Abandoned Prayers: An Incredible True Story of Murder, Obsession, And

by Gregg Olsen

  Meanwhile, Stutzman had taken a break from Truitt’s farm, a great relief to the Indiana man, and gone into Ohio, where he signed up for a new driver’s license and fabricated a new middle initial and birth date.

  Stutzman returned to Aztec, with his scabies cleared up, a new social security card, a new name. A new man. Yet he still had the same old problem—Danny. He planned to leave the boy in Wyoming until he had gotten back on his feet again and put Pritchett’s murder behind him once and for all.

  Eli moved into the trailer house on Chuck Freeman’s six-hundred-acre ranch near Dutchman’s Hill, in Aztec, New Mexico. He worked on the so-called Breakaday Ranch—“Either we start at the break of day or we break something everyday”—for five dollars an hour, painting, pouring cement, and putting up rails.

  Whenever he called Danny, it was from the back bedroom. On September 7, two days before Danny turned nine, he spoke with someone at the Barlows’ number for thirty-one minutes.

  The next day, Stutzman dispatched a letter to the Gingeriches. He and Danny, he said, had returned from a two-month vacation—having moved back to New Mexico on June 15. He claimed that Danny had spent July and August in a children’s summer camp—“He chose to go to this camp instead of traveling.”

  The truth was that Danny had been abandoned by his father.

  Danny said he enjoys school here more than in Texas. School started Sept. 3. He is getting tall, hard to keep in clothes. He had his 9th birthday yesterday.

  In desperation Amos Gingerich wrote to the Austin police again. Would they help find Danny now?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Just before Halloween, Dean Barlow and another man—a live-in friend, as he later described the man to police—dropped Danny off at Breakaday Ranch on the way to the American Poultry Show in Albuquerque. Barlow had packed the boy’s belongings in a box, believing the stay was going to be permanent.

  Stutzman, naturally, had other plans.

  Danny played on the farm, and Stutzman had him take pictures of him for his ads, including a shot of his Levi’s-clad backside. It wasn’t likely that taking such a photo mattered much to the boy. Neither was it likely that the boy didn’t know why his father wanted a “butt shot.” By 9 years of age, Danny had seen it all. Those who saw him a month before his death felt that the boy was showing signs of emotional wear and tear. Danny, according to the ranch foreman, Byron Larson, was “in his own little world.”

  Freeman saw different behavior.

  “That kid couldn’t sit still. He was always trashing things, cutting up the garbage cans and breaking eggs in the henhouse.”

  When Barlow returned from the chicken show, Stutzman told him to take Danny back to Wyoming.

  “My roommate is an alcoholic—this isn’t a good place for the boy to be,” Stutzman said.

  Later, Barlow told police, “Danny cried all the way to Mesa Verde. He really missed his dad.”

  Stutzman’s excuse was lame, if indeed that had been the excuse he gave to the Wyoming man. It was true that his roommate drank some, but he hardly posed a threat to the child’s safety. Further, Danny had been in and out of situations far more unsettling ever since his father had left the Amish.

  Perhaps Stutzman didn’t want the boy around because he got in the way of his fun—though even that hadn’t been a problem in the past. Regardless of the truth, however, Stutzman still projected the image of the model father.

  On November 4, he mailed a letter to the Gingeriches. An obvious forgery, the letter was a deliberate attempt to mislead the Amish about Danny’s whereabouts. Stutzman double-spaced on notebook paper and made a couple of errors with letter spacing to make the writing look childlike. He even misspelled week as weed.

  Dear Susie

  How are you? Dad and I are fine. The weather here is not very cold. I like school. I play soccer in school. My team won second place. I got my report card this weed. I got good grades. I am in third grade.

  Love, Danny

  The Gingeriches wondered if “Danny’s” letter had been in answer to their contact with the Austin police. But if Stutzman had sent the letter to stop them from looking for their grandson, he had miscalculated.

  The Eli Stutzman they knew had forged notes before—at Stoll Farms in Marshallville and at Keim’s farm in Apple Creek. They didn’t know that Stutzman had been lying when he claimed that Danny was with him in Georgia when he had actually left the little boy with cousin Abe Stutzman.

