Left Where God Could Find Him: Amish Serial Killer Eli Stutzman

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, campers, Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true
crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie and I'm Whitney,
and we're here to tell you a true story that
is way stranger than fiction or roasting murderers and marshmallows
around the true crime campfire.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
The thing about serial killers is that it seems so
obvious to us after the fact, right Their behavior is
so outrageous and so anti social that we're always left
wondering why nobody noticed. Eli Stutsman's strange behavior was written
off by everyone that knew him. He was quiet and odd,
but being raised Amish, who could blame him to the Amish,

(00:43):
his time spent with the English gave him some strange habits.
No one really blinked when he stabbed himself in order
to get himself out of a sticky situation. No one
wondered about why he lied constantly, and maybe if they did,
Eli's son and at least four other people would still
be alive. This is part two of Left where God

(01:03):
could find him Amish serial killer Eli Stutsman and heads
up that there is some discussion of child abuse and
child sexual abuse In this episode, we do not go
into any deep detail, but it's in there. So campers.

(01:26):
We're back in Shrieve, Ohio, specifically Amish country. Eli Stutsman
had decided that he was going to return to the
Schwartz and Troober sect in which he was raised. Eli
sold all his English clothes, sold his car, and bought
a buggy. He told a friend that he had heard
that Ida was waiting for him, and that he wanted
to do right by her. When he moved back in

(01:48):
with an Amish man, the community at large was skeptical.
They thought his hair was too short, that he wasn't
showing the right kind of repentance, or they heard that
he still had his driver's license. Some thought he wasn't
even mentally well enough for marriage.

Speaker 3 (02:03):
Yeah, to the Amish, Eli's refusal to abide by their
rules was proof of his mental illness.

Speaker 2 (02:09):
It's interesting because it's like they knew something wasn't quite
right about him, but because church and community was so
central to them, his ambivalence about both was proof. Like
for them, that's all it could be. His father, though,
was pleased and agreed to have one of Eli's brothers
take him to confession. The Amish are remarkably forgiving though,

(02:29):
you know, as long as you do what they want,
and despite his history, Eli was welcomed back with open arms.
He was even rehired as a teacher at the one
room schoolhouse. Later, when his crimes came to light, they
justified this by saying he was a better teacher than
a farmer. That's fine.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
Then.

Speaker 2 (02:49):
Eli's engagement to Ida was formally announced in October, and
the couple went in to get their state mandated blood tests.
At the time, most states required couples, even Amish couples,
to be tested for syphilis and gonorrhea before marriage. This
is a public health effort. The state reported that the
blood tests were unacceptable and the couple couldn't get a

(03:09):
marriage license, and to the Amish, blood test might as
well have been witchcraft, and Ida and her family didn't
really understand the significance of Eli failing the blood test.
Most Amish believed it had something to do with genetics
and having children. Eli told Ida that he knew a
doctor that would help them forge the blood test so
they would pass, but Ida didn't approve of the dishonesty

(03:31):
and told him no. Shortly after, Eli showed up at
the Gingrich's house showing a past blood test. He told Ida,
I drank some herb tea my doctor prescribed, and it
fixed my blood. Ida was thrilled, but her father, who
was suspicious of Eli and knew that Ohio was testing
for STIs, straight up asked if he was lying. Eli. Ever,

(03:54):
the proficient Liar looked him square in the eye and
insisted he was telling the truth. Eli's brothers Abe, thought
that maybe it was their father, One Hand Eli, that
convinced a doctor to sign off on the tests. He
later told author Greg Olsen that he thought his father
quote didn't want to lose his grip on Eli, and
that marrying a nice Amish girl was away for One

(04:16):
hand Eli to control his defiant son. I'm not sure
whether Eli actually got treatment for his sdis but I
think it's pretty likely. The treatment for both styphilis and
gonerrhea was just penicillin, and it was obviously readily available
in the seventies. Eli had to lie in order to
portray himself as pure, and he wanted to prove to

(04:37):
Ida that he was good enough for her. He actually
refused to use any protection with his partners. He told
some of them I ain't bucking in no sock when
they tried to get him to use a condom. Charming.
Ida and Eli were married on Christmas Day nineteen seventy five.
Ida told her sister, I think Eli is a weak man.

(04:58):
I know I can be a help to him. Lord
have mercy's the Amish. I can fix some ladies.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
Run.

Speaker 2 (05:05):
I'd a run on the day. Though her friends thought
she seemed unhappy about what. They weren't sure, but her
unhappiness wasn't enough for Ida to call off the wedding.
As the couple started setting up their new home, i'd
have found out that she was pregnant. Eli, whether he
liked it or not, was now pinned down with the Amish.

