Abandoned Prayers

by Gregg Olsen

  Stutzman nodded.

  “At the time you spoke to Danny on the telephone, according to Mr. Barker, and had Mr. Barker speak with someone whom you said was Danny, is that correct?”

  Stutzman disagreed. “Not to my knowledge. I remember him talking to Danny while I was there, but it was prior to Danny’s death. But that particular Father’s Day, I don’t know.”

  Werner asked if Stutzman had ever called anyone on the phone and pretended it was Danny he was talking to.

  Stutzman admitted it was possible. “I know it was on my mind a lot, and I was trying to cover the fact at that point that he had died.”

  Werner entered into evidence the letter from Stutzman to his former in-laws as exhibit number four. Stutzman confirmed that he had written it.

  “Now, Mr. Stutzman, on several occasions now at least, you’ve told us that you lied about Danny’s death, telling people what was not true. Did you ever tell anyone the truth about Danny’s death?”

  “Yes. Last month. Yes, since I realized his body has been found.”

  The judge couldn’t hear the answer, so Stutzman repeated his response. He added that it was the court and a reporter to whom he had told the truth. He had also told his attorney and a couple of others from Texas.

  He never told anyone else.

  “Did Danny die in that blue sleeper, then, that he was wearing when you placed him in the ditch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you clean him up any before you placed him in the ditch, do anything to him?”

  “The only thing is him washing up after he ate. That’s all I remember.”

  “Mr. Stutzman, before you took the stand, you took an oath to tell the truth. What does that mean to you?”

  “What I say is the truth.”

  Werner asked for a brief recess, and the court granted him five minutes.

  Next, Werner focused on a letter, exhibit number five. It was the letter to Eli’s parents with a British return address.

  “Did you write your parents a letter indicating that it was from England, in 1987?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve heard different things about that, and I’m not real sure what that is about.”

  Werner showed Stutzman copies of the letter and the envelope and asked him to review them. “Do you recall that now?”

  “I recall writing this to my mother, but there is something wrong with this here, I don’t know what happened.” Stutzman indicated the return address.

  “Well, the letter states that you’re working with horses. In November of 1987, were you working with horses?”

  “Yes.”

  “The wording on the envelope, is that your wording? Is that your writing?”

  Stutzman nodded. “Yes. It is to my parents, but this is not.” He indicated the return address. He said that he had some friends who lived at that address, but that it had been several months since he had corresponded with them.

  Wyant and Young knew that Interpol had reported there was no such address.

  Werner offered the letter as an exhibit, and Gallup objected, stating that the defendant could not identify the letter’s return address. The court received the exhibit anyway.

  Bill Gallup had some brief additional questions. He touched on his client’s training as an orderly in a hospital.

  “Did you see dead people as you worked as an orderly in a hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are of the opinion, when you saw your son and placed him in that field, that he was dead, is that correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “To the best of your knowledge, as a person with some medical training, is that true?”

  “Right.”

  Werner had no further questions, though he did request that the court accept into evidence exhibit number six, which included reports by Jack Wyant and Ted Garber.

  The judge instructed Werner to present his argument for sentencing.

  “Well, Your Honor, I cannot conceive of abandoning a body or concealing a death in a situation . . . more severe than this one. And I believe that the court is aware of the situation through the reports, through the testimony, through the pleas.

  “And I would ask that the court announce a sentence in accordance with the facts of this case.”

  Gallup backpedaled.

  “Your Honor, I think that the tone of this whole proceeding was probably set the other night, when my wife told me she got a couple of phone calls from what appeared to be elderly people, saying that her husband better not get the child killer off.

  “And I mention that because there has been a misconception that Mr. Stutzman has been accused of killing his son, and the State has never made that contention, although the general perception about that has been that he killed his son.”

  Gallup said that since the ground was frozen, the defendant couldn’t have dug a grave. What he did was not unnatural for someone with only an eighth-grade education. Considering that Stutzman had lost his son, was only 36 years old, and had never had a brush with the law beyond a few traffic tickets, Gallup asked for leniency.

