Abandoned Prayers (15 page)

Another time, Stutzman confided his hatred of his father. “He was too strict. He wouldn’t even let us boys smoke!” Stutzman complained.

Dan understood. He had worked for One-Hand Eli when he was 16 and had found the man too “sarcastic” and too unyielding and set in his ways. To One-Hand Eli, there was only one way—
his
way.

January 16, 1978

Amos Gingerich was stunned by the parallels between Stutzman’s situation and that of a LaGrange, Indiana, farmer he read about in the Amish newspaper
Die Botschaft
.
Gingerich urged his son-in-law to write to the farmer, Harley Schrock, an Amishman whose wife had also died suddenly and tragically.

A week later, Stutzman mailed a 4-page letter written in an off-putting red ink to Schrock. In it he offered Schrock his condolences and, for the first time, he recounted the night of the barn fire in writing. It was around midnight, he wrote, when Ida woke him after hearing an explosion and seeing flames through a barn window. The couple hurried to the barn, but found it too engulfed in flame to save the old wooden structure. Stutzman described how he had in mind to save some tools and implements from the barn and when Ida asked what she could do to help, he told her to go to the neighbors to call the fire department. On her way, she asked if she shouldn’t try to retrieve some things from the milk house and Stutzman told her she could—as long as it was not too hot inside the little room. Stutzman wrote that he then went about salvaging what farm equipment and livestock he could—a foal was saved, but a bull was taken by the flames—before returning his attention to the milk house. Just outside the milk house, he found strainers and other equipment, and the doorway blocked by a milk vat that Ida had been attempting to save. Inside, he made a horrible discovery: his beloved life’s companion dead, her body slumped next to the doorway.

All of this was possible, of course. Yet Stutzman, eager to enhance the story’s credibility, went further, as he had many other times in his life. He wrote that it was the doctor who had determined that Ida had died from a heart attack, and that other “officials” had determined that the fire might have been caused by lightning. The truth was that
he
had been the one to suggest both scenarios. He had told many people over the previous six months that he had
seen
the lightning strike with his own eyes—but now it was some nameless official who had identified the cause.

When he made his statement to Sheriff Frost, Stutzman reportedly indicated that he wasn’t able to hear what Ida was saying when she left for the neighbors. But in the letter
Stutzman stated that he and Ida had a discussion about the milk house and what the Amishwoman could do to help.

Harley Schrock was touched by the letter and put it away in a safe place, unaware that it was Stutzman’s most complete—and only documented—version of the night of the barn fire. Suddenly Eli Stutzman recalled details that had eluded him—and events and ideas that were patently untrue.

When he opened his front door, Chris Swartzentruber was shocked and delighted. At his door in Greenville, Ohio, was his buddy Eli Stutzman, dressed in his Amish clothes and grinning ear to ear. Swartzentruber hadn’t seen Stutzman since his marriage to Ida Gingerich.

“How did you get here?”

Stutzman just smiled that old Eli grin and skirted the question. But Swartzentruber pressed him. “How did you get a driver’s license? You’re supposed to be Amish!”

Stutzman just laughed.

For Swartzentruber, the laughter stopped when Stutzman shared his tragic news about Ida’s death in the fire. Swartzentruber offered his condolences, but was still curious about what had happened to Stutzman’s wife.

“What was she doing in the barn?” he asked.

“She had gone into the barn near the hayhold to save some puppies.”

The response caught Swartzentruber off guard. To Low Amish, a dog is not a pet, it is an animal. There would be a lot of other things more important in a burning barn than some puppies.

Stutzman said he had seen lightning strike the barn when returning from Kidron. Swartzentruber was skeptical. He had been up that way many times when his brother Daniel owned the farm. How could Stutzman see lightning strike the barn coming from Kidron? A bolt in the sky, maybe, but not a direct strike on the barn. What was Stutzman trying to pull now?

