Abandoned Prayers

by Gregg Olsen

  Stutzman said he and Danny had settled into a wonderful new life. They had both taken up skiing and were attending the Brethren Church in Durango.

  Even better for the man who had suffered such tragedy when Ida had died, Stutzman said he now had a girlfriend. He even showed the Bylers a photograph of an attractive woman with long, dark-blond hair. When they left Colorado after a week with their old friend, the Bylers felt that Stutzman had finally found happiness and peace.

  Of course, everything he’d said had been a lie.

  In September, Palmer began to receive strange phone calls. Two or three times per week for several months, Palmer was awakened at 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. by the ringing of his telephone. When he picked up the receiver, he would hear the noise of someone hanging up—or worse, heavy breathing and gay sexual slurs. It didn’t take him too long to figure out who the caller probably was—the biggest mistake of his life: Eli Stutzman.

  While Palmer fretted about the horse, Stutzman continued to do as he pleased. On October 8, 1983, he threw a party with Michael Harris playing DJ. The small group of gay men and lesbian women danced and partied until 2:00 A.M.

  As the party cooled down, Stutzman took Harris into his bedroom and showed him some photographs of men he had met through The Advocate, and some shots of horses he said he owned.

  “Eli was real proud of his place,” Harris said later. “He told me that he wanted to make it into a gay dude ranch—if he could get the right backing.”

  Halloween in Durango is the town’s Big Party. People fly in from Albuquerque and drive in from Salt Lake City to dress up and join in the unruly celebration—Colorado’s answer to Mardi Gras. Though Stutzman told everyone he loathed the Amish, he wore his plain clothes as his costume. It was the ultimate put-down when he dropped his broadfall pants for sex with men.

  Whatever happened between Wyoming teacher Dean Barlow and Eli Stutzman when they met in 1983 was something the Lyman, Wyoming, man deemed “kind of private” and refused to discuss with law enforcement officers when they knocked on his door years later. Married to a schoolteacher also from Lyman, Barlow, an excitable and nervous man, was given to odd and inappropriate bursts of laughter. Stutzman presented a smooth and controlled image, which he apparently found appealing.

  Chuck Freeman also attended the party.

  “One man showed up as a ‘jolly green giant,’ holding a can of corn and wearing only tennis shoes. Two ranchers wore only spurs and chaps, no shorts. Men paired off and went to the barn for sex. I think everyone in the country but the police department knew about the party,” Freeman later said.

  Barlow later told police investigators that he came down to the Four Corners to see his ill grandfather and a teacher friend. Yet somehow Dean Barlow ended up at a Four Corners gay party with Stutzman.

  At the time, Stutzman told Barlow he was in the process of finding a buyer for the ranch. Barlow toyed with the idea of purchasing the place, though the $150,000 price was steep and his wife didn’t seem interested. After the party, the two men went out to the mall to look at a costume contest. Stutzman, who said he could feel the beginnings of a cold coming on, gargled with whiskey in the parking lot.

  “He didn’t even drink it,” Barlow later said, as if talking about some great character trait indicating abstinence from alcohol.

  Barlow spent the night and the following day with Stutzman and Danny at the ranch, taking photographs of father and son. Stutzman presented his sweet, naive side, and Dean Barlow fell for it.

  “Eli is a real religious person. I think he prays—it’s a part of his daily practice,” the Wyoming teacher later said.

  Barlow encouraged Stutzman to look for work in Wyoming. “Our area is in a real boom,” he explained.

  In November Stutzman disappeared from the Four Corners, leaving without notice. Michael Harris, who had seen him in mid-October at a party, was amazed and sorry at the same time.

  “David Tyler liked Eli so much that I wished I had gotten to know Eli better. None of us knew Eli was leaving. I thought he was trying to start the dude ranch.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  November 8, 1983

  Gertie Paton wore her gray hair swept up off her face in the kind of minibouffant that required more hairspray than trouble. For more than forty years she had made her home in a tidy stucco house on the outskirts of downtown Austin, Texas. In the years since her husband’s death, she had lived alone with her cat Missy.

