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

by Gregg Olsen

  Nebraska State Patrol investigators Jack Wyant, Dan Scott, and Carl Nedley mapped out the details of the scene. Most of the sheriff’s department wore insulated coveralls, and a few of the state troopers were lucky enough to have a pair. Those who didn’t made trips to the car heaters every twenty minutes or so.

  An imposing figure of height, weight, and credentials, Jack Wyant is a veteran of the state patrol and is considered both competent and gruff—although when he smiles his grin is as wide as a jack-o’-lantern’s. During his career he’d worked the full range in Nebraska, from traffic duty in Fremont and Broken Bow to narcotics investigations in Lincoln. He transferred into criminal investigations in 1977. A burly man who chokes the handlebars on his Harley on weekends, Wyant keeps Winstons in his front pocket and a lighter in his right hand. Even in the subzero temperatures of that day, he found time to puff between shivers.

  Wyant took critical measurements of the scene and mapped out the body’s position, noting that it had been discovered approximately twenty feet west of the dirt road, which ran north and south. It was lying on a line from the head to the feet of west-northwest to east-southeast. The ditch, which drained through a culvert under the road to the adjacent field, was approximately two and a half feet deep at the point where the body had been discovered.

  While investigators continued to search the scene for evidence, Dan Scott knelt down and unzipped the blue sleeper to see if there were any clues about the manner of death—maybe more bruises or cuts.

  Scott carefully peeled back the fabric, which was loose against the frozen, dry skin. Finally, he pulled the zipper to the crotch.

  “Hey, this is a boy!” he called out.

  Scott also discovered that the boy was not wearing any underwear. The troopers who had children felt that this was peculiar. Their boys and girls always wore underpants with their sleepers. No one speculated what it might mean, but it seemed to have some significance.

  The marks on the neck, of course, appeared critical.

  Young told Wyant that he thought the child had been beaten to death or strangled. “Those purple lines look like ligature marks,” he said.

  Wyant, usually inclined to wait for the results of an autopsy, agreed.

  “Who would murder a little boy and throw him in a ditch like so much trash?” Young asked.

  The investigators rolled the boy over to see if there was any evidence underneath him. Nothing seemed remarkable, although Wyant noted that a small stick had been caught in the frozen folds of the boy’s neck. The stiff child was wrapped in a sheet and zipped into a body bag.

  The body had not been frozen into the ground; a slight indentation like a little cup or cradle remained where the child’s head had rested. It was likely that rigor mortis had not yet set in and the body had been warm when put there. Although soft to the touch, a patch of snow under the boy’s legs remained undisturbed.

  Frozen vehicle tracks from a pickup truck were photographed. Normal procedure would have called for plaster castings, but the frigid weather ruled that out. Killers had been identified before on the basis of tread marks, but if the little boy’s murderer had just been passing through via U.S. 81, there would be no telling where he had gone.

  Sheriff Young arranged for Lon Adams to bring a hearse from Hebron to Chester and the dead boy was taken to Adams-Tibbett Funeral Home. Once there, the sheriff’s department and the state patrol could regroup. With any luck they would wrap it up before Christmas Eve dinner.

  In the hours that followed, there would be little physical evidence recovered from the scene. A Sneaker brand T-shirt, size 34–36, was found three-eighths of a mile northwest of the body by Trooper Al Wise, who was scouring the area on horseback. It was gray, with PANTHER WRESTLING emblazoned in black block letters. A pair of white cotton men’s briefs were found at the Lutheran cemetery a half-mile southeast of the dump site. Those pieces of evidence were tagged and bagged and sent to the state crime lab for analysis.

  Watching in his rearview mirror until he could see no more, Kleveland drove straight home. The haircut could wait.

  After telling Kathy about the body he’d found he went down the hall to check on his children, Amy, Becky, and David. All three teenagers were given to sleeping late, especially on school holidays. He checked to see that each was safe. He had no doubt that things were going to be different in Chester this Christmas.

