P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Journal

Barbara Raber has been found guilty of the aggravated murder of Barbara Weaver, of Maysville, Ohio, and Eli D. Weaver has been sentenced to 15 years to life in prison for conspiring with Raber to do it.  Barbara Raber will be sentenced on September 30, 2009.   The jury took five hours to deliberate before delivering their verdict.  Text messages between Raber and Weaver were very incriminating, as was the testimony of Eli Weaver, himself, but Raber’s defense attorney claimed that Eli Weaver manipulated Raber, and he also presented the alternative scenario that Eli Weaver murdered his wife, himself,  early on the morning of June 2, before leaving for a fishing trip with friends.

Thus we are coming to the end of the first Amish murder trial I can remember.  There was the tragic kidnapping case many years ago, what is locally known as the case of Little Boy Blue, and a man suffering from depression killed his son and wife, and then himself, last spring near here.  But as far as first degeree murder with a gun specification, Raber and Weaver are the first convictions among the Amish.

I will be happy not to have any of this to write about in the future.  I’d rather show you Holmes County scenes of school children playing softball or Martin houses against blue sky.  I would rather write about culture, theology, and lifestyle, like I do in my Ohio Amish Mysteries.  Amish people have their own troubles and their own human foibles, like all the rest of us, but conspiracies to commit murder are not at all typical.  As for one, I pray we never see this sort of thing again.

I have posted several times about the Amish murder we suffered here in Wayne County, Ohio, and now the trial of Barbara Raber for the murder of Barbara Weaver has run for three days, Thursday and Friday last week, and Monday this week, plus a fourth day of trial to come today.  This should be the day for final arguments.

Last Thursday the jury was seated, and opening arguments were heard.  On Friday the principal prosecution witness was Eli D. Weaver, husband of the murdered Barbara Weaver of Maysville, Ohio.  Eli has already pleaded guilty to the charge of complicity to commit murder.

Yesterday the arresting officers and detectives testified about Barbara Raber and about text messages sent between Eli and her before and after the murder.  Raber testified that she went to the Weaver house just to scare Barbara, but the gun went off accidentally.  She also testified that she went along with Eli’s schemes to murder his wife just to see how far he was willing to go with the conspiracy.

So Amish history in Holmes County is now just as commonplace as the typical human condition.  I shouldn’t be surprised.  Amish people aren’t saints; they are, after all, only people.  They hold to a higher religious standard than most of us, but perhaps it is just a different religious standard, not necessarily a better one.  They believe God intends us all to live as peasant farmers, and they put their beliefs into practice.  So there is no hypocrisy here to charge on the question of lifestyle.

But now there is a very real Amish murder charge, and that is a game changer for us who live among them, especially for writers like me.  I write the Ohio Amish Mysteries, and the game changer is that now there can very believably be an Amish murder.   There can also very believably be an Amish person on trial for murder.  We have such a thing, right here in Wayne County, Ohio.

Life in Holmes County, Ohio, can be as serene as a drive through the country.  If you are brothers with a horse and buggy, you probably have it better, on the scale of serenity, than most of the rest of us.  Amish life does have its advantages.  I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone, but you can see how it might be peaceful.

The hearing this morning in Wayne County courthouse’s Courtroom No. 2, on two defense motions in the trial of Barbara Raber for the murder of Barbara Weaver, lasted less than an hour.  The prosecutor called one witness, the lead detective in the murder investigation, and her questions to him were focused on detailed aspects of Raber’s arrest at her home on June 10, 2009.  In the gallery, there were three English folk (my wife and me, and Daily Record reporter Chris Leonard) and roughly a dozen Amish folk, who all sat behind the prosecutor’s table on the right side of the courtroom.

When Barbara Raber was brought in, wearing red metal handcuffs and silver leg irons, the Amish people did not react overtly, but their expressions grew stern, and they variously cast their eyes down or stared at Raber with red faces and evident deep emotion.  Raber sat at the defense attorney’s desk on the left, head down, not speaking at all during the hearing.  The Amish people listened intently to the testimony of the lead detective, and once or twice a court assistant whispered quietly with one of the Amish women about the details of the testimony.  When the hearing was finished, the Amish people walked quietly out of the courthouse and got in a van across the street, driven by an English fellow.  I’m sure they were mostly either relatives of Barbara Weaver or neighbors of hers in Maysville.

In my opinion, the defense attorney made quite a strong point out of something that I think will prove critical to the judge’s decision.  As I understood certain aspects of the testimony of the detective, when Barbara Raber, sitting on a boat trailer outside her house the afternoon of her arrest, asked “Can I have an attorney?” she became very emotional and asked also immediately about her children and her husband.  Her emotional condition worsened, and she was led to an unmarked detective’s car, and she continued to react emotionally in the car, with the result that the detective did not further explain Raber’s rights to her.  The Miranda card evidently has an asterisk note instructing the arresting officers to explain the details of how and when an attorney will be appointed for the defense, if it does not appear that a suspect fully understands her Miranda rights.

Is that what happened here?  Did Raber’s severe emotional state prevent detectives from giving her a sufficient and timely explanation of her rights, at a time when she apparently was so distraught that she may not have understood her Miranda rights?  That is what the judge will have to decide.  He has asked for written statements from the prosecutor and the defense attorney.

So that is where it stands this morning.  We walked out of the courthouse in bright morning sun and drove home past the Wayne County Fair grounds on the west side of town.  It’s “school day” today, and all the kids get in free.  We could smell barbeque smoke, fresh fried donuts, livestock, and the fumes of traffic as we drove by the fair, and the streets were filled with school children walking down to the fairgrounds, unaware that Barbara Raber was being taken out of the courthouse in handcuffs, one hearing closer to her murder trial

As for us, considering the grim circumstances of the morning, I think I need some sassafras tea.  You can get sassafras root down at the bulk foods store in Mt. Hope, so this afternoon we’ll drive through Maysville on the way there, and maybe we’ll time it for the end of the school day, when the Amish kids will be walking home with their lunch pails, past the neighborhood where Barbara Weaver used to live.

The murder trial of Barbara Raber is scheduled to begin in the Wayne County Courthouse in Wooster, Ohio, on September 16, 2009, but first there will be a hearing on September 14th concerning the public defender’s motion to suppress statements made by Raber to police when they continued to question her after she asked if she could have a lawyer.  Thus the most sensational Amish murder trial anywhere on record may be stalled by the type of Miranda issues that wouldn’t even be considered interesting topics for an episode of TV’s Law and Order.  I know my readers of the Ohio Amish Mysteries wouldn’t consider it credible that police would make a mistake like that in one of my mystery novels.  But let’s wait to see what happens.  It’s the public defender’s job to make motions like this one, and there may be nothing to this charge, once all the facts are known.  The public defender has also requested the services of an Amish translator to listen to phone messages left in a neighborhood phone booth for Raber’s alleged accomplice, Eli Weaver, whose wife Barbara Weaver was murdered in her home near Maysville, Ohio, on June 2, 2009.

With all this going on, you’d think Holmes County would be turned upside down with the turmoil of it, but it is as peaceful here as ever.  There are more important things to worry about in life.  Barbara Raber will eventually be forgotten among the Plain People, and rightly so.

I’ll try to attend the trial, once it gets started, but I doubt many Amish observers will be there.  “Out there among those English,” is already too far off the “true path,” never mind giving attention to the likes of murderers and schemers, and the spectacle of one person’s sin is not a fit topic for conversation, it will be said.  I’d like to know what some Amish people think of all this, but it’s too soon to press questions into that community, and some people will be disinclined ever to speak of it, anyway.

I’ll let you know what happens at the trial.