  He stressed that the appropriate sentence for the two misdemeanors was thirty days in jail, meaning that Stutzman should be released in a couple of days—given that he’d been held in Thayer County Jail for twenty-eight days already.

  Werner was permitted the last word.

  “This is a case where we, as far as the State is concerned, and sentencing, everything is true that Mr. Stutzman has said, but we do not know why Danny died, how Danny died, or where, precisely, Danny died. And we do not know whether Danny was alive or dead when he was placed there.”

  The judge stated for the record, in case of appeal, the court’s impression of the defendant.

  “He was, in the court’s opinion, very matter-of-fact, controlled. He did not shift in his chair under cross-examination. Oftentimes he covered his mouth on the part of his responses, and there was, the court noted, almost a complete lack of emotion.”

  Judge McCardle sentenced Stutzman to one year for the charge of abandoning of a human body, and six months for that of concealing a death, the counts to run concurrently.

  As Stutzman was led back to jail, it seemed to be over. But it wasn’t, not for Thayer County and not for Eli Stutzman.

  Wyant and Young left the courtroom feeling frustrated and angry.

  “I knew he was lying,” Wyant said.

  AFTERWORD

  Eli Stutzman’s day of reckoning with Texas law was played out in the chilly environs of an air-conditioned Travis County courtroom in July 1989 when the former Amishman was finally tried for the 1985 murder of roommate Glen Pritchett.

  In what had become typical of his erratic and self-righteous behavior, Stutzman fired his court-appointed attorney only a few weeks before the trial. He feigned outrage when he told friends that the Austin lawyer had said he could do a better job if Stutzman slipped him ten thousand dollars under the table. Stutzman retained Houston-based Connie Moore and Debra Hunt with funds provided by the remarkable and unlikely alliance of conservative Mennonite supporters and a former gay lover.

  The defendant’s thinner appearance and graying hair prompted those who knew he carried the AIDS virus to speculate that the disease was taking its deathly toll. The truth was less malevolent. Travis County Jail food was not agreeable, and he no longer had his Grecian Formula.

  The prosecution’s case was circumstantial and slight and everyone knew it. No physical evidence tied Stutzman to Pritchett’s murder. No gun. Absolutely nothing. Moore and Hunt conceded that their client was a liar, but argued that that didn’t make him a killer.

  Stutzman seemed preoccupied, at times even detached, as he slumped in his chair. His eyes never met those of his accusers as they took the witness stand: Sawyer, Ruston, Hankins, and Miller.

  Travis County assistant district attorneys Carla Garcia and Maryanne Powers argued that Stutzman’s Nebraska convictions be admitted because the defendant’s actions in bot
h cases had been so strikingly similar that they should be considered “signature crimes.” The rural deposition of the body, the elaborate cover-ups, and the phone conversations with the victims—after they were dead—were among the points the attorneys enumerated.

  A courtroom spectator scribbled a cue-card-like message on a scrap of paper: “They were both dumped in a ditch!”

  Presiding judge Jon Wisser, who ironically had been the same judge who signed the destruction order on Stutzman’s rifle, rejected the motion. Wisser did permit the jury to hear that Danny Stutzman was deceased, but nothing further.

  “Well, we’ve lost it,” Garcia said in the hallway, after learning that Travis County’s Little Boy Blue trump card could not be played before the jury.

  The defense offered no witnesses. Moore and Hunt did not feel compelled to refute what they perceived to be a weak case. The state, they said, had simply failed to prove the charge beyond a reasonable doubt.

  The verdict was swift and surprising to the spectators, who half-expected that Stutzman might go free. But after a lunch of cheeseburgers and Cokes, the jury returned a guilty verdict on the fourth day of the trial.

  Stutzman was sentenced to forty years in the Texas Department of Corrections at Huntsville.

  Connie Moore broke down later. “If they can convict him on such a circumstantial case, they can make a case on anyone. You or me. Anyone—for any crime.”

