Abandoned Prayers

by Gregg Olsen

  A corpse in a darkened room with no running water was a gruesome nightmare for the mortician. Gravity drained the blood, and old-fashioned pumps were used to force preservatives into the body. The Swartzentrubers did not want their dead taken to a worldly funeral parlor. They were the only group that still asked for home embalming.

  Stutzman, his parents, and in-laws were waiting for Spidell at the hospital. Their black attire accentuated the somber nature of the meeting. Even though the men had been in the room for some time, they still wore their hats. Spidell gathered information about the survivors for the newspaper.

  Amos Gingerich wanted the embalming—“embamming,” the Amish called it—done at home, but Stutzman spoke up. “Given the circumstances, you would probably like to do the embamming at the funeral home, wouldn’t you?” he asked.

  Spidell was surprised but grateful. He assumed that Stutzman set aside the tradition because the fire had damaged too much of the Stutzman home as well as the barn.

  No makeup was applied to Ida Stutzman’s face at the funeral home. Even the gash in her mouth was not concealed. Spidell dressed her in some clothes her relatives had furnished.

  YOUNG AMISH MOTHER DIES

  IN DALTON AREA BARN FIRE

  The Tuesday edition of the Wooster Daily Record carried a front-page article and photograph of the fire. The article gave Stutzman’s story of what had happened, including the lightning strike and his periodic checks to see if a fire had resulted. Ida Stutzman had gone into the milk house and was trying to recover milk cans when she was overcome.

  The Amish assumed that if it was in the newspaper, it was true.

  Dr. Elton Lehman was one of the first to be troubled over the reports of Ida Stutzman’s tragic death. Lehman knew the Stutzmans as well as any non-Amish. The story was a bit unusual in that barn fires occurred frequently in the county, yet he couldn’t remember anyone else having died in one. But it was not the unprecedented nature of the woman’s death that would bother him in the end.

  Dr. Lehman, who doubled his duty to the rural community as assistant coroner, made a call to Questel to discuss business, including the barn fire. During the conversation, the coroner said he had named heart attack as the cause of the 26-year-old woman’s death. The statement brought a sharp response.

  “Heart attack?” Dr. Lehman was incredulous.

  “That’s what killed her. It wasn’t the smoke or fire,” Questel said, not knowing that the woman’s heart had been as strong as his own.

  Dr. Lehman asked how the coroner had come up with that ruling.

  “The husband told us,” Questel answered. “Ida Stutzman had a weak heart. Always had. She collapsed in the milk house because of her heart condition.”

  Lehman was stunned. The case had been closed. Notes from the coroner and Polaroids of Ida’s dead face had been locked up in the coroner’s file cabinet. Everything neatly put away.

  Eli told them Ida had a bad heart. It was Eli’s word, Lehman thought. But he knew that Ida Stutzman hadn’t had a weak heart. He had been her doctor since she was 16.

  Why did Stutzman tell that story? he wondered. It didn’t feel right, but he gave the Amishman the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps someone had gotten his story wrong.

  Dr. Lehman, like Questel and the others, was unaware of Stutzman’s history of deceit and violence.

  Of course Sheriff Jim Frost was all too familiar with it, and after the barn fire he even talked about it. At a social gathering at his home, Frost told a friend he was skeptical about Stutzman’s story of the fire. He said he felt Ida had been murdered.

  “He [Frost] told me that he thought Stutzman had beaten his wife—possibly with a rock—and planned to put her in the fire to destroy the evidence. He was frustrated he couldn’t find enough to pin it on him. There wasn’t enough to go on,” the Wayne County man said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was as if Chuck Kleveland had unwittingly tossed a stone into a very still pond the morning he found the dead boy. Rings of fear moved from Chester to Hebron to Deshler and crossed over state boundaries into Kansas and Missouri. Before the end of Christmas week, the paranoia was felt deeply and bitterly far from the ditch where the body had been dumped.