(05:26):
The Amish have strange, often hypocritical loopholes about using modern conveniences.
They can't own a phone, but they can use somebody else's.
They're not allowed to drive, but they can get someone
else to drive them around if needed. Driving is how
a guy named David met Eli. David ran a cab service,
and the Amish often got rides from him. One night,

(05:48):
clearly drunk, Eli offered him twenty dollars if David would
let Eli perform oral sex on him. David remembered that
a friend of Eli's had told him that Eli was
obsessed with sex and hard all the time. Ew but
he had brushed this off his gossip. Now though Eli
was all over him, David said, now, thank you. But

(06:10):
Eli increased his offer to twenty five dollars. David again
told him new and Eli offered him sixty dollars. Finally,
David kicked him out of his cab. And can you
freaking imagine, like you agreed to get an Amish guy
a ride somewhere and the next thing you know, he's like, hey,
when I hop on my junk, Like that would just

(06:31):
be so surreal, Like that is the last thing I.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
Expected you to say, yes, exactly. At home, poor Ida
was left by herself more often than not. She had
no idea where her husband went, and he never told
her he would be gone for days at a time,
and poor Ida, heavily pregnant, had to manage on her own.
She told a friend, I don't know what I would
do if I needed to go to the midwife to

(06:53):
have my baby. I wouldn't know where to find Eli.
And we see this a lot actually with serial killers.
That just go, they just leave, oh yeah, and no
one knows where they are, and they always come back
with excuses, but it's always that they just leave without
telling anybody, and then it's just accepted.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
Because they don't care how you feel, you know, It's
just it's all about them and what they want to
do in the moment.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
Luckily, Eli was home when Ida went into labor, and
on September seventh, nineteen sixty six, Daniel Eli Stutsman was born.
Ida named him after her brother, and obviously his middle
name after his father. He had glossy blue eyes and
blonde hair even as an infant, Eli, in another act
of defiance toward the Amish, requested that his son get

(07:37):
vaccinated and circumcised, both of which were extremely uncommon requests
for an Amish man. But at this point I don't
think Eli considered himself Amish, nor do I think he
planned on staying with the Amish. Six months later, the
young family moved into their own farm, truly alone for
the first time in their marriage. Then Ida got pregnant again.
I'da hoped that a second baby would fix things, but

(08:00):
they only got worse.

Speaker 2 (08:01):
Why Why would another baby fix things?

Speaker 3 (08:03):
Why are people like this, I don't know, I do.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
Not know, frustrate, like, oh yeah, no problem, let's add
a whole bunch more stress. That'll fix everything.

Speaker 3 (08:12):
Come on. I think it's I think it's like, oh,
he's hardwired to love this baby, and if I give
him another baby, he will love me. And it's like,
that's not how things work at all. Greg Olsen, whose
book Abandoned Prayers we use as a primary source, wrote
to Eli Stutsman, another baby would not have been seen

(08:32):
as a joy, but another impediment to his freedom, another
nail in the coffin. Eli ran around even more. He
started selling horses to people outside the community, and he
was often seen in cars with englishers. Ida's family, the Ginggriches,
were concerned for their daughter, but in Amish culture it's
seen as improper to intercede with a married couple's business.

(08:52):
You know, Ida was Eli's now none of their concern.
God had joined them in matrimony. Whatever happened now was
in God's hands. Ida told her family that Eli wasn't
doing well. She didn't clarify except to say, through tears,
I don't know what to do. I try everything I
can think of, yet nothing seems to work. Her family

(09:14):
told her to pray, to which she said, I can't
handle him, and I don't think Eli loves me. Eli,
for his part, played the part of the doting husband.
He asked Ida's father if he would build some steps
fa their well. She was having heart problems, Eli said,
from rheumatic fever that she'd had as a child. That

(09:34):
was strange, though Ida's father hadn't ever heard of her
having those issues. On July eleventh, nineteen seventy seven, a
foul storm blew into the Stutsman's farm. Eli told a
farm hand working that day that lightning struck the barn,
but when the boy rushed with him to the barn,
the boy, also named Eli, saw nothing. Another Eli, I

(09:58):
just can't Eli's all the weight down.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
It is.

Speaker 3 (10:04):
Eli's and abes Those are the two most commentaries, Eli
kept insisting, pointing at a beam high above their heads.
The young Eli still saw nothing, but when Eli ordered
him to get a bucket of water to pour on
the granary, he ran and did it. Later, an attorney
stopped by the Stutsman farm to help and Ida write
a will. Eli told him about the lightning strike too,

(10:27):
even showing him where the lightning had allegedly broken a
window and started a fire. There were embers on the
ground of the barn, but there was no shattered glass
under where the window had been broken. Later, the farm
hand said he hadn't seen any embers when Eli initially
led him to the barn. After looking at the barn,
the lawyer sat down with Eli and Ida. In the
event of Ida's death, Eli would get everything and vice

(10:50):
versa if he were to die. If they both died,
it would all be left to Danny. The will wasn't
valid yet, it still needed to be formally typed and witnessed,
which wouldn't be done until later that week. The attorney
left the farm at eight thirty pm. The couple went
about at nine p m. And the house was quiet
until midnight, when Eli, the farm hand, was woken up suddenly.

