Abandoned Prayers (11 page)

The hired boy hadn’t seen any embers when Stutzman commanded him to get a bucket of water earlier in the evening
.

“His wife seemed very happy that Eli had been able to extinguish the fire before it burned down their barn,” Blosser later said.

If the attorney ever doubted Stutzman’s honesty, it was only briefly when the Amishman said he had seen the lightning strike. The attorney thought such timing was remarkable.

Inside, while Ida rocked the baby in her arms, the men discussed the terms of the will Stutzman said he wanted. If Ida died, everything would go to her husband; in the event of his death, the estate was hers. If they should die simultaneously, Danny would get the estate. Amos Gingerich was named executor. The will would need to be typed and witnessed before becoming a valid legal document.

Blosser later recalled that he left the farm around 8:30
P.M
.

As far as the hired boy knew, the rest of the evening passed quietly. The ticking of a wind-up mantel clock marked the hours. With the weak glow of kerosene lamps the only source of light, and with cows in need of milking before sunrise, the Amish retire early. That night was no different. Ida, Eli, and Danny slept in the small bedroom on the main floor. Before bed, Ida sang old German songs and cuddled her son. The curtains were drawn, but the windows
were open to allow a cool breeze to circulate in the still, hot house.

Young Eli went to bed upstairs around 9:00
P.M
.

If anything out of the ordinary happened between bedtime and the hours before midnight, no one was old enough to remember it—or lived to tell about it.

At midnight, the hired boy stirred. His eyes were drawn to the window, where a brightness shone. He went to the window. Below, he saw the gold and red of flames and a black plume rising from the barn. Dressing as he went, he raced down the stairs and called for Eli and Ida to wake. Light from the fire illuminated their room; curtains fluttered from the rush of hot air. Danny was asleep in his crib, but the Stutzmans were gone.

Why didn’t Eli or Ida wake me with news of the blaze?
the boy wondered.
Where are they? Why didn’t they call for me to help?

On the front porch, the boy ran into Stutzman. The Amishman’s dilated pupils made his eyes seem black, only rimmed in blue.

“Go to Harley Gerber’s! Have him call the fire department! Hurry!”

Young Eli ran past the south side of the barn, away from the flaming north side, his bare feet pressing the surface of the now-dry dirt driveway. Over his shoulder he saw Stutzman pull farm machinery from the barn. A box wagon and tools had already been moved.

As he turned the corner where Moser Road meets the driveway, the boy saw Ida, motionless on her back. Her eyes were closed. She was very still and only a step or two from the barn.

“Ida! Ida!” he called as he knelt beside her. “What is wrong? Ida, wake up!”

He touched her, but she didn’t budge. Although most of the color was washed from her face, her left cheek and her left hand were pink from the heat. He could see that she was too hot, too close to the fire.

Thinking that he’d better tell Eli, the boy ran back and screamed that Ida was hurt.

Stutzman just shook his head.

He already knew
.

“Go to Harley Gerber’s now! Get the doctor, too!” Stutzman instructed.

“He seemed mad that I had not done what he told me,” the boy later said.

Young Eli did an about-face. Passing Ida again, he wondered why Stutzman hadn’t mentioned that his wife had been hurt in the first place. Why was Eli Stutzman more concerned about the farm equipment than his wife?

The crashing of splintering, burning timbers and the snap of crunch-dry straw riddled the night like gunfire. The frightened boy ran as fast as he could.

Ida needed help . . .
now!

Across Moser Road, the sound of the fire ricocheted through an open window and woke Sue Snavely. She woke Howard, who pulled on a pair of pants and told his wife to call the fire department. As they ran downstairs, the noise woke two of their children.

The screen door slammed behind Howard Snavely as he ran across Moser Road toward the Amish family’s front door. He assumed that the Stutzmans were unaware of the fire, since he saw no one outside. Just as Snavely reached the porch, Stutzman came around from the other side of the barn. Had the Amishman heard Snavely calling for them to wake up? Had he seen him run across the road? The timing seemed lucky and remarkable.

Stutzman was a fright. The bearded Amishman was frantic, disheveled, hysterical. He waved for Snavely to come. Snavely sensed that something bad had happened—something more terrible than the burning barn.

