by Gregg Olsen
To everyone, they were the kindly foster family from Wyoming. Nobody thought to ask how it was they had come to know Eli Stutzman.
December 21, 1987
Sitting in his smoke-choked office at the state patrol office in Lincoln, Investigator Wyant played it nice and easy when he got Kenny Hankins on the phone at his Four Corners trailer home.
Hankins told Wyant that he had first met Stutzman in 1981, when Stutzman lived on his ranch. Wyant wanted to know how close Hankins and Stutzman were, and a nervous and intimidated Hankins sweated the answer. He didn’t want anyone to know his personal life.
“I can’t say we were too close. We were on and off friends,” he said.
Wyant asked Hankins if he had any recollections of Danny Stutzman. Hankins indicated that he had seen the boy “seven or eight” times and that the boy had always been healthy and seemed happy.
“When was the last time you saw Danny?”
Hankins searched his memory. “The last time would have been 1985, when Eli was working up at Chuck Freeman’s place in Aztec. Eli and Danny lived up at the ranch in Cedar Hill.”
He also described the visit—in his report, Wyant noted April 1986—during which Stutzman had told him that Danny had died in a car accident in Wyoming.
“One thing that made me feel uncomfortable about it was that he didn’t seem to show any emotion when he was telling me about his boy dying like that. Didn’t seem right,” Hankins said.
Hankins further advised the Nebraska investigator that Stutzman had told him a man in Texas had been killed with his gun. Furthermore, he said that his attorney had told him to “get out of the state or he would be arrested for murder.”
The last line of Wyant’s report was chilling: “Hankins also made a statement that Eli told him that because of the resentment to the Amish faith Eli told him that he would rather see Danny dead than for Danny to go back to Eli’s folks.”
Wyant wondered if that could be the motive.
Hankins said he thought Stutzman had been at the Nebraska funeral for Little Boy Blue.
“We videotaped it, and Eli Stutzman wasn’t there,” Wyant responded.
“But you were looking for a man. You should have been looking for a woman.”
Hankins knew Stutzman sometimes went in drag. Not often, but he had seen him in a dress a couple of times.
“I think he was keeping an eye on Danny being found. I really felt that’s why he went back, that he was back for the funeral,” Hankins later said.
Durango police detective Bill Perreira contacted Thayer County sheriff’s deputy Bill McPherson with a little tidbit about a couple of murders he was working on—the victims were men named David Tyler and Dennis Slaeter.
A doctor from the Four Corners area had seen a television news broadcast of Stutzman’s capture and indicated that Stutzman was a man who had worked on his house.
“We’re wondering if you can put Stutzman in our area about the time of the murders—November and December 1985?”
McPherson said he could, and made arrangements with the state patrol’s criminal investigation division to have Stutzman’s prints sent down to Colorado.
While McPherson was fielding calls and digging into the Stutzman story in the sheriff’s absence, a photo opportunity took place at the Chester cemetery. Funeral director Lon Adam’s wife, Dixie, posed in front of Matthew’s marker, now etched with Daniel E. Stutzman’s name and date of birth.
Cameras clicked and rolled as Mrs. Adams choked with emotion.
At the same time, old lovers listed in Stutzman’s address book were being milked for funds with the persistence of a telemarketing firm.
“Please help us defend Eli in Nebraska. Send whatever you can,” the man who identified himself as Stutzman’s lawyer told Al Jorgensen.
Jorgensen wrote out a check for $50. The Eli Stutzman that he knew would never have harmed his boy. Then again, there was that letter Stutzman had sent on the day he picked up his boy; Jorgensen kept it in a file box with the others. It was a letter that the police would never see.
“I must admit,” Jorgensen later said, “I was disturbed by the letter’s contents.”
Christmas cookies again piled up, and hot mulled cider still steamed back by the sink, but Christmas Eve in the Thayer County Sheriff’s Office was decidedly different in 1987 than it had been two years before when Danny Stutzman’s body was found in Chester.
As Stutzman had been two years ago, Gary Young was in Ohio celebrating Christmas. This year found Eli Stutzman in the Thayer County Jail.
Stutzman, the father of Little Boy Blue, sat in his cell eating a tray of goodies the Reverend Bill Anderson had brought in. Stutzman, who had found God again—or at least wanted those around him to think so—requested a copy of the Book of Psalms.
“Amen!” was inscribed on the jail sign-in sheet by the faithful who brought the book to him.
Christmas Eve gave Young a few minutes to sit back and think. Everything had happened so fast.
I wish I could just stop the world for a few minutes, he thought. Give me a minute to catch up!