  With nothing tangible to go on—no identity and no cause of death—from day one the investigation boomeranged from lead to disappointing lead, alternately giving Sheriff Young and Investigator Wyant hope and then mercilessly yanking it away.

  Although the autopsy at Lincoln General failed to determine the cause of death, Young and Wyant considered the case a homicide. So what if Dr. Porterfield had been unable to come up with the cause of the death? County Attorney Dan Werner was unsatisfied and ordered another opinion. A pathologist from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, was called in.

  The state patrol commissioned an artist from Washington County, Kansas, to sketch a composite of what the boy might have looked like before the rodents disfigured his face. The artist struggled with the nose—there was no telling if it had been long or short, broad or turned up. The two front teeth also posed a challenge. Was the child bucktoothed, or did his upper lip cover his front teeth? Several versions were tried and finally one was selected to represent what some locals now called the Christmas Child.

  Flyers headlined WANTED: your help in identifying this child, were printed and circulated across Nebraska, then beyond. The results of such efforts were astonishing, if only for the sheer number of responses. In the first week of the investigation, more than 150 leads flooded Young’s office.

  However, one by one, the leads evaporated into nothing. The crazy lady at Ortman’s was checked out and eliminated as the dead child’s mother.

  In the days after Christmas, Young’s quiet little office on Third and Olive Streets had turned into a tornado of turmoil. Missing-children’s agencies from coast to coast had been contacted and immediately inundated Thayer County authorities with possible names of the victim.

  Young and his deputies were moved by the often sketchy stories that came with each child’s name. So many kids were missing, and so many had been lost forever. Last seen: two years ago, four years, seven years.

  Photographs also arrived by the fistful. Young reviewed dozens of snapshots of little boys who resembled the freckle-faced, gap-toothed victim. He also received many bearing no similarities—black, Mexican, and even some missing little girls.

  Deputy Bill McPherson contacted Chuck Kleveland at Foote’s Truckstop to determine who had been on duty that day. The two men who had worked the shift in question had no recollection of anyone getting off the bus. It was another dead end.

  A woman called the sheriff after seeing the sketch in the local media. She thought the child looked like a boy she knew up in Havre, Montana. The woman told Young that there were several children in the family and that they’d had a great deal of contact with social services. Some of the children were learning-disabled.

  “No kid wears a sleeper when they are this boy’s age. Must be retarded or something.”

  It seemed farfetched, but Young followed up on the Montana lead. After a few phone calls, he learned that all of the children in the family were fine. It was another zero.

  A grandmother from Van Nuys, California, got wind of the story and made a frantic call to the sheriff. She thought the little boy looked like her missing grandson, although she hadn’t seen the boy in four years. Young took down the information, and after a series of phone calls he tracked down the child, now a sixth-grader.

  Other leads offered cruel and false hope.

  A photo and a report of a child believed to be the Chester boy was received by the sheriff. The boy’s father was an escapee from a prison in West Virginia and rumor had it that he had returned to southeast Nebraska. The family had disappeared from their home in Humboldt, Nebraska, more than one hundred miles east of Hebron. The photograph showed a gap-toothed boy of the right age and coloring. He even had freckles. Young brightened. This one was bizarre, but it might be the one.

/>   The state patrol was summoned to assist. A sneak attack seemed like the best plan. If the father had killed the boy, he’d surely run if he caught wind of the law’s pursuit. Yet, word leaked through town that an escaped criminal had killed the boy.

  Four patrol cars streaked down the highway to where they had learned the boy’s family was living in Washington County, Kansas.

  A knock on the front door of the tiny frame house and the great hope was gone in a second. Hearts sank when the escapee produced the boy in the photograph.

  “Is this you?” an investigator asked the child, holding out a color portrait.

  “Yeah,” the kid answered. “I still have that shirt. I’ll go upstairs and get it!” As he ran upstairs, he was eliminated from the potential victim list. The escapee was arrested and returned to West Virginia.

