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

by Gregg Olsen

  A soft-spoken Abner Petersheim called from Ohio with information for Sheriff Young. He said he was reluctant to get involved, but saw some similarities between the boy described in Reader’s Digest and a child he knew named Danny Stutzman. Danny’s father was a man named Eli Stutzman.

  “We knew them real well.” Petersheim said in a halting voice. “My wife and I baby-sat the little boy until he and his father moved out west.”

  He gave the boy’s date of birth as September 7, 1976. Danny was blond-haired and blue-eyed. He had freckles, just like Little Boy Blue. Danny had been staying with foster parents in Wyoming and his father had picked him up on the way to Ohio just before Christmas 1985.

  “But he never got here. Several months later Eli told his parents the boy died in a car wreck somewhere out in Utah.”

  Young asked if Petersheim had any photographs of the Stutzmans.

  The Mennonite man didn’t think any existed.

  “The boy and his father were from the Amish. They do not allow photographs.”

  Petersheim gave Young the names of the foster parents—Dean and Margie Barlow—and their phone number.

  “I feel this is something that should be investigated,” Petersheim said, “but please do not use my name.”

  For the first time in two years, Young had something he could investigate. This story sounded plausible—the boy’s Amish background might explain a few things. Why no one had come forward, for example. Since the father had said the boy was dead in a car accident, it now made sense why no one had reported him missing.

  He called the Wyoming number and spoke with the Barlows. Both were schoolteachers who had participated in various foster-parenting programs for a number of years. One child had been Danny Stutzman. They too had read the article and thought a connection might exist, though they doubted it.

  “We don’t think it is Danny, but it does kind of fit.” They had little to say about Eli Stutzman.

  Nevertheless, they had sent a letter to the Chester Police Department the preceding Saturday, with Danny’s school photograph enclosed.

  Since there was no Chester Police Department, Young figured the letter might still be down in Chester.

  “Eli loved his boy very much, there is just no way that he could ever have harmed him,” Dean Barlow insisted, his speech a jumble of nervousness. “My wife and I are absolutely certain about that.”

  Young thanked them and told them he might be getting back to them soon. First he needed a look at the photograph. The lead still seemed good, maybe even better after talking with the Barlows.

  He dialed the Chester post office. The postmaster had no such letter. Young said he would try later.

  The following day, Young learned that a misaddressed letter with a Wyoming postmark had arrived. Shortly afterward, he was staring at a school photograph. He didn’t need to compare it with the morgue photos, so imprinted on his mind was the dead boy’s likeness. His heart began to race. He read the typed letter, dated November 28, 1987.

  Gentlemen:

  I recently read the story “Little Boy Blue of Chester, Nebraska” in the December, 1987, Reader’s Digest, relating the story of a dead child found along the roadside.

  On the remote possibility that there may be a positive identification, I’m enclosing a picture of a nine-year-old-boy Danny Stutzman who left our home in Wyoming December 20, 1985, heading for Ohio with his father. Since then neither his grandparents nor we have heard from him.

  Margie Barlow had signed the letter. Young studied the photograph again. The kid was all smiles. If Little Boy Blue wasn’t Danny Stutzman, Young reflected, beyond a doubt he was Danny’s twin brother.

  The teeth that had seemed so large and buck-toothed, were covered by his lip, a lip that field mice had gnawed off. No wonder the composite didn’t work, he thought.

  On the way back up 81, the sheriff cruised past the turn-off Chuck Kleveland had taken two years ago to go pheasant hunting, past Chester’s cemetery, where hundreds had gathered for Matthew’s service the Easter before last . . .

  But that child wasn’t really named Matthew. He had another name. Could it be Danny Stutzman?

  He wondered about the man Lehman called Eli Stutzman. If he had done this to his boy, what had led him to it? Such thoughts were not new to the sheriff. He had long ago made up his mind about the individual who had left the child in a ditch, back when he had stood over the child’s body in that bitterly cold cornfield.

