by Gregg Olsen
Barb: Eddie, I did not.
Ed: I just want the truth, honey.
But Barb wasn’t capable of telling it to him. Her conversation circled over to Heidi’s love life and problems she might have had in her marriage.
Ed gave up and questioned her about an income tax refund check that he couldn’t find, and why she was reluctant to pay family members back money they owed them.
And yet their conversations always came back to one subject.
Ed: I just want the truth.
Barb: I am telling you the truth, Eddie.
Ed: I mean the truth will come out.
Barb: I know that, Eddie, I know that.
Ed: The truth is going to come out, and if you did not do it, then that will come out.
Barb: So now you’re coming against me now?
Ed: No, I am not coming against you, absolutely not.
Barb: Do they have fingerprints on the gun or what?
Ed: I don’t even know if that was the gun that was used.
Barb: I don’t know either.
Through the grapevine Ed had been told there was enough evidence to convict her.
Ed: Somebody up in Wooster, the chief, just said, “We have more than enough.”
Barb: Yeah, but what does the attorney say?
Ed: I don’t know, but we had that gun before that. If you are innocent, we want to welcome you home with open arms.
He finally suggested that she take some responsibility.
Barb: What is the use to come home, Eddie, if they are blaming me for all this stuff?
Ed: Now, honey, [no reason] to get all upset right away, okay? That is not wise. You know in your heart the truth.
Barb: I know that, I know that, but I have [said] that I did not do it and here I sit.
Ed: Okay, look at it this way, why are you in there? What, okay, were you living right? There is a reason you are in there. They got something on you.
Barb: Eddie, were me and you living right?
Ed: I was trying. Were you not living right?
Barb: Well, I tried to.
Ed: Yeah, I want to know just for my sake. I mean, why are you sitting in there?
Barb: I don’t know, Eddie. That is what I don’t know.
Ed: I mean, the Lord won’t let you sit in prison for something you did not do, okay.
Barb: I did text that stuff.
Ed: Why?
Barb: I was not always totally alright. I mean, not like I should have. I admit that, whatever, Eddie.
Ed: I am not going against you.
Barb: Well, it sounds so.
Ed: No, I am not coming against you. I like you, you are still my wife, and I want to believe you.
Barb: I know I have had problems with not being truthful and stuff, but I was trying to do better, Eddie. I was trying. Like I said yesterday, I want a clean slate, [to] start all over with my life and marriage, but if nobody wants me around that is fine.
27
Defense
I didn’t try to charm her.
—ELI WEAVER, WHO HAD A COMPLICATED HOLD OVER BARB RABER
Even in jail, Eli was full of surprises.
On August 27, just a few weeks before his trial was to begin, Eli agreed to plead guilty to complicity to commit murder. In return for a lighter sentence, he would testify against Barb Raber. Andy Hyde was good at getting his clients to know when it was time to cry uncle.
In an office at the sheriff’s department, Edna Boyle sat with Hyde, Detective Chuhi, Detective Maxwell, Lieutenant Garrison, and Eli Weaver.
They got the truth—or Eli’s version of it—on the record. Finally. His troubled marriage. His affairs. His discussions with Barb Raber about killing his wife. How Barb had set out one night a couple of weeks before the murder to kill Barbara but had called it off. How his fishing buddies had had trouble waking him.
“Eli was very matter-of-fact,” Boyle said later. Then the interview turned Kafkaesque. They asked him every detail about the early-morning hours when he struggled to get up and dress and answer his friends pounding on the door.
She never forgot how he answered one question.
“What struck me the most was when we asked him, ‘And that was the last time you saw your wife alive?’ and he said very coldly, ‘Yes.’
“It was chilling.”
Hyde saw the same coldness from Eli. “There was no remorse. There was some emotion, but it was all about how it was affecting him,” he said. “He was focused on ‘me—take me out of this mess.’”
