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

by Gregg Olsen

  WELL-BUILT HORSEMAN—29, 5’6”, 140, brown hair, blue eyes, with a hairy body, looking for same to share our lives together. Send photo and phone number to: 2848 Moser Road, Rt. 1, Dalton, Ohio. See photo.

  Though he knew the advertiser had kept his name out of the magazine on purpose and sought only written responses, Adamson simply used the address to get the phone number, and called Eli Stutzman.

  A couple of days later, Stutzman came out to Adamson’s apartment, and the two of them spent some time getting acquainted before they went to bed. Stutzman told Adamson his preference was for anal sex and, as Stutzman bent over, Adamson obliged—though it really wasn’t what he was into. Stutzman ejaculated while Adamson was still inside him, and it was over. Stutzman didn’t want to do anything else.

  Adamson was a little disappointed, but not enough to pass up the opportunity to try again at Stutzman’s farm a week or so later. After Stutzman had put Danny to bed, he and Adamson went into the master bedroom for sex. It was a replay of the time before—Stutzman climaxing while Adamson rammed him from behind.

  Even though sex between them wasn’t great, the two men became friends. Adamson even admired Stutzman.

  “He was a real concerned father,” Adamson later said. “He had arranged for Danny to get some speech training for his stutter. As far as gay activity, he didn’t want his son to know any of it was going on. Anytime we messed around he made sure Danny was asleep first.”

  Adamson was a regular visitor to the farm that summer, visiting as many as two dozen times. Once, he came to Moser Road for a square-dance party in Stutzman’s barn. It was a good turnout, with as many as thirty gay men attending. Adamson was amazed at the number of gay men Stutzman knew. As far as he could see, the parties were relatively harmless, a little bit of marijuana and a bunch of gay men looking for friendship and fun.

  It was a conversation Adamson had with Jim Frost that made him think twice about seeing much more of Eli Stutzman.

  “Be careful about Eli Stutzman,” Frost warned, “Though I couldn’t prove it, I think Stutzman murdered his wife in that barn fire at his place.”

  With his dark hair and dark eyes, Timothy Brown might have considered a career as a model instead of a cop. At the time, he lived with his parents in Stark County and needed to establish thirty days’ residency in Wayne County before he could join the sheriff’s department as a deputy. A mutual friend—half of a gay couple who had been frequent visitors to Stutzman’s farm—put him in touch with Stutzman, who was renting out rooms at his farm.

  Brown moved in the first week of July 1981. Matt Schwartz, another Amish boy, had moved in also. Daisy Mast liked Brown, who, Stutzman had told her, was a friend from church.

  Brown had been raised in rural Brewster, so he understood Meidnung. He also knew that sometimes the Amish break the rules. It happened at the Stutzman farm. At night, Stutzman would sometimes go out to the barn to talk with someone in a buggy who had come to visit.

  While he lived on Moser Road, Brown learned that several businessmen from Kidron had loaned Stutzman money—it had something to do with the horses that kept coming and going at the farm.

  Brown found Stutzman to be a good father, disciplining Danny with care and consistency.

  More than once, Stutzman professed concern that the Amish would try to take Danny from him. He never said why he felt that way.

  Danny, whose terrible stutter was exacerbated when he was excited, seemed afraid to sleep alone. He slept almost every night in his father’s bed—not the bedroom upstairs next to Brown’s.

  Having Tim Brown’s patrol car on the premises proved too tempting for an Amish boy like Matt Schwartz. One time neighbors watched as Schwartz drove the car, flashers on, through one of Stutzman’s fields. Stutzman and Brown were up in Cleveland at the time.

  In March 1982, Stutzman left Brown a cryptic note—in effect, an eviction notice.

  Brown didn’t understand why Stutzman couldn’t just tell him to leave the farm. It was a strange way to treat a friend. Brown had even loaned Stutzman a few hundred dollars with no questions asked. Stutzman referred to the cash as “advance rent payments.”

  The next thing Brown knew, Stutzman said that he and Danny were going to Colorado on vacation. Neither Brown nor Matt Schwartz knew what Stutzman had in mind. Later, it wouldn’t faze them when they learned the truth.

