P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Journal

Where is Amish country?  If you were to ask that question in Ohio, the answer would be Holmes County.  There we have the largest Amish settlement in the world.  In truth, this region of Plain People sprawls out over all of the adjoining counties, too, but Holmes County is the center of it.  Its rolling hills and secluded pasture lands reminded the earliest Amish settlers of their lands in the foothills of Germany and Switzerland, and the first group settled here in the Killbuck Valley in 1807, led by Jakob Miller, who brought a group over from Somerset County in Pennsylvania.

But “Amish Country” now could be just about anywhere in America.  It seems almost every state and region has its own Amish/Mennonite population.  And new settlements are springing up in far-flung places.  For instance, I met an Amish bishop at a library talk I gave in Batavia, New York last March.  He had brought a group of Old Order Amish people up to New York from the area around Mt. Hope, in Holmes County, Ohio.  They needed cheap land, and they wanted to start a more conservative church in a remote part of America, someplace where they wouldn’t be bothered by the in-press of us English or Yankee folk.  Holmes County Amish have settled as far north as Ontario, Canada, and as far south as Florida, all looking for good land to farm and quiet, untroubled places to live.

But there is one interesting exception to that notion, in Sarasota, Florida.  In that sprawling coastal metropolis, parked right in the middle of the most English of worlds, sits the little Amish community of Pinecraft, Florida, where small homes and trailers cluster around a few Amish establishments, most notably, Troyer’s Dutch Heritage Restaurant and Gift shop, on Bahia Vista Blvd.  It is a quintessentially Amish community, but there are no farms and no horses and buggies like we have in Ohio.  Instead, this is rather more like a sleepy retirement community of mixed Amish and Mennonite persuasions, and the people there ride around on bicycles and tricycles.  Then when the buses pull in from Ohio each week, everybody comes out to see who has made the trip.  It will be retired Holmes County farmers and whole families in winter, going down for a visit with friends and relatives.  The buses from Ohio travel straight through, with one driver taking a three-hour shift at the wheel, while a second driver sleeps in a small compartment built at the front of the bus.  A friend of mine drives that trip quite often, and he says that the whole Pinecraft community meets the bus, everyone curious to see who has come down for a seaport vacation near the beaches at Longboat and Siesta Keys.

So as to my original question?  Where is Amish Country?  Well, it seems now, it is anywhere a Greyhound bus can travel.  Amish people on a Florida vacation!  What a picture.

I took this photograph today in Holmes County, Ohio, showing a young woman driving home from the market in Fredericksburg.  I love the deep teal hue of her dress and the obvious good health of the horse.  I covered about 50 miles of country road on this trip, looking for the color in the trees, and then saw this shot on my way home.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

For the aggravated murder of Barbara Weaver, Barbara Raber of Millersburg, Ohio, has been sentenced by Judge Robert J. Brown to twenty-three years to life in prison.  This happened several days ago in Wayne County (Ohio) court, and I’ve taken the time since then to think about this.

At the time the verdict was announced on September 22, 2009, Raber said time and again that she didn’t do it.  Her attorney presented the plausible alternative scenario that Weaver’s husband Eli actually killed his wife in the early morning hours of June 2, 2009, before leaving on a fishing trip with friends.  The coroner’s best estimate of the range for time of death does fit this theory, but the jury still convicted Raber, and the judge at sentencing said, “You were involved in the death of Barbara Weaver.  There is no evidence to contradict that.”  The judge also expressed the opinion that Raber’s sentence ought to have some “parity” with that of Eli Weaver (fifteen years to life), who earlier pleaded guilty to the charge of complicity to commit murder, before testifying for the prosecution.

Is that then a clean verdict and a reasonable sentence?  Maybe so, but also maybe not.  Holmes County residents have expressed the opinion to me that this case is more complicated than it appears.  That certainly is what the defense presented in court.  But Judge Brown said at the time of sentencing, “You and Mr. Weaver had a strong role in the death of his wife.  Without your cooperation, she would still be alive today.”

I think he was right. I think we have justice.  But is it flawless?  Probably not.

What catches your eye in this picture of a typical Holmes County Amish homestead?  Is it the two houses, the main house plus one for the retired grandparents and perhaps an unmarried brother or sister?  How about the windmill on the hill?  There are the usual outbuildings and white fences.  There are draft horses in the pasture and several features not easy to see unless you can enlarge the image: Martin houses, grape arbors, laundry drying on lines under the porch roofs, and flower and vegetable gardens around the house.

But what do you not see that also makes this so typically Amish?  It is the absences that I notice – no TV antenna or cable, no telephone wires, no electricity coming into the house from a pole out by the road.

We see these types of houses all over Holmes County, Ohio, and you can see versions of it anywhere in America where the Amish have settled.  I hear of new settlements everywhere I go to speak about my Ohio Amish Mysteries. If there is a settlement of Amish people near you, I’d sure like to read about it, if you find the vast outward migration of Amish people into the rest of the country as fascinating as I do.

Land is now so expensive in Holmes County that many Amish people are forming settlements in other states.  There is a new settlement, for instance,  north of Batavia, New York.  I met the bishop of that group at a library talk I gave near there last March.  He had moved his group up to New York from our Mt. Hope area, and when he told me where his old farm had been, I knew right where it was.

So, if you have Amish people living in your area, I’d be pleased if you would post a comment.  I think we’ll all be surprised by how many new settlements there are in America.

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.

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.

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.

I have been writing the Ohio Amish Mysteries for ten years now, and at talks I have given about my novels, I have always admitted to my audience that I make a rather obvious bargain with my readers – it will never be an Amish person who commits a murder in one of my stories. It just wouldn’t happen, and I wouldn’t want to write about it if it did. In the kind of story I write, I always figured that the fiction ought to imitate Amish lifestyle and culture faithfully, and since there had never been an Amish-involved murder in Holmes County, I considered myself safe in my assumptions.

But that all changed this spring, and now sadly life has imitated fiction in a way that has set me back as a writer, at least for a while. I haven’t been able to make progress recently on the seventh Ohio Amish Mystery (tentatively titled “Harmless as Doves”) because now four Amish people in Holmes County Ohio have been murdered in two separate incidents, apparently by other Amish people. The tragedy of this so completely dislodged me from my creative state that I have not written a word for three months.

In the first incident, a father apparently killed his son, his wife, and himself. In the second incident, a man’s girlfriend apparently killed his wife so that they could leave the Amish life and enjoy modern conveniences. So the world was turned upside down for me, and it took a couple of trips out of state to put my mind back in the creative condition I need to finish my seventh novel.

We first went south to the islands and “got out there” as they say, into the warm weather, the tropical waters, and the gentler mindsets of the Caribbean. There I am in the first picture, soaking in one of the pools on Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas. They say it is currently the biggest cruise ship in the world, and I believe it. We were on the boat for seven days, and I saw only 40 percent of the thing.

Then we came home, packed the camper, and headed to Michigan’s “Up North” regions, where we needed jackets every night and warm clothes most of the days. In the second picture, I’ve found a peaceful chair at a campfire early in our first week out. We spent nearly three weeks up near Michigan’s “Tip of the Mitt” as they call it, and between the two excursions, I seem to have purged the mental sluggishness that was caused by the cruel reality of four non-fictional Amish-involved murders.

Now I’ll get back to the earnest business of finishing Harmless as Doves, which I started in January. I think I can now live with the irony that this is a story about a murder committed by an Amish lad, over a dispute about a girlfriend. Knowing that plot line, perhaps you can see why the new homicidal realities in Holmes County rocked me so hard.