It was a bit of a race between Eli and Barb, although they may not have known it at the time. The one who accepted a plea deal first would serve less time because testimony from an accomplice makes for a stronger case.
Eli agreed to the deal.
“It was a better deal than he deserved,” Hyde said.
He was sickened by Eli’s crimes. He still chokes up when he talks about reading Barbara Weaver’s diary and letters, the stories of “a father not there for his children.”
“In most cases, you do your job and move on,” he said later. “But there was something about reading those letters.” He is emotional about Barb Raber’s children, too. “Theirs was a house with an absent mother.”
There were times Hyde wanted to grab Eli and shake him. “Eli was very selfish. The story of his life was looking out for himself.”
* * *
AFTER THEIR ARRESTS, Eli and Barb went their separate ways. Of course, Eli wasn’t going anywhere. He would sit in jail until he testified against Barb.
Edna Boyle offered Barb deals, too—the first offer was twenty-three years to life, and the second was fifteen years to life plus three years for using a gun. Barb turned both down and the offers were taken off the table, for good. She wanted a trial.
John Leonard, Barb’s public defender, planned to argue that Barb was afraid of Eli because she believed he killed his wife and then tried to make it appear she was involved. There were texts that could be interpreted as Barb trying to back out of the murder.
He could say that Barb thought his plans to kill his wife were “jokes.” He could argue that Barb had been manipulated by Eli, who’d “charmed” her into giving him a cell phone and a laptop and helping plan the murder.
The defense could oppose testimony about the telephone conversations that were recorded in Pennsylvania Dutch and then translated into English on the grounds that the investigators were selective in what was transcribed.
Working in Barb Raber’s favor was the fact that the murder weapon had not been found and her fingerprints weren’t in the Weaver house. In fact, there was nothing to place her at the crime scene except a text about where to park her car.
And Leonard could put Eli on trial. Eli wasn’t on trial, because he had made the plea deal. But Leonard planned to convince the jury that the timing of Barbara Weaver’s death led to one conclusion—that Eli murdered his wife at the early end of the coroner’s time frame, about 2:00 a.m.
John Leonard had been an assistant public defender since 1998. He’d handled a few cases involving the Amish over the years, but most of the time they had been minor. Sometimes Amish young people get into trouble with alcohol during Rumspringa and there’s a fender bender involving a buggy and a car. The Amish are much more likely to be the victim of a crime than to commit one. And when it is serious, they try to keep matters “in-house” with their council of bishops.
This murder among the Amish was the biggest case he’d ever had.
Leonard was forty years old. He had dark, thinning hair, and wore wire-rimmed glasses. His face told the story of the seriousness of his client’s case. This was no laughing matter, and he often looked grim as the trial unfolded.
Two days after Eli pleaded guilty, Leonard and Barb Raber were in court for a pretrial hearing before Judge Brown. Barb waived her right to a speedy trial. Because Leonard was appointed to represent Barb late in the game, he needed more time to prepare a case. By the time a case is assigned to a p
ublic defender, the prosecution has had months to prepare and is nearly ready to go to trial.
That was the case here. Within a day of the murder, the sheriff and the district attorney had decided that Barb Raber and Eli were responsible for Barbara Weaver’s murder.
Barb Raber had not been able to raise the money needed to post bond, not even a fraction of her million-dollar bail. Leonard told the court that he had some “catching up” to do. Judge Brown approved Leonard’s request to hire a computer expert to review the phone and computer records Edna Boyle planned to introduce during the trial. He also approved the hiring of an investigator to help Leonard.
Leonard had to explain to Barb that she would remain in custody for now and that this wasn’t the type of case they would “rush into.”
He would have to scramble, though. He would have only a few weeks to plan her defense.
A key point in her trial—and later—would be that after Detective Maxwell placed her under arrest and read Barb her Miranda rights, she had asked Detective Chuhi, “Can I have an attorney?”
