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

by Gregg Olsen

  “He’s kind of gotten away from the language . . .” he had written in the letter to Jorgensen that he mailed the day before he and Danny left Wyoming for Ohio.

  Wyant focused on the boy’s health. The Barlows had suggested numerous times to Gary Young that the boy had been ill.

  Margie Barlow explained that Danny had complained of a sore throat and been diagnosed with hemopholis, a viral infection similar to strep, and had been given a prescription for Ceclor on December 11 for twenty-one pills, to be given over seven days.

  When Stutzman got the boy, Margie Barlow had told him about the virus and its treatment. “I wrote instructions for the medicine, and made it clear that Danny needed another throat swab,” she told Wyant.

  Wyant probed. “His general health . . . would you describe him as getting better?”

  “Yes,” Margie answered quickly.

  Wyant thought it was worth checking out. But he didn’t think Danny had died of a virus.

  Father and son slept at the Barlows’, and left before 8:00 A.M. on December 14. Before leaving, Stutzman gave Dean and Margie an Amish quilt as a thank-you for all they had done.

  Later, around January, Dean Barlow said he and Stutzman spoke again. Barlow asked about Danny and about an Amish china hutch Stutzman had said he would have made for them. Stutzman said he had enrolled Danny in a Mennonite school in Benton, Ohio, and was working at Troyer’s Cabinet Shop. Margie Barlow also got on the line and asked if Stutzman had had Danny’s school records forwarded from Wyoming. Stutzman said the Mennonites didn’t require any records.

  “How did Danny like his gifts—the soccer ball and the Garfield?”

  “Danny enjoyed them. Loved them.” Stutzman had said.

  Wyant asked if the Barlows had heard from Stutzman after January.

  They said they had, in April 1986.

  Margie had wanted to know if the Mennonite school was doing anything for Danny’s speech.

  Stutzman indicated that progress was being made and that the boy was improving.

  Like the first time, when the Barlows asked to speak with Danny, Stutzman claimed he was at church or at the neighbors’ playing.

  “Why hasn’t Danny written?”

  “I’ll remind him,” Stutzman promised.

  At the end of June 1986, the Barlows said Stutzman called to say that he and Danny were going to take a vacation trip to California, and that Stutzman would bring the hutch with him then.

  “Have you heard from my in-laws?” Stutzman asked.

  “No, why?” Barlow said.

  “I just wanted to know.”

  Barlow asked for Stutzman’s phone number, and the former Amishman gave the first three digits before stopping and saying he was very difficult to reach.

  After hanging up, Barlow called his wife, who was out of town visiting relatives at the time. “I just got a really strange call from Eli,” he said.

  The Barlows indicated that they had spoken with Stutzman a couple of times since his confinement in the Thayer County Jail, but that they were reluctant to give any information about those calls. Wyant pursued it, and finally Dean Barlow agreed.

  “There’s no information that I have that could hurt Eli,” he said.

  Eli Stutzman had cried on the phone, telling them the story of Danny dropping dead in the middle of the night—the second day after he left Lyman.

  Stutzman mentioned the blue sleeper.

  “Eli told us the sleeper was a Christmas present for Danny,” Barlow explained.

  Barlow had called Stutzman’s attorney and told him about Danny’s illness, but the attorney didn’t seem interested.

  “He said he knew ‘the boy wasn’t sick enough to die.’ ”

  The attorney said that people in Texas had the Gremlin and that it was the car’s faulty exhaust system that had killed Danny. The boy had died of asphyxiation related to carbon monoxide poisoning.

  Barlow said the Nebraska attorney was getting his information through a man named Robinson, in Texas.

  More than two hours had passed when Wyant got up to leave. The picture of Stutzman as a pathological liar and manipulator had become even more clear. Wyant felt that the Barlows had been honest, but had held something back.

  “We don’t think there is any way on the face of this earth that Eli killed Danny. No way,” Dean Barlow said.

  “We’re after the truth,” Wyant said. “I’m sure that if and when it goes to court you’ll be in court as a witness.”