  Stutzman had struck a deal with LaVon Kratzer and sold his farm for $200,000—four times what he had paid Daniel Swartzentruber only five years before. The Amish wept at the news—they had lost more precious land to the Englischers.

  Once they had taken possession, the Kratzers found something very strange. Why on earth, they wondered, had Eli Stutzman kept a stove and a couch inside the milk house?

  PART TWO

  Murder Out West

  “Most people are alarmed and ask questions about a murder involving a friend. Eli Stutzman didn’t ask one question.”

  —Travis County Sheriff’s Detective Jerry Wiggins

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  May 1985

  The first time he noticed the rancid smell, the sun hung low over the area known for the lump of earth called Pilot Knob, south of the commotion of metro Austin, Texas, and the noise of Bergstrom Air Force Base, in southwest Travis County. Raymond Kieke, his face as crinkly as buckskin left out in the rain and hung to dry again, scrunched his nose at the first whiff of the too familiar stench. White lines etched the corners of his eyes. The compact, trim man wore glasses, and kept a spare or two stuffed in his pockets so that they were there when he needed them.

  Something was dead.

  Pilot Knob rises 711 feet above crusty rangeland and fields of maize swirling over a craggy, arid landscape. The Knob is the remnant of a volcano that a millennium ago spewed forth in fury and then faded into extinction. It is the only visual break in an otherwise monotonous land. Farm kids head for the Knob as soon as they are old enough to ride. It’s a destination in a place where there is little else outside of barns, irrigation ditches, and endless acres of cropland.

  Austin is only twenty minutes away via the major north-south route of Highway 183, and Pilot Knob locals consider it a suitable place for the city folks—all noise and traffic. South Travis County is, after all, the country, a place where cowboy boots are second nature, not de rigueur. The area had been desert before irrigation, and the locals see beauty in the land. Two towns in the vicinity of Colton-Bluff Springs Road are Scenic Loop and Pleasant Valley.

  Austinites would say neither place fits its name.

  It was the evening of May 9 that Raymond Kieke first smelled the dead thing. The air was thick and hot, and the windows on his dusty pickup were rolled down: Kieke had assumed the position that leaves many farmers with a darker tan on their left forearm—he had propped his elbow on the window frame. The odor was strong, like that of a road kill that hadn’t passed through the stage of stench to reach that of a dried, leathery mass. Kieke figured that a calf had wandered off or that maybe a coyote hadn’t eaten all of its kill. It doesn’t take too long in the Texas sun for fresh meat to become a stomach-turning, revolting mass that would gag a buzzard. He’d look into it later.

  On the morning of Mother’s Day, May 12, 1985, Kieke was checking on the cattle he grazed on the property he rented, just south of Colton-Bluff Springs Road. In part, he was there to check out the smell—it had reached the point where he could no longer avoid the inconvenience of investigation. He pulled to the side of the road and parked his truck. It was time to find the dead calf.

  Kieke walked to a culvert on the south side of the road. The odor grew intense. New weeds edged the thicket of dead, winter brambles. He peered over the edge of the retaining wall built to halt erosion and looked into the ditch. The odor was overpowering and hideous. A body, black with death, was slumped with legs rigid and arms flailing. The body seemed to melt into the damp earth. Bright yellow sunflowers broke the somber pall enveloping the culvert.

  Kieke had seen
enough—more than enough, actually. He got back into his pickup and drove home. There, he called the Travis County Sheriff’s Office. The dispatcher recorded the time of the call: 8:09 A.M. Kieke gave directions so that an officer could meet him on Colton-Bluff Springs Road, just off FM 1625—known to many as the road to the little town of Creedmoor, the farm road breaks off Highway 183 like a dried-up, brittle twig, jutting to the southeast across the rangeland. Returning to the culvert, Kieke waited downwind.

  The dispatcher alerted Richard “Frito” Navarro, a deputy on patrol in the area. Dark-eyed Navarro, his black hair combed back over his head like a helmet, had seen his share of dead bodies. In fact, the remote area around Pilot Knob had been a popular site for the disposal of victims.

  As one veteran cop later said, “If I had a body to dump I think it would be the first place I would go. There’s no one out there, and it’s still fairly close to town. Kind of convenient, I’d say.”