  As if there could be a good time to pass away, sixty-year-old funeral director Lon Adams considered Christmas Eve a “bad time to die.” The pain accompanying a sudden death is unbearable, especially at Christmas. His heart went out to those who had loved this boy and would find out that he had been strangled.

  The investigators and the patrolmen had followed the gray hearse to the funeral home, and their eight cars crammed the back parking lot behind the mortuary. The boy in the black body bag was set on a porcelain table in the embalming room. Investigators hovered, speculating about the cause of death over the din of the old furnace, only inches from where the body lay in the cramped, mint-green room.

  It was well past lunchtime but no one was hungry. There was too much to do, too much to consider. That afternoon, the funeral home was the liveliest place in town.

  Both of the mortuary’s phone lines were put into use as calls were placed to local officials who might be aware of a missing child. This seemed doubtful to Gary Young, who had a feeling that this child did not belong to anyone from Thayer County. More photographs were taken as the body was pushed back and forth like a rolling pin. An investigator climbed up on a chair to get a better overview Polaroid shot of the body. The local school superintendent was called in, but when he looked at the body he drew a blank.

  Back in the sheriff’s office, a teletype about the Chester victim was transmitted to all states crossed by U.S. 81: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Later, a report was dispatched to law enforcement in Missouri, Iowa, Colorado, and Wyoming.

  Phone calls to the media were made, although the timing and the holiday work schedules kept cameramen and reporters from coming down for interviews. A brief news item based on the phone call was scheduled for the 10:00 P.M. news in Lincoln.

  A few more visitors arrived at the funeral home. Among them were a sheriff and his deputy from neighboring Republic County, Kansas. They were ushered across the mortuary’s sunflower-yellow shag carpet, through the casket and monument showroom done up in silver- and gray-flocked wallpaper, and into the embalming room. When they saw the boy, they shook their heads; they didn’t recognize him either.

  Although it was freezing outside, Adams told one of the troopers he could leave the mortuary’s front door open to allow officers to come back and forth from County Attorney Dan Werner’s office, which was next door.

  “We don’t have crime like you have up in Lincoln,” Adams half-joked to a trooper.

  “Doesn’t look like that in your back room,” the officer shot back.

  So small it still closed down for lunch hour, the tiny State Bank of Chester had been a meeting place for the locals for years. It was the kind of place that symbolized Chester and its people: small-townish and proud of it. Bank president Harold Porter still typed his correspondence on a manual Royal—not because he didn’t like change and refused to upgrade to an electric or, God forbid, a word processor, but because the typewriter still worked.

  As had been her routine, United Methodist minister Jean Samuelson stopped in the bank the morning of December 24 and was immediately hit with the story of the dead boy. The news drained her. It didn’t seem possible.

  People in Chester now looked to Samuelson to make some sense out of what was happening on U.S. 81 just a mile from town.

  Throughout the afternoon and evening rumors spread through town. People were afraid that some terrible child killer, a pervert probably, had come through town and murdered a little boy. Some even wondered if the child’s pajamas indicated that the boy had been stolen from his bedroom. A ritual killing
was also suggested.

  “Chuck Kleveland says the child was wiped clean as could be. They washed him before they dumped him. His hand had been placed over his heart!”

  Samuelson felt the fear build and searched for words to console her parishioners. When it was time for her 7:00 P.M. Christmas Eve service, the minister stood before her congregation of farmers and their wives and children and spoke about the little boy Kleveland had found that morning.

  “Here we are celebrating the birth of a child and there is a dead child in our midst,” she told them.

  With a couple of hours to go before the midnight service, Samuelson went home to the seventy-year-old parsonage on the northwestern edge of town. On the back of a Christmas postcard she wrote the words to a song.

  Who are the children, the ones with no one to care?

  Our Lord says they are everywhere.

  They are in the cities.

  They are in the towns.

  They are on a country road . . .

