A Killing in Amish Country: Sex, Betrayal, and a Cold-blooded Murder

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A Killing in Amish Country: Sex, Betrayal, and a Cold-blooded Murder Page 23

by Gregg Olsen


  —BARBARA WEAVER, WHOSE FAITH WAS WITH HER TO THE END

  The lives of ten children were forever changed by the murder of Barbara Weaver.

  Five of the children are Barbara and Eli’s. Two are their cousins, who were sleeping over on the night of the murder. The other three are Ed and Barb Raber’s.

  The two oldest Weaver children now live with Fannie and Cristy Troyer and their now six children. The three youngest are with another relative. For a long time all the children had bouts of crying and anxiety.

  After Eli’s sentencing, Fannie explained to Harley that his father wouldn’t be home soon. It would be a very long time.

  “Will Dad be able to attend my wedding?” Harley asked.

  Like a stone tossed into the still waters of a millpond, the rings of evil that emanated from Eli Weaver continue to reverberate. It has been several seasons of quiet soul-searching in Apple Creek. Friends and family still ask themselves why they didn’t take Eli seriously when he talked about killing his wife.

  “It just seemed like talk,” one said. “Like a joke or something. I don’t know. I couldn’t imagine that he really wanted to kill her. I was pretty wrong about that.”

  A woman who grew up with Barbara Weaver wonders if anyone ever told her friend that it’s okay to leave an abusive and disrespectful husband, even if you’re Amish. Maybe if today Eli Weaver wanted to come home after living with an English girlfriend, Barbara would say no.

  “I’d like to think that someone would have said something [to warn Barbara to leave her husband], but even now I don’t think so. The Amish want to stay separate from the world and that means keeping their own secrets,” said an observer of the case.

  “They should have divorced,” said Barbara Weaver’s girlhood friend Ruby Hofstetter, who grew up Old Order Amish. “Her church sweeps things under the rug and doesn’t deal with problems.” She concedes that counseling is more accepted now, and encouraged, among the Amish.

  Some think the murder may have had an impact on the Amish view on staying in a marriage, no matter how troubled. Samuel Miller said that church leaders recently helped a woman in a physically abusive marriage move out of her home.

  “Now there is a tendency to recognize danger,” Samuel said.

  Barbara’s murder has had an enduring effect on the Weavers’ friends and neighbors, especially the women.

  Not long after Eli was arrested, Samuel’s wife told him that the everyday sound of his entering the house through the basement and climbing up a stairway frightened her. Other Amish women expressed the same fear. They asked themselves if they needed to fear their husbands.

  “Who can you rely on if you can’t rely on your husband?” one asked.

  Gone are the days when you could trust someone “just because they are Amish,” said Samuel. The Amish have learned that technology can be used for evil purposes. He said it gives pause to the Amish who want to move the line of demarcation between the old ways and the newer.

  “When Eli went looking for trouble, the cell phone and Internet made it easier,” Samuel said.

  But Andy Hyde isn’t so sure that the Amish are more likely to, as Samuel phrased it, “recognize danger.” He has never heard of an Amish domestic violence case reaching the court, “because the bishop will tell them not to report it,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of molestation crimes in Amish families, too, but again, they are urged not to report the crime. And they could be in legal trouble because they are supposed to report it. And they will tell women they can’t leave their marriage.” He has represented formerly Amish women working to get custody of their children. “The Amish will not support their efforts to get custody,” he said.

  “It was almost the perfect murder,” Hyde said. “If they hadn’t found the text messages, if they had thrown their phones away, there would have been little or no evidence. Investigators would have gone after Eli’s girlfriends, rivals, angry husbands and boyfriends looking for who did this.”

  As to that lingering question, why didn’t Eli just leave his marriage, Hyde said it wasn’t that Eli cared so much about being Amish—he knew which would be the easier path to the freedom he wanted.

  “If he had left, he would have been shunned. If his wife is dead, they pat him on the back.”