  With the Texas murder on his mind, Stutzman became increasingly irritable—he was no longer the easygoing man he had been before the trouble in Austin. He still went to parties, however, wearing his Amish clothes if a costume was needed. Friends knew that no matter what preoccupied him, Stutzman would always have time for sex and dope.

  Late one cold, fall night Kenny Hankins and Eli Stutzman were among a group partying at the Diamond Belle Saloon, at the Strater Hotel in Durango. Stutzman bristled when David Tyler approached their table.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Stutzman told Tyler, who immediately left for the hotel bathroom.

  Before Stutzman followed, he told Hankins, “If Tyler would pay me what he owes me, I’d never have to work again.”

  Hankins didn’t know what Stutzman was talking about, though he did think it might have something to do with drugs.

  “That was the last time I saw David,” Hankins said.

  On November 7, Chuck Freeman and ranch foreman Byron Larson had had enough of Eli Stutzman.

  “Byron called me and told me to get rid of the son of a bitch,” Freeman recalled later.

  If seeing Stutzman canning pears in the nude hadn’t been enough to cause a rift in the trailer house on Breakaday Ranch, there was the run-in Larson and Stutzman had after Dean Barlow dropped Danny off.

  Larson, going to the freezer next to Stutzman’s bedroom window, saw Stutzman, again nude, doing something he didn’t like. “I don’t know what he was doing. I think he had been exercising, laying on the floor naked. He pulled the curtains right quick.”

  What Larson saw was something he later refused to repeat—except to his boss.

  Chuck Freeman filled in the blanks: “Eli was jacking off and Danny was in bed with him when Byron came by the deep freeze.

  “That’s about the time he called me and said for me to get Stutzman the hell out of there!”

  Freeman asked Stutzman why he’d pulled the curtains on Larson.

  “Well,” Stutzman sniffed, “he was looking in the window.”

  Larson shot back: “I was getting something out of the deep freeze and you were by the window stark-ass naked. You didn’t really impress me—I’m built the same way, you know.”

  “Eli, we can’t have this. We live in a Baptist community—even though we aren’t Baptists!” Freeman told his friend when he gave him the boot.

  Stutzman packed up his toolbox and moved into a trailer on Kevin Whitten’s property, sharing the place with one of Whitten’s friends, Ray Peters.

  “Eli and I shared a lot,” Peters said in a 1988 interview. “We had late-night talks about religion, his family, his relationship with his father.

  “Eli thought the Amish religion was a dumb religion, a joke, because they kept changing all the rules.”

  Peters also said Stutzman laughed at the tradition of bundling. “Everyone was having sex,” he said.

  Kenny Hankins stopped by Whitten’s place to pick up Stutzman before going into Durango to party. Stutzman smoked a joint and told Hankins that he and Whitten were having some problems over his roommate at the trailer, Ray Peters.

  “Ray and I were down by the river barbecuing and messing around.”

  Stutzman implied that the messing around was sex—whether it was true or not didn’t matter. He knew it would impress Hankins.

  “Kevin came and caught us. He got real mad, real jealous.”

  • • •

  If AIDS hadn’t put a damper on the gay scene in Durango, what happened in November did.
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br />   A tourist saw the body from a passenger’s window on the Narrow Gauge Railroad the morning of November 11. The woman told her husband, but he dismissed it as a bum sleeping it off in an old military trailer behind the Automatic Transmission Exchange. When the train returned, the woman saw that the bum in jeans and suede jacket still hadn’t stirred. She and her husband notified the police.

  The tourist had discovered the battered, blood-soaked body of 36-year-old David Tyler. Tyler had been bludgeoned to death.

  “His head had been smashed like a hard-boiled egg,” said a Durango police investigator who attended the autopsy.

  The murder, a crime nearly unheard of in the bustling tourist town, was a mystery. No suspects emerged, in part because of the closeted nature of many who knew Tyler. Sketchy details finally came to light. On November 8, a bunch of gay men had partied at the Holiday Inn, in room 167 overlooking the Animas River.