  Though she wore the kind of cat’s-eye-shaped lenses favored by her generation, she missed nothing. And while her vision was not 20/20, she had no difficulty seeing the good in people. She put her “live and let live” philosophy into practice when she found out the “nice boys” across the street were more than just roommates.

  Ray Watson and Tom Agnello were gay lovers, and though the Bible told her homosexuality was wrong, Paton set judgment aside. After all, they had been so kind, helping her with her yard work.

  She was sorry to see them leave when they moved to San Antonio in 1981. The old neighbors kept in touch, and in 1983 Paton learned that Watson had had what Agnello called a heart attack, and died.

  It was during the summer of that same year that Paton first heard of Eli and Danny Stutzman. Agnello brought over a batch of letters from Danny—including several school pictures. The boy had written to Agnello about his school in Colorado and signed them, “Love, Danny.” Agnello was charmed by the boy’s affectionate letters. He told Paton that he had found Stutzman through an advertisement and that, having corresponded, he planned to go to Colorado to get the Stutzmans. The three of them were going to live as a family.

  Two weeks later, on the evening of November 8, a giant U-Haul truck pulled up in front of Gertie Paton’s house, and Agnello knocked on the door. He asked if he and the Stutzmans could stay the night. The motel wouldn’t take their U-Haul. Paton invited them in.

  The following morning the two men started looking for a place to live, and Paton watched Danny. Even though looking for a house, Stutzman found time to rake twenty sacks of leaves in Paton’s yard.

  “I want to show my appreciation for what you’ve done for me and my son,” he told her.

  On Friday, Paton, who was expecting her son and grandson for the weekend, told Stutzman and Agnello that they absolutely had to get a place of their own that day. By noon they had found a place by the railroad tracks, at 3408 Banton Road. The stucco house had two bedrooms and a den. The yard was ratty, and the grimy interior could have used a scraping with a putty knife.

  Oddly enough, although they finally had a place to live, trouble seemed to develop between the two gay men.

  On the afternoon of November 14, Stutzman and Paton took Danny up to Maplewood Elementary for registration.

  When they returned, Agnello blasted the old woman.

  “You shouldn’t have taken him! That’s my job!”

  That night, around suppertime, Agnello returned to Paton’s and asked the old woman if she would mind watching Danny for the evening.

  “Eli and I haven’t had the chance to be alone yet,” he explained.

  Paton, who was tired, balked.

  Agnello became angry again. “You’re breaking up me and Eli!”

  “No. I haven’t got anything to do with that,” Paton shot back, more in self-defense than anything else.

  “Gertie, I’m never going to set foot in this house again,” Agnello said as he left.

  But the next morning, around eight, Agnello returned; he asked for Eli, who hadn’t been home that night.

  Paton didn’t know what was going on. Later she learned that Stutzman and Agnello had had a big fight, and that during the night Stutzman and Danny had crawled through a window and walked to the Stop ’n Go convenience store on Thirty-eighth Street to wait for daylight.

  The lovers who had met through the mail were finished before they had started.

  The same thing had happened to Terry Palmer.

  Stutzman’s Ohio friends Eli and Gail Byle
r were stunned by the news about Eli’s girlfriend, whom Stutzman said had followed him to Austin, where they had planned to marry.

  “She took ill with cancer and died,” Stutzman said.

  Later the Bylers and Liz and Leroy Chupp discussed the tragedy.

  “First his wife dies in a terrible fire and now his girlfriend. Eli seemed to have the most rotten luck in the world,” Liz Chupp later said.

  There was at least one bright spot in Stutzman’s life. He told them he had been hired for a position teaching horsemanship at a college in Austin.

  “Here he was with just an eighth-grade education, and teaching college. Can you beat that?” an amazed Eli Byler told a friend.

  Full, leafy trees have a way of making even the most bleak of buildings look better than they really are, framing them with green. Oak trees line the street fronting Maplewood Elementary School, a big sandstone-colored brick school built in 1951 when the neighborhood was newer and safer.