  Navarro followed Kieke’s pickup truck to a point just beyond the culvert. The deputy didn’t need Kieke to point out the site of the body. The stench was like a smelly rope pulling him toward the corpse. He immediately confirmed what Kieke had told him, and radioed for Homicide and the medical examiner—a body in a ditch, hidden behind the cover of weeds and grasses, didn’t usually indicate death by natural causes. He secured the crime scene for the detectives and medical examiner—keeping his distance from the corpse.

  If Navarro had looked up from the ditch, across the field, he would have seen the barn and pasture of Harry Reininger’s farm. In the pasture was a beautiful stallion.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A monument marks the only spot in the country where the borders of four states converge: Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Cottonwoods grow along ditches, sucking water from the bleak, juniper-studded landscape. Tumbleweeds are suspended forever, impaled on barbed-wire fences cordoning off rangeland. The jagged forms of the snow-covered La Plata range jut up from the desert.

  The Four Corners’ towns of Durango and Cortez, Colorado, and of Farmington and Aztec, New Mexico, show traces of the Hispanic, Indian, and Old West influences that mark the region: pueblo, mesa, and wagon wheel pop up in cafe names and design motifs. Breathtaking mountain and desert scenery draw in tourists from all points, to ride the Durango-Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, to wander the Anasazi ruins, or just to kick back and relax in Old West shops and restaurants. In winter, world-class skiing tops the itinerary.

  As far as the gay scene of the early 1980s was concerned, locals confined themselves to the Diamond Belle Saloon, the bar in the red and white Gay Nineties Strater Hotel, and the Animas Riverside Lounge at the Durango Holiday Inn. Out-of-towners looking for gay sex also took in the Main Mall and the Narrow Gauge Train Station, both of which were listed in Bob Damron’s Address Book, a pocket guide listing gay “cruisy” places.

  When Stutzman connected with Colorado rancher Terry Palmer, the former Amishman made it clear that he wanted to get away from Ohio—more critically, away from the Swartzentruber Order.

  The West was Stutzman’s escape route, and, in the end, a death sentence for Danny.

  Several years older than the Amishman from Ohio, Palmer was a trim man with smooth skin and fine features who had never before advertised in The Advocate. Yet, in the spring of 1982, following the suicide of his lover and adopted “son,” he placed an ad answered by Eli Stutzman.

  Stutzman’s reply displayed a naïveté about the gay lifestyle that appealed to Palmer, who had a job requiring discretion, hence the ruse “the adopted son.” Stutzman seemed a perfect candidate. In fact, the Amishman claimed he had never seen The Advocate until a Mennonite friend showed him the edition featuring Palmer’s ad.

  Stutzman wrote that he had been shunned by the Amish, and that it was causing his son some problems. He was looking for a new life, something wholesome for his little boy. He enclosed photographs of Danny.

  Palmer, who was of Swiss stock and had been brought up on horror stories of the “weird” Amish, was moved by Stutzman’s predicament. Palmer’s grandmother had painted a sinister picture of the Amish.

  “You have no idea how many Amish children never grow up,” she had said.

  “I was raised to believe that the Amish were strange, more or less that they worship the devil,” he recalled. “I knew they had been thrown out of the Catholic Church in Europe. I wanted to help Eli get out of that situation.”

  Palmer flew to Cleveland and spent the Memorial Day weekend of 1982 at the Dalton farm. Stutzman played the shunned Amishman to the hilt, and Palmer bought it.

  Stutzman said that when he was a young man he had been raped by an old Amishman in a feed mill.

  “That’s what made me gay,” he said.

  In June, Eli and Danny flew to Durango to look over Palmer’s ranch. Stutzman said the place wasn’t large enough for what he had in mind, and left without making a deal.

  In the summer he returned to Colorado, and, after a week with a real estate agent, Stutzman and Palmer put money down on a large ranch with a four-bedroom house, near Durango.

  Palmer sold his small ranch, and Stutzman put up the down payment of $65,000. Palmer, who had fewer resources, agreed to make the monthly payments until their equity balanced. Palmer’s chief asset outside of some farm equipment was a stallion valued at $15,000.