  Now, when there seemed a million things to know, Gary Young had reduced his questions to a solitary word: Why?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Dalton, Ohio, is a nice little town in the heart of Amish Country that for some lucky reason escaped the trappings of the Amish tourist trade. Restaurants catered to tourists, but that was about the extent of it. As it should be, not a single hex sign could be found in Dalton. The bright, stylized hex signs associated with Amish barns are purely a Pennsylvanian invention.

  Yet, beneath the skin of that placid world, like a burrowing tick, something strange was happening at the Stutzman farm on Sand Hill. And whatever it was, the people who knew Eli Stutzman knew that the activity wasn’t the kind of thing that made it into tourism brochures.

  Norman Moser’s mother, Luella, had a good view of the Stutzman farm—her rambling brick house sat up the hill above Stutzman’s property. While she worked in her garden she could watch who came and went. In time, the plain-spoken old woman figured it out. She noticed that all the visitors were men.

  “There were others who were waiting for Eli to remarry. I knew it wasn’t going to happen. He wasn’t the type to get married,” she later said.

  Larry Barlow lived in Akron, a homosexual trapped inside the body of a 40-year-old school administrator. Barlow wanted love and sex, though mostly the latter. Akron’s only gay bar brought him a few contacts, and he found even more at the gay bathhouse in town.

  Barlow was a gentle man who loved muscles. The house he shared with his mother was painted in Wedgewood-blue tones, a color he favored. If ever the clichéd adjective “flaming”—for a male homosexual—was appropriate, it fit the man with the pencil-sharp nose and jovial eyes.

  “Come and stay with me,” he told a friend. “I’ll treat you like a king, as only a queen can!”

  Yet Barlow had been married—that is, until his wife became suspicious about his trips to the library “to study.” The truth was that Barlow had been at the college campus giving blow jobs, not reading books. It had been part of the repetitious pattern of his life that he half-hoped would change with marriage. It had started when he was a boy and invited other boys to his bedroom for a quick blow job.

  Barlow, bored and looking for a little excitement, scanned the pages of The Advocate, a Los Angeles biweekly magazine devoted to gay sex, good times, and the accessories of the gay lifestyle. The biggest lure for readers was likely its large section of personal ads. Pages and pages set in minuscule type promoted men meeting men. The variety was astonishing, anything the lonely and horny gay man might want—including, of course, men looking for a date, maybe even a relationship. One ad in the 1979 editions stood out:

  Ohio W/m 140 lbs, 5′6″, light brown hair, blue eyes. Am 28 years old & have a three-year-old son. I like male companion, cooking, horse racing, and country music, etc. Am tired of the bar scenes. I am a country guy and prefer country living. Hope to find someone to meet the gap. Call (216) 857-8099 and ask for Eli.

  Barlow circled it, looked up the location of the prefix on the telephone number and checked an Ohio map for Dalton. He didn’t want to get involved with a man if he was too far away.

  “I didn’t want to drive three hours out of my way for a bum fuck,” he said later.

  Dalton was close enough. He dialed the number and talked with a shy man named Eli Stutzman.

  Barlow’s and Stutzman’s first meeting took place in late November in the parking lot of a closed-for-the-season frozen-custard stand in Dalton. When the former Amishman arrived,
he brought his son Danny.

  Stutzman was everything Barlow wanted: masculine and handsome, and, especially appealing, he was Amish. Nearly every Saturday morning for the next two years, Barlow went to Dalton and spent the day doing what he called his “wifely chores”—cooking, cleaning, and taking care of Danny.

  If Stutzman had one flaw, Barlow considered it to be his habit of spitting Wintergreen chewing tobacco into a Noxema jar he stowed under the front seat of his car.

  The men did some sightseeing when time permitted. Stutzman showed Barlow Ida’s grave in Fredericksburg, as well as the Cherry Ridge School and his parents’ Apple Creek farm—though neither went inside to visit. Stutzman told him that since he had been under the bann, his minister father had refused all contact with him.

  In December, Stutzman asked Barlow for $2,500, and Barlow was a little put off at the request since they barely knew each other. In the end, he gladly gave Stutzman the money. Stutzman said the loan was for business purposes.