More stories about Stutzman and the murder in Texas got the attention of the Amish and Englischers who had known Eli Stutzman.
“Eli Stutzman was making drug runs to the Mexican border.”
“Danny was sexually abused.”
“Eli’s construction business was only a front.”
Later, when Wayne County sheriff’s deputy Tim Brown’s work on the Stutzman case came under fire from people like Diane Swartzentruber, who assumed he and Stutzman had been more than friends, the deputy was already in too deep.
“He lived with Stutzman, for God’s sake, and he says he’s not gay? Right!”
Brown had even been on television. People magazine had interviewed him. He was a cop, he had to talk with them. The sheriff’s department hadn’t instructed him not to. Besides, he was running around—just ahead of the press—interviewing those who knew Stutzman—people he said wouldn’t talk to anyone but him.
He gave all of his information to Captain Jim Gasser, who funneled reports to Nebraska and Texas investigators.
“My job comes first. If it were a minor thing . . . but murder, no way. I wasn’t going to do anything to cover for him. I don’t want any shadows on me,” Brown later said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
December 28, 1987
When state patrol investigator Jack Wyant flew into Lyman, Wyoming, he had reservations at a mom-and-pop motel, and the idea that Dean and Margie Barlow were holding the key to the mystery of Little Boy Blue.
Over the phone, the Barlows had seemed reluctant, even asking if they should have an attorney present. They were frightened. Maybe it was the result of their conversations with a relentless Gary Young, who had made them feel as though he thought they had something to hide. Young did, of course, but he didn’t mean to come across as brusque. He had a job to do.
For Dean Barlow, 39, a slender six-footer, the events unfolding must have been his worst nightmare. His sexual secret would be told, exposed, put up on the front page of the local paper. His wife, Margie, a small, reddish-blond woman seven years older than her husband, couldn’t have liked the situation any better. Yet throughout the interview she displayed a cooler and more articulate manner than her husband. Margie taught creative writing at Western Wyoming Community College in Rock Springs.
It was mid-afternoon when Wyant arrived at their neat house on Lincoln Street. The Barlows were guardedly friendly. As they had told Amos Gingerich when he and the other Amish had come to Wyoming, they wanted answers, too.
Before the interview began they made it clear they didn’t think Danny had been murdered by his father.
Wyant set up his tape recorder and sized up the subjects. Dean Barlow seemed agitated. There was good reason for that, and Wyant knew it. He asked Barlow how Stutzman had come into his life.
Barlow hesitated.
“I met Eli in Durango, Colorado. That’s the on
ly thing that’s kind of private and I don’t want to discuss,” Barlow said rather dramatically, as though he had practiced the words.
Wyant planned to corner the man later, away from his wife, which he did when Margie left the room.
“I don’t care if you like to suck . . . I have a murder to solve . . .”
Barlow admitted he and Stutzman had sex, but it had been only “one time.”
He didn’t volunteer, however, that he and Stutzman had met through a magazine.
Barlow said the next time he saw the Stutzmans was when they came up from Texas for Christmas 1983. After that, they lost contact. Accordingly, he was surprised to hear from Stutzman when in late June or early July 1985 he called to see if the Barlows could take Danny. He was having trouble with the police regarding the murder of an employee.
Barlow reasoned that Stutzman had called the Barlows because he knew they had been foster parents in Hawaii and Colorado. Barlow also said he had been a “Big Brother” in Hawaii for eight years.
Wyant let the fidgety schoolteacher ramble before asking for details about Texas.
“Danny had gone through a pretty brutal session with an investigator,” Barlow said, “and Danny had been upset about it.” Barlow explained that Stutzman had wanted to “get Danny out of Austin as quickly as possible. There was some question about a rifle. Later he told us it was not his gun that killed his employee.”
“Did he say who had been killed?”
“A guy from Wyoming. He had paid him two weeks earlier to go back to Wyoming to be with his family.” Stutzman had never indicated to Barlow that Glen Pritchett had been his roommate.
Barlow picked up steam. “This sounds real crazy. I questioned him at the time. He said his lawyer in Texas told him to leave Austin and take Danny to Colorado.”
When Barlow had picked Danny and Eli up at the Greyhound station in Salt Lake City, the boy and his father were carrying only a couple of small bags between them.
Stutzman had signed over two checks totaling $1,950 for Danny’s care and clothing. He told the Barlows that he knew who the killer was and was going to look for him in Denver and Ohio.
“He said a private investigator in Denver was looking for this guy,” Barlow said.