  Tyler’s 1971 Suburban was found parked at the motel.

  November 29, 1985

  To Stutzman, the car must have seemed like a junker, and the price of nine hundred dollars a bit steep. He had complained to Freeman and others that the attorney in Texas had taken most of his money and that he was only making five dollars an hour at Whitten’s place.

  But on November 29, Stutzman put three hundred dollars down on a 1975 AMC Gremlin at Neil’s Auto Plaza in Farmington. A week later he paid another three hundred dollars and took the car from the Auto Plaza’s lot.

  Dennis Slaeter, whom friends considered a “gentle giant,” was only 24 when he was murdered in a storage room at Junction Creek Liquors in Durango. The Fort Lewis College student from Missouri had been shot in the back of the head. Cash from the store was missing.

  There was no evidence of a struggle, though two possibilities easily explain that. Slaeter could have been forced into the basement storage room at gunpoint. Or he could have known the killer.

  For jolted Four Corners’ gays, it increased their paranoia. Slaeter had known David Tyler, had used drugs Tyler provided, and had been to his house. Some thought the college student might have been gay also.

  Someone out there is killing gay men, Louise Hanson thought.

  It had been more than three years since a murder was last committed in Durango. Now, in the space of less than a month, two men were dead—two men who had known each other.

  Around that time Kevin Whitten noticed that a Uberti rifle and a Colt Sauer were missing from his ranch, though how he could possibly notice anything missing would be beyond anyone who knew the man. Like the NRA’s worst nightmare, Whitten kept his guns scattered throughout his place. Easy access was one thing, but a gun in every other room was, even he admitted, careless.

  He confronted Stutzman, who said he hadn’t taken the guns. He said he thought Ray Peters had them.

  Whitten asked Peters about the guns, but Peters denied having them. Whitten figured it had to be Peters who was lying. The Eli Stutzman he knew was a study in honesty and good Amish values. What he didn’t know was that Stutzman had become skilled at implicating others: he had said that Abe Stutzman was involved with drugs and that that was why he left Greenville, Ohio; that Ed Stoll had stolen parts from a store and that that was why he left Stoll Farms; that “Jay” had killed Pritchett . . . it was always someone else.

  • • •

  Before leaving the Four Corners for Lyman, Stutzman made arrangements with Kenny Hankins to take care of some boxes he needed stored.

  “There isn’t much room in the back of the Gremlin,” he said, indicating that he wanted to save room for Danny’s things.

  Hankins also agreed to take care of Stutzman’s mail, holding it until he got to where he was going.

  On December 10, Stutzman pawned Whitten’s missing Uberti and Colt at King’s Pawn in Durango. It netted him $210.

  He needed all the money he could get.

  Stutzman stopped in at the Farmington K-Mart and purchased a blue sleeper and mailed a letter and a Christmas card to Al Jorgensen, a Missouri farmer who had “met” Stutzman through an Advocate personal ad and had been corresponding with him for a couple of months. Though Stutzman dated the letter December 11, he did not mail it until two days later—the day he left the Four Corners to pick up Danny from the Barlows. In the letter, he said that Danny might not be with him when he came east—that the boy would rather spend Christmas with the friends he was staying with; that he didn’t, after all, relate well with Stutzman’s family. . . .

  Jorgensen received the letter on December 16. By then, of course, Danny Stutzman wasn’t going anywhere. Ever.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  December 15, 1985

  Just to the right of the center-fold in an atlas where the rectangular state of Kansas is usually cut into two squares is Salina, Kansas. Salina is at the crossroads of U.S. 81, which turns into U.S. 135 en route south to Wichita, and the state’s main east-west route, U.S. 70. From Salina, it’s less than one hundred miles north on 81 to Chester, Nebraska.

  Salina is the hub of Saline County, so named for the Saline River, which joins the Smoky Hill River at the point where the town was founded in the 1850s. Local folklorists tell visitors that Salina is an Indian word meaning “Where two rivers meet.”

