Abandoned Prayers (19 page)

Troyer couldn’t drive because he was considered legally blind, and he felt the drive to Florida would be too much for Stutzman alone, so he asked Miller if he wanted to go. Though it seemed clear that Stutzman didn’t want him along, Miller agreed anyway.

“I didn’t really care that much for Eli, but I wanted to see Key West,” Miller recalled.

When it came time to leave, Miller parked his car inside Stutzman’s barn, and the three set out in Stutzman’s pickup. Stutzman planned the itinerary. He indicated that he had traveled to Florida many times and had a lot of friends with whom they could stay along the way. He also knew the right rest stops or roadside parks along the interstate—such places were cruising spots where they could stop and have sex with a stranger.

Miller felt he had put a damper on Stutzman’s little party. If he had been into the sexual stuff as much as Stutzman, perhaps they might have hit it off better.

Stutzman did little to endear himself to Miller. When the man wasn’t being surly and reminiscing about his past, he seemed less than sincere. He was cool and detached when he talked about his wife’s death. Miller thought he was lying.

“Why would a pregnant woman with a husband and a son risk her life in a milk house during a fire?” Miller later asked.

The first night they stayed at a horse farm outside of Atlanta, Stutzman having called ahead to let the man who lived there know they were coming. Miller gathered that the man and Stutzman were friends and that Stutzman had stayed there before—had maybe even worked there at one time.

The following morning the travelers stopped to fill the gas tank. Miller wanted a cup of coffee, so he went to a cafe across the road while Stutzman pumped gas. When Miller returned, he met an angry Stutzman.

“If you’d been here I would have got a free tank of gas!” Stutzman screamed.

He’s mad because he had to pay for the gas . . . because I wasn’t there so he could steal
, Miller thought.

Miller apologized, but Stutzman wouldn’t let up. Miller could do nothing right from that point on.

When they made it to Key West, Miller had had enough. The three of them stayed at their Ohio friend’s place, a
kind of rooming house next to the beach. Miller kept his distance during the day. At night, Stutzman and Troyer went out to party at the bars.

When it was time to leave, they discovered that the truck had started to leak oil. Stutzman blamed it on Miller.

“You caused this!” he yelled at Miller. “If you knew how to drive this wouldn’t have happened!”

Miller took the abuse and even considered rerouting the trip up the coast to the place of a friend—a mechanic who could fix anything. He figured it would soothe Stutzman.

Nothing worked. Stutzman’s haranguing continued.

In Kissimmee, Miller left the group and caught a Greyhound bus for Ohio. By then the man was stricken with fear. He wanted to make sure he got back to Moser Road before Eli Stutzman.

He couldn’t shake the look he had seen in Eli Stutzman’s cold blue eyes. It was as if the Amishman could have killed him in cold blood and not even blinked an eye.

Rick Adamson
, 31, found a likely candidate for a date on page 28 in the April/May 1981 issue of
Stars
, a kinky gay correspondence publication known for the home sex photos of erect penises accompanying its ads—something the more conservative
Advocate
did not feature. It was true that some of the photographs in
Stars
were of young men with their clothes on, but those ads undoubtedly didn’t pull as well as the more explicit ones.
Stars
was a gay man’s cruising catalog.

The photo that caught Adamson’s eye was of a nude, muscular young man posed in a stance that showed off his body. The background was the light-colored wood of a new barn.

WELL-BUILT HORSEMAN
—29, 5’6”, 140, brown hair, blue eyes, with a hairy body, looking for same to share our lives together. Send photo and
phone number to: 2848 Moser Road, Rt. 1, Dalton, Ohio. See photo.

Though he knew the advertiser had kept his name out of the magazine on purpose and sought only written responses, Adamson simply used the address to get the phone number, and called Eli Stutzman.

A couple of days later, Stutzman came out to Adamson’s apartment, and the two of them spent some time getting acquainted before they went to bed. Stutzman told Adamson his preference was for anal sex and, as Stutzman bent over, Adamson obliged—though it really wasn’t what he was into. Stutzman ejaculated while Adamson was still inside him, and it was over. Stutzman didn’t want to do anything else.

