by Gregg Olsen
“The poor child has been through several autopsies. If I were his mother, I’d die if my baby had been subjected to that.”
Her women parishioners urged her to organize a simple community service and burial that would put the child back with God.
People in Chester were aghast when they heard that the county attorney was going to order another autopsy.
“They keep looking for evidence that doesn’t seem to exist. It’s time to stop it. It’s time to let the child rest.”
Sheriff Young and investigator Wyant scheduled a press conference for Tuesday, January 28, 1986. An airbrush artist hired by the state patrol had mixed reality with fantasy by painting a nose, lips, and cheek on top of the morgue photograph. The child’s teeth, however, still dominated the image, like two square, perfectly spaced white tiles. As was the case with the artist who had done the first composite, the features were a guess.
Young hoped the photo would be the impetus for more publicity, and, God willing, a lead that would finally go somewhere. That afternoon, 5-by-7 prints were mailed all over the country.
The time had come to bury the boy and the national media responded. Reporters wondered what the townspeople had called the boy. Samuelson received a letter from a Missouri minister and gave them the answer:
“As a father of three children, including a 9-year-old boy, I was saddened and moved by the story in USA Today in which your community will bury the unknown boy, whose name is known only to God.
I hurt for that little child. . . .”
Before closing, the man suggested the name “Matthew,” which means “Gift of God.” Samuelson felt the name fit.
• • •
Donations from the community and beyond came to Chester in support of their plan for the burial. A mother from Fairbury donated her son’s size-8 suit. A widow gave up one of her family plots in Chester’s cemetery. Lon Adams’s wife, Dixie, arranged for the donation of a marker:
LITTLE BOY
ABANDONED
FOUND NEAR
CHESTER, NEB.
DECEMBER 24, 1985
WHOM WE HAVE CALLED “MATTHEW”
WHICH MEANS “GIFT OF GOD”
A space was left on the stone with the hope that someday the boy’s real name could be engraved there.
Gary Young knew that the burial was important for the community’s healing process. People wanted the uneasiness to end. But for him it was an unsolved murder, a tragedy that someone had forced on the community when they killed the little boy. The minister down in Chester could forgive that, but he couldn’t.
Forgiveness, after all, was part of her job.
Offers to help solve the mystery of the dead boy continued to come from far away and from the most unlikely places.
Impressionist and stand-up comedian Fred Travalena was touched deeply by the story when he read about it in a Las Vegas paper.
Travalena felt compelled by God to help the sheriff and packed his bags for Nebraska. To Travalena, the story indicated that God had sent the child as a messenger of some kind: found on Christmas Eve, his funeral was planned for Easter. Travalena was even taken aback by the name of the town generating most of the stories—Hebron. It was the name of a holy place in the Bible.
It was as if the little boy were calling to him: Find out who I am! Hurry!
A press conference with Travalena was held and another composite of the boy was released. Accompanied by Young and Samuelson, the comedian drove out to pray at the dump site.
At midnight, several days after she learned that she would give the boy’s funeral, Samuelson woke abruptly from a dream. A gut-wrenching feeling of fear and sadness gripped her. She saw tears at the roadside where the boy had been found. Whoever had left the child in Chester had left with great pain and a heavy heart.
In prayer, the minister asked, “Why do you keep speaking to me about this child? Why should I feel guilty? Why should I feel guilty?”
The answer that came to her was that the boy had been in her life many times. And she had been too busy trying to prove herself worthy to see him.
Suddenly, Samuelson felt that whoever had left the child had probably once been like him. He, too, was like a child who had fallen through the cracks.
The little boy’s service was supposed to be a quiet, community funeral—a few flowers, some appropriate scripture, and hymns sung deeply from the heart. People in Chester talked about the service with great relief as Easter drew closer. The word, however, had gone beyond Thayer County.
Media calls became so incessant that Samuelson unplugged her telephone. Calls from the press inundated the church and the parsonage. CBS, ABC . . . call letters melded into one another. People magazine planned to send someone.