  Barlow’s infatuation continued, though Stutzman did not return the affection. When Barlow purchased matching rings from the Akron Sears and gave one to Stutzman, his “husband,” Stutzman thanked him but seldom, if ever, wore the ring. Indeed, their relationship never involved sex.

  It wasn’t that Barlow didn’t try. One afternoon when they were in bed, Barlow pulled off his would-be lover’s underwear and fondled his penis, but failed to arouse him.

  “Eli slept through it—or at least he pretended to sleep,” Barlow later said.

  Because Stutzman seemed so uninterested, Barlow got the impression that he was naive about gay sex. Stutzman told Barlow that his first homosexual liaison was with another boy at a feed mill. The two went off in his buggy and had sex during their lunch break. He had several gay friends, including a gay couple from Wayne County, whom he saw regularly. But that was about the extent of it.

  Barlow got the impression that the housemaid, Daisy Mast, was in love with Stutzman. He felt sorry for the girl. Mast didn’t know it, but the hired boy had a much better chance with the boss than she did.

  If Mast ever did catch a clue to what was going on it was the day Stutzman told her that he thought two men—frequent visitors to the house—were homosexual. Stutzman’s tone was gossipy, and Mast later wondered if he had been just testing her reaction to the idea.

  In the summer of 1979, Levi Swartzentruber, 19 years old and just having left the Amish, ran into Stutzman in a bar in Massillon. Though both were from the Swartzentruber Order, they did not know each other.

  Stutzman hired Swartzentruber a week later, paying him $80 per month, plus room and board. Swartzentruber cleaned fence posts and painted the barn and the fence around it.

  Within the next couple of months the rooms in the Stutzman farm were filled with boarders—two other former Amish boys came to live, though Swartzentruber never saw much of them, or of Stutzman for that matter. Stutzman had a wide circle of friends and seemed to go out every night. Swartzentruber saw Barlow a few times, but didn’t get to know him well.

  “Carloads of men used to come out to the farm,” Swartzentruber recalled. “Some would come into the living room, some out to the barn for an hour or so. They kind of kept floating around, flipping in and out of the farm.

  “Now it seems stupid I didn’t know what was going on, but I really didn’t. I blame it on the way I was raised with the Amish.”

  Eli, Danny, and Levi drove to Gladwin, Michigan, where the Swartzentruber Order had established a new colony. Amos Gingerich and his family had been among the first Amish to settle there. Levi Swartzentruber’s brother, John, had married Ida’s sister Lydia, and moved with the Gingeriches to the new settlement.

  Danny seemed like a happy little boy, though the fact that he could barely speak Deutsch caused the Amish some sadness.

  “We could see he was no longer Amish. We would have been happier if he had spoken some German,” Amos Gingerich said.

  The Gingeriches were left to wonder: things had changed so quickly for Stutzman. It seemed so convenient—the fire, the nervous breakdown.

  “We were concerned Eli had not told us the truth,” Gingerich said later.

  After Stutzman, his son, and Levi returned to Moser Road, it became clear to the confused and somewhat sexually naive 19-year-old that living with Stutzman and the gay lifestyle was not for him.

  “One time Eli insisted that I put on my old Amish clothes to go out to a club in the city. I did, and he ended taking me to a gay bar,” Swartzentruber later recalled.

  Another time Stutzman sent him to Barlow’s to do chores—and to have sex with the school administrator. It didn’t work out on both accounts.

  Levi wanted to turn Stutzman in, but he was afraid to because of his own involvement in a lifestyle that would not sit well with the people of conservative Wayne County.

  “I’ve got a new roommate coming, so you’ll have to leave anyway,” Stutzman told him.

  Stutzman called his cousin Abe Stutzman, who now lived in Pennsylvania, and told him he had just returned from a trip to Oklahoma, where he had worked for a wealthy horse owner.

  “This hotshot horse owner had a high-bloodline horse that he couldn’t control. He heard about me and called me. He even sent me plane fare. I stayed for a month,” Stutzman bragged.

  The man wanted Stutzman to stay and train horses for a while, but Stutzman claimed he had suffered a broken rib in an accident on the track, when one horse had run over him while he was cooling off another.

