UBC: Olsen, Abandoned Prayers

Abandoned Prayers by Gregg Olsen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(N.b., I made a new edition for this book in Goodreads because (1) the edition I have is a hardcover, but the subtitle on the dust jacket is "The Shocking True Story of Obsession, Murder and 'Little Boy Blue,'" not "The Incredible True Story of Murder, Obsession and Amish Secrets," and (2) careful inspection of the book itself reveals no subtitle on title page or copyright page, which says to me that the bibliographic entry shouldn't list a subtitle at all. The cover of my edition is the same as that of the paperback edition with the "Obsession, Murder, and 'Little Boy Blue'" subtitle.)

Short, flippant summary: Even the Amish aren't immune from sociopaths.

It is, however, unfair to imply that Eli Stutzman's Amish upbringing had anything to do with his career as a murderer, starting with his pregnant wife (in a staged barn fire, which incidentally also netted Stutzman a free new barn), then a roommate, then most likely two men involved in drug deals with him, and finally his nine-year-old son, whose body he abandoned in a ditch near Chester, Kansas, on Christmas Eve in 1985. It was never proved that Stutzman murdered the boy, mostly because the forensic pathologists who examined the body couldn't determine cause of death. Olsen thinks the boy may still have been alive, although unconscious, when his father dumped him. It was brutally cold that Christmas, and Danny Stutzman was wearing nothing more than a cheap pair of footie pajamas from K-mart. He would have frozen to death before his body even had time to become hypothermic.

Stutzman was a pathological liar and sociopathic (forgetting to fake grief when you tell people that your son died in a terrible traffic accident in Salt Lake City is a pretty clear diagnostic marker). He lied his way out of trouble again and again, and when his lies got too tangled, or the trouble got too big for them to contain, he ran. And if people were inconvenient enough to him, he murdered them.

Stutzman was gay, and for 1990, Olsen does a good job of examining his choices without judging (although some of the cops who interrogated Stutzman would so be up on charges for the things they said to him); he makes it clear that it wasn't Stutzman's sexual orientation that made him a murderer, a drug dealer, a liar, or an abusive father. Olsen is actually able to tell more of the story than the police were able to find, because the men Stutzman had relationships with, one of whom had a letter that a good prosecutor could have turned into proof of premeditation in Danny Stutzman's death, didn't talk to the police. It was the mid-80s; they were afraid of the cops and afraid to come out.

This is the competently written result of a lot of research and legwork and interviewing people who don't want to talk about their secrets, both in the gay community and in the Amish community. One of the things I like about it is the way that Olsen's own anger bleeds through; although he keeps himself out of the narrative, he is transparently infuriated by the way Stutzman treated his son, the pattern of abuse and neglect that culminated in Danny Stutzman's death. Objectivity is important, but so is basic human empathy--empathy that Stutzman himself lacked.

Eli Stutzman was paroled in 2005, having served 15 years of a 40 year sentence for the murder of Glen Pritchett. He committed suicide in 2007.



View all my reviews