She had then become emotional and asked about her children. After a few moments, Chuhi asked if she understood her rights and asked if she would be willing to speak with the detectives. She said yes to both. It wasn’t until the next day that she clearly stated, “Give me a lawyer.”
Leonard hoped to prove that it was during that extremely emotional time when Barb was arrested that she had requested an attorney and was not provided with one.
There was no question that Barb’s “confession” to the police was incriminating. She had admitted that she was at the Weaver home the morning of the murder, went through an unlocked basement door, and only intended to scare Barbara, but “the gun went off” when she was standing in the bedroom doorway. But she also told the police, “I don’t even know if I done this.”
On August 21, Leonard filed a motion to suppress her statement made to police at the time of her arrest. It was denied, and the trial went forward.
What looked really bad were the texts to Eli, sent just days before the murder, showing that Barb had helped plan the murder. It didn’t prove she had committed the murder.
BARB: If we could get something in her to make her sleep hard and then get a can or two of nitrogen or CO2 gas, let it leak out under the bed, it would look like carbon monoxide poisoning.
And:
BARB: I thought if we could get that fly stuff in a spice cupcake she might not detect it.
Leonard wanted to prove that by this time Eli was impatient and desperate and that Barb became frightened of him.
ELI: I don’t care at all how it’s done, just do it.
By the morning of June 2, Barb’s fears were evident.
BARB: It’s too scary, Eli. Damn, Eli, I don’t know if I can do it. It’s too scary.
When she advised Eli not to give investigators his cell phone, Leonard would argue it was because she was convinced he had killed his wife. She was still protecting him.
Leonard thought her confession could be used to create reasonable doubt. She said she was standing at the bedroom door, but the shot had been fired at close range; she said she had taken a shotgun from her husband’s cabinet and returned it, but it wasn’t there. If her story didn’t match the facts, maybe her admission of guilt wasn’t true either.
John Leonard would try to paint a picture for the jury of a thirty-nine-year-old woman, mother of three, married for twelve years, with steady employment, who had never been in trouble with the law. She had become entangled in Eli’s schemes to murder his wife. Barb Raber would not take the stand. Leonard would speak for her. Despite depictions of defendants dramatically testifying on television or in movies, it’s risky and not often done.
Leonard could pull out all the stops—showing that Barb had been denied an attorney when she first requested one, that she was fearful of Eli, that her texts and statements were confusing enough to throw doubt on her confession.
There was no way Leonard could counter other aspects of the trial still to come. What was there to say about photographs of a dead Barbara Weaver, murdered in her bed with her children nearby?
28
Prosecution
You’re not supposed to be talking about that stuff.
—ED RABER, REMINDING HIS WIFE NOT TO TALK TO OTHER INMATES
When it came to Eli, Barb Raber never did think clearly. His other girlfriends and even the men he fished with or who cleaned his shop’s Porta-Potty laughed off his questions about how to kill his wife. Barb didn’t. Through hell and high water, during his other affairs and comings and goings from his home, she was loyal to him, in her own misguided way.
It had landed her in jail.
Barb thought it was smart to insist on a trial. “She thought Eli wouldn’t testify; she thought witnesses wouldn’t show up,” Edna Boyle said. Eli would testify and witnesses would show up. Boyle would see to that.
After meeting with Eli and the detectives, Boyle plotted the trial. The evidence, to be given by Eli, and detectives Chuhi and Maxwell, was solid. Text messages proved that Eli and Barb had planned the murder. Barb had researched various poisons and finally, without much discussion, settled on a shotgun as the murder weapon. Texts placed Barb at the murder scene. After the murder, Barb had asked Eli how to clean a shotgun and told him to stop using his cell phone until she changed the number.
The detectives would testify that there was no sign of a break-in, that burglary wasn’t the motive, and then there were all those texts.
Boyle would call David Weaver, Barb’s friend and onetime lover, to testify that she’d asked him to make the fake threatening call to the shanty phone. And she had another surprise for Barb.