May 19, 1986
As expected, a flurry of activity followed the memorial-service story told in People. Most mysterious—or, Jack Wyant initially believed, ludicrous—was the call from a Missouri woman who claimed to possess special gifts that could help the authorities solve the case of the Chester boy. The woman did not consider herself a psychic, but a person with a direct line to God.
She told Wyant that she felt that the boy was neither retarded nor mute, as had been speculated in the magazine. She said that she felt a connection to Kansas, and that through a vision she had seen a two- or four-lane highway—similar, Wyant wasn’t surprised to learn, to the one pictured in People.
The woman shared a few other visions and impressions that seemed far from the reality of the case. She saw a white male, medium build, with brown straight hair and wearing slacks and a long-sleeved white shirt.
“He seemed to be spreading a flammable liquid near a building,” she later wrote in her follow-up letter to Wyant. “I heard the word ‘kerosene.’ Next I heard the words ‘Iowa’ and ‘Iowa farming community.’ Next, ‘Near a dairy farm.’ ”
She also said she saw a vision of land and a fence. The land sloped upward to the right, and a dirt road ran opposite the fence. She felt the place was close by the dairy farm.
The woman had no idea how it all connected, or if indeed it did. But she did have the distinct impression that the man she had described was the suspect in the case. She wanted no money, only the permission to use the Nebraska State Patrol as a reference on her résumé.
Wyant was polite to the woman and filed her letter in his case notebook—the first of two three-inch binders he would fill over the course of the investigation. He had heard stories of cases where psychics had helped out, but he had no firsthand knowledge of a psychic actually doing any good.
The months passed, and the holiday season brought snow, school concerts, and the case of a Grinch who stole Christmas light bulbs from homes and businesses in Hebron. It also brought the unshakable memories of the year before. For Thayer County, the memories could be recalled in vivid detail.
The Hebron Journal Register summed it up in a frontpage headline:
ONE YEAR LATER AUTHORITIES ARE NO CLOSER
TO SOLVING CHESTER CHRISTMAS MYSTERY
The new year started off with County Attorney Werner requesting that another pathologist look into the case of the boy’s death. John Porterfield had no problem with the state seeking another opinion, though he didn’t believe the investigators were likely to turn up anything.
“To plow the same old ground again has never yielded anything I’ve ever heard of,” he said.
Photographs, X rays, police reports, and microscopic tissue slides were shipped to the pathology department at the Saint Louis University Medical Center, a facility that handled more than one thousand autopsies a year. Wyant considered the Saint Louis facility to be the best in the region.
Dr. Michael Graham, the Saint Louis pathologist, had what Dr. Porterfield considered a major disadvantage: looking at a picture is never the same as looking at the corpse. Dr. Graham, on the other hand, felt that sometimes it’s better to be an outsider and review the complete package—that sometimes things are clearer that way.
Li
ke the rodent who didn’t see his shadow, Jack Wyant might have wished he’d stayed in bed on Groundhog Day. He didn’t much care for the news he received from Dr. Graham the morning of February 2, 1987. It was another strikeout. The 35-year-old assistant professor of pathology said that the cause of death could not be determined based on the available information.
He didn’t fault the information provided. The reports were clear, the slides excellent. But nothing in the package pointed conclusively to the cause of death.
Further, the anal dilation had been the result of the dying process. He could find no evidence that an object had been inserted into the boy’s rectum. The low level of carbon monoxide found in his blood could be explained as having resulted from breathing tobacco smoke or car exhaust—the amounts were only trace, and by no means lethal.
Pathologists used drug screens to test for the more common lethals—barbiturates and alcohol. None turned up. Certain drugs, however, do not show up unless the lab knows what to look for. Such phantom drugs are a closely guarded secret—for good and obvious reasons.
