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

by Gregg Olsen

  “Did you kill your son?”

  For the first time, Stutzman showed some emotion. Tears welled in his eyes. It was the first time Garber saw that the man might have actually cared for his child.

  “No, the boy was sick.”

  “Did you use the blanket to smother the boy?”

  “No.”

  Stutzman fought for composure.

  “Look at me!” Garber demanded. “Did you kill your son?”

  Tears pushed at Stutzman’s eyelids. “No. No, the boy was sick.”

  Stutzman said he drove for a long time, and, after he had pulled himself together, he decided to leave Danny, as he put it a moment later, “where God could find him.” Stutzman described how he turned off a highway onto a side road and decided to leave his son.

  Garber wanted details.

  “I drove a ways, pulled over, and got Danny out from the back seat. I took him off to the side near a ditch, laid him down, and covered him with snow. I would have buried him, but I didn’t have anything to dig with. I wanted to leave him where God could find him.”

  This was too much. Garber wanted to reach across the table and smack Stutzman. Better yet, he wanted to ram him into the wall. But the good old days were gone. Instead, he pushed on and asked another question.

  “Was Danny alive when you threw him outside into that ditch?”

  Stutzman tensed. “I didn’t throw him. I laid him there.”

  “Sure, Eli. Was he alive when you laid him there?”

  Stutzman paused. “That’s a very good question. I don’t think so, but he could have been.”

  He said he continued on to Ohio, where he lied to relatives about Danny’s whereabouts. He also admitted he had lied when he later told people the boy had died in a car accident. None of that, of course, would be news to Gary Young.

  “Why did you lie about Danny’s death?” Garber asked.

  Stutzman repeated himself. “That’s a very good question.”

  “After you left Ohio, where did you go?”

  “Back to Texas.”

  “Did you go back to Nebraska to the spot where you left Danny?”

  “Yes,” Stutzman said, his eyes now drying. “I went there to see if Danny was still there. He wasn’t, so I figured someone had found him.”

  Garber was beat from twenty-four hours without sleep, and Stutzman didn’t feel too good himself. He’d had too much coffee and too many cigarettes. Five hours had passed since they’d sat down in the little interrogation room. Garber wrapped up the interview.

  “Sounds like the devil really got a hold of you, Eli.”

  Stutzman agreed. “Could be.”

  “I’ve been doing this for twenty-three years,” Garber later said of the interview, “and Eli Stutzman is the hardest one I’ve talked to. I can usually bullshit you pretty good, and if you’re crazy, I can get crazy to get you to talk. But this guy was tough. Tough like cold.”

  Garber filled Young and Wyant in on the interview and left them with a final thought. “When you get down here to pick him up, don’t you be kissing him,” Garber warned the Nebraskans. “He’s got AIDS!”

  When Wyant heard about Stutzman’s statement that the boy might have been alive when his father left him, he recalled the day at the field. He had noticed that the snow had melted, leaving an indentation, almost a cradle, for Danny’s head.

  The boy was warm when he was laid there, he thought.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Gift to town: A slain boy’s name

  —USA TODAY

  December 15, 1987

  Gary Cutler, pumped up by the spotlight for the big interview with Stutzman and Jerry Wiggins, still angry they had delayed their interview because of a departmental group photo session, drove the long, flat drive to the Tarrant County Jail. It was the first time Travis County investigators and Stutzman had had a face-to-face since he’d hightailed it from Texas in June 1985.

  Plenty had happened since then. Danny Stutzman’s mysterious death had made the Pritchett case important enough to work on again.

  It was a different Eli Stutzman than Wiggins had seen in Austin. Now he was cornered, and he seemed frightened. Right off, he admitted he had lied to Wiggins when he made his statement to the Travis County Sheriff’s Office.

  “I was there when it happened,” he said softly. “It might have been my gun . . .”

  The story he began to tell was the same one he had told Ted Garber the day before.

  “Danny and I were in bed and I heard a gunshot . . .”