When Jean Samuelson came to Chester as pastor of the United Methodist Church, she brought with her a marriage as shaky as the railroad tracks leading out of town. Try as she and her pastor husband did, neither could make it work. As a minister she could chalk up the strain to God’s Grand Plan; as a wife, that proved excruciatingly difficult.

The Methodist church was built in 1912 of red brick with clay from deposits found in Thayer County. When Samuelson first saw the facade it looked like an institutional building, maybe a school. Inside, of course, it was a church. Rich, red carpet and row upon row of gleaming oak pews filled the expansive room. A stained-glass dome topped the ceiling. More than 250 belonged, making it the biggest of the three churches in town.

Two months after his discovery, the dead boy continued to find his way into her prayers and thoughts. Samuelson felt a connection to the child, as though God was speaking to her through the tiny lifeless form in the blue blanket-sleeper.

When her parishioners came to her with stories of the indignity of keeping the body in a freezer, she felt the bond strengthen.

“Ambulance drivers are talking about the stinky body in Hebron.”

“The poor child has been through several autopsies. If
I were his mother, I’d die if my baby had been subjected to that.”

Her women parishioners urged her to organize a simple community service and burial that would put the child back with God.

People in Chester were aghast when they heard that the county attorney was going to order another autopsy.

“They keep looking for evidence that doesn’t seem to exist. It’s time to stop it. It’s time to let the child rest.”

Sheriff Young and investigator Wyant scheduled a press conference for Tuesday, January 28, 1986. An airbrush artist hired by the state patrol had mixed reality with fantasy by painting a nose, lips, and cheek on top of the morgue photograph. The child’s teeth, however, still dominated the image, like two square, perfectly spaced white tiles. As was the case with the artist who had done the first composite, the features were a guess.

Young hoped the photo would be the impetus for more publicity, and, God willing, a lead that would finally go somewhere. That afternoon, 5-by-7 prints were mailed all over the country.

The time had come to bury the boy and the national media responded. Reporters wondered what the townspeople had called the boy. Samuelson received a letter from a Missouri minister and gave them the answer:

“As a father of three children, including a 9-year-old boy, I was saddened and moved by the story in
USA Today
in which your community will bury the unknown boy, whose name is known only to God.

I hurt for that little child. . . .”

Before closing, the man suggested the name “Matthew,” which means “Gift of God.” Samuelson felt the name fit.

•    •    •

Donations from the community and beyond came to Chester in support of their plan for the burial. A mother from Fairbury donated her son’s size-8 suit. A widow gave up one of her family plots in Chester’s cemetery. Lon Adams’s wife, Dixie, arranged for the donation of a marker:

L
ITTLE
B
OY
A
BANDONED
F
OUND
N
EAR
C
HESTER
, N
EB
.
D
ECEMBER
24, 1985
W
HOM
W
E
H
AVE
C
ALLED
“M
ATTHEW
”
W
HICH
M
EANS
“G
IFT OF
G
OD
”

A space was left on the stone with the hope that someday the boy’s real name could be engraved there.

Gary Young knew that the burial was important for the community’s healing process. People wanted the uneasiness to end. But for him it was an unsolved murder, a tragedy that someone had forced on the community when they killed the little boy. The minister down in Chester could forgive that, but he couldn’t.

Forgiveness, after all, was part of her job.

Offers to help solve the mystery of the dead boy continued to come from far away and from the most unlikely places.

Impressionist and stand-up comedian Fred Travalena was touched deeply by the story when he read about it in a Las Vegas paper.

Travalena felt compelled by God to help the sheriff and packed his bags for Nebraska. To Travalena, the story indicated that God had sent the child as a messenger of some kind: found on Christmas Eve, his funeral was planned for Easter. Travalena was even taken aback by the name of the town generating most of the stories—Hebron. It was the name of a holy place in the Bible.

It was as if the little boy were calling to him:
Find out who I am! Hurry!

A press conference with Travalena was held and another composite of the boy was released. Accompanied by Young and Samuelson, the comedian drove out to pray at the dump site.