  A few years after the murder, a man approached Hyde at an auction and introduced himself as Eli’s brother. Not to thank him for his help. Not to deliver news about Eli.

  “He wanted me to know that the rest of the family was not like Eli, that Eli was the black sheep.”

  * * *

  BARB RABER’S CONSERVATIVE Mennonite congregation still reaches out to their most infamous member. Every week the church newsletter has a reminder to those whose turn it is to write to Barb in prison.

  “We’re supposed to send her cards,” a longtime church member and family friend said. She has never sent a card. “I felt she needed to be punished.” If the friend happens to be present when a prayer is said for Barb, she participates. But other than that, “They don’t say too much in church about her.”

  Like Ed and Barb, the friend was raised Amish and left to become Mennonite. “We wanted a car; we wanted to get around,” she said.

  She sees Ed at church every Sunday, and he seems happy when he is there. “He is not over this, but it makes him happy that we send her mail. I hope she finds Christ before she dies.”

  Eli reportedly attends church services in prison. He rarely has visitors. A few years ago Eli’s bishop came to see Steve Chupp. He had heard that Steve might visit Eli in prison and encouraged him to do so.

  Steve has visited Eli three times. “He needs to know there’s hope for him. All I try to do is give him hope,” he said.

  * * *

  THE LIVES OF Barb Raber’s children are oddly better. Their grades in school have improved. Their mother used to leave the three boys home alone often. Now, an aunt helps care for them and they live, by all accounts, in a better environment.

  After his wife was arrested, the congregation stepped in to help Ed and his sons. A couple of members loaned him money, interest free, and also helped him get a mortgage. He bought a home for his children and himself. They left the house that was immaculate outside but a nightmare inside.

  “He needed help managing things, learning to make ends meet,” his friend George said. “He’s improved a lot. He’s a worker; he makes good money, and bought a home.”

  Ed visits his wife every few months. Their sons have seen their mother a couple of times.

  “I don’t think he’ll ever divorce her,” George said. “We don’t believe in divorce. He’s not angry. He has a forgiving attitude.”

  Maybe too forgiving.

  After Barb was convicted, a friend of Ed’s went to Hyde, asking if the attorney would meet and speak with Ed. His friends were concerned that he was still in denial about Barb’s role in the murder.

  Hyde agreed, and he and Ed met in a room at the courthouse. For an hour the attorney went over the evidence against Barb, including the texts. “Ed said, ‘But they never found the gun, so it can’t be proven that she did it,’” Hyde said later. He left the meeting knowing that Ed’s belief in his wife’s innocence had not been cracked.

  Ed Raber’s new home’s telephone answering system doesn’t ignore the woman who may be away for a very long time. It still tells callers they’ve reached the home of Barbara and Ed Raber. In 2010, Barb Raber lost an appeal of her conviction to the Court of Appeals, Ninth Judicial District, State of Ohio. An attorney for her argued four motions: That her statement to police that the murder was “an accident” should have been suppressed since it was given after she had asked for an attorney; that text messages should not have been admitted into evidence during her trial; that information from computer searches should also have been barred; and that the weight of evidence did not lead to a rightful conviction.

  And the question persists—why wasn’t she provided with an attorney as soon as she requested one? She was
questioned for two days before detectives took her request seriously. That doesn’t go down well with those who think Barb took the rap for Eli.

  Her appeals now nearly exhausted, Barb Raber tells anyone who will listen that she did not commit the murder. During every weekly phone conversation with her mother, Barb says again that she did not do it.

  She is incarcerated in the Ohio Reformatory for Women. Her first date with the parole board is in April 2032.

  Over time, more people seem to view her with a modicum of sympathy. They wonder just how guilty she was. Had Eli Weaver already killed his wife before dispatching Barb to the scene?

  A friend says Eli has not seen his children. Although he is still Banned, Eli’s parents write to him. And he writes letters—a lot of them.