  On December 31, the weekly Hebron Journal Register published its first article on the Chester boy. The headline of the lead article read:

  FOUL PLAY STILL SUSPECTED IN DEATH OF

  YOUTH FOUND BY COUNTY ROAD NEAR CHESTER

  LAST WEEK

  Humbolt, Nebr., Boy Found Alive in Kansas

  Phone lines at the sheriff’s office jammed so frequently that an additional line was brought in so the county attorney could reach Gary Young. In addition, when the volume of information required it—which was nearly daily during the first couple of weeks following Kleveland’s discovery—meetings of the sheriff’s department and state patrol investigators were held in the basement.

  At the end of one bitter January day; Gary Young set up a conference call with Dan Werner, Investigator Wyant, and Dr. Blevins, the medical examiner from Scottsbluff.

  Blevins told Young that he believed the boy had died from rapid freezing. Due to analysis of the material provided by Dr. Porterfield and the staff at Lincoln General, Blevins did not consider hypothermia or gradual freezing to have been involved.

  Blevins told them that in some northern states, bodies are found after people have wandered off into frozen woods, by rescuers following a trail of clothing. As the victim’s body temperature drops, they feel euphoric, then hot as though they are burning up. Clothing is shed in the snow.

  The boy could have frozen to death, but it would have been rapidly.

  Blevins said the dilated anus was another sign of the rapid freezing of the child’s body. He called the marks on the boy’s neck and forehead “freezer burns.” It was possible, he said, that the boy was alive but unconscious when placed in the ditch.

  Young shook his head. None of this made any sense. There were no signs of violence on the boy’s body. Judging by the condition of his body—clean and well nourished—he had to have been cared for and loved. How had he died? If the boy had been alive, then why was he put outside in the cold?

  The implication of that question chilled him deeper than the blast of cold he’d felt in that field in Chester a couple of weeks before: the boy had been alive when he was set outside.

  Something Blevins said about hypothermia played repeatedly in Wyant’s mind: “It’s an easy way to die.”

  The robin’s-egg-blue sleeper was another long shot and this time the FBI stepped in to help. The brand was Toddlecare, manufactured by Regal. The sleeper was so new it still had the plastic thread used to secure the tags on the collar. An FBI investigator tried to link the sleeper’s garment production unit number to the location of shipment. With that information, the scope of the investigation could be narrowed considerably.

  On the morning of January 10, an FBI agent called Sheriff Young with a classic good news/bad news message. The good news was that the sleeper had been manufactured for K-Mart and that the particular garment production unit number had been shipped to one of two K-Mart distribution centers in July 1985. It had probably been on the sales floor in August.

  “The bad news?” Young asked, not really wishing to hear any.

  “The bad news,” the agent went on, “is that one of the distribution centers services stores east of the Mississippi and the other serves the ones to the west. This one came from the western center. There’s nothing more we can do to track the garment any further.”

  The phone call left the sheriff with the feeling that the only way they were going to find out the boy’s identity was if someone came forward and told them his name. He wondered why no one had.

  January 17, 1986

  The sheriff’s dispatcher took the call late in the afternoon. The caller had information regarding the unidentified boy. Jack Wyant got on the line.

  The caller, a nervous man who refused to identify himself, stated that he wanted to come down to the sheriff’s office in person. He knew plenty about the little boy abandoned in Chester. “I was there when it happened,” he said.

  Wyant pressed for details, but the man declined. He said he would be at the sheriff’s office in five minutes, then he hung up.

  After fifteen minutes of clock-watching, Wyant had Deputy McPherson call the phone company to trace the strange call.

  It was tracked to a York, Nebraska, residence. After further investigation, the police learned that they were dealing with what Sheriff Young liked to call an 8-ball.

  More leads were followed up. A 43-year-old Columbus, Nebraska, man came forward—somewhere in the back of his mind drifted the memory of something strange involving a man chasing a little boy near the Belvidere Corner off U.S. 81 north of Hebron. The date he had encountered the man and child was Sunday, December 22.

  In an effort to see if there was anything to his vague recollection, Wyant suggested hypnosis. The man agreed.