  As a decaying neighborhood, it draws those who can’t afford to live anywhere else. A lot of the Anglos who live there are former counterculture types. Students from the University of Texas find cheap rentals with plenty of bedrooms suitable for lots of roommates. Poor blacks and illegal aliens also have found a home in the Northeast Austin area next to the airport.

  Despite its diversity, the neighborhood is close-knit and tolerant. Gays have established an enclave in the area, and there is little violence directed toward them by straights.

  The school itself is in the center of it all, abutted by railroad tracks and a creek bed that is a trickle most of the year. A hole in the fence running along the back of the school provides an invitation to transients.

  At Maplewood, Danny was assigned to Janis Bradley, who quickly assessed the situation at the boy’s home.

  “Danny talked about all the men that lived there,” she later said. “ ‘My dad’s boyfriends’ was the phrase he always used. I didn’t judge it . . . this was the situation we’ve got to work with.”

  When Danny came to school one morning extremely tired, he told Bradley that his father had had a party, and that he hadn’t gotten much sleep.

  Terry Palmer, who had learned Stutzman had moved to Texas, sent a Christmas card to Danny. A week later it came back with “Refused. Return to Sender” scrawled on the envelope. The handwriting, Palmer said, was Stutzman’s.

  A few weeks before Christmas, Eli and Danny brought Gertie Paton a Christmas present—a piece of glass with a rose etched on it, and Paton hung it in her kitchen. Stutzman told her that he and his son were going on a trip.

  “We’re going to Wyoming. Friends sent us tickets, so we’re going up to ski.”

  Stutzman and Danny flew into Salt Lake City during a snowstorm on Christmas Eve with little more than a couple of bags and some Christmas gifts for each other and their hosts, Dean and Margie Barlow.

  One can only wonder what Margie Barlow made of all of this—particularly sending tickets to a man her husband supposedly met just once at a Halloween party.

  The Barlows met Eli and Danny at the airport and snapped photos, for which Stutzman seemed grateful. He claimed to be worried that his grandfather was about to pass away, and said that he wanted to send photographs to him right away.

  If Barlow had thought for a minute, it might have occurred to him that an old Swartzentruber Amishman like Stutzman’s grandfather would be offended by photographs.

  The Barlows drove east on Interstate 80, headed for their home in Lyman, in Uinta County.

  The area might have reminded Danny Stutzman of the Four Corners ranch—rugged mountains and rocky enclaves. A few dormant oil wells dotted the landscape.

  For Christmas, Stutzman gave his son a pair of roller skates.

  Later, Barlow drove Stutzman out to the family ranch in Kemmerer, a town northwest of Lyman, in Lincoln County. While driving he asked Stutzman about the barn fire, and Stutzman explained that the Amish don’t put lightning rods on rooftops—it tampers with God’s will.

  “What was it like to deal with your wife’s death?” Barlow asked.

  Stutzman, silent at first, grew angry.

  “It was terrible,” he said, refusing to elaborate.

  When it came time to leave, Dean Barlow must have been hooked. He must have wanted the relationship more than Stutzman did. When Barlow phoned Stutzman later in 1984 and left a message on his answering machine, it got no response.

  Around Valentine’s Day 1984, Gertie Paton was invited to the Stutzmans’ for dinner. Stutzman said he wanted to thank her for all she had done for him. Paton noticed the trophies and ribbons won by the stallion, and the Amish clothing Stutzman kept for Danny.

  Stutzman increased his involvement in the local gay community, even serving as an officer for the Texas Gay Rodeo Association’s Austin chapter. He spent evenings picking up tricks at the Round-up, which was at the time a gay western bar.

  In the spring of 1984, Stutzman shocked local gays when he ran a classified ad in the Austin American-Statesman, saying that he was a country boy new to the city and looking for companionship. Stutzman told 34-year-old landscaper Clint Skinner that he had received more than two hundred responses to the ad. Stutzman invited Skinner to dinner and they had sex. Stutzman gave Skinner the impression that he was sexually naive and a homebody.

  “He was a little too much country for my taste . . . he was raising chickens in the city!” Skinner recalled. “On the other hand, if I had known he was a ‘bottom’ things might have been different.”

