigated the case of a 17-year-old who had committed suicide by sucking on an M-80. But this was a baby.

  Like Young and Werner and the other deputies at the scene, McPherson didn’t know who the child was. Her skin looked dark enough that she might have been Mexican. He tried to look beyond the torn and chewed face, the buck-toothed mouth without an upper lip to cover the base of the front teeth. He wondered what the girl had looked like before she ended up in the ditch.

  The baby-blue sleeper was noteworthy in another way: it was clean and seemed brand-new. The white and blue striped cotton ribbing of the collar and cuffs were in flawless condition. McPherson, the father of three girls, was puzzled by the perfect condition of the sleeper’s plastic feet. He knew, as any father would, that the feet on a child’s sleeper are the first to wear out. But these feet were spotless. The child hadn’t done much, if any, walking.