  When it came to gay men in Wayne County, Stutzman quickly became a celebrity. His farm with its barn parties had become a magnet, drawing gay men from miles around. In Wayne County’s small and closeted gay community, everyone knew of him, and, for a time, they all wanted to meet him.

  If Stutzman had been turned down when he offered money to give David Amstutz a blow job, he found plenty of other takers at home or in the gay bars he frequented. Visitors to his farm could count on action.

  Ben Miller was one of the curious. Though he didn’t consider himself homosexual, he had experimented some. It was the all-consuming lifestyle of some gays that turned him off.

  Early in 1980, Miller heard that Stutzman and his friend Henry Troyer were taking a trip to Key West to visit a gay man who had lived with Troyer’s parents on their Wayne County farm. Troyer, like Stutzman, had grown up Amish. And like Stutzman, he was gay.

  Troyer couldn’t drive because he was considered legally blind, and he felt the drive to Florida would be too much for Stutzman alone, so he asked Miller if he wanted to go. Though it seemed clear that Stutzman didn’t want him along, Miller agreed anyway.

  “I didn’t really care that much for Eli, but I wanted to see Key West,” Miller recalled.

  When it came time to leave, Miller parked his car inside Stutzman’s barn, and the three set out in Stutzman’s pickup. Stutzman planned the itinerary. He indicated that he had traveled to Florida many times and had a lot of friends with whom they could stay along the way. He also knew the right rest stops or roadside parks along the interstate—such places were cruising spots where they could stop and have sex with a stranger.

  Miller felt he had put a damper on Stutzman’s little party. If he had been into the sexual stuff as much as Stutzman, perhaps they might have hit it off better.

  Stutzman did little to endear himself to Miller. When the man wasn’t being surly and reminiscing about his past, he seemed less than sincere. He was cool and detached when he talked about his wife’s death. Miller thought he was lying.

  “Why would a pregnant woman with a husband and a son risk her life in a milk house during a fire?” Miller later asked.

  The first night they stayed at a horse farm outside of Atlanta, Stutzman having called ahead to let the man who lived there know they were coming. Miller gathered that the man and Stutzman were friends and that Stutzman had stayed there before—had maybe even worked there at one time.

  The following morning the travelers stopped
to fill the gas tank. Miller wanted a cup of coffee, so he went to a cafe across the road while Stutzman pumped gas. When Miller returned, he met an angry Stutzman.

  “If you’d been here I would have got a free tank of gas!” Stutzman screamed.

  He’s mad because he had to pay for the gas . . . because I wasn’t there so he could steal, Miller thought.

  Miller apologized, but Stutzman wouldn’t let up. Miller could do nothing right from that point on.

  When they made it to Key West, Miller had had enough. The three of them stayed at their Ohio friend’s place, a kind of rooming house next to the beach. Miller kept his distance during the day. At night, Stutzman and Troyer went out to party at the bars.

  When it was time to leave, they discovered that the truck had started to leak oil. Stutzman blamed it on Miller.

  “You caused this!” he yelled at Miller. “If you knew how to drive this wouldn’t have happened!”

  Miller took the abuse and even considered rerouting the trip up the coast to the place of a friend—a mechanic who could fix anything. He figured it would soothe Stutzman.

  Nothing worked. Stutzman’s haranguing continued.

  In Kissimmee, Miller left the group and caught a Greyhound bus for Ohio. By then the man was stricken with fear. He wanted to make sure he got back to Moser Road before Eli Stutzman.

  He couldn’t shake the look he had seen in Eli Stutzman’s cold blue eyes. It was as if the Amishman could have killed him in cold blood and not even blinked an eye.

  Rick Adamson, 31, found a likely candidate for a date on page 28 in the April/May 1981 issue of Stars, a kinky gay correspondence publication known for the home sex photos of erect penises accompanying its ads—something the more conservative Advocate did not feature. It was true that some of the photographs in Stars were of young men with their clothes on, but those ads undoubtedly didn’t pull as well as the more explicit ones. Stars was a gay man’s cruising catalog.

  The photo that caught Adamson’s eye was of a nude, muscular young man posed in a stance that showed off his body. The background was the light-colored wood of a new barn.