P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Journal

Facing the charge of aggravated murder with a gun specification, Eli Weaver has pleaded instead to complicity to commit murder, and the gun specification has been removed from the charge.  In this infamous case, Weaver’s wife was murdered in her sleep, allegedly by Weaver’s accomplice, Barbara Raber, who now faces trial for aggravated murder.  Eli is expected to testify for the prosecution.

I have written recently about this tragic case in Holmes County, Ohio, where Raber lived, and Wayne County to the north, where Eli and Barbara Weaver lived.  It is the type of murder I never thought I would see, when I first began to design and write the Ohio Amish Mysteries.

Eli Weaver’s picture was in Wooster’s Daily Record this morning, and he looks like any typical Amish fellow one might see in this part of Ohio.  But he had been shunned by the time of his wife’s murder, because he was involved in sexual affairs with a number of women, and because he had allegedly discussed his wife’s murder several times with other people.

Thus half of the puzzle of Barbara Weaver’s murder is finished.  Now we wait for the trial of Barbara Raber.

And I have to shake my head.  That murder took place in Maysville, Ohio, which is a barely definable town on Harrison Road in southern Wayne County, where some of the events in my Ohio Amish Mystery Separate From the World were set.  And when I think of Maysville, I remember the places there, where I like to visit.  There is the one-room school house on the corner of Harrison and Mt. Hope roads.  I like the Schlabaugh furniture store just east of there.  The Raber furniture shop just south of that intersection is one of the best places for roll-top desks.  And the little market right next door (closed on Thursdays) is so quintessentially Amish that I surely ought to have used it already in one of my mysteries.  Then just at the border with Holmes County, there is a new parochial school being built for the Amish kids of the area.  They had the softball diamond and backstop finished before the school was done, but it will all be ready for school in a couple of weeks.

I think time will help to erase the thoughts I have of murder there, but for a while at least, Maysville will not be the same to me.  Sadly, it used to be a favorite spot of mine.  The photos in my blog A Sure Sign of Spring were taken less than half a mile from Maysville.  Maybe I’ll go back next spring and find those same sugar buckets hanging from the maple trees.  Or find those same kids playing softball at the nearby school.  Or maybe I’ll just go back today, and try to reclaim some of the peacefulness I remember there, hoping and praying that any further murders involving Holmes County Amish folk happen only in my mystery novels.

The trial of Barbara Raber for the murder of a Maysville, Ohio, woman will take place in the Wayne County court room of Judge Robert J. Brown soon, after a continuance that was granted recently so that the public defender can hire additional experts for the defense.  The trial of Raber’s alleged accomplice Eli Weaver is scheduled for Monday, August 24th.  They are accused in the murder of Weaver’s wife Barbara Weaver, who lived on Harrison Road in Wayne County, Ohio, just north of the Holmes County line.  Barbara Weaver was found shot in bed on the morning of June 2, while her husband Eli was away on an early morning fishing trip on Lake Erie to the north.  Phone records of calls and text messages between the accomplices will evidently be used in the trial.

This is not the first Amish murder (aside from the fictional ones in my Ohio Amish Mysteries) in Ohio’s famous Amish Country.  Earlier this year, a man shot his wife and son, and then himself.

So I guess the bargain I have always made with my readers has now been made unrealistic, in a most profane and surrealistic way.  I can no longer assume that my readers will understand that it will never be an Amish person who commits a murder in one of my stories, because it is no longer true that there haven’t been Amish murderers.  That’s a game changer for me, and my Ohio Amish Mysteries will have to be read quite differently from now on.  Sadly, murder is now a very real Amish phenomenon, and I find myself laying down the plot sequences for a very different type of Ohio Amish Mystery.  I can’t say I very much like it.

I will report from time to time on these trials here in Wooster, Ohio, but in the meantime, I’d be glad to read about any true Amish crime others of you may know about.  I suspect there are other stories to be told, since Amish people are not Saints at all.  They are just people, like all the rest of us, and now two of them have been accused of murder.

In Holmes County, Ohio, and Wayne County to the north, we are thinking in new ways about the Plain People.

The wheat is in this year, and it seems as if there was much more of it planted in Holmes County than usual. In fields nearly everywhere one turns, the crop has been cut, and the sheaves have been shocked, stacked that is, as in the picture. Oats, barely, and other grains are done the same way, and late in the fall, the field corn will be put up too.

It usually takes the whole family working together to harvest a field as big as this one. Even the kids who aren’t big enough to help, really, are often out with the family in the field. I’ve seen men with scythes cutting by hand, women and children following along behind to gather six bundles, which are then tented together, with a last sheave spread out over the top as a cover. That makes the shock.

I have never stopped long to watch, because it’d be too intrusive to just stare at a family at work, but this is quiet work, and it is hard. It is also extraordinarily peaceful. Living this close to the earth has its rewards, even if it does involve hard work.