by Gregg Olsen
“Barb.”
John Leonard took over questioning and asked Tabitha about the nature of the texts she and Barb Raber had exchanged.
Tabitha said they had discussed what they had in common—Eli had talked to them both before the murder about killing his wife.
“And … she also texted you,” Leonard asked, “and said ‘I don’t know what to say. He said remarks and so did I but nothing serious,’ right? Do you remember that?”
“Yeah.”
“And you said, ‘Same here, we joked but now I think he was serious.’ And not to be flippant but obviously it’s a good reason to believe he was serious at this point, right?”
“Yes.”
“And in fact, he’d made comments like that to you before?”
“Yes.”
“And there’s been testimony he made these comments to other people as well. You didn’t—and I’m not saying you did anything wrong. You didn’t think that these were serious enough that you need to call the police or anything?”
“No.”
“I mean, had Mr. Weaver been making comments that you did take seriously you would have contacted the police ahead of time, right?”
“Right.”
“And, in fact, you did contact the police when you heard about what happened, right?”
“Yes.”
Actually, Tabitha had not contacted the police to volunteer that she was a friend of Eli’s with possible information. Her former boyfriend had.
“And you did the right thing. I respect that. So Eli had made comments, you didn’t think anything of it and you got a message from Ms. Raber saying that she was also aware of these comments and had made some, but really didn’t think it was serious?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Does that sound like pretty much the crux and the full amount of your conversation about that? Just surprise, couldn’t believe he really did it?”
“Right, yeah, we just were both in disbelief.”
The defense attorney wanted to show that Barb Raber was just like Tabitha—not a killer, just someone the killer had joked with.
No one thought to ask Tabitha if Barb had mentioned a shotgun.
33
It Was Lust
He looks at me and lies. Sometimes I already know the truth, other times I find out the truth later.
—BARBARA WEAVER, IN A LETTER TO HER COUNSELOR
Every member of the courtroom had been waiting for the big moment, when Eli Weaver would take the stand to tell his side of the story. They wanted understanding of Eli and Barb Raber’s murderous affair.
Affair. The word sickened the Amish who filled the gallery. It was so trivial a word. None saw what Eli and Barb had engaged in as anything short of an abomination, an affront to the laws of God and the rules that governed the Andy Weaver Amish and Conservative Mennonites. Eli had decimated a solid chunk of the Ten Commandments and the Amish Ordnung. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not kill.
The Amish who made up almost the entire gallery barely looked Eli in the eye. It was doubtful that many would truly forgive him for what he had done, though they said they would.
“They say they forgive, but they never really forget. He brought shame and attention to an entire community in a way that just doesn’t wash well,” said an observer of the trial. “Forgive? That’s a tall order even for the Amish.”
There would be a volley of questions, thrown first by prosecutor Edna Boyle and then by defense attorney John Leonard.
Leonard would put Eli on trial. He wasn’t on trial because he had copped a plea. But Leonard wanted to hold Eli responsible for manipulating Barb Raber and maybe, just maybe, convince the jury that there was some doubt about who actually committed the murder.
Mark Weaver, Steve Chupp, and others were there because the local newspaper had said Eli would be testifying against Barb Raber. As for her side of the aisle, Barb’s husband and a few of his friends were scattered on the benches.
Mark Weaver watched as Eli shuffled into the courtroom, shackled. Eli was chained at his hands and feet. Mark—his loyal friend, neighbor, and hunting and fishing companion—sat watching Eli take the small steps, dragging his chains like Marley’s ghost, across a dead silent courtroom. It was awkward for Mark, who was the best Amish husband, father, son, and friend he could be. His faith and his life were important to him. Mark would learn a lot about Eli that day—things he wished he never learned.
Deputies unchained Eli’s hands but left the shackles on his feet. Eli was sworn in and took the stand. Wearing an orange Wayne County jail-issued jumpsuit and slippers, Eli folded himself into the witness box in Judge Brown’s courtroom. But for his bushy beard, he could have been any young offender. He looked appropriately contrite, lowering his gaze as Boyle plowed through the rudimentary questions that established his name and relationships, and the connections to the story that had led him to that place on the front pages of the local newspapers and the front of the courtroom.
“Mr. Weaver, how was your marriage?” Boyle asked.
Eli looked at her. There was no need for lying, but he did anyway.
“It wasn’t the best but we always tried to work things out the best we could.”
The prosecutor pressed the witness. “Did you have problems?”
“At times, yes.”
“And why did you have problems in your marriage?”
He answered in a near whisper. Spectators strained to hear. “I guess I just didn’t love my wife the way I should have loved her.”
“And did there come a point in time where you left the Amish faith?”
“Uh-huh.”
Boyle reminded him to speak up. The proceedings were being recorded in the event that Barb Raber would find some grounds for appeal in the proceedings.
Boyle asked him why he’d left the faith.
Eli paused before answering. “I just kind of wanted some more—a little bit more freedom than what I had and I wasn’t happy with what I had I guess.”