  In all directions outside of Salina lie the small towns that look with neither envy nor scorn at the city—at least, that’s how their inhabitants view Salina, with its population of 45,000. It is a place, a necessity, for shopping, and it is a place to go for services that cannot be supported in towns less than a tenth its size. The bigger cities—Topeka and Wichita—are far enough away that they are reserved for special trips.

  The small towns that pockmark the smooth fields of wheat blanketing Saline County are blessed with names that nicely fit their founders’ heritage or their plentiful natural resources. Holland and Bavaria, and Gypsum and Wells, are a few.

  It had been snowing heavily off and on during the days before December 15—the day Stutzman found his way to the little town John Yost called home. A 30-year-old school-teacher, Yost had also met Eli Stutzman through an Advocate personal ad.

  Yost had not yet found holiday cheer, though he planned to decorate his place and put up a tree when Eli and Danny Stutzman came to stay, though he didn’t know exactly when the Stutzmans would arrive. The weather, of course, was always a factor for car travel. Further, Stutzman had been vague about his plans when he last spoke to Yost. He had said he would be driving up from the Four Corners to Wyoming to pick up Danny at the foster parents’ home.

  “My mother’s sick. She might be dying,” he had said, before leaving for Wyoming. “It might be the last time Danny and I get to see her. She’s been asking for him.”

  It was just after daylight, about 7:00 A.M. Sunday, when Yost answered the front door to find Stutzman standing before him, backlit by the early morning light. Stutzman seemed smaller than Yost had imagined, but that was fine. He told himself not to make a snap judgment based on physical appearance. Stutzman was also shy, almost a little sheepish, as he stood in the doorway. He even hung his head slightly.

  Of course, his son had been dumped in a ditch in Thayer County, Nebraska, only hours before.

  Yost was surprised the little boy was not with his father. Stutzman had talked often about how much he had missed his son during the months they had been separated.

  Stutzman explained that he had called ahead before leaving for Wyoming and that Danny had seemed so happy, looking forward to Christmas with the Barlows, that he had let him stay with them.

  “Danny was so excited. There were presents under the tree for him. He didn’t want to leave.”

  Yost didn’t think to ask about Stutzman’s mother and how she was doing, even though she was supposedly the reason Danny and his father were going to Ohio in the first place. In fact, the Kansas man’s judgment was a little clouded by stress. All Yost could focus on was how nervous he was about meeting this Amishman. He had built his expectations higher than the tallest popl
ar in Saline County.

  Yet Stutzman didn’t look too good, at least not as he did in the photographs he had sent with his letters. In those shots, Stutzman’s face seemed fuller, almost youthful. Yost rationalized that Stutzman’s haggard appearance was the result of too many hours behind the wheel. Considering Stutzman’s arrival time, Yost calculated that he must have been driving all night. Understandably, he looked exhausted.

  Yost had no way of including in his calculations what had happened a few hours prior to Stutzman’s arrival. He didn’t know that only hours before Danny Stutzman had been abandoned in a remote ditch just across the state line.

  The day was spent visiting Yost’s parents and sister—on the off-chance that the two gay men became a serious couple—and eating a hearty meal at a local truckstop. Yost even drove the Gremlin that Stutzman boasted having paid only nine hundred dollars for.

  “Don’t you think I got a great deal on it?” he asked.

  After the men had sex, two things would always stand out in Yost’s mind—the foremost one being the size of Stutzman’s genitals. Yost had never seen anything like them before—Stutzman’s penis and testicles seemed abnormally large. Yost asked him about it, and Stutzman confided that he was not the only one in the family who had been so endowed. Three of his brothers were that way also.

  The other thing Yost noticed was the way Eli Stutzman’s body felt. His muscles were incredibly tense; they felt like steel.

  “I thought his body would clank when I touched him—he was so stiff, so hard. I chalked it up to being a ranch hand or construction worker. Or maybe he was as nervous as I was,” Yost later said.

  Yost didn’t worry about AIDS. After all, he had been negative on his AIDS test, and Stutzman had reported the same on a test he claimed he’d had performed in Durango. And if Stutzman hadn’t wanted to use a condom, Yost could understand. He didn’t want to use one either.