Dr. Graham favored the view that the child had died a natural death, though not related to an upper-respiratory viral infection the boy may have had. Death due to a seizure disorder such as epilepsy was another possibility, but it too could not be established conclusively, since no medical history was available on the unknown boy.
Dr. Graham disliked leaving the case with a question mark, but he had done all he could.
CHAPTER TEN
Like the lights of a hundred cigarettes, fireflies bobbed up and down through the calm of the quiet night air as Dan Gingerich returned from visiting Abe Stutzman’s parents, in Apple Creek. It was after 10:00 P.M., and since the lights were out, he assumed Eli Stutzman was asleep. Concerned that the noise of the buggy might awaken Stutzman, Gingerich brought it around into the upper driveway. Quietly, by the yellow glow of a kerosene lantern, he put the horse into a stall.
Just as he set foot on the gravel between the barn and the house there was movement at the bedroom window.
“Daniel, Daniel, where is my gun? Where is my gun?” Stutzman called from the window. His voice was full of fear. He begged Gingerich to get his gun and put it away in a safe place—a place where Stutzman couldn’t find it.
Gingerich tried to calm the frantic man. “I’ll take care of it,” he promised.
“Hide it!” Stutzman pleaded.
Gingerich got the gun and put it in the barn.
When he returned, Stutzman explained that he was having horrible nightmares so frightening that he was afraid to close his eyes. One nightmare in particular was unbearable.
In his dream, he said, he knelt before Jesus Christ and confessed his sins. He asked if he would be saved if he took his own life. Jesus looked at him and said, “Yes, you will be saved.”
Stutzman repeated his question again, just to make sure he understood, and again Jesus told him salvation would be given even if he killed himself. Stutzman had pulled the barrel of his gun to his face and just started to pull the trigger when the weathered hand of an old man reached from behind him and forced the gun away.
It was his father.
One-Hand Eli screamed at his son: “You will not kill yourself! You will not!”
The next day, Amos and Lizzie Gingerich came to the farm and learned of the nightmare.
“Take my gun away from the farm,” Stutzman begged them. “I don’t trust myself with it.” They packed it in the buggy and took it to their farm for safekeeping. Their son-in-law was in frightening shape. What was going to happen next?
If Stutzman was telling everyone about his nightmare, it was nothing compared to what his twin brothers-in-law had endured. Something terrible had happened to the Gingerich boys, Amos and Andy, when they stayed overnight at Stutzman’s. At the time neither boy had ever spoken directly of it—they only alluded to it years later when more information about their brother-in-law found its way to the formidable Amish rumor mill.
In bed late one night, Andy felt his brother-in-law pushing his pelvis against him. The 15-year-old turned away, thinking Stutzman was having a bad dream. Stutzman made soft sounds, almost a whine, but no words came. Stutzman pushed his pelvis against the boy and pressed his erect penis against Andy’s back several times. Then he stopped.
The boy reasoned Stutzman had stopped because he knew Andy would not be part of anything so much against God’s word.
Later, he learned that his twin, Amos, had gone through the same thing. They knew that Stutzman was mixed up from Ida’s death and that he had had problems in the past, but this kind of thing was totally forbidden. They were 15 years old, their sister was dead, and their brother-in-law had tried to have sex with them. How could they make sense of this?
“I wanted him to just leave me alone. I didn’t know what to do—I thought he was trying some homosexual things to me,” Andy later said.
July 11, 1978
The Gingeriches were held hostage by their emotions: the memory of Ida haunted them, as did Stutzman’s disturbing behavior. No one wanted to push or confront Stutzman. The Gingeriches were afraid that Stutzman was slipping into an abyss of madness.
Exactly one year to the day after Ida had died in the fire, the inevitable happened.
Susie was the first to notice that Eli and Danny had not been home that night. The buggy was missing and Stutzman’s bed had not been slept in. Stutzman had been acting so strangely lately, she was worried that something terrible had taken place. When he came home later that day, he went right up to his bedroom.