(11:11):
He wasn't sure what woke him, but when he got
his senses he saw a bright, flickering light outside. The
barn was on fire. He ran to get Eli and Ida,
but when he got to their room, they were both missing,
and Danny was alone sleeping in his crib.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
The farm hand wondered in a panic why the couple
hadn't woken him up to help. A fire would be
devastating for the farm. Farm hand Eli rushed outside where
he saw Eli on the porch. Eli's eyes were pitch black,
only rimmed in blue, and he commanded the boy to
run to the next farm over, owned by an English
couple to get help. Meanwhile, Eli started to get equipment

(11:48):
out of the barn. As the kids started running, he
saw something that made his blood go cold. Ida Stutsman
lying on the ground, motionless near the burning barn. As
he ran to her, he could feel the blistering heat
from the barn. She was far too close to the blaze.
Her cheek and hand were seared bright pink. He tried

(12:08):
to shake her. Ida, Ida, what's wrong? I'd a wake up?
He begged her to hear him, but she didn't move.
He doubled back to let Eli know his wife was injured.
When he got back to Eli, he seemed angry that
the boy hadn't listened to him. Go to the neighbors.
Now get the doctor too, he barked. He seemed to
be aware of Ida's condition already, even in his panic.

(12:32):
As he sprinted toward the neighbor's farm hand Eli wondered
why Stutsman seemed more preoccupied with the equipment than his
injured wife, or why Eli hadn't told him that Ida
was injured in the first place. A neighbor, woken up
by the sound of the fire, sprinted across the road
after telling his wife to call nine one one. He
didn't see anyone outside, so he assumed that no one

(12:53):
was awake, but as he called for Eli, the man
himself came tearing around the barn. Eli seemed hysterical and
told the neighbor, We've got to get my wife out.
She's trapped in the barn, so all of a sudden,
he's all worked up. He was fine a second ago, right.
The neighbor followed him and found Ida in the barns
attached milkhouse, feet closest to the door and head inside.

(13:15):
Eli and the man grabbed her while Eli said something
about a heart attack and took her out of the flames.
The neighbor noticed that after his initial reaction, Eli seemed
eerily calm, much different than his previous shaky, panicky demeanor.
The neighbor felt for Ida's pulse, but felt nothing when
Eli left the homage He worked for a time as

(13:36):
an orderly and had been trained in CPR. But as
they waited for the fire department, he did nothing but
stare at the flames that rose higher and higher. Fire
department arrived and immediately got to work extinguishing the blaze.
Eli's neighbor waved over the fire Chief Melweiss and told
him that a woman needed help. As soon as he
saw her, Weis knew that she was dead, but would

(13:58):
wait for the paramedics to at her. He started asking
Stutsman questions twice. Eli was understandably nervous, but his reactions
still struck him as odd. Eli never once asked about
his wife, didn't ask about where the paramedics were, didn't
ask about their unborn child, didn't seem concerned for her
at all. The paramedics pronounced id to dead at the scene.

(14:22):
She was twenty six years old. Sheriff's deputy Phil Carr
arrived at around twelve forty pm. He spoke to Chief Wis,
but didn't bother to interview anyone else at the scene.
It seemed pretty straightforward and he didn't feel like he
needed any more information. He did some basic measurements and
noticed a large milk pail and some other items around

(14:42):
the entrance of the barn. Sheriff Jim Frost took a
cursory glance at the scene, but immediately headed toward the
hospital to talk to Eli Stutsman. He knew Eli Frost's
department had devised the hair brain sting operation that resulted
in Eli's stabbing himself. You know that we discussed in
the last episode. Investigators who spoke to Eli noticed he

(15:04):
wasn't super emotional about Ida's death, but they didn't really
find that strange, and the Amish were not expressive people.
None of the investigators thought it was strange that Ida,
in her pregnant state, had stormed into the barn to
save the milk cans. She was Amish. They thought the
Amish would run into a burning barn to save a
milk vat in some equipment. They didn't question Eli's story

(15:27):
about Ida's heart, although she'd never been diagnosed. They didn't
connect Eli's violent and criminal past with the mysterious death
of his wife. The coroner didn't even question the cuts
on Ida's face and mouth, all of which had occurred
ansy mortem. The coroner ruled IDAs Stutsman cause of death
as natural caused by cardiac arrest. Sheriff Jim Frost wrote

(15:51):
a report on the incident, and we're going to read
it because it shows exactly how easily Eli lied and
how easily everybody swallowed. It. Related to me that this evening,
while he was coming home from Dalton, about late supper time,
he thought he saw a flash of lightning strike his barn.
He checked the barn and could not find any sign
of fire. He then ate milked the cows, and when

(16:14):
he was done milking the cows, he went up to
get some straw and found a spot on the top
of the granary, which stores wheat, that appeared to have
been burned by a lightning strike. Because of this, approximately
every half hour he checked the area on the west
side of the barn, but never found any other evidence
of fire. His wife, Ida woke him in the night
and stated, there looks like there is a fire in