* * *
NO ONE COULD argue that desperation and tragedy hadn’t enveloped Jamie Wood for most of her young adult life. They were a dark cloud that hung over her, following her, taking control. It was too bad. The young woman wasn’t stupid. She was quick on her feet. Spoke a good line. She was strikingly beautiful with thick, dark hair and lively green eyes. Yet at every fork in the road, trouble beckoned her to turn in its direction. By the time she was in her early twenties, Jamie had marked up her body with tattoos that told her sad story.
On her right shoulder an artist had inked a pair of angel wings and the name of her fiancé, a twenty-two-year-old landscaper who’d died in a car accident in Wadsworth, Ohio. Jamie hadn’t made perfect choices up to then, but her life spiraled downward afterward. At twenty-five, she found herself in the Wayne County jail, facing a charge of corruption of a minor for a sexual encounter that she insisted had been consensual.
A sex offender. It was the lowest of the low. Now she sat in jail with nothing but time to think.
How am I going to get out of this?
The answer came to her in the form of a mousy little woman who barely made eye contact with anyone.
For all of Barb’s promises to her husband that she wouldn’t gossip in jail, she had. Jamie had chatted up Barb. They had confided in each other. Barb—who wasn’t much of a mother to her own three children—became a maternal figure to Jamie.
Just in case, Jamie kept notes.
While TV and films paint an ugly picture of a jailhouse snitch and what other prisoners think of those who kiss and tell to get a reduced sentence, in reality any con that has the opportunity to get out will go for it. Jamie Wood’s criminal record had stacked up on her. Petty theft. Corruption of a minor. Parole violations. She’d been in jail before and the endless hours of waiting were wearing on her. She wanted out to see her daughter, and her release date seemed so far off.
Barb Raber was her way out.
While her cellmate opened up about her miserable life, the lightbulb glowed over Jamie’s head. When Barb was out of the cell, Jamie wrote a letter to Judge Bill Rickett, who had sentenced Jamie to jail. She told him she knew things about the Amish murder case that had grabbed headlines all summer. She wondered in her letter whether if she shared her informati
on with the detectives and prosecutor, her sentence could be reduced.
And she waited.
Not long after she sent the letter, Detective Chuhi came calling.
Later, Jamie would insist that what she knew was offered freely without the promise of anything by the authorities.
Still, she hoped to get a sentence modification in return for the details of her conversations with Barb. Detective Chuhi said he couldn’t promise anything, but he promised to send her letter along to her probation officer and to Edna Boyle.
Jamie had organized her notes into a list.
Barb Raber asked how long fingerprints remain on a gun.
Eli gave Barb the money to buy a gun for him.
Eli asked her to blow up his house. He was confident his children would go to heaven.
They had slept together.
She bought rat poison for him to give his wife.
She said they won’t find the gun so they won’t be able to charge her.
Eli hid the gun in a case outside. She thinks her prints are all over it.
Eli claimed he sold the gun.
He knew the cops were coming and hid the gun in shrubbery.
The gun is a .410 and it was bought at a gun store Barb’s cousin owns.
She talked about committing suicide by putting her blanket through holes in the top bunk and tossing it over the side and hanging herself.
She didn’t shoot Barbara Weaver. Eli asked four different people to shoot her.
He left the basement door open for her because he left his wallet in her car. She opened the door and threw it on the floor but didn’t enter the house the night of the murder. She said it was storming badly.
He told her to have two guys go to his house the night of the murder with two guns and demand to see him, then shoot Barbara because they couldn’t get him.
Detectives immediately told jail supervisors about the suicide threat, and they informed mental health personnel.
Barb had told Jamie a weird mishmash of truth and fiction, but Edna Boyle thought the woman had enough credibility to put her on the witness stand.
Despite the fact that detectives didn’t know where the shotgun was, they’d limited their search for it to Eli’s outbuildings and the Raber house.