  In the early summer of 2011, two years after the murder of his wife, Eli wrote a letter that was printed in The Budget, the weekly newspaper that serves the Sugarcreek, Ohio, area, as well as Amish and Mennonite communities throughout the Americas.

  A Penitent Heart:

  I want to apologize to my children, in-laws, family, friends, church, neighbors and entire community for all of the grief and pain I caused all of you in my involvement in the death of my wife, and loving mother, Barbara Weaver. I’m sorry that due to my selfishness all of you had to go through things nobody should ever have to go through.

  I’m sorry for all of the lies and heartache I put all of you through, while trying to be somebody I wasn’t, and I’m sorry to everyone I misled.… I pray that someday God grants me the opportunity to apologize and seek your forgiveness face to face.

  May God bless you all.

  Eli D. Weaver, Mansfield, Ohio

  Eli’s ministers and some family considered the missive insincere. It was just Eli continuing to duck responsibility for the murder of his wife. Some feel it was proof that his manipulations continue. In 2015 Eli began writing to newly widowed Amish women, plucking their names and addresses out of copies of The Budget. Was he bored—or perhaps lining up support and a home for after he is paroled? There had to be something in it for him. The women lived outside of Wayne and Holmes Counties, but news of his crimes had, of course, spread. The women were not happy to have received the letters and did not respond.

  * * *

  ONE OF ELI’S many “best friends”—all of whom were women—was okay hearing from him. Eli Weaver was never going to let her go, and part of that was fine with Tabitha. She’d loved him like a friend for a very long time and despite all the lies and deception, she could not shake off her feelings. Whenever she heard Tim McGraw’s song “My Best Friend” on the radio, she’d think of the Amish man who broke her heart.

  When a letter arrived at her home in Massillon, Tabitha dropped everything and tore it open. She hadn’t heard from Eli since he sent a birthday card a few months earlier. She settled into a chair to savor his words. His salutation: Greetings of love.

  As Tabitha read, she found herself in his world, hearing his voice. He peppered the pages with exclamation points and smiley faces. He complained about the delay in the mail. He was ecstatic that his mother still wrote to him every week.

  He filled half a page with the mundane: how he missed fieldwork, how he was looking forward to softball with the other “residents,” as he preferred to call the inmates.

  While she was interested in all of that, Tabitha had dangled a question for her friend in her last missive. She’d wondered how Barb felt about everything that had happened. “Resentful” and “bitter” was his response.

  She denies everything to everybody and gets very upset if anybody even talks about it and that’s why not too many people back home have much to do with her.

  He said he wrote to Barb and told her to confess what she’d done.

  Yes, it’s hard to admit to such a thing, but it will make her feel better and only then can healing start for her and everybody else.

  Speaking of Barb, who’d once suggested that she could tour high schools and talk to kids about the dangers of texting, Eli, too, had a plan for helping young people stay on the straight and narrow. He wanted to create some kind of group home that provided shelter and guidance for those who had stumbled.

  Tabitha had suggested a Facebook page to get things going in her previous letter and he loved the idea. He also indicated that a “top detective” from Holmes County had promised to help, and he was excited about a couple of Amish men coming to see him too.

  He ended a letter to Tabitha with a smiley face and a mention of the song they both loved, “My Best Friend.” While she was listening to it at home, he played it over and over on the CD player/radio his aunt in Pennsylvania had sent him.

  I love my music plus it drowns out most of the noise in here. My family would never approve of it.

  As always, Eli Weaver blamed the Amish for keeping him away from all the things in life that he’d wanted.

  Tabitha was being kept from something she wanted as well. She made multiple calls to the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office asking for the return of her laptop. They refused.

  “The Wayne County sheriff will protect the Amish,” she said later. “They don’t want to give them a bad reputation. Maybe my laptop has something on it they don’t want out.”