(16:35):
the west end of the barn. They both ran outside
and he asked her to call the fire department. She
went around one side of the barn and yelled something
back to him which he could not understand. He tried
to get things out of the barn. However, the fire
was too hot and intense.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
As he went around the side of the milkhouse, he
saw many items out by the side of the road
that had been in the milkhouse. Upon checking in the milkhouse,
he found his way with her feet toward the door.
Lying in somewhat of a curled position. Blocking the door
was a large milk vat filled with items from the milkhouse.
He indicates the milkhouse was full of smoke, but there

(17:11):
was no fire and no intense heat. He dragged his
wife out of the milkhouse to the other side of
the road, with her left side toward the fire. He
attempted CPR and mouthed to mouth resuscitation, but was unable
to revive her. After help began arriving, he noticed that
the heat from the fire was apparently burning her face
and arms. He got help to drag her further into
a field away from the fire. As a PostScript, Frost wrote,

(17:36):
Eli Stutsman sees a psychiatric doctor and gets a prescription
for valuum. From time to time, I want to point
out that almost everything Eli said was a lie or
a twisted version of the truth. He never attempted CPR,
he never checked on the barn prior to the fire,
and he lied about moving Ida. For his part, the
sheriff filed the report and didn't pursue it further. After all,

(17:57):
according to almost everyone around those parts, the Amish didn't
commit murder. Eli would later change his story repeatedly depending
on who he was talking to. He told one friend
that Ida had gone into the barn to save some puppies,
which was strange considering the Amish attitudes towards animals. He
wrote to another amishman whose wife also died very suddenly,

(18:18):
that Ida asked him if she could save some things
from the barn before she did so. In another telling,
he said that the fire investigators found the lightning struck
the barn, not him. A friend of Frost's said that
at a party shortly after the murder, he expressed frustration
about not being able to find evidence of murder. Frost
said he believed Eli had beaten Ida with a rock

(18:39):
and put her in the fire to destroy evidence. Now,
whether this is true, we'll never know, but as you'll
find out, like most serial killers, Eli didn't keep getting
away with it because he was particularly clever. He got
away with it, in our opinion, because of gross incompetence
of the investigators. If Frost actually believed that Eli had
murdered Ida, why hadn't he given the coroner a heads

(19:01):
up about Eli's past. It seems like a pretty severe
oversight to.

Speaker 2 (19:05):
Me, definitely. I think it's atrocious.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
The only Amish who seemed suspicious about Ida's death were
Ida's family. They asked Eli over and over again what happened,
trying to understand why and how Ida died. His story
changed again, this time he'd done CPR for thirty minutes
and dragged her clear of the fire by himself, But
there was nothing they could do. God had seen fit
to call Ida home, and they still had a grand

(19:30):
baby to care for. In August, the Amish descended on
the Stutsman farm to help him raise a new barn.
When they got there in the morning, however, Eli was
nowhere to be found. Some of the younger boys had
seen one of Eli's less reputable friends grab a couple
of pills from Eli's desk and take them to Eli's bedroom.
Eli never made an appearance, which to the Amish was

(19:52):
a mark against him. His entire community had gathered to
build him a new barn and he just ghosted them.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Plus, he demanded a specific design of a barn that
had more horse stalls than he would need for a
dairy farm. In their minds, they thought his obsession with
horses was very English and that he was just biding
his time and would soon leave the Amish. Yet again,
It's almost like Eli's hot and cold attitude about the
Amish helped him hide better. He was able to convince

(20:18):
both the English and the Amish that he was acting
weird because he was a member of the other group.
It was a pretty effective set of masks, using one
against the other. Ida's younger twin. Ida's younger twin brothers,
Amos and Andy, sometimes stayed the night at Eli's home.
The Gingriches, despite their misgivings about Ida's husband, often stopped

(20:40):
by the farm to help out, most likely in an
effort to stay in touch with Danny. The Gingrich boys

(21:11):
were just fifteen when something horrific happened to them, something
that confused them so much that they never spoke about
it until much much later. The Almish often share beds,
so it wasn't unusual for Eli to have them sleep
next to him. One night, Andy woke up to find
that Eli was rubbing his erect penis against his back.

(21:33):
Andy froze, not knowing what to do, but knowing that
something was very wrong. Eli suddenly stopped, possibly realizing that
the boy was awake. He said, I wanted him to
just leave me alone. I didn't know what to do.
Amos later shared with Andy that the same thing had
happened to him. Exactly a year after Ida's death, Eli

(21:56):
had a mental breakdown so severe that he was committed
for a week. He was delirious and angry. He had
to be removed from the home, tied to a gurney,
screaming until the moment that the ambulance parked at the hospital.
An eerie calm took over then, as if he was
exactly where he wanted to be. Five months later, Eli

(22:16):
brought Danny to visit his cousin Abe. He let Abe
know that he wanted to leave the Amish once and
for all, but he needed to leave Danny there for
a while. He was afraid that the Amish might take
Danny away from him. Abe agreed, he knew the Amish,
and he knew what Eli was saying was true. Eli
said he'd gotten a job raising horses in Georgia and

(22:37):
that he was going to save some money and come
back to get Danny. Danny was a toddler now and
his behavior was out of control, but seemingly only around Eli.
When Eli would leave, Danny would throw a fit, but
then he'd relax and become a pretty well behaved kid.
He didn't speak English at all, and he never smiled.