  Just as he started to spill it, he was cut off. Without warning, Rob Robinson, a lawyer, unexpectedly and dramatically broke into the room where they were holding the interview.

  “I’m this man’s attorney. The interview is over!”

  Wiggins couldn’t believe it. He flashed back to his days as a cop in Sherman when he had arrested Randall Silk-wood, a man who had broken into a department store and stolen dozens of leather coats. The police had recovered all but a few of them.

  “Silkwood pleaded guilty to several charges and Rob Robinson represented him,” Wiggins once explained. “We were talking to the judge and letting him know that we had recovered most of the coats, but that there were a few missing. The judge looked at Robinson, then at Silkwood. Robinson was wearing a leather coat, and the judge asked him to take it off. The label had been cut out. Rob Robinson remembers the story differently.”

  “Frank sent me,” Robinson said to Wiggins and Cutler, as if a surname were unnecessary.

  “Frank?” Wiggins drew a blank.

  “You remember Frank Hefner?”

  The detective didn’t. But he did know a Steve Hefner. Almost everyone in law enforcement in Grayson County, Texas, did.

  Stephen Frank Hefner had been a Sherman attorney when he’d made headlines in the Mary Ellen Bader case.

  In April 1984, Bader, a 55-year-old Sherman widow with a history of mental problems, retained Hefner and handed over $67,000 for “safekeeping” while her son was seeking through the courts to have his mother declared mentally incompetent, thus gaining control of her estate.

  Shortly after giving the money to Hefner, the widow’s small fortune vanished.

  After considerable publicity, Hefner was convicted of third-degree theft and ordered to pay restitution to Bader.

  Naturally, the Texas Bar followed the conviction with a proceeding of its own. Hefner was disbarred on September 17, 1985, for numerous violations of professional conduct, including taking client funds and charging excessive and unwarranted fees.

  The Sherman Democrat summed up this embarrassing abuse of the legal profession in an editorial the following day: “Hefner is more to be pitied than reviled. His verdict was correctly rendered by a jury that saw him for what he is: a thief.”

  As one close to the Texas Bar put it: “This guy is some kind of bad.”

  Tall and wavy-haired, Robert K. Robinson—who had been one of Hefner’s co-counsels during the Bader affair—didn’t exactly have a sterling record, either. Though he had escaped the kind of attention that had nailed his client and good friend, the combative attorney had problems of his own. In matters unrelated to Hefner’s, the state bar handed him a five-year probated suspension on April 9, 1987. The complaints were excessive fees and refusing to return client funds.

  Hefner disappeared for a while, resurfacing on November 9, 1987, when he and Rusty Porter formed HIC Associates.

  Wiggins figured Stutzman wasn’t too careful about the company he kept. The truth was, he never had been.

  Cutler and Wiggins left the Tarrant County Jail with little more than they had had two years before.

  So, bombarded by the local and national media, Wyant and Young, both in street clothes, pulled a fast one and slipped out of Lincoln on the Lancaster County plane to extradite Stutzman to Thayer County. For the interview, Wyant even set up a video camera, but Stutzman, in chains and handcuffs, kept his mouth shut. He had said too much already and seemed to know it.
“I will not talk to you about the case on the advice of my attorney,” he said in his quiet, clipped speech.

  They were too late.

  “By the time I got to talk to Eli, he’d pretty well shut up. I sat next to him on the plane. I didn’t badger him. But there was always the chance he would change his mind and say something off the cuff. I wanted to be there to get it,” Wyant said.

  Young tried to size up the elusive mystery man.

  “Inside he might have been scared spitless, but he was cool,” he later said. “Eli is smart. He would like us to think he doesn’t know the ways of the English world. But he does. He used being Amish as a ploy to make people think he was naive.”

  On the flight back to Nebraska, Young wished he’d had a camera with him, though he didn’t need a photograph to remember the scene.

  “A tear rolled down Stutzman’s cheek as we flew over Oklahoma City. I wondered if Stutzman’s tears were because he got caught or because he was sorry for what had happened.”