  She was not the only one who left the capital city of Texas, bitterly disappointed.

  Disbarred attorney Frank Hefner and partner Rusty Porter came to the trial banking on a not-guilty verdict and armed with a news release stating that HIC Associates had sold film rights to Stutzman’s story for a figure in “excess of $500,000.” Without an innocent man—persecuted by the media and a victim of the naïveté of an Amishman—HIC didn’t have rights worth anything. A rights contract with a convicted killer was in violation of state law.

  After the verdict, prosecution witness Wanda Sawyer paid a visit to the convicted murderer. Incredibly, she still considered him a friend. They even touched hands through the glass divider.

  “He said he suffered a severe memory loss because of a car accident. He couldn’t remember anything before 1985.”

  Stutzman said he had been planning a trip with his Mennonite supporters to see Danny’s grave, and Wanda Sawyer was moved, as Stutzman had surely meant her to be.

  Stutzman declined all media interviews, claiming that People magazine had done a hatchet job and twisted his words when the weekly published a follow-up to its “Death of an Unknown Boy” feature story, in February 1988.

  Though Eli Stutzman is in prison, the story of the former Amishman’s dark descent continues. Some wonder if it will ever end.

  In 1990 Stutzman emerged as a key suspect in the Colorado murders of David Tyler and Dennis Slaeter. Durango detective Tony Archuleta plowed through the files of the stalled investigation, launched a relentless series of interviews, and uncovered more information linking Stutzman and Tyler. He also faced the same frustrating problem that had dogged others working Stutzman-related cases. Many witnesses were reluctant or outright refused to come forward because they were gay and feared being labeled homosexual.

  That conspiracy of fear and silence helped lead Danny Stutzman to the Nebraska cornfield.

  From their pastoral settlements, the Amish still wonder and talk among themselves about Ida Stutzman’s death. They refuse to pass final judgment—only God can—and many decline to make definitive statements about her death. Most are diplomatic and simply say they “fear Eli killed Ida.”

  Stutzman is a diabolical star in a community that abhors media attention. Murder committed by an Amishman has but a single precedent in the history of the religious order.

  Former Wayne County sheriff Jim Frost offers no help in sorting out the truth. He told a journalist in 1989 that he couldn’t recall any details of the night the pregnant woman died.

  Wayne County coroner J. T. Questel has told several reporters that he “blew” the case at the time of the original investigation.

  Gary Young remains Thayer County’s sheriff, with plans to run for another, possibly final, term. He looks back on his most famous case with frustration and the regret that he might have missed something during the investigation. When he looks at Eli Stutzman he sees the eyes of a killer.

  The Reverend Jean Samuelson, now pastor of a huge church in Aurora, still prays for the wayward Amishman.

  “I think he’s kind of naive and innocent. Certainly he got into some bad stuff,” she said in 1990. “He’s got a vulnerability.”

  But vulnerability is a trait Stutzman has practiced. Today he fine-tunes the charade from prison. His letters open with prolonged passages from Scripture and words about his love for God, though some recipients get the impression that the words are copied from a Sunday schoolbook. He is studying drafting and algebra, with his eye on earning a college degree.

  And as has been his habit at least since he was 21, Stutzman continues to walk the tightrope of two worlds, excluding people from both sides. He paints the picture he wants people to see—innocent Amishman, sexual maniac, good father, religious scholar. Even after all he’s been through, Eli Stutzman still thinks no one will catch on. But he is wrong.

  “He told me he was offered thousands of dollars for movie rights and he flushed the letter down the toilet,” said a Mennonite man who visited Stutzman at the prison in Lincoln, Nebraska.

  Another’s experience was the converse.

  “Stutzman now tells me he wants $100,000 for the rights! I keep telling him I can’t come up with that kind of money. No one can,” complained a Hollywood-based producer who corresponded with Stutzman in an effort to put together a deal.

  The father also persists with easily disproved fabrications about his son’s death. Now he no longer talks about the Gremlin’s faulty exhaust system, but rather hints of a conspiracy.