Wyant asked why the Barlows had let such a bizarre story pass as truth. Why hadn’t they questioned Stutzman more thoroughly?
“It was an awkward topic—we didn’t want to be rude and ask him too much,” Dean Barlow said.
Stutzman said he had signed over his checking account to his Austin attorney.
“At the time it seemed real bizarre,” Barlow conceded.
I’m sure it did, Wyant thought.
Barlow said Stutzman left on July 5 or 6.
“He seemed real anxious to leave,” he said.
Wyant asked if Stutzman’s story had seemed genuine.
“We never questioned his honesty until all of this. We never thought he was lying. My impression was that he was the Quaker Oats guy on the Quaker Oats box—strong Amish, kind, sensitive,” Dean Barlow said.
Wyant later wondered if Barlow had been in love with Stutzman. The way the Wyoming man protected and talked about Stutzman, it was like a man talking about the woman he loved.
Yet Margie Barlow’s statements mirrored her husband’s.
“I think he’s naive and he doesn’t understand the ways of the world,” she said softly, sitting next to her husband as he defended Stutzman.
Maybe she didn’t know about the two of them, but, of course, she had to.
Dean Barlow told Wyant that he had gone with Stutzman when he purchased eastbound bus tickets, but that he hadn’t paid any attention to the man’s destination.
And Danny Stutzman, for one, hadn’t known how long his father was going to be gone.
“Just a few weeks,” Stutzman had told the boy before he left on the Greyhound. He told the Barlows that enrolling Danny in school wouldn’t be necessary—he’d take care of his problems and be back for Danny.
Wyant coolly flipped the tape over.
Occasionally Stutzman called to have Barlow wire money through the Western Union office at the Evanston, Wyoming, bus station. Stutzman had arranged it so that he would pick the funds up by giving his mother’s maiden name: Susan Miller. The mother whose illness had been an excuse wherever Stutzman went had come in handy again.
A mouse scurried across the floor, provoking a tension-releasing laugh. Dean Barlow laughed the hardest.
Wyant, who didn’t know about the parties in Colorado and was still trying to see if a case could be made for felony child abuse, asked what kind of a father Stutzman had been.
It was Margie Barlow who took the lead.
“Kids would ask him why his father left him, why he was here, but he would never answer,” she said. “ ‘My dad’s the best,’ he’d say.”
“Danny missed his father,” Barlow added. “At the end of every phone conversation Danny would cry. ‘How long before you come and get me?’ ”
Maybe it had never occurred to the Barlows just why Danny Stutzman had cried after every call. What was it that Eli Stutzman had said to his boy? Was he threatening the boy?
Sam Miller said Danny knew about the murder in Texas—he was sitting in the truck when Stutzman confessed to it, and the boy showed no reaction—yet the Barlows maintained Danny never mentioned it.
Not a single word, they said.
Margie and Dean Barlow said they had liked Danny. “Danny was a cuddlebug. He would jump in our laps.” Indeed, he was so much of a “cuddlebug” that one of the Barlow children became jealous of the attention Danny got from his parents.
Wyant turned his attention to the events leading to the boy’s death.
“Eli told us and Danny that he’d be picking Danny up to take him to Ohio for Christmas.”
Barlow said Stutzman had called December 13 to tell them he was on his way to get Danny. That was the same day he had mailed the letter to Jorgensen telling him Danny probably wouldn’t be with him.
The Barlows had been surprised, they said, because Stutzman had changed his plans and would be taking the boy out of school before his third-grade class party.
But, as usual, Stutzman had a convincing reason.
“He said his mother had problems with her lungs,” Dean Barlow said.
“He felt that his mother would die,” Margie added.
Because Danny always got so excited, the Barlows said they waited until the last minute to tell him that his dad was planning to get him.
Stutzman showed up after dark, driving the Gremlin, the same day.
The Texas murder was on Dean Barlow’s mind, and he asked about it.
“He said that it was cleared up. The guy had been arrested and convicted. It was the fastest murder trial I’d ever heard of,” Barlow said.
Stutzman said he expected to be in Ohio in two days.
It was another lie, of course. Stutzman had planned to stay with Yost and Jorgensen before showing up in Ohio.
Wyant, unfortunately, didn’t know any of that. Jorgensen and Yost were unknown to the investigator and would remain so, though both men had read about the Little Boy Blue story in the paper when Stutzman was arrested. Neither man came forward.
“He was going to leave Danny with his folks for Christmas,” Barlow said.
That, of course, didn’t fit with what Stutzman had told others. He hated the Amish. He would never allow Danny to stay with his parents.
“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.