At midnight, several days after she learned that she would give the boy’s funeral, Samuelson woke abruptly from a dream. A gut-wrenching feeling of fear and sadness gripped her. She saw tears at the roadside where the boy had been found. Whoever had left the child in Chester had left with great pain and a heavy heart.

In prayer, the minister asked, “Why do you keep speaking to me about this child? Why should I feel guilty?
Why should I feel guilty?
”

The answer that came to her was that the boy had been in her life many times. And she had been too busy trying to prove herself worthy to see him.

Suddenly, Samuelson felt that whoever had left the child had probably once been like him. He, too, was like a child who had fallen through the cracks.

The little boy’s service was supposed to be a quiet, community funeral—a few flowers, some appropriate scripture, and hymns sung deeply from the heart. People in Chester talked about the service with great relief as Easter drew closer. The word, however, had gone beyond Thayer County.

Media calls became so incessant that Samuelson unplugged her telephone. Calls from the press inundated the church and the parsonage. CBS, ABC . . . call letters melded into one another.
People
magazine planned to send someone.

May 19, 1986

As expected, a flurry of activity followed the memorial-service story told in
People
. Most mysterious—or, Jack
Wyant initially believed, ludicrous—was the call from a Missouri woman who claimed to possess special gifts that could help the authorities solve the case of the Chester boy. The woman did not consider herself a psychic, but a person with a direct line to God.

She told Wyant that she felt that the boy was neither retarded nor mute, as had been speculated in the magazine. She said that she felt a connection to Kansas, and that through a vision she had seen a two- or four-lane highway—similar, Wyant wasn’t surprised to learn, to the one pictured in
People
.

The woman shared a few other visions and impressions that seemed far from the reality of the case. She saw a white male, medium build, with brown straight hair and wearing slacks and a long-sleeved white shirt.

“He seemed to be spreading a flammable liquid near a building,” she later wrote in her follow-up letter to Wyant. “I heard the word ‘kerosene.’ Next I heard the words ‘Iowa’ and ‘Iowa farming community.’ Next, ‘Near a dairy farm.’ ”

She also said she saw a vision of land and a fence. The land sloped upward to the right, and a dirt road ran opposite the fence. She felt the place was close by the dairy farm.

The woman had no idea how it all connected, or if indeed it did. But she did have the distinct impression that the man she had described was the suspect in the case. She wanted no money, only the permission to use the Nebraska State Patrol as a reference on her résumé.

Wyant was polite to the woman and filed her letter in his case notebook—the first of two three-inch binders he would fill over the course of the investigation. He had heard stories of cases where psychics had helped out, but he had no firsthand knowledge of a psychic actually doing any good.

The months passed, and the holiday season brought snow, school concerts, and the case of a Grinch who stole Christmas
light bulbs from homes and businesses in Hebron. It also brought the unshakable memories of the year before. For Thayer County, the memories could be recalled in vivid detail.

The Hebron
Journal Register
summed it up in a frontpage headline:

The new year started off with County Attorney Werner requesting that another pathologist look into the case of the boy’s death. John Porterfield had no problem with the state seeking another opinion, though he didn’t believe the investigators were likely to turn up anything.

“To plow the same old ground again has never yielded anything I’ve ever heard of,” he said.

Photographs, X rays, police reports, and microscopic tissue slides were shipped to the pathology department at the Saint Louis University Medical Center, a facility that handled more than one thousand autopsies a year. Wyant considered the Saint Louis facility to be the best in the region.

Dr. Michael Graham, the Saint Louis pathologist, had what Dr. Porterfield considered a major disadvantage: looking at a picture is never the same as looking at the corpse. Dr. Graham, on the other hand, felt that sometimes it’s better to be an outsider and review the complete package—that sometimes things are clearer that way.

Like the rodent who didn’t see his shadow, Jack Wyant might have wished he’d stayed in bed on Groundhog Day. He didn’t much care for the news he received from Dr. Graham the morning of February 2, 1987. It was another strikeout. The 35-year-old assistant professor of pathology said that the cause of death could not be determined based on the available information.