(22:58):
After he left, Eli knew he never called and asked
after his son. A few months later, though, he did
come back for Danny and they both went back to Ohio.
Eli was now clean shaven and his hair was cut.
He wore jeans and spent money to have electricity installed
at the farm. He started raising and selling race horses

(23:19):
if he wasn't before, That was enough to get him
put under the bonn again. One couple, Chris and Diane's Swartzentrouper,
visited the farm and were introduced to little Danny. Diane
thought that Danny seemed withdrawn, quieter than a toddler should be,
and when he did speak, it was with the stutter.
When they were touring the house, they found three year

(23:40):
old Danny alone in his room with a pornomag next
to his bed. Diane thought maybe Danny was being sexually abused.
His behavior certainly showed signs of abuse, but her husband
talked her out of reporting anything. Eli seemed so soft
spoken that he couldn't hurt a fly. You know him,
Do you do you think he could be involved in

(24:01):
something like this? Danny was failed again and again by
adults that saw how strange he was, how withdrawn and
never said anything. We don't know exactly how many men
Eli slept with before Ida's death, that it was definitely
more than a few. Remember the hunting buddy we mentioned
in episode one, Yeah, he was likely one of them.

(24:23):
One of his longest enduring male companions was a man
named Larry Barlow. Larry was a school administrator who had
grown tired of Akron, Ohio's gay scene, and started looking
for love and sex in the pages of the LGBT
magazine The Advocate. Now The Advocate is centered on LGBT news,
but in the seventies it was more focused on the

(24:44):
g part. It started as a newsletter for pride or
Personal Rights and Defense and Education. After the police raided
a gay bar and beat several of the patrons, kicking
off several demonstrations against police brutality all across the country.
This was a couple of years before Stonewall.

Speaker 3 (24:59):
Actually, as the magazine grew, so did their offerings. By
the late seventies, the magazine had two parts, the magazine
part with advice columns and general articles about the gay experience,
and then the Personals, which were hundreds of personal ads
sent in by gay men looking for love or sex.
It was in The Advocate that Larry found an ad

(25:21):
that caught his eye. It read Ohio white male, one
hundred forty pounds five six, light brown hair, blue eyes.
I am twenty eight years old and have a three
year old son. I like male companion, cooking, horse racing,
and country music, et cetera. I am tired of the
bar scenes. I'm a country guy and prefer country living.

(25:41):
Hope to find someone to meet the gap, call and
ask for Eli. Larry called Eli up, and when they met,
Larry was instantly attracted to him. For the next two years,
Larry would visit Eli and Danny, joking that he was
doing his wifely chores. He'd cook and clean watch Danny.
Larry even lent Eli twenty five hundred dollars. It's not

(26:04):
clear if Eli ever paid him back, but I think
you know what we think. Yeah, Larry bought Eli and
himself matching rings, but Eli was reluctant to wear it.
In fact, the two didn't even have sex. Larry tried once,
but Eli pretended to be asleep.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
Larry, come on, man, dump his dumbass. You're too good
for this shit.

Speaker 3 (26:26):
Yeah, it's a little sad, isn't it. I think Larry
liked the idea of the innocent Amish man not understanding homosexuality,
but I don't think he realized how worldly Eli actually was.
Employees of the farm reported that Eli hosted dozens of
men at various times. He was actually quite popular with
the local gay scene. He'd host parties at his barn,

(26:47):
and those in attendants knew they could get laid if
they wanted. After two years, Eli unceremoniously evicted his roommates
and fired his helpers after telling them that he'd planned
on visiting Colorado with Danny. He then sold the farm
to an englisher for two hundred thousand dollars. That was
four times when he'd paid another amishment for it, And
perhaps that was always the plan.

Speaker 2 (27:08):
Yeah, that's amazing. In seventies money too. That is a
lot of scratch. That was a very good sale. And
when you were talking about hosting the parties and just
a revolving door of men, didn't it remind you have
picked in the Canadian serial killer with the pig farm,
sex workers in and out all the time, and that
was part of why he didn't get caught, because it
was just a constant stream of you know, too many

(27:30):
girls to just keep track of.

Speaker 3 (27:32):
Yeah, you know, absolutely, Yeah, And the Amish were actually
really upset when he sold the farm to an englisher
because Amish, the Amish have issues with the outside world
kind of encroaching on their land, like sure, we keep
buying up their land, and so they're you know, reduced, reduced, reduced,
and so yeah, they felt like Eli scammed that by

(27:53):
pretending to be Amish for a couple of years and
then selling it for for more money.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
I think that's I think that's exactly what he did.