Adamson was a little disappointed, but not enough to pass up the opportunity to try again at Stutzman’s farm a week or so later. After Stutzman had put Danny to bed, he and Adamson went into the master bedroom for sex. It was a replay of the time before—Stutzman climaxing while Adamson rammed him from behind.

Even though sex between them wasn’t great, the two men became friends. Adamson even admired Stutzman.

“He was a real concerned father,” Adamson later said. “He had arranged for Danny to get some speech training for his stutter. As far as gay activity, he didn’t want his son to know any of it was going on. Anytime we messed around he made sure Danny was asleep first.”

Adamson was a regular visitor to the farm that summer, visiting as many as two dozen times. Once, he came to Moser Road for a square-dance party in Stutzman’s barn. It was a good turnout, with as many as thirty gay men attending. Adamson was amazed at the number of gay men Stutzman knew. As far as he could see, the parties were relatively harmless, a little bit of marijuana and a bunch of gay men looking for friendship and fun.

It was a conversation Adamson had with Jim Frost that
made him think twice about seeing much more of Eli Stutzman.

“Be careful about Eli Stutzman,” Frost warned, “Though I couldn’t prove it, I think Stutzman murdered his wife in that barn fire at his place.”

With his dark hair and dark eyes, Timothy Brown might have considered a career as a model instead of a cop. At the time, he lived with his parents in Stark County and needed to establish thirty days’ residency in Wayne County before he could join the sheriff’s department as a deputy. A mutual friend—half of a gay couple who had been frequent visitors to Stutzman’s farm—put him in touch with Stutzman, who was renting out rooms at his farm.

Brown moved in the first week of July 1981.
Matt Schwartz
, another Amish boy, had moved in also. Daisy Mast liked Brown, who, Stutzman had told her, was a friend from church.

Brown had been raised in rural Brewster, so he understood
Meidnung
. He also knew that sometimes the Amish break the rules. It happened at the Stutzman farm. At night, Stutzman would sometimes go out to the barn to talk with someone in a buggy who had come to visit.

While he lived on Moser Road, Brown learned that several businessmen from Kidron had loaned Stutzman money—it had something to do with the horses that kept coming and going at the farm.

Brown found Stutzman to be a good father, disciplining Danny with care and consistency.

More than once, Stutzman professed concern that the Amish would try to take Danny from him. He never said why he felt that way.

Danny, whose terrible stutter was exacerbated when he was excited, seemed afraid to sleep alone. He slept almost every night in his father’s bed—not the bedroom upstairs next to Brown’s.

Having Tim Brown’s patrol car on the premises proved
too tempting for an Amish boy like Matt Schwartz. One time neighbors watched as Schwartz drove the car, flashers on, through one of Stutzman’s fields. Stutzman and Brown were up in Cleveland at the time.

In March 1982, Stutzman left Brown a cryptic note—in effect, an eviction notice.

Brown didn’t understand why Stutzman couldn’t just tell him to leave the farm. It was a strange way to treat a friend. Brown had even loaned Stutzman a few hundred dollars with no questions asked. Stutzman referred to the cash as “advance rent payments.”

The next thing Brown knew, Stutzman said that he and Danny were going to Colorado on vacation. Neither Brown nor Matt Schwartz knew what Stutzman had in mind. Later, it wouldn’t faze them when they learned the truth.

Stutzman had struck a deal with
LaVon Kratzer
and sold his farm for $200,000—four times what he had paid Daniel Swartzentruber only five years before. The Amish wept at the news—they had lost more precious land to the
Englischers
.

Once they had taken possession, the Kratzers found something very strange. Why on earth, they wondered, had Eli Stutzman kept a stove and a couch inside the milk house?

“Most people are alarmed and ask questions about a murder involving a friend. Eli Stutzman didn’t ask one question.”

—Travis County Sheriff’s Detective Jerry Wiggins

May 1985

The first time he noticed the rancid smell, the sun hung low over the area known for the lump of earth called Pilot Knob, south of the commotion of metro Austin, Texas, and the noise of Bergstrom Air Force Base, in southwest Travis County. Raymond Kieke, his face as crinkly as buckskin left out in the rain and hung to dry again, scrunched his nose at the first whiff of the too familiar stench. White lines etched the corners of his eyes. The compact, trim man wore glasses, and kept a spare or two stuffed in his pockets so that they were there when he needed them.