  It was dark outside, and the darkness brought an even greater chill when Lon Adams took the body to Lincoln General Hospital, where it would be stored and defrosted for the autopsy now scheduled for the day after Christmas. The body was put into a vault secured with a combination lock.

  The assemblage of police officers, state troopers, and regular Thayer County sheriff’s personnel had rapidly dissipated after the body was taken to Lincoln. A few phone calls came to the sheriff’s department after the late news broadcast, but nothing was definitive. One by one, the men working the case went home to their families feeling angry, disoriented, and totally unprepared for the holiday.

  With thoughts of a killer on the loose, Jack Wyant drove up to his in-laws’ home outside Lincoln for Christmas Eve dinner. Cops like Wyant like to say they get used to dealing with murder. They don’t, really. Especially when it’s a dead kid.

  When Chief Deputy Bill McPherson went home to his family in Hebron, his girls’ eager, smiling faces made him think of the boy in the pajamas. He left his children in the living room and went into the kitchen. His wife held him while tears came.

  Gary Young was among the last to leave the office. As he walked to his car, he heard the bells of Sacred Heart Catholic Church chime parishioners to Christmas Eve Mass. It was five minutes before midnight. He went home and watched Mass on television, and all he could think of was the boy Chuck Kleveland had found in Chester.

  Sheriff Young spent all of Christmas Day in the office except for a family dinner at his sister’s in Byron, eight miles from where the victim had been found. The Young clan gathered and exchanged gifts as they always had, but for Gary it was not the same. The image of the little boy haunted him.

  In some ways, the celebration seemed frivolous, maybe even trivial. It certainly didn’t feel right. He left after dinner and went back to the office. The day had been a blur. He knew he would be in a better frame of mind once the autopsy was done. He had to be in Lincoln first thing in the morning. The autopsy was scheduled for 9:30.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  On August 23, 1972, Liz and Leroy Chupp, a New Order Amish couple living at Stoll Farms in Marshallville, took Eli Stutzman in, giving him room and board in exchange for chores. When Stutzman arrived at the sizable dairy operation in hilly, northeastern Wayne County, he was a young Amishman who seemed unsure of himself, as though he had had few dealings with the outside world.

  When Ed Stoll’s wife, Bonnie, first saw Eli Stutzman, her heart went out to the small-framed young man. When he came to the door—his face partly shielded by a wide black felt hat—she knew instantly that he was from a low Amish group. His skin was pale, almost chalky. The blue of his eyes seemed to be the only color on his body.

  She had heard that he’d had a rough time with his father, who had thrown him out and put him under the bann for owning a radio.

  “ ‘You!’ ” Stutzman said his father had screamed at him. “ ‘You are out! You are no longer my son!’ ”

  Bonnie Stoll had also heard the story of the skinned cat.

  Stutzman kept unusual company for an Amishman who had just left the Order. One of his closest friends was Jim Taylor, a deputy sheriff with the Wayne County sheriff’s office. Taylor and Stutzman occasionally went out for late-night “coon hunting.” They never caught anything; if they had, Liz Chupp, who’d kept a diary since she was 12, would have noted it in her journal.

  Another who seemed to be a close friend was Morton Bissell, the chiropractor from Brewster whom Stutzman said specialized in herb teas.

  Stutzman was open and honest about his mental collapse at Mose Keim’s farm. But now his story had changed from the salary increase he sought, to a story that he must have thought the New Order Amish would feel more sympathy for. He said he had been under pressure from the Swartzentrubers because he had encouraged his pupils to speak English during recess, which was strictly forbidden by the conservative Order.

  He was glad to get away and start a life of his own, he said.

  Stutzman was delighted when Liz Chupp helped him order non-Amish clothes—particularly underwear, since the Swartzentrubers had forbidden it because of the clothing’s worldly elastic waistbands—from the Penney’s catalog. On September 10, days after he got a driver’s license, he bought a 1970 Oldsmobile.

  On his birthday, the Chupps presented him with a birthday cake and Stutzman seemed to choke with emotion. “This is the first birthday party I have ever had,” he told them.