“We’ve got to get my wife out! She’s trapped in the barn!” Stutzman cried out.

Adrenaline surged through Snavely’s body as he followed
Stutzman to the milk house on the south side of the barn. Amish dairy farmers used the little rooms, neatly lined in clay tiles, to keep milk cool and clean until haulers came to get it.

“We’ve got to get her out!” Stutzman screamed again.

Snavely noticed some stainless steel three-gallon buckets and a milk strainer in a heap outside the door. Panting for breath, Stutzman swung the door open, and Snavely saw Ida, dressed in her Amish clothes—including her small, starched black scarf—lying on her back. Her feet were next to the door, her head farther inside. The woman’s pregnancy was obvious beneath her dark coat.

Stutzman muttered something about a heart attack as he lifted his wife up by her underarms. Snavely carried the woman’s feet and legs. Her uncradled head hung down. The men carried her across the road to the night pasture.

By then Stutzman had calmed considerably. He was quiet, and his body no longer shook in frightened spasms. On impulse, Howard Snavely reached for Ida’s wrist; he detected no pulse. Stutzman, who knew mouth-to-mouth resuscitation from his work at the hospital, did nothing.

Kidron fire chief Mel Wyss saw flames rising off the peaked roof of the barn as his fire truck topped Sand Hill. With the speed and efficiency of any big-city fire department, firemen started pumping water from a 1,500-gallon tanker—the small department’s only such unit.

Bystanders arrived. A few Amish from nearby farms came by buggy, but most were
Englischers
coming by car. Elam Bontrager was on the scene, although later no one from the fire department could remember talking with him.

Snavely frantically called for Wyss to come across the road to the pasture. “We have an injury! Mrs. Stutzman is hurt!” he called.

When the fire chief looked at the woman, he knew she was dead.

Wyss, who as a Sugarcreek Township trustee knew
Stutzman well enough to recognize him on the street, approached the Amishman to gather information for his report. Stutzman was nervous and excited, and no one could blame him for that. Yet, his reaction seemed incomplete. He was oblivious to the condition of his wife.

Wyss noted a few milk pails in the vicinity of the milk-house doorway. The heat was too intense for him to enter, but it was clear and smoke-free.

Stutzman looked on, blinking at the yellow light of the blaze. He told Wyss that his wife had awakened him in the middle of the night and told him the barn was on fire.

“I told her to go call the fire department and she left for help. When I came around the barn and went into the milk house, I found her inside. She was lying inside on her back. She must have had a heart attack because of the smoke,” he said.

The Kidron Rescue Squad arrived then. Of course, they were too late to save Ida Stutzman, but they still had a role: the Amish would ride to the hospital in their van.

Howard Snavely watched as the paramedics tried to revive Ida. After a few minutes, a young paramedic said softly: “She’s gone.”

Stutzman didn’t hear the fatal prognosis. He was busy discussing with one of the firefighters the lightning bolt that he said had caused the blaze. His mind seemed to be on things other than his wife and the unborn child she carried.

Stutzman’s seeming indifference to his wife’s death was considered by some a normal reaction to the most horrible of circumstances. It was a case of shock, some would later say.

Some things were missed or went unnoticed. It was dark, investigators’ eyes alternating between the dark of night and the bright light of the fire. It was hard to see certain things. No one gave the marks on Ida’s face and mouth any consideration.

Sue Snavely, who didn’t know that Ida had died, worried about the Stutzmans, although she barely knew them. The soft-spoken Amishman had been over to use their telephone
a few times. Amish were hard to get to know. She wondered if their livestock had gotten out of the barn in time.

Returning from the Gerbers’ place, young Eli ran up Moser Road and saw that Ida had been carried to the pasture on the other side of the road. Through the fence he saw her lifeless body. She looked exactly as she had when he’d first seen her slumped outside the milk house on the south side of the barn.

The boy figured that the paramedics had carried her across the road. He didn’t know that it was Stutzman and Howard Snavely who had done it—
after
the boy had gone for help. He didn’t know that it was after he ran to Gerbers’ that a terrified Stutzman had screamed to Howard Snavely to help him get his wife out of the barn.