Speaker 3 (28:00):
Yeah, one hundred percent. Yeah. Eli took Danny to Duringo Colorado.
Earlier that year, Eli had answered an ad and the
advocate by a man named Terry Palmer who lived there,
and they'd met a few times before Eli moved. Once there,
Palmer and Eli purchased a ranch together with the intention
of raising and training more race horses. The couple was strange,

(28:22):
and they were both hiding things from the world. Terry
Palmer was deeply, deeply in the closet, going so far
as to call his former lover his adopted son, a
relationship made all the more messy by his lover's suicide.
Eli was running from his past, though he used it
as a shield as well. He was moody and mean.

(28:43):
He snapped at any mention of Terry's former lover and
seemed more sullen than he ever was before the move.
It takes energy to hold up a mask, and it
becomes impossible when you're living with someone to keep it
up twenty four to seven, where Terry found Eli charming
and affectionate. When he met him in Ohio, he was
a completely different person now. Eli had presented himself as

(29:04):
a naive amishman looking for gay man to show him
the rope, something that Terry was really attracted to. But
in Colorado, Eli seemed to have an expansive collection of
gay nudi mags and lots of sex toys. Again, he
would leave for days at a time, never telling Terry
where he'd been. Eli even seemed disinterested in Danny, who
was starting school. I found it strange that most people,

(29:27):
when talking about Danny, considered Eli to be a good father.
It's clear to us that Danny was little more than
a shield against scrutiny for Eli. He constantly told friends, lovers,
and strangers that he feared the Amish would take Danny away,
but would never explain why.

Speaker 2 (29:42):
Well, Danny was away for him to look human, but
away from the prying eyes of Ida's family and the
Amish at large. Eli didn't really feel a need to
dote on Danny as much. Danny, who was now starting school,
started gloming on to Terry as a father figure rather
than Eli. Terry drove him to the bus stop. Terry
made sure he was fed and properly clothed. Terry made

(30:03):
sure he did his homework. In turn, Danny tried to
tell him about his day after school. Terry told him,
tell your dad. I don't want to hear it. Terry
later said that he didn't want to meddle with the
father son relationship, but I can't help but just feel
so sad for this poor little boy. Just reaching out
for any connection at all, only to just get rejected again.

(30:27):
While still with Terry Stutsman still found ways to slam
ass all over town. He did coke and pot and
poppers and found himself a revolving door of lovers pretty quickly.
Durango had a pretty anemic gay scene, and Eli made
quite the splash. His reputation preceded him as someone with
a rather large personality. No, I'm kidding, he has a

(30:49):
huge penis.

Speaker 3 (30:51):
Yeah, let's talk about it, because Greg Olsen in his
book mentions it about forty times about this guy and
like that he's packing a wallup in the pants apartment.
And in fairness to Greg, it's always in the context
of interviewing Eli's lovers. But come on, we get it, man.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
Gregory, my dude, it's so funny. But it's always one
of the first things people bring up about him, like yeah, quiet, handsome,
blue eyes, massive hog. I think guy was a tripod. Like, okay,
we get it. Eli wasn't shy about bringing Danny around
his new friends, and his treatment of Danny got worse.

(31:34):
At a friend's birthday party, Eli brought Danny and encouraged
him to grope several male partygoers and slap them on
their butts. Danny, who clearly didn't understand the context, went
around to all the men doing as he was told.
One of Eli's friends was horrified. She said, he's just
a little boy. Let him be a little boy. Stutsman said,

(31:55):
I'm going to train him so he'll never have to
deal with women who just digest that for a second.
That is dark, Lord, have mercy. At one party, Danny
tried undressing one of the guests, to the poor guy's horror.
At another, Danny sat on the couch while his father performed,

(32:15):
you know, a sexual act on another man on the floor.
Danny seemed completely unfazed. One night, Danny grabbed Terry Palmer's
penis through his robe. He would constantly draw pictures of
male anatomy. His kid was severely disturbed. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
Eli was basically the kind of gay guy that your
annoying uncle brings up at Thanksgiving dinner, A specter, a
villain who wants to groom children to the gay lifestyle.
Let's be clear. Eli did this because he was a
psychopath and abuser, not because he was gay. I don't know,
just wanted to put that out there before anyone started
writing us emails. Eli Stutsman was evil.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
Yeah, we've seen this kind of stuff in you know,
serial killers who were straight a million times too. This
is just a marker of his psychopathy. Did anybody call
the authorities about Eli's behavior, though, of course not. One woman,
the other half of an alternative couple whose husband was
experimenting with other men, said she wanted to report it,

(33:17):
but was afraid that the cops would ask her why
she was at a gay party. Later, she heard that
Eli was going to gift Danny to some of his
friends to abuse, and she said she found it hard
to sleep that night. Yeah, it was so hard to
sleep that she just kept that little info to herself.
How would you live with yourself after that? I just

(33:40):
and I know it was a different time, but oh
my god, if you knew that was getting ready to
happen to a little boy, no force on this earth
would keep me from No force on earth would keep
me from rescuing that kid.

