Abandoned Prayers (46 page)

“Did you buy a T-shirt like that for Danny?”

“I don’t recall buying a T-shirt with Panther Wrestling on it.”

“Did you throw out a T-shirt like that in the country?”

“I don’t remember throwing anything out.”

Werner changed the direction of his cross-examination. “What type of toys did Danny have?”

“That he was playing with? He had all kinds of toys.”

Werner asked him to describe some, and Stutzman responded that Danny had some video games. He also had a soccer ball on that trip two years ago.

“Do you remember him playing with any toys that were blue in color, with kind of a metallic paint?” Werner asked.

“Blue? No, I don’t.”

“Mr. Stutzman, did you kill Danny?”

The room was so quiet that no one had difficulty hearing the man’s response.

“No, I did not.”

“Did you help Danny die in any way?”

“No.”

“Do you remember anything else about Danny’s death that you haven’t told us about?”

“No, not that I can think of. Only thing I can say, it’s real tragic. I still, to this day, don’t know why or exactly what—”

“Did—what did you do when you placed him in the ditch?”

Again, Stutzman was very quiet. “I told him another prayer. I decided to leave him and let God take care of him.”

He said he pulled off the road, parked, and carried the boy’s limp body to a ditch and covered him with snow. He got back on the main road and headed south. He said he didn’t report the boy’s death because he could not bear what had happened.

“I guess I didn’t want to face my friends and family, realizing what had happened. I couldn’t figure out
why
.”

Werner asked how many days had passed between Stutzman and Danny leaving Wyoming and Danny’s death, and Stutzman told him that Danny had died the same day.

“I left there on a morning and he died during that night, and I left him.”

Did Stutzman know on what day he had arrived in Ohio?

“It was towards—I would say either—probably either Thursday or Friday.”

“Where did you go—did you go directly to Ohio after you left Thayer County?”

“I did spend some time—I had difficulty continuing on. What I had in mind—I lost the holiday spirit, and spent some time in motels.”

Lost the holiday spirit?
The statement was so ludicrous
that some spectators might have laughed had the case not been so grim.

“Do you remember where?”

“I suppose I could find it or look it up. I don’t remember the names right offhand.”

Stutzman said that he remembered spending some time in his car and that he did not get a motel room every night. He said he did not recall getting a room until the night after Danny died.

Questioned further, however, Stutzman could not recall the motels or anything about them.

With good reason. There hadn’t been any
.

Stutzman told how he had lied about his son’s death when he arrived in Ohio. He also said he had lied to the Barlows, telling them that Danny was enrolled in an Ohio school.

After the holidays, Stutzman said he went to the Azle, Texas, area, where he lived with Owen Barker.

Werner asked, “What did you tell Owen Barker about Danny?”

“I believe I told him Danny was with the Barlow family.”

“Is there a time when you told Owen Barker that Danny had died?”

“Yes.”

“Did you have Owen Barker speak with someone and tell him—have Owen Barker speak with someone on the telephone and tell him that it was Danny?”

“Repeat that again, if you would?”

“Remember Father’s Day of about 1986?”

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.

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 both 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.