  Young later wondered if the tears hadn’t been solely for his benefit.

  A greeting party of media buzzards was waiting at the sheriff’s office, and the investigators and the prisoner raced to get into the garage ahead of them.

  Stutzman asked if he could see Danny’s grave. Young and Wyant, thinking it might break him down, obliged. His head lowered, Stutzman stood out in the Chester cemetery alone, next to “Matthew’s” marker. If he looked straight past the trees on the edge of the cemetery, it was less than a mile to where he had put the boy.

  “It’s nice what the town did for the boy,” Stutzman said.

  If the scene seemed touching, some knew better. It was Stutzman manipulating the people around him—or at least trying to.

  “Eli’s dumb like a fox,” Young later said.

  After booking, Stutzman settled comfortably—and quietly—into a cell in Thayer County’s jail. He requested Grecian Formula, cherry cough drops, Skoal chewing tobacco, and a prescription for Restoril, a sedative to be taken in the evening time.

  He also asked for copies of the Omaha World.

  Studying up? Young wondered.

  The sheriff gave Stutzman a photograph of Danny when he asked for it.

  That looks good, too. Why didn’t he see fit to have a photo of his son in his wallet?

  He had no trouble finding room for Frank Hefner’s business card.

  The Nebraska investigators were frustrated by the information provided by Garber’s interrogation. Maybe more could have been dragged out of him, maybe even the truth, if he had been shown photographs of Danny’s body.

  “That might have shaken him up some,” Wyant later said.

  “When we went down there looking for him, if we could have found him first, I think I would have had a chance . . . but I didn’t get to talk to him right away. Not taking anything away from Mr. Garber—he’s a fine police officer, but he only had limited info on the case. It’s hard. I might not know something that is important—he might jump all over some detail that I might not even remember. He only knew what we told him,” Wyant said later.

  Young and Stutzman confined their conversations to small talk. Meanwhile, Young and Wyant did their best to find the truck stop Stutzman had told Garber his boy had eaten at hours before his death.

  “It was a needle in a haystack or worse,” Young said. He talked with people at a couple of truck stops near Salina, but the exercise proved futile.

  “Ever try waving a picture around in a restaurant two years after the fact? It doesn’t go very far,” Young later said.

  In Lyman, Wyoming, the Bridger Valley Pioneer published an ambiguous statement of half-truths by Dean and Margie Barlow, though their names were withheld from the December 17 edition.

  We hope people will respect our privacy as we are grieving over Danny, but we will make this statement.

  Danny’s father, who was a casual friend, knew we had had foster children. He had met our family and knew we loved children. July, 1985, he asked if we would take care of Danny for a short period of time as he had run into some difficulties. The father and we went to a lawyer, who drew up guardianship papers, so we could enroll Danny in school and take care of any medical problems if they should arise.

  Danny was a loving, happy little boy who had the ambition to be a soccer player. He did well in school, but missed his father whom he loved very much.

  What we saw of his father was a soft spoken man who was very concerned about the welfare of his son.

  When his father notified us that his problems were resolved, and he would pick up Danny, we had no questions since we had initiated the guardianship. We wrote a note to the school and told them Danny’s last day of school would be December 13 as his father was picking him up. Danny and his father left December 14. What transpired from that date on, we have no idea. We, too, are waiting for answers.

  On the same day, Frank Hefner and his HIC associate Rusty Porter came up from Fort Worth and met with Stutzman for nearly two hours. They identified themselves as “investigators” from Texas.

  “Eli Stutzman is a victim,” Hefner proclaimed.

  December 18, 1987

  Dirty, thawed, and frozen snow covered the ground like burned sugar the morning of Stutzman’s arraignment. Stutzman, dressed in jeans, a down vest, and tennis shoes, looked appropriately sullen as he walked from his cell to the courthouse.

  It was the day before Gary Young and his family planned to leave for Ohio for Christmas vacation.

  Court-appointed attorney Lyle Koenig, whose office was a door down from County Attorney Dan Werner’s, sought the dismissal of Stutzman’s $500,000 cash bond. No one was surprised when Judge J. Patrick McCardle let it stand.