Speaker 3 (33:55):
She later justified it by saying, oh, the police probably
wouldn't have believe me anyway.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
Oh my god, you don't know, you'd tell you try
for crying out loud? If you have to just go
over there and grab him and take him away. For
the love of God, don't let that happen to that child.
It's just horrific. And meanwhile, Terry, who genuinely believed that
Eli was sexually abusing Danny, decided that it was time
to end the relationship. He later said, I couldn't live there, Danny.

(34:23):
It tore me up, but the best thing was for
me to get out of there now Here. He meant
that the best thing for him was to get out
of there, not the best thing for Danny. He was
afraid that Danny's behavior would reveal Terry's homosexuality, so he
left that little boy alone. Again. Everyone always left Danny
with Eli. Later, when Eli and Danny visited Terry on

(34:47):
his new farm, Danny asked, Terry, could I live with
you instead of my dad.

Speaker 3 (34:52):
People believed Eli was a great father, which I guess
just meant that he didn't just get drunk and come
home and beat Danny very high bar eye. Now, although
at least one person saw Eli smack Danny across the
face because he was stuttering, and he hit the child
so hard that he drew blood. That same witness said
that Eli would pat Danny's butt in front of people

(35:12):
in a way that the witness thought was sexual.

Speaker 2 (35:16):
This is maybe one of the darkest stories we've ever covered,
I think simply just because of all these people that
sat around and did nothing to help Danny Stutzman. The
general attitude was just snunned by a business. And we
see this with domestic violence too, a lot, lot lot
where people will know that there's, you know, a guy
beating his wife and that's none of my business. And
I think that was way more the case in the

(35:36):
seventies than it is now.

Speaker 3 (35:38):
Palmer tried to have a pleasant relationship with Eli after
the breakup, but quickly found out that Eli was crazier
than a shithouse rat and twice as mean. Terry had
left a prize winning stallion at Stutsman's farm for boarding,
thinking that Eli could care for the horse better than
he could. They had an agreement that the horse would
stay in Colorado, though, and Palmer found out that Eli
had taken the horse on a trail ride in New Mexico, oh.

(36:01):
Palmer was furious and confronted Eli. Shortly after, a note
appeared in a rest stop bathroom, reading, if want a
good blowjob call Terry Palmer. He's over fifty, but he's goot.
Goot was spelled the German way, and the note was
written in Eli's handwriting. Terry got several calls about it,
but Eli denied writing it right, must be the other

(36:24):
Amish men in Durango, Colorado. Even after Eli moved to Austin, Texas,
his harassment campaign continued. Terry's greatest fear was being outed,
and Eli was now trying to use that against him.
Terry started getting phone calls in the early hours, and
when he answered, the caller would only breathe heavily or
mutter gay slurs. Finally, Terry's new boyfriend answered the phone

(36:47):
and went to the police. The police confirmed the calls
were coming from Eli's new address in Texas. The police
then let Eli know that those kinds of calls were
criminal in nature, and mysteriously they stopped.

Speaker 2 (36:58):
You know what you could have done while you were
sit in there at the police station tell him about
the creepy phone calls is you might have mentioned that
there was a little boy being abused as well, and
they could have let him know that that kind of
behavior is criminal in nature. You know what I mean,
like just a thought.

Speaker 3 (37:12):
Yeah, yeah, just a tip makes me so mad. Okay,
let's put a pin in that saga for a moment,
and let's talk about a guy named Glenn Albert Pritchett.
Glenn was born to a Mormon family in Utah and
had never quite jealm with the LDS faith. It seems
like maybe Glenn was born under a bad sign. He
never seemed to land on his feet. He was a

(37:33):
skinny kid who rebelled against authority whenever he could. His
adolescence was filled with petty crime, runaway attempts, and a
deep seated insecurity that would follow him all his life.
The only thing that seemed to soothe him was alcohol.
He'd struggled with alcoholism from his teenage years until he
was an adult. His behavior was so unpredictable that his
family said they had to place him in a foster home,

(37:55):
where he stayed for a few months until he was
sent marijuana in the mail. The foster father was an
FBI agent, and he was not amused. At one group
home he was sent to, he met a young girl
named Sandy, who he ran away with. Sandy called her
mother from Montana and said that she'd only come home
if she could marry Glenn. Her mom agreed. Glenn seemed

(38:17):
to calm down with marriage, and he decided he was
going to join the Coast Guard and enlisted when he
was eighteen. At first, it seemed like he was finally
getting a shit together. The coast Guard would teach him discipline,
and he would get out with an electrician certification for
the first time in his short life. He felt like
he had the future. Sandy and Glenn had two children,

(38:37):
a boy and a girl, but things started taking a
turn for the worse. Glenn drank more than ever, and
by the time he was arrested and charged with a
DUI in nineteen eighty three, Sandy filed for divorce.