Neighbors took Danny to Elam Bontrager’s home, a mile or so down the road. David Amstutz was dispatched to Fredericksburg to summon the Gingeriches to the hospital.

The flames threatened a shed, but firefighters were able to save it. The farmhouse was undamaged. The cherry tree that was so beautiful and smelled so sweet in the spring was scorched and wilted.

It took Wayne County sheriff’s deputy Phil Carr ten minutes to get to Moser Road from Kidron, where he had been on patrol. He arrived at the Stutzmans’ farm at 12:40
A.M
. He was alone, although he knew from the radio dispatcher that Sheriff Frost had been alerted and was on his way. Carr, who had been with the department two years, was briefed by Mel Wyss. He conducted no interviews of his own. At the time, it didn’t seem necessary.

As it had been obvious to Wyss, Carr knew that Mrs. Stutzman was dead. He observed the firefighting effort, which now focused on ensuring that the flames did not ignite the house or any outbuildings. Carr measured the
distances from the barn to where the woman had been set that night. She now lay 103 feet west of the barn in the night pasture. Prior to that, according to where Stutzman said he had put her, Ida Stutzman had lain 56 feet from the barn.

Stutzman, shaken and disoriented, initially estimated that he had put her 30 feet from the barn. Such a discrepancy was understandable given the stress of the fire.

Wyss instructed Wes Hofstetter and another squadman to take Ida Stutzman to Dunlap Memorial Hospital. With as much grace as possible, the woman was put on a stretcher and covered to the neck with a sheet. Her husband didn’t ask about her and gave no indication that he knew she was dead.

Although Stutzman’s reaction seemed inappropriate, he was an Amishman. Amish don’t show emotion.

But his wife is dead
, Hofstetter thought.

The strobe of the lights flashed on the eight-mile drive to the hospital. No sirens wailed on the deserted roadway—no need for them at that time of morning. Stutzman sat in the front next to Hofstetter. Another squadman rode in back with Ida.

Sheriff Jim Frost arrived at the fire scene and moved on, staying at the farm only a few minutes. He left word that he was on his way to the hospital to interview Stutzman.

Another who showed up at the fire was Tim Blosser, the attorney who had been at the Stutzman house just before the fire. “You aren’t going to believe this,” he told one of the deputies at the scene. “I was here earlier in the evening helping the Stutzmans write their will!”

Dr. J. T. Questel was a slight man with white hair and a penchant for belt buckles big enough to cut him in two. One buckle was the symbol of the NRA, and the Wayne County coroner made no bones about his affiliation. He was
a doctor, a farmer, and a man who hated crime and criminals with an unwavering passion. As coroner, he had seen too often what criminals can do.

Questel grew up on the Ohio–West Virginia border. After serving in the Air Force, he went to medical school at Ohio State, where he met his wife. Helen Questel was from Wooster, which was reason enough for them to settle in the Wayne County seat.

The couple made many friends in Wooster, including Jim Frost. “We both consider Jim to be like a son,” Questel later said.

Nearly every coroner has a case that haunts him long after he makes his ruling. Reasons vary. Sometimes a piece of evidence doesn’t fit. Maybe a statement doesn’t jive with the crime scene. When Dr. Questel was called in on the death of an Amishwoman from Dalton, he came face to face with one that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

The fire was still smoldering when the coroner arrived at the scene. Dr. Questel was not required to inspect every death scene reported in the county. The woman was Amish, pregnant, and dead due to a violent situation—a raging barn fire. It warranted a look.

Deputy Carr briefed him on the Amishman’s tragic story—his wife had died while rescuing milk cans. Stutzman indicated that his wife had a weak heart, the legacy of a bout with rheumatic fever when she was a teenager. She was unconscious when he found her and carried her outside the doorway of the milk house. Because it was too hot, he moved her again. Questel studied Deputy Carr’s sketches of the scene.

The idea of a pregnant woman hauling milk cans from a burning barn in the middle of the night did not strike him as odd. Like other
Englischers
in Wayne County, Questel had always considered the Amish industrious and thrifty. If they could save something from ruin, they would.

No one—not Sheriff Frost or any investigator—told the coroner about Stutzman’s history of violence and deception
in Marshallville. No one mentioned that setups had been the Amishman’s forte.