  After all, it had taken two years to get him to Thayer county. Who was going to take a chance on Stutzman disappearing again?

  Werner still didn’t have a felony child-abuse case, and he knew it. He only hoped that Young and Wyant would come up with something. The Christmas and New Year’s holidays bought them some time.

  The preliminary hearing was set for January 11.

  Jean Samuelson’s phones rang like old times after Stutzman was captured. This time, though, it was different. While many of the callers were reporters, some who called were friends of Thayer County’s most celebrated prisoner.

  “Eli has a lot of friends, a lot of people who care,” she said later.

  A man from Oklahoma called to speak on Stutzman’s behalf. He said Stutzman had been planning to move in with him before he was picked up in Azle.

  Samuelson met with Stutzman twice after the arraignment. The man she met was shy and remorseful, a gentle and cowering lamb. She was the shepherd.

  Stutzman told her the reason he’d fled Austin was that one of the investigators had shoved a grisly photograph of Glen Pritchett’s body in his son’s face. “Danny was terrified, because they were showing him pictures and asking him questions about the murder,” he said.

  The answer made sense. If it were a normal thing occurring in the household—like his father’s homosexuality—it wouldn’t have shaken him so. Unaccustomed details of a death would hit the child hard.

  Samuelson didn’t know it had been the homosexual-oriented questions directed to Danny, which Stutzman had mentioned to others like Wanda Sawyer and the Barlows, that had been his impetus to leave Austin.

  At first, he denied that he was gay, but the woman gently pursued the truth.

  “Eli, I’ve got two of your friends that have told me you are. Tell me the truth.”

  He finally did.

  Stutzman told her that he didn’t use drugs, that it had been murder victim Glen Pritchett who was the user and dealer.

  When they discussed the story about Danny’s death on the way to Ohio, she wondered why he hadn’t called the police.

  Stutzman looked blank. “Why would I do that?”

  “Why didn’t you call the hospital?”

  “You don’t call the hospital . . . he was alread
y dead. You call family together. You call people together,” he said. “Why would I call the police? What could they do?”

  He knew he had to face his family, and the thought was unbearable. His father had told him, cursed him, that when he left the Order he and Danny would both die on the outside.

  “It was the price we would pay for leaving the Amish,” he said.

  Samuelson wondered if Danny’s death had been the result of an allergic reaction to medication. She knew some kids were allergic. Stutzman told her he had given pills to Danny at six in the evening, and at midnight he had gone back and shaken his son’s foot over and over, and he’d been dead. His eyes were rolled back and white.

  “When he told me the story, he wept the entire time,” she later recalled. “He had to use Kleenex after Kleenex.”

  “Why is death stalking me?” Stutzman asked between tears.

  He talked about his grandmother dying.

  “She was the only one who loved me,” he said, his eyes now red from tears.

  He told Samuelson about the barn fire.

  “He talked about the fact that the bull could have killed him. . . . He had to get all of the animals out. He carried his wife across the road into the ditch.

  “He’s a haunted man,” Samuelson later said.

  Stutzman and his tears had drained her. He had presented himself as a naive and misunderstood man—a victim of some kind of media witch hunt. Samuelson desperately wanted to believe his story.

  She later described Stutzman. “He’s not somebody who invites you into his life easily. He was wracked with pain over Danny, but he also had a huge pride. Gigantic pride. ‘I will not show who I am to other people.’ Not the hurt part.”

  From his cell, Stutzman wrote the following to Dean and Margie Barlow:

  Dear [Dean], [Margie] and all:

  How are you all? I am sure you heard on the news what took place today in court so I won’t waste any ink. A lady by the name of Rev. Jean Samuels [sic] was here today. She would really like to talk to you all. She did Danny’s funeral services and sure seems to be real nice. So I gave her your address so she’ll probably drop you a line. I understand she now lives in Harvard. I don’t know what else to write so I’ll close for you. Please write if you like. . . .