  Under hypnosis, the man recalled driving north on 81 while his wife and children slept. On the east shoulder he noticed a man and a young boy. As he got closer, he could see that the man had grabbed the boy and that they seemed to be involved in some serious talk.

  The man was in his twenties; the boy appeared to be about 12 years of age. As he drove past the man and boy, the witness saw an older, full-sized car—a Chevrolet, he thought. Seated behind the wheel was another man, a little older and clean-shaven. The look on the driver’s face was odd, an expression he couldn’t quite peg. The witness wondered what was going on. He recalled watching the younger man and the boy run across the road to the west shoulder.

  He couldn’t recall any details of the license plates or the exact make and model of the car. The investigators excused him and indicated that they would bring the witness a vehicle-identification encyclopedia in the hope that the right photo would jog his memory.

  A Greyhound bus driver from Omaha told the sheriff that he had picked up a boy on December 20, 1985, at Bosselman’s Truckstop in Grand Island, northwest of Hebron. The bus driver said the boy had been running when he made contact with him. The driver took him to town, where he purchased a ticket.

  Young listened with interest as the details became more clear and precise. The bus driver said the boy was wearing a gray T-shirt with PANTHER WRESTLING emblazoned on the front.

  “I even kidded the boy about not being big enough to be a wrestler!” the driver said with a laugh.

  Further, the boy had a sack of clothes with him and was last seen when the driver dropped him off around 8:00 P.M. at the Lincoln terminal.

  By now Gary Young had learned the hardest lesson of law enforcement. It isn’t that no one comes forward to help the police. Often it’s simply the wrong kind of people who do. Some are crazy and some are just overly helpful. And as helpful as the news media were in getting the word out, the information they disseminated seemed to fuel the fantasies of the crazies.

  The bus driver could have been either of those, and, Young also conceded, he could also be right.

  But the lead was checked out. It went nowhere.

  Each morning after stopping at Ortman’s for breakfast, the sheriff went to his office, poured himself a cup of coffee, and tried to catch the killer. For a time, it seemed that Thayer County’s sheriff and his deputies had become the nucleus of a clearinghouse for missin
g children.

  Days passed into weeks. Like a magician’s perpetual string of kerchiefs, leads kept coming from and going to nowhere. A boy from Savannah, Georgia, was eliminated from the list of possible victims, as were ones from Orlando, Phoenix, Canada, and Mexico.

  Some suggested that the boy had been abducted from his bed at his home. Both Young and Wyant discounted that theory. No one had reported this child missing. None of the missing-children’s agencies or the FBI had any reports of abductions that fit the boy’s case. The case of the frozen child, who some now called Little Boy Blue because of the blanket-sleeper, had to be handled in a manner opposite that of most missing-children cases. They had a body, but no name. Usually a case starts with the name and investigators scour the country for the missing.

  Wyant and Young kept each other informed as necessary, but their contact tapered off as the case grew older.

  The call from the crime lab in Lincoln couldn’t have come at a better time. The last day of January 1986 found the Nebraska investigation fizzling and in desperate need of a boost. With the results of the lab report, Wyant and Young hoped they could pinpoint both the dead boy’s identity and that of his killer.

  The lab technician’s microscope had discovered a large number of thin, half-circle-shaped blue paint fragments as well as red, white, and blue cotton fibers with the fingernail scrapings submitted by Dr. Porterfield.

  Examinations of the blue sleeper turned up more of the paint fragments as well as some nylon and polyester fibers.

  Only one soil grain was recovered from the sleeper’s rubber feet. Abrasions were barely evident—even under extreme magnification. This confirmed that Wyant was right: The child had not walked to the site where his body had been found; he had been carried.

  Further scrutiny of the sleeper showed that faint, brownish stains on the left foot and the inside front neck of the garment were urine. No urine, however, was detected in the crotch area. This meant that likely the child had been alive when he was dressed in the sleeper. Young surmised that when urinating the boy had dribbled a little on his toe, and when pulling up the sleeper a few drops had stained the neck area.