  In time, Eli Stutzman, who helped with canning, painting, and cleaning—even when he didn’t have to—became a part of the Chupp family.

  “We felt lucky to know him,” Liz Chupp said.

  When he learned that the Chupps had taken in his son, One-Hand Eli wrote a terse letter to the New Order Amish couple.

  “He wrote that he was sorry we saw fit to go against the church and interfere with the bann. ‘This is not the Amish way,’ ” Chupp recalled.

  The New Order Amish differed in areas of the Ordnung. New Order homes frequently had phones, indoor plumbing, and electricity. They sometimes used tractors in the field, yet many, like the Chupps, used a buggy instead of a car for transportation. They disagreed with the harshness of the bann, although they understood its purpose.

  They were considered “high” or “high-class” Amish.

  Even though he was settled into an Englischer’s routine at Stoll Farms, the Amish never seemed far from Stutzman’s thoughts. On the evening of October 6, 1972, he wrote to an Amish friend that he had heard about some trouble in church—as more Swartzentruber boys left the fold.

  Presumably for emphasis, Stutzman underlined the last sentence, which indicated that he hoped trouble in church was a thing of the past for him—at least for the time being. His Amish friend wondered if it was a hint that Stutzman would be coming back to church.

  Stutzman wrote that he’d run into a friend who had told him how many boys had left the church. “Now just what is this world coming to?” he added.

  As the days passed, Stutzman, as far as the Chupps could see, remained close to God and attended the Salem Mennonite Church. His evenings were spent at church functions or attending gospel concerts. For fun, Stutzman donned his Amish clothes and went to a Halloween party.

  Abe Stutzman, Eli’s first cousin, left the Amish and eventually found his way to Stoll Farms as a milker. On the weekends he and Eli went to country music shows in town or out for a few beers. Others who left the Amish at that time were Chris Swartzentruber and John Yoder. All the boys were Swartzentruber Amish, but since they had grown up in different church districts there had been little, if any, contact between them. Chris Swartzentruber had learned that Stutzman was working at Stoll’s. Even better, Eli Stutzman had a car.

  Eli Stutzman, Lydia Stutzman, and John Yoder formed an odd romantic triangle. John was in love with Lydia; Lydia was infatuated with Eli; and Eli—well, no one really knew how he felt about either of them. When he had the opportunity, it seemed he came between Yoder and
Lydia.

  Lydia Stutzman, a Conservative Mennonite, had a couple of dates with Eli Stutzman, although nothing serious ever developed. Once he took her to the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Wooster and ordered a single meal for the two of them to share. Other times they just drove around the community, listening to country music and visiting friends.

  John Yoder was no saint, and no one needed to tell him that. But what Eli Stutzman was telling him seemed out of line. It was hurtful to Ida Gingerich.

  “I got me a real good girl—that Ida,” Stutzman boasted.

  “She lets me do everything when we’re in bed.”

  As he listened to Stutzman detail his sexual involvement with Ida, Yoder felt sorry for the girl. Maybe Stutzman had forced himself on her. Or maybe she really did love him. But if he had any real feeling for her, how could he treat her this way?

  Yoder liked Ida. He had dated her once—and nothing like that happened between them.

  With the exception of his mother and one sister, Stutzman spoke little about his family. He almost never talked about his father, but infrequent comments—derogatory asides, actually—made it clear that they did not get along.

  One day while they were passing the time at Stoll’s, Stutzman told Eli Byler, a close friend who had left the slightly more moderate Troyer Amish Order before taking a job at Stoll Farms, that living with his father had been a “hellish nightmare.”

  Stutzman said he had once put a little button with an equine image on the bridle of his favorite horse. That kind of adornment wasn’t allowed, but Stutzman as a teenager was determined to test the limits of the Ordnung. His father discovered the decoration and became furious and a shouting match ensued, yet the young man prevailed and the button stayed where he had fastened it.