Abandoned Prayers (42 page)

The preliminary hearing was set for January 11.

Jean Samuelson’s phones rang like old times after Stutzman was captured. This time, though, it was different. While many of the callers were reporters, some who called were friends of Thayer County’s most celebrated prisoner.

“Eli has a lot of friends, a lot of people who care,” she said later.

A man from Oklahoma called to speak on Stutzman’s behalf. He said Stutzman had been planning to move in with him before he was picked up in Azle.

Samuelson met with Stutzman twice after the arraignment. The man she met was shy and remorseful, a gentle and cowering lamb. She was the shepherd.

Stutzman told her the reason he’d fled Austin was that one of the investigators had shoved a grisly photograph of Glen Pritchett’s body in his son’s face. “Danny was terrified,
because they were showing him pictures and asking him questions about the murder,” he said.

The answer made sense. If it were a normal thing occurring in the household—like his father’s homosexuality—it wouldn’t have shaken him so. Unaccustomed details of a death would hit the child hard.

Samuelson didn’t know it had been the homosexual-oriented questions directed to Danny, which Stutzman had mentioned to others like Wanda Sawyer and the Barlows, that had been his impetus to leave Austin.

At first, he denied that he was gay, but the woman gently pursued the truth.

“Eli, I’ve got two of your friends that have told me you are. Tell me the truth.”

He finally did.

Stutzman told her that he didn’t use drugs, that it had been murder victim Glen Pritchett who was the user and dealer.

When they discussed the story about Danny’s death on the way to Ohio, she wondered why he hadn’t called the police.

Stutzman looked blank. “Why would I do that?”

“Why didn’t you call the hospital?”

“You don’t call the hospital . . . he was already dead. You call family together. You call people together,” he said. “Why would I call the police? What could they do?”

He knew he had to face his family, and the thought was unbearable. His father had told him,
cursed
him, that when he left the Order he and Danny would both die on the outside.

“It was the price we would pay for leaving the Amish,” he said.

Samuelson wondered if Danny’s death had been the result of an allergic reaction to medication. She knew some kids were allergic. Stutzman told her he had given pills to Danny at six in the evening, and at midnight he had gone back and shaken his son’s foot over and over, and he’d been dead. His eyes were rolled back and white.

“When he told me the story, he wept the entire time,” she later recalled. “He had to use Kleenex after Kleenex.”

“Why is death stalking me?” Stutzman asked between tears.

He talked about his grandmother dying.

“She was the only one who loved me,” he said, his eyes now red from tears.

He told Samuelson about the barn fire.

“He talked about the fact that the bull could have killed him. . . . He had to get all of the animals out. He carried his wife across the road into the ditch.

“He’s a haunted man,” Samuelson later said.

Stutzman and his tears had drained her. He had presented himself as a naive and misunderstood man—a victim of some kind of media witch hunt. Samuelson desperately wanted to believe his story.

She later described Stutzman. “He’s not somebody who invites you into his life easily. He was wracked with pain over Danny, but he also had a huge pride. Gigantic pride. ‘I will not show who I am to other people.’ Not the hurt part.”

From his cell, Stutzman wrote the following to Dean and Margie Barlow:

Dear [Dean], [Margie] and all:

How are you all? I am sure you heard on the news what took place today in court so I won’t waste any ink. A lady by the name of Rev. Jean Samuels [sic] was here today. She would really like to talk to you all. She did Danny’s funeral services and sure seems to be real nice. So I gave her your address so she’ll probably drop you a line. I understand she now lives in Harvard. I don’t know what else to write so I’ll close for you. Please write if you like. . . .
Sincerely,
Eli Stutzman
Sheriff’s Office

P.S. I would like to know about the exact date was that I left your house with Danny. I do remember it was on a Saturday morning before Christmas but I don’t know what day of the month it is. Also what day of the week was Christmas in 1985? I would like a statement from you of what you feel was the kind of relationship between Danny and I.

The postscript, of course, was the reason for the letter.

On December 19, 1987, the Young family drove east to Urbana, Ohio, for Christmas. Gary Young made a detour from his in-law’s place in Urbana and poked around the Amish Country of Wayne and Holmes counties, looking for leads to the Stutzman case.

In Mount Eaton, Dr. Elton Lehman showed him Stutzman’s medical records and filled him in on the story of Ida’s death, the barn fire, and Stutzman’s mental breakdowns.

Young also picked up copies of Stutzman’s driver’s-license forms, noting how Stutzman had apparently used his left hand for his signature. Young figured Stutzman had done the fake initial and birth date and obtained a second social security number in order to “lose himself in the computer.”

“Maybe the middle initial was C so that later, if someone asked, he could say ‘it was a clerical mistake—it should have been E.’ ”

No one Young talked with ever referred to Stutzman as “Junior.”

Trailed by a photographer and a reporter from
People
, Young visited the cabinet shop of Abner Petersheim, in Dalton, and met the young Amishman who had first wondered if Little Boy Blue could be Danny Stutzman. The Amishman described how, after Petersheim had told him about the story in
Reader’s Digest
, it had come to him that the child in the story must be Danny Stutzman.

“After what Abner told me and what I saw, there were too many coincidences that fit together,” he said.

When he returned to Hebron, Gary Young had more questions than answers. Where Eli Stutzman was concerned, that seemed to be par for the course.

Everyone, of course, wanted answers. Ohio, for Ida’s death; Texas, for Glen Pritchett’s; Colorado, even, for the two murders they had been sitting on for two years; and Nebraska, for Danny.

Young wondered if the bunch of them shouldn’t hold their breath. Stutzman wasn’t talking and there didn’t seem to be any evidence.

The media attention on Thayer County heated up again after Stutzman’s arrest. Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather introduced segments about Stutzman on the evening news. The NBC report even featured a family portrait of the Barlows—though it didn’t name them.

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.

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.