Later that afternoon, Andy Gingerich was tending livestock in the barn when he heard screams and scuffling sounds coming from the house. The next thing he knew, someone was running for the neighbor’s to telephone for help, shouting, “Call the emergency squad! Eli Ali’s gone mental!”
Upstairs in his bedroom, covered with a blanket and looking disheveled and wild, Stutzman was wavering between semiconsciousness and alert tirades.
“Where did you put the stones?” he demanded, pointing a finger at a bewildered and frightened little Danny. “Where are the stones?” He spoke loudly, his voice stern. He was sweating under the blanket, and his eyes rolled upward.
The Amish had gathered at the foot of the stairs, and someone said that Stutzman had spent the night at the graveyard where Ida had been buried—or at least that he had babbled something of the sort.
When the emergency squad from Kidron arrived, the volunteer firemen heard howls and shouts from upstairs. Like a child, Stutzman was chanting the same thing over and over, starting and stopping without rhythm. The words were in Deutsch, and the firemen, although of Swiss extraction, couldn’t understand them—the Amish tongue is its own language.
The chant in fact had something to do with stones or a stone. Some of the Amish wondered if he meant Ida’s headstone.
The Stutzman farm was familiar to the squad members who had been there to fight the fire. When the Amish told them it was the exact anniversary of Ida’s death, it all made sense. The Eli Stutzman they had seen the year before had been emotionless, but now he was a raging animal. Maybe he had bottled everything up inside, trapping his emotions for the big explosion they were witnessing.
The men waited at the bottom of the stairs while the Amishmen filled them in on what had happened. They heard what sounded like a hurricane lamp crash to the floor, and more screams.
Fire Chief Mel Wyss led the squad. He grabbed a quilt, proceeded upstairs with his men, and threw the quilt over Stutzman as he thrashed on his bed.
Stutzman struggled to break free. He was so wild and strong that it took four men to hold him and bind his legs and arms for the drive to the psychiatric ward at Dover Hospital.
“Watch that he don’t bite,” a squad member warned.
On the way, Stutzman continued to struggle. At least once en route, the squad pulled over to tighten his arm straps. He continued screaming until they pulled into the hospital parking lot, when he seem
ed to calm. Perhaps he had worn himself out, or perhaps he knew that screams wouldn’t matter in a psychiatric ward.
Stutzman was admitted on July 11 and remained there for a full week.
The Amish community grieved for the disturbed young man. What if he did not pull out of this? What would happen to his little boy?
Twice the Gingeriches went to the hospital to visit Stutzman. Both times he seemed subdued, and afterward the Gingeriches felt he had not been happy to see them. They couldn’t understand why. They loved Ida, too. They understood his grief.
A week later, Stutzman returned to Moser Road. He was on medication, and he had appointments scheduled with the psychiatrist for follow-up sessions.
If the Amish wondered whether he was going to be all right, their answer came, in part, during the first church he attended after being discharged from Dover. After only an hour of preaching, Eli rose, picked up Danny, and left.
Andy Stutzman saw that his brother was slipping away and made numerous trips to Moser Road to try to help him. Sometimes he brought ice cream or watermelon, and a few times he even stayed overnight. One time Stutzman refused to take the tranquilizers. Dr. Lehman suggested it might help to dissolve the pills into Mountain Dew or 7-up. Andy followed the advice, and as long as Eli drank it all, it worked.
One morning, however, Stutzman seemed to have taken a turn for the worse. He sent Andy to a neighbor’s to call the doctor for more drugs. On his way back, Andy ran into Eli, who had left his bed and was walking quickly toward him.
“You’re not going to put me away again? You’re not going to sign me in to the mental hospital again?”
“No, Eli, I’m not going to sign you in unless you are mentally unaware and you don’t know how to take care of yourself. Then I will have to. Do you understand?”
A week later, Stutzman started attending a Mennonite church. For the Amish, the pattern was all too obvious, and they were desperate to save him—and keep him Amish.