  “Court records about Danny’s death have been sealed in Nebraska. I want to know how my son died,” he wrote to New Order Amishwoman Liz Chupp in June 1990. “Five children died in Wyoming of a rare disease the same year Danny died.”

  Both statements are untrue.

  Questions remain and continue to haunt. Did Danny die at the hands of his father? Investigators affirm the idea with conviction and authority—though the allegation can’t be proved. Stutzman’s actions and statements point to foul play. Why didn’t he seek help from a farmhouse, or from others in the truck stop cafe where he might have stopped for coffee and composure? It would seem to be the natural reaction for a father with a sick child. The idea that his Amish upbringing left him with no basis for dealing with the outside world is ludicrous and insulting. Eli Stutzman was far from naive. One reason for his inaction might be that Stutzman knew that hospital authorities would want to know who he was, and would possibly learn that he was wanted in Texas for questioning. Stutzman couldn’t risk that. If Danny had to die, so be it. Eli Stutzman wasn’t going to jail for anything or anyone.

  Just how did Danny die? Of course, a natural death is plausible, and no medical evidence exists that doesn’t support that possibility. Murder is also a possibility. Pathologists concede that suffocation could have caused Danny to die. Stutzman himself suggested the scenario of Danny suffocating in the back as the boy lay pressed up against the luggage with a sleeping bag or blanket wrapped around his head. If there had been a struggle and the boy had suffered some trauma to his face when and if he were smothered, such evidence, of course, had been lost by the time the body was found. Half of Danny’s face, including the mouth and nose, had been gnawed away by field mice.

  Freezing to death is the scenario favored by state patrol investigator Jack Wyant. He feels that Stutzman left the boy outside in the subzero temperature to die. Danny might have been weakened or unconscious, or Stutzman could have just told the boy to lie down until he told him to get up. The boy had been abused so much and for so long that it is likely he would
have been compliant.

  The freezing scenario makes sense. Stutzman’s Gremlin was seen by a Thayer County sheriff’s deputy at Foote’s early the morning Danny was dumped. Was Stutzman passing time with plans to return to the field to make sure Danny had succumbed? If he wasn’t, then why the stop at Foote’s? One would have thought he’d want to get the hell out of Thayer County. Did he need the time to pull himself together to run through the skiing story? Not likely, as there was plenty of time for that on the way to his lover’s place near Salina, Kansas.

  There is also the matter of the letter Stutzman sent to the Missouri man while on his way to Wyoming to pick up the boy. “My son may not be coming with me . . .”

  Stutzman might have been planting the seed as he had with Ida’s death, when he told Amos Gingerich that Ida’s heart was giving her trouble when she did chores. Prosecutors and cops first saw the note in 1990 and immediately considered it the “best piece of evidence.” It’s the kind of document that Jack Wyant could have pushed into Stutzman’s face when he was being interrogated: “Why did you do it? You planned it!”

  But Wyant didn’t know about the letter. And he didn’t know about the Kansas or Missouri men.

  The wrestling T-shirt remains an intriguing piece of the puzzle. Found a mile from the dump site, it had on it blue paint particles—the same color as the interior of the so-called Levi’s-style Gremlin—that matched the particles on the sleeper. At the hearing, Stutzman denied that he had seen the shirt before. Why? Why was it left on the side of the road? He said he never got out of the car before he left Danny where “God could find him.” Yet it must be another lie. What happened at the side of the road that would have caused Stutzman to get out of the car, and the shirt to fall out?

  The sleeper continues to baffle. The boy was too old, too sophisticated to wear such a babyish garment. Stutzman purchased it in New Mexico before he left to get Danny—after he knew that the boy wouldn’t be with him when he got to Missouri. If it was part of a plan, what role did it play? In Stutzman’s anxious state, had he felt compelled to return Danny to an earlier time, a time when the boy was younger and no threat to his father’s life-style? Besides Eli Stutzman, who knows?