His answer was vague and evasive. She pushed for clarity.
“I guess I went out, you know, into the world and got myself a truck and everything. I took what I promised to God and to church and the witnesses, you know, I just kind of laid that aside.” He told the court how he left his family to live with Shelley for six months before returning home to his wife and children.
As Mark listened, he thought about how he first met Barbara and her children. Eli was living with the English woman at the time. As long as he was doing that and driving a vehicle, Barbara wouldn’t permit him to be around home much. Mark and his wife, Elsie, and their children became fond of Barbara and her little ones.
“And when you went back home what happened?”
Eli hesitated. He told the court that he’d gone before the bishop, confessed his sins, and promised never to be unfaithful again. The Amish took him back. Many in the courtroom would have liked to see a do-over on that decision.
Next, Boyle questioned Eli about Amish life and how the Ordnung varied depending on which group a member had been born into. Eli danced around the particulars a little. He said he was Old Order.
To the Amish in the courtroom, it was peculiar that Eli didn’t state that he was Andy Weaver Amish. The prosecutor had him explain that his home didn’t have electricity but did have natural gas lights and running water. Eli didn’t volunteer that he wasn’t supposed to be using natural gas in the home.
“And the use of telephones, were you permitted to have telephones in your home?” she asked.
Eli shook his head. “No, not in the home.”
“Okay, and how did you communicate?”
“Well, I had a phone in the shop, you know, where I had my business. You know, I could communicate that way.”
“So in your order you’re not permitted to have a phone in your home. What about cell phones?”
“No.”
“Text messaging?”
“No.”
“And access to the Internet?”
“No.”
“Those are all things that are prohibited but did you have a cell phone?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“And how did you get your cell phone?”
Finally he said the defendant’s name. “Through Barb Raber.”
As Barb Raber sat in the courtroom and heard Eli Weaver recount their relationship, she slumped into her chair looking afraid and sad. There was something strange about how a younger man could have found her sexually appealing. She was ten years older than he but would never be confused with the kind of glamorous cougar depicted on television.
Her affairs with men, including Eli, had nothing to do with her looks. They never had.
She wasn’t just a steady sexual outlet for Eli—even when he was involved with other women. He could count on her to understand him. When he was shunned by the Amish, she gave him solace. She also gave him the tools to live like the non-Amish. She was there, available to him when he wanted the kind of sex his wife wouldn’t participate in.
She shocked people. She was Conservative Mennonite, but would “talk dirty” in the presence of Eli’s friends when she drove them fishing.
Boyle wasted no time in going for the heart of the matter. “And what was your relationship with Barb Raber?”
Eli appeared uncomfortable, again refusing to meet her direct gaze. He shifted in the chair. “I mean,” he stammered, searching for the words, “we were good friends but, you know, it was more than friends. You know, we had a sexual relationship.”
“And when did that sexual relationship begin?”
“Approximately six years ago.”
“And how long did that relationship last?”
“Till about three weeks prior to what happened.”
“What happened” was his wife’s murder. Throughout Eli’s testimony, he tried to avoid the subject.
Mark was stunned. He had known Eli and the taxi lady had once had an affair, but he thought it had ended years ago.
Boyle moved on to the subject that was most shocking to Eli’s Amish community: how Eli used forbidden technology to break his marriage vows. He’d quickly learned how to meet women on MocoSpace.
“Okay, and what is that?” she asked.
“It’s for, you know, you can meet friends. You know, you can take it further if you want to take it further.”
“So is it like a chat room?”
“Right.”
“And so how did you access Moco—”
“With my cell phone.”
“So you had Internet access on your cell phone so it was a pretty fancy cell phone you had?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“So you would communicate online with your cell phone. Did you have any—and what was your screen name?”
“Amish Guy.”
“Did you have another screen name?”
“I did at first but I changed it. You know, I didn’t use that one.”
Boyle let it go. She didn’t make him say the name—Amish Stud—out loud. Boyle asked him about his other female companions. There was Cherie, whom he’d met in a sex chat room. There was Tabitha. There were others, too.
Including, of course, Misty.
“And how did you meet her?”
Eli looked on. “Chat line.”
“And what was the nature of your relationship with her?”
Eli hesitated a little before answering.
“It started out as friends, you know,” he finally said. “We got into, you know, we had a sexual relationship and she—I got her pregnant and she had a child.”
Mark sat up straighter. Eli had fathered a child out of wedlock? It was the first he’d heard of it.
“How old is your child with Misty?”
“One.”
“And did you pay her child support?
Eli answered quickly as though his response would put him in a favorable light—despite all that he’d done.
“Yes,” he said.
“And how did you make those payments?”
“Normally by check unless she needed it right away she came down and got it in cash. It wasn’t always by check.”
“You had these relationships with these other women so were there times where there were—you’re having relationships with multiple women at the same time?”
Again, Eli wanted to make it clear he wasn’t some kind of sexual marauder.