  “I hope not.” Barlow said, with an annoying burst of nervous laughter.

  Wyant leaned forward. “If you have nothing to hide there is no reason to be nervous.”

  He got the approval necessary for obtaining Barlow’s bank records and Danny’s medical records. The next day he picked up copies of Danny’s December 11 prescription from the drugstore in Lyman and paid a visit to Dr. Jane Wuchinich’s office at the Bridger Valley Health Services. “Dr. Jane,” as they called her, was on vacation, but an associate provided records indicating that Danny’s throat had been swabbed for culture on December 10.

  The medical records backed up what Dean and Margie Barlow had told him.

  Wyant went on to Kemmerer and picked up microfilmed copies of the checks Stutzman had signed over to the Barlows. A trip to the bus station to find out where the money for “Susan Miller” had gone proved futile.

  Wyant flew out of Salt Lake City thinking he didn’t have anything to make a case against Stutzman.

  “By then I was getting to know Eli real good,” Wyant said later.

  With the Danny Stutzman/Little Boy Blue mess out in the open and the rumors around Wayne County burning like a tire fire, Diane Swartzentruber took to her telephone again. This time she called Gary Cutler in Austin.

  She and Chris had visited with Amos Slabaugh again, and the story of the Texas murder, mixed in with some wild innuendo, was being discussed at feed mills, barn raisings—anyplace the Amish gathered.

  Diane told Cutler that Sam H. Miller, a young man from the Freeport/Newcomerstown area, had been in Austin around the time of Pritchett’s murder. He had since gone into the navy.

  “He found bloody clothes in a closet, hidden under some things. He got frightened and left.”

  She told Cutler she was going to go see the Amish again to see what else she could learn.

  “I was a go-between for the Amish who didn’t want to get involved. If they didn’t speak up, he was going to get away with it and kill more and more people,” she said later.

  The homicide investigator appreciated the lead, though it was not a particularly good one. After all, Diane Swartzentruber had said other rumors circulating included one about a woman, a girlfriend of Stutzman’s, who had died thirty days before he was captured in Azle. Additionally, word had it that two other men—“bosses of Stutzman’s”—had died mysteriously, too.

  Gary Cutler needed to trace Diane Swartzentruber’s information to its source—which meant Sam Miller. When Miller had been interviewed in Texas he had made no mention of the “bloody clothes.” What his questioners didn’t know was that Stutzman had made his comments about killing Pritchett after he gave his statement to the sheriff. The comments were made, in fact, in Stutzman’s truck on his way home from the sheriff’s office.

  Though new information was finding its way to Travis County, in some ways investigators had even less than they did in June 1985. The rifle Stutzman gave to Jerry Wiggins ended up on a destruction order signed by Judge Jon Wisser.

  “Ballistics didn’t match, but you try telling that to a jury. ‘We accidentally chopped up the potential murder weapon.’ Right. That sounds real bad,” Wiggins later said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Travis County homicide detective Jerry Wiggins had to sit back down when a TV reporter called him and announced that Stutzman had signed over book, movie, and television rights to disbarred attorney Frank Hefner. It was unbelievable.

  But it was true. The next day Hefner was spouting off
on TV and in the paper. When asked who had hired him and HIC, the lawyer-turned-con-turned-investigator-turned-movie-magnate indicated it had been Rob Robinson.

  Not Rob Robinson again. Wiggins thought. Eli Stutzman sure knows how to pick ’em.

  Movie rights would pay Stutzman’s legal bills.

  “He doesn’t have a lot of resources,” Hefner explained to a Dallas Morning News reporter. “We thought it would be of economic value to help pay for his defense. It’s like looking around and all you see on your dresser is the watch your grandfather gave you, and you see what you can get for it.”

  Hefner proclaimed Stutzman innocent and indicated that HIC had retained Omaha attorney William Gallup. Court-appointed Lyle Koenig was out.

  The agreement between Stutzman, HIC, and Robinson raised a few eyebrows at the Texas State Bar in Austin, and in Thayer County, Nebraska.