  After the trial, Tabitha added another tattoo to the sixteen that already adorned her body. On the nape of her neck, concealed by her very long black hair, she has a message borne of her experiences with an Amish man that turned her life upside down: TRUST NO ONE.

  * * *

  SOMETHING WAS MISSING from the investigation and the Raber trial and subsequent sentencing. Why had no one spoken for the victim?

  Barbara Weaver was all but absent from the proceedings. The only time Eli Weaver’s wife was mentioned during the trial was when her sister described her as “a dear friend.”

  Americans are used to victims and families giving tearful television interviews and facing down murderers in court to speak bitterly about how the crime has changed their lives forever. They pour out memories of their dead loved ones—their kindnesses, how well-loved they were, the children left behind.

  Except for a brief exchange between Eli and his father-in-law at Barbara’s funeral, no one confronted the two people convicted of her death.

  One reason there wasn’t more from her family and friends was that this had never happened before in Wayne County.

  “Facing one of our own on trial for the murder of one of our own was an event unprecedented in this community,” said an Amish friend and neighbor of Eli.

  “For the family to have remained silent at Barb Raber’s trial, and at sentencing for both Eli and Barb, screams volumes. I can see how it looks ‘cold’ to a non-Amish person. There’s a deep feeling of horror and shame that this happened.”

  If the Amish talked about Barbara, it would force them to face the outside world and they would have to give up their separateness from that world. And being isolated is central to the Amish. They keep their grief and pain private from a world they do not understand.

  Barbara Weaver’s parents may have found themselves struggling with their beliefs on forgiveness as they watched her husband on trial for the murder of their daughter, his wife. The Amish teach and believe in the necessity of forgiveness. But even for the Amish, forgiving murder is difficult, and much more so when the murderer is one of their own.

  There were no pleas for clemency or statements of forgiveness as there have been when other crimes have been committed against the Amish. Just silence.

  She is still discussed in the privacy of the Amish community. The neighbor believes Barbara would want them to forgive Eli.

  It speaks volumes about the kind of person Barbara was—nice, maybe to a fault.

  Human nature being what it is, the Amish, former Amish, and non-Amish talk about Eli more than they do about Barbara. Eli continues to provide plenty of fodder for conversation.

  For hundreds of years there were few murders perpetrated by an Amish man, and only two
before Barbara Weaver’s that were widely known or even reported to English authorities. The Amish have a history of settling things themselves. But Eli Weaver was not the first Amish man to commit ungodly acts and he won’t be the last.

  As one Amish leader said, the Amish have their good ones and bad ones, just like the rest of the world.

  Afterword

  by Karen M. Johnson-Weiner

  THE STORY OF Eli and Barbara Weaver is, unfortunately, a human story, not a particularly Amish one.

  In America, ten million men and women suffer physical violence at the hands of their intimate partners each year.

  While partner abuse is less well documented in the Amish world, it certainly exists. After all, the Amish are human. Yet Barbara Weaver’s death at the hands of her husband is unique in the Amish world, for unlike the two other murders of Amish individuals—Katie Gingerich and Hannah Stolzfus—Barbara died at the hands of her all-too-sane husband and his formerly Amish, now Mennonite, lover.

  Perhaps what makes the story of Barbara and Eli so compelling is that Eli brought the world into a church community ill-equipped to deal with it. Had Eli just left the Amish (as he had done before), Barbara would have been expected to remain single, but she would have had the support of family and church. The church community, like Barbara, was unable to handle the selfishness of the man who wanted it all, had no desire to yield to the teachings of the church, and was willing to manipulate those around him for his own ends.

  Much is made of the wife’s role in Amish church culture. The man is the head of the household and the woman is responsible for housekeeping and mothering. She is the helpmeet, a “keeper at home,” a role that is biblically defined. Titus 2 instructs women to “be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed” (Titus 2:5).

  The Amish would deny that women are less than men. Indeed, many have told me that men and women are equal according to scripture, for, as it says in Galatians, “There is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

 

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