Something was dead.

Pilot Knob rises 711 feet above crusty rangeland and fields of maize swirling over a craggy, arid landscape. The Knob is the remnant of a volcano that a millennium ago spewed forth in fury and then faded into extinction. It is the only visual break in an otherwise monotonous land. Farm kids head for the Knob as soon as they are old enough to ride. It’s a destination in a place where there is little else outside of barns, irrigation ditches, and endless acres of cropland.

Austin is only twenty minutes away via the major north-south route of Highway 183, and Pilot Knob locals consider it a suitable place for the city folks—all noise and traffic. South Travis County is, after all, the country, a place where
cowboy boots are second nature, not de rigueur. The area had been desert before irrigation, and the locals see beauty in the land. Two towns in the vicinity of Colton-Bluff Springs Road are Scenic Loop and Pleasant Valley.

Austinites would say neither place fits its name.

It was the evening of May 9 that Raymond Kieke first smelled the dead thing. The air was thick and hot, and the windows on his dusty pickup were rolled down: Kieke had assumed the position that leaves many farmers with a darker tan on their left forearm—he had propped his elbow on the window frame. The odor was strong, like that of a road kill that hadn’t passed through the stage of stench to reach that of a dried, leathery mass. Kieke figured that a calf had wandered off or that maybe a coyote hadn’t eaten all of its kill. It doesn’t take too long in the Texas sun for fresh meat to become a stomach-turning, revolting mass that would gag a buzzard. He’d look into it later.

On the morning of Mother’s Day, May 12, 1985, Kieke was checking on the cattle he grazed on the property he rented, just south of Colton-Bluff Springs Road. In part, he was there to check out the smell—it had reached the point where he could no longer avoid the inconvenience of investigation. He pulled to the side of the road and parked his truck. It was time to find the dead calf.

Kieke walked to a culvert on the south side of the road. The odor grew intense. New weeds edged the thicket of dead, winter brambles. He peered over the edge of the retaining wall built to halt erosion and looked into the ditch. The odor was overpowering and hideous. A body, black with death, was slumped with legs rigid and arms flailing. The body seemed to melt into the damp earth. Bright yellow sunflowers broke the somber pall enveloping the culvert.

Kieke had seen enough—more than enough, actually. He got back into his pickup and drove home. There, he called the Travis County Sheriff’s Office. The dispatcher
recorded the time of the call: 8:09
A.M
. Kieke gave directions so that an officer could meet him on Colton-Bluff Springs Road, just off FM 1625—known to many as the road to the little town of Creedmoor, the farm road breaks off Highway 183 like a dried-up, brittle twig, jutting to the southeast across the rangeland. Returning to the culvert, Kieke waited downwind.

The dispatcher alerted Richard “Frito” Navarro, a deputy on patrol in the area. Dark-eyed Navarro, his black hair combed back over his head like a helmet, had seen his share of dead bodies. In fact, the remote area around Pilot Knob had been a popular site for the disposal of victims.

As one veteran cop later said, “If I had a body to dump I think it would be the first place I would go. There’s no one out there, and it’s still fairly close to town. Kind of convenient, I’d say.”

Navarro followed Kieke’s pickup truck to a point just beyond the culvert. The deputy didn’t need Kieke to point out the site of the body. The stench was like a smelly rope pulling him toward the corpse. He immediately confirmed what Kieke had told him, and radioed for Homicide and the medical examiner—a body in a ditch, hidden behind the cover of weeds and grasses, didn’t usually indicate death by natural causes. He secured the crime scene for the detectives and medical examiner—keeping his distance from the corpse.

If Navarro had looked up from the ditch, across the field, he would have seen the barn and pasture of Harry Reininger’s farm. In the pasture was a beautiful stallion.

A monument marks the only spot in the country where the borders of four states converge: Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Cottonwoods grow along ditches, sucking water from the bleak, juniper-studded landscape. Tumbleweeds are suspended forever, impaled on barbed-wire fences cordoning off rangeland. The jagged forms of the snow-covered La Plata range jut up from the desert.