Speaker 2 (38:48):
She and Glenn continued to see each other, though, and
their relationship was so volatile that the local police started
recognizing Sandy's address when it was called over the radio.
After one conflict, during which Glenn flew into a rage
at finding out Sandy was seeing someone new, Glenn asked
for a ride to the edge of town. Alcohol had
ruined his life, but he had no intention of stopping

(39:10):
his drinking. The next thing Sandy knew, Glenn was calling
her up from Austin, Texas. He told her he'd gotten
a construction job and moved into a house with two roommates,
a gay couple. Sandy knew Glen to be pretty homophobic,
but when he told her about his roommates, he seemed
more amused than anything. She assumed that his alcoholism had
dragged him so far down that he didn't care about

(39:32):
who he lived with. The roommates were Eli Stutsman and
Denny Rustin. Eli had been introduced to Denny through Denny's aunt, Wanda.
Denny had been outed by an ex and his family
was trying to come to terms with his sexuality. Wanda
had met Eli when he did some construction work at
her house, and they became something like friends. She asked

(39:54):
Eli for advice and eventually asked Eli to talk to
her nephew, and the two got along swimmingly and Denny.
He eventually moved in with Eli and Glenn.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
Glenn, as far as we know, was straight. He'd go
with Eli and Denny to gay bars, but that's as
far as he went.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
Of course, it's possible that Glenn just changed his mind
about homosexuality. People's views do evolve and change What we
do know is that in December of nineteen eighty four,
some officers saw two men standing around a parking lot
near a truck. When the men saw the cops, they
got in their truck and drove to the other end
of the parking lot, where they got out again. One man,

(40:30):
later identified as Glenn Pritchett, knelt on the ground while
the other, Eli Stutzman, stood, I wonder what's going on.
The police drove toward them, and the two men attempted
to get in the truck and leave. The police stopped
and questioned them. Eli told the officers that he stopped
the car toilet Glenn's stretch. The officers noticed that Glenn

(40:52):
had a scratch on his forehead, and when they asked
him where it came from, he told them he'd gotten
it at his construction job. He then admitted he'd got
in a fight at a gay bar. Again. Glenn only
ever identified as straight, but the encounter with the police
may indicate that Eli was taking advantage of Glenn's alcoholism,
which I would not have passed him in any way,
shape or form. Eli's sexual proclivities became more and more

(41:17):
kinky as time went on. He told one gentleman at
a bar, I'll slap you around and fuck your brains out.
Once he invited Denny to a threesome where the third
was an incoherently drunk man. Eli bound the guy and
was so rough that Denny was sure he didn't enjoy
anything about the encounter. He said later that he thought

(41:37):
Eli was displeased with Denny's performance because he never asked
him to do it again. Once, Denny wrote a sweet
little I Love you on a note after he cleaned
the house for Eli, and afterwards Eli sat him down
and berated him. He wasn't attracted to Denny, he said,
and this kind of thing can't go on. Denny was shocked,
but he was like, Okay, I got it. He would

(41:59):
continue his friendship with Eli, and just that Glenn's behavior
escalated too. He called his ex wife so often that
she had to change her phone number, and he was
drinking more than ever. Glenn would often accompany Eli to
job sites to meet with clients, but by April nineteen
eighty five, he'd disappeared from Eli's life and home entirely.

(42:20):
Eli told people he'd gone back home to see his
family in Pilot Knob Texas, on May twelfth, nineteen eighty five,
Mother's Day, rancher Raymond Keek was investigating a horrendous smell
on his property. He assumed a calf had wandered away
from its mother or something. He'd smelled it a few
days before, but now it was too strong for him

(42:42):
to ignore. In a culvert, he saw a badly decomposed body,
skin blackening and sloughing off. Raymond rushed home to call
the police, who sent Deputy Richard Navarro. Navarro gazed across
the dump site. It was at the very edge of
Keek's property, where his property met his neighbour's pasture. In

(43:03):
the pasture was a large, well bred stallion. What they
didn't know yet was that the stallion was cared for
by Eli Stutzman, the same stallion that had shattered Eli's
relationship with Terry Palmer. Now we're going to leave it
there for part two. Campers. You will not believe how
much weirder it gets. And you know we're gonna have

(43:23):
part three for you next week, which will be the
final part. We promise, right, Katie, Yes, I promise, But
for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay
safe until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire,
and as always, we want to send a grateful shout
out to a few of our lovely Patreon supporters. Thank

(43:44):
you so much to Ben, Lisa, Cuserus, which is one
of my favorite words, Jordan and Caitlin. We appreciate y'all
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(44:04):
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Left Where God Could Find Him: Amish Serial Killer Eli Stutzman

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