  “If there is such an agreement—and I haven’t seen one—I have grave questions as to whether it’s ethical or not. My concerns aren’t directed so much to Mr. Stutzman as to the attorney in this matter,” Dan Werner told reporters hanging around the county courthouse.

  Gallup told reporters he had asked that the felony charges against Stutzman be reduced to the misdemeanor “abandoning a human body.” Stutzman would plead guilty to the charge, he said.

  Dan Werner didn’t say a word about that.

  Sheriff Young shook his head when he heard that the defense attorney might contest that Danny had died of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a leaky exhaust system.

  He knew that the Lincoln and St. Louis autopsies had indicated carbon monoxide levels no greater than what might be absorbed during normal car travel.

  Stutzman smothered his son, he thought.

  Wyant still believed that Danny had been alive when he was put outside to freeze. He focused on Stutzman’s statement to Ted Garber conceding that Danny might have been alive when left in the ditch in Chester.

  Either scenario was possible, and as the Nebraskans came to know Stutzman, either was likely.

  The leaky exhaust was typical Stutzman—a convenient excuse.

  “We have the car. We have pictures. We can prove it,” Frank Hefner later claimed.

  December 30, 1987

  With Stutzman awaiting his hearing, Ted Garber decided to dig a little deeper. The news media had stirred up a thick, wretched pot. Phone calls from the media after Stutzman’s arrest had been continuous, and, Garber thought, a little annoying. Garber liked media attention, but a call from an out-of-state reporter at the ungodly hour of 2:00 A.M.?

  Garber called Elvy Kenyon in for an interview. A tape recorder whirred as the two began speaking about Stutzman. It was 3:03 P.M.

  At 48, Kenyon looked older than his age, the inevitable result of sunshine and his share of beer. He said he and Stutzman, both carpenters, were drinking buddies who had met two years before. They had worked on two or three jobs together in Dallas.

  “I wrecked my car and he give me a ride, and he was working in Dallas and I worked in Dallas a time or two. So I worked over at Dallas with him on a job,” he said.

  He told the police chief that they had met when Stutzman had just returned from a trip to Colorado, driving the Gremlin.

  “What did you do?” Kenyon recalled asking, just making small talk with a person he said had just happened along.

  “He said, ‘My boy was in a car wreck.’ The boy’s name was Danny. And it bumped his head and—he had a word for it—blood clot.”

  Garber pressed for details: “Did he tell you where this wreck was, where this wreck occurred?”

  “I think he said Colorado. Now I’m not for sure on that. But he said his godfather and his little boy were in the wreck, too. I didn’t have no reason to doubt him. And the boy died. That was the whole deal on his family then.”

  The boy’s body, Stutzman told Kenyon, had been sent to New Mexico for burial.

  Garber wondered why Kenyon believed such a story. Why would a man send a body all the way to New Mexico for burial? It wasn’t the boy’s home; his family wasn’t there. Garber thought it was a stupid lie—the kind that could easily be disproved with a telephone call.

  Stutzman had said that his house on Toronto was sold and that he needed a place to stay, and Kenyon had offered his place as long as they split groceries and utilities.

  Stutzman had moved in a week or two before he was arrested.

  When the word got out through the local media that the police in Nebraska were looking for a man named Eli Stutzman who was believed to be in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, Kenyon said Stutzman was quick to place the blame somewhere else.

  “Tell me in as much detail as you can when you saw the article in the paper about him and his son. What happened then?” Garber asked.

  “He went down and got the Sunday paper, and he brought the paper back, and I looked at the paper. He said, ‘That’s a lie. That’s not me. That’s my cousin!’ ”

  “There are lots of Amish named Eli Stutzman,” Stutzman said. “It’s a cousin of mine that they are looking for.”

  Kenyon confronted him. “Eli, tell me the truth. That’s you. I thought you told me your boy died in an accident in Colorado.”

  “I didn’t want to tell you the boy died on the way to Ohio. What they are saying is not the way it was. It didn’t happen that way. It’s not true.”