  Skinner introduced Stutzman to a friend of his, Jim Donovan, an international banker and urbane opposite of most of the men Stutzman associated with. He liked Stutzman, who claimed he was looking for a permanent lover.

  “I got the idea that Eli’s opinion was, ‘There’s no shortage of finding someone to suck your cock, but a relationship, that’s something else,” Donovan remembered.

  There were other ways to meet gay men, and Eli Stutzman tried them.

  Compucopia was the gay world’s answer to computer dating. Men input sexual vitals, likes, and dislikes and let the computer match them up with the perfect date.

  San Francisco transplant Willie Paynter was member number 240. He was a six-foot-plus, blue-eyed man with a sexual appetite for uncircumcised—“uncut”—men. When he first landed in San Francisco he took a job as the office manager for a charitable foundation. Later he found his true calling as an electrician when a gay man taught him the trade.

  Paynter had his first sexual encounters as a teen with men at bus stations in South Carolina, where he grew up as the scion of a fairly well-to-do family.

  “My first time with a man,” he later said, “was when I changed buses in Charlottesville and met a man in the restroom who took me to a near-deserted office building next door. I licked him off in a locked bathroom stall. I still remember his come on my wrist.”

  Paynter had met men through The Advocate, RFD—a rural gay men’s magazine—and finally, through Compucopia. Like many gay men, Paynter saved every letter he received and copies of the photographs of the men who wanted to date him. He kept them all in a file box, and when the need arose—to fight a depression, or just to have the rush of a happy memory—he could review them.

  On his application, he detailed what he was and what he wanted. Paynter was the active partner in anal sex, and he wanted to be on the receiving end of “rimming,” the gay term for one man stimulating another anally with his tongue. The 36-year-old did not want a partner who was into sex toys, S&M, or “fisting”—shoving a fist inside a partner’s rectum.

  Tall and lean, Paynter was a straight-looking, educated man who loved the symphony, gourmet cooking, reading, and, more than anything, sex with men. His preference was a lumberjack type or a farmer, but years on the make had left him a little more realistic about what he’d turn up.

  He wrote in his “personal statement” for Compucopia: “I am looking mostly for casual sex—I’m a good fucker—but would also like to f
ind an uncut outdoorsman to move with to my family farm in the south someday. Also looking for a hiking/camping buddy.”

  Paynter paid his ten-dollar membership fee and sat back and waited for the perfect match.

  On March 18, Eli Stutzman, also a member of the dating service, responded with a bare-chested photograph and a letter in which he described the size of his penis and explicitly noted his preferences for anal and oral sex.

  Stutzman added that he was the father of a 7-year-old named Danny. A rubber-stamped image of a unicorn decorated the envelope and its Austin, Texas, return address.

  On March 23, Paynter struggled with three different versions of his response to Stutzman’s letter: he knew a good man when he saw one. He thanked Stutzman for the “very handsome picture,” and noted that his own penis was seven inches, cut, and that his balls were on the small side—“particularly in Texas’ cold weather.” He reaffirmed his enjoyment of casual sex.

  They talked on the phone, and Stutzman filled him in on Danny. Though Paynter wasn’t particularly interested in meeting a man with children, he listened carefully. He wanted to know all he could in case he was to become the little boy’s “stepfather.”

  On April 2, Stutzman wrote again, this time enclosing several more pictures of himself. One shot showed him clad in a bikini bottom and slung over Terry Palmer’s horse. Stutzman wrote that it was late and that he’d had a hard day, signing off with, “Danny’s in bed asleep and I should be, too.”

  Paynter caught a United Airlines flight to Austin on April 13. Stutzman had told him that he’d be working and that Paynter should walk to Banton Road—just a few blocks from the airport—and wait for Stutzman and Danny to return at the end of the day. Chickens in the backyard fueled fantasies that Stutzman might be the one to take back to South Carolina with him.

  “I could envision that he would be a real good person to settle down with,” he later said.

  Danny, Paynter, and Stutzman had dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and the two men topped the evening off with sex. For Paynter it was as good as good got.