  Though Stutzman had sold most of what he had in Ohio, he packed a buggy and the Amish furniture Amos Ginger-ich had built. Stutzman announced that he planned on introducing surrey racing to Colorado.

  With Eli and Danny Stutzman gone from Ohio, Dalton neighbors worried about the boy.

  “What would his life be like in Colorado?” Wilma Moser asked her husband. The Mosers could only assume the worst—the rumors about Stutzman’s activities were no longer whispered. They were public knowledge.

  On her way to work at Gerber’s Feed Mill, Wilma Moser prayed that God would save Danny from the nightmare she felt certain he must be enduring.

  On the surface, Danny Stutzman’s life might have seemed idyllic given the magnificence of the Colorado ranch setting. Anyone seeing the 5-year-old likely would have believed him to be an average, happy child. He dressed in blue jeans, wore Dukes of Hazzard T-shirts, and had a ready smile.

  But it was a facade. The truth was that Danny represented little more than a cover for his father’s homosexuality. That had also been true in Ohio, but in Colorado, away from the Amish and the neighbors who had passed judgment on him, Stutzman felt free to ignore his son and cut loose. Terry Palmer provided the parenting role that Stutzman shirked.

  Each morning, Palmer drove Danny to the county road to catch the bus for the fourteen-mile ride to the Ignacio Elementary School, where the boy had been assigned to kindergarten teacher Janet Green. Though drawn to the little boy, Green could barely understand him when he spoke, so severe was Danny’s stutter.

  His father was ready with an excuse. “Danny didn’t speak much English until about a year or so ago,” he offered as an explanation, when he enrolled the boy in November.

  Danny, his hair now clipped so close to his head that he looked as if a Marine had shorn him, was assigned to a speech pathologist for twice-weekly therapy. Stutzman told the school that stuttering had been a family problem. “All seven of my brothers stuttered,” he said. “All but my oldest brother talk fine now.”

  Almost immediately Danny began to relate more to Palmer than to his own father. The boy started directing his school activities to Palmer, who tried to avoid them, sensing that he was in the middle of a dangerous situation.

  “Tell your dad. I don’t want to hear it,” Palmer would say, whenever Danny approached him with news from school.

  While Danny was settling into a normal routine at school, things were happening at home suggesting renewed trouble with Stutzman’s mental health. Of course, Palmer didn’t know anything about Stutzman’s previous breakdowns, other than what he volunteered.

  In Ohio, Stutzman had been w
arm and communicative; in Colorado, he was often silent and moody. Palmer, who had expected both a partnership and a life with Stutzman, felt that the Amishman was slipping away. Once, when he asked Stutzman if he, Palmer, had done something wrong, the younger man snapped at him, “No. It’s not you.”

  Another time, Stutzman became enraged after Palmer opened a box of Pennsylvania Dutch stickers he had purchased on the trip to Wayne County. “Throw them away! I don’t ever want to see them around here again!” Stutzman screamed.

  When Palmer spoke about his dead “son,” Stutzman yelled at him to be quiet. “I don’t ever want to hear about him again,” he said.

  “It was almost a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde kind of switch in personality. It was like he had a split personality,” Palmer later said.

  Strangely, there were times when Stutzman seemed like the caring man Palmer had met through The Advocate. Stutzman asked Palmer if he would be Danny’s guardian should something happen to Stutzman. He had a lawyer draft up a document specifying the wish.

  Palmer was flattered, but Stutzman’s erratic behavior made him guarded.

  “What about your relatives back east?” he asked.

  “I don’t want my boy with the Amish. Anyway, none of them would travel out west to get him.”

  If Palmer’s relationship with Stutzman was faltering, the little boy continued to grow closer. Danny shadowed Palmer on the ranch. Since Stutzman had said he wanted Palmer to be close with the little boy, Palmer asked if he could take Danny to church.

  “No! I’ve had enough of that in my life,” Stutzman said.

  Eli Stutzman had changed from the man Palmer had met in Ohio.

  For a gay man who had initially professed disinterest in the gay lifestyle, Palmer noticed that Stutzman kept a sizeable collection of gay porno magazines and videotapes.