  Kenyon had no way of knowing if his friend was lying or telling the truth this time.

  But the picture in the paper was his.

  “I said, ‘Well, you better go down to the police and tell them and straighten things out.’ ”

  Stutzman said he would, after he got hold of his lawyer.

  “Eli got on the phone and talked with someone who he said was his lawyer, and then he got off the phone and said that his lawyer told him he would meet him down at the police Monday morning.

  “And the next thing, y’all were here.”

  “Do you remember what attorney that was? Did he ever tell you?”

  “No. I don’t believe he ever said his name. But he told me that he was a real-estate attorney, and he recommended him to somebody else.”

  “As time went along, what happened? Was there any mention about his son?”

  “No. He showed me a picture of him one time. He said, ‘This is Danny.’ That’s the only time he discussed anything about his boy.”

  “There was no more mention of the boy after, other than when he showed you the picture?”

  “That was all.”

  “At what point did he tell you the truth, that he was lying to you?”

  “That was the next time I talked to him. That was on the telephone. He said, ‘Well, I lied to you. I’m sorry I lied to you and got you in trouble.’ ”

  “He called you from the jail?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was the first time that you heard from him straight out that he had been telling you stories?”

  “Yeah. That’s what he told me. ‘I lied to you, it didn’t happen the way I told you, but it didn’t happen the way it was in the paper.’ ”

  Kenyon didn’t know what to believe.

  “Did he ever tell you how it happened?”

  Kenyon said he didn’t ask. “I didn’t say ‘Hey, man, did you do what they said or not?’ ”

  Garber wanted to learn more about the attorneys Stutzman had hired.

  “When did the attorney from Dallas—did he mention the name Robinson?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kenyon was being helpful within his own limits. He did not volunteer anything. Garber had to ask even the most obvious and tedious follow-up. “What did he say?”

  “He said that was his attorney, and he was gonna take care of everything.”

  “Did Eli tell you about signing over any rights to this attorney?”

  “He told me that they had some contracts for him to sign. I don’t know what he called them . . . just contracts.”

  “Did they have anything to do with book ri
ghts or story rights?”

  “Yeah, book rights.”

  “Since all of this has come down, you mentioned to me that an attorney or some representatives from an attorney in Dallas had come out to your house. You want to tell me what the situation was?”

  “That was on his pickup. I bought the pickup from Junior.”

  “And Junior is who?”

  “Eli. I bought the pickup from him. And y’all had impounded it here in Azle, and the attorneys or the guys from Dallas or whoever they are—they was going to pick up the pickup.

  “So I give up the title—he left the title and everything with me—so they could go pick up the truck. And I done paid him four hundred dollars on it, and I was going to pay the rest of it when they bring the title back. They brought the pickup but they didn’t bring the title back.”

  “Did they say anything to you in regards to testimony?”

  “They said I might have to go up as a character witness.”

  “Did he express any remorse to you about the situation with his son?”

  Kenyon said they hadn’t talked about that, and the interview was over at 3:25 P.M.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The Nebraskans were going to plead Eli Stutzman on two misdemeanors—abandoning a body and concealing a death. Two lousy misdemeanors. When he heard the news, Azle police chief Ted Garber winced hard. It was a joke. He knew that Stutzman was a killer.

  Garber considered calling Gary Young. Words ran through his head: This is your business and I don’t want to tell you your business, but you need to pursue this. This is a murder. The man is a killer. He told me the boy might have been alive when he put him in the field.

  As far as Garber could see, they were going to slap a killer on the wrist and send him off for a few months of time.

  “Knowing Eli, he’d probably think prison was some kind of vacation,” he later said.

  January 11, 1988

  Chuck Kleveland did an about-face on the concrete steps of the Thayer County Courthouse on the morning of Stutzman’s hearing. He had come to renew a vehicle license, but was confronted by the commotion of a group of media people. The man who had found Danny Stutzman’s body didn’t want to answer any more questions about how he had felt and what he had done two Christmases ago. He was not, he later said, a hero.