“No.”
The prosecutor wasn’t buying it.
“But you had an ongoing relationship with Barb Raber while you were having a relationship with these other women?” she asked.
He finally conceded the fact. “Yes,” he said.
* * *
FINALLY ELI WEAVER admitted that despite the conditions under which he was forgiven and returned to Amish life, he continued to break the rules. His bishop had warned him not to ride with taxi lady Barb Raber anymore. He did anyway. A pin dropped in that courtroom would have sounded like a knife thrown to the floor.
The betrayal was beyond belief. The Amish spectators did everything they could to remain expressionless, but that was difficult. The man in the witness box had used all of them, their faith, and their culture as a way to have sex with women. He’d used being Amish as a lure.
Barb Raber was Eli’s confidante—not the only one, but the one with whom he had the longest history. She wasn’t just a “friend with benefits” to Eli—her downfall was that she’d allowed herself to fall under his ruthless spell. She thought that he needed her. She believed that sex with him was merely a conduit to some kind of deeper relationship. She was using sex to make her troubled friend and lover feel better, and to escape her own messy life. It was true that Eli’s other friends and sex partners might laugh off his talk of an unhappy marriage. Barb didn’t. He learned that when he talked of problems in his marriage, and deadly solutions, she wasn’t laughing like the others. She was listening.
Prosecutor Boyle asked Eli to explain what happened after he introduced the idea of getting rid of his wife.
“She just kind of took it and ran with it, you know. Just like she’s going to take and try and find a way to help me, you know, get it accomplished.”
Eli’s description of how the murder was planned could have sounded juvenile if it hadn’t been so deadly.
“What do you have in mind?” Eli said Barb had asked him. “And I was like well, you know, we could poison her, you know, or stuff like that and it just … one thing led to another.”
Barb, he insisted, was really good at research. Boyle asked for a rundown of killing methods he and Barb had considered.
“There was Tempo [a bug killer]. We had the Golden Malrin, which is a fly killer, you know. And there was some gas stuff, you know, that she did some research on it, sleeping pills.”
“So she did research on gases, poisons, pills and she told you about this research?”
“Yes,” he said.
“And so did you ever attempt to use any gases or poisons?”
“The gases we didn’t, no. I mean, the sleeping pills I tried, you know, once for myself.”
That was the night a few weeks before the murder when he had crushed sleeping pills into a glass of pop. He watched his wife sip it and spit it out.
“And where did you get the pills from?”
Without looking in her direction, he named Barb Raber.
Along with other church friends of Ed’s, a woman named Helen attended the trial that day. She never went back. “I couldn’t handle it,” she said. “I couldn’t take hearing about how they had planned the murder.”
Mark had trouble stomaching the details, too. How could Eli talk so nonchalantly about poisons, sleeping pills, and murder?
Boyle continued her questioning about the sleeping pills.
“Did you tell her what you were going to do with those pills?”
“She thought it was for my wife. You know, which it was and it wasn’t. You kn
ow, I mean I was going to take them myself after what all I’d been through and everything.”
No one who knew Eli ever took that seriously.
“Eli kill himself?” a friend asked after the trial. “No way. That guy was all about himself. He was a complete narcissist. He thought that everyone should kowtow to his needs. It was like his wife, his girlfriends, whatever, were only there to serve him. He was too selfish to kill himself. That’s why he used Barb Raber.”
The prosecutor asked Eli to describe his last in-person conversation with his alleged coconspirator. It was the day before the murder when she drove Eli and his friends. By then they had a plan and had confirmed it by texting. Eli would leave the house about 3:00 a.m. to go fishing with a group of men. He had talked with her in person while the others were tying down the boat. They had gone over plans for him to leave the basement door unlocked.
This hit close to home because Mark had been there; he had witnessed Eli and Barb sneak private moments to discuss something that they didn’t want the others on the trip to overhear. In fact, Mark had been subpoenaed to testify, but he would not be called.
Boyle asked Eli how he spent the few hours he was home before he left again and before his wife was murdered. He had carried the three children upstairs. Locked up his store. Fed his deer. Took a shower. Had a cigarette and a cup of coffee.
“And do you remember what the weather was like that night?”
“Yeah, it was raining. It was—we had a big thunderstorm rolling through.”
“And did you talk to your wife at all that night about your plans for the next day or did she already know where you were going?”
“She already knew that I was going fishing.”
Eli would have, at the most, two hours of sleep before he was picked up by friends to go walleye fishing at Lake Erie.
When his friends arrived to pick him up—at about 3:00 a.m.—they couldn’t wake him. They pounded on his door and after several minutes, he answered it. Eli said Barbara had helped him get his clothes together.
“And that was the last time you saw your wife alive.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
Steve, who had been driving that morning, had been subpoenaed too, but prosecutors didn’t need him to describe the morning because Eli had agreed to plead guilty. It was surreal for him to hear in Eli’s own words what went on that morning.