P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Journal

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.

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 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 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.

We have had about a foot of snow on the ground in Northern Ohio since Christmas, and today we are getting another eight to ten inches. In truth, it has been one of those harder, colder winters, very much like the ones I remember from fifty years ago. The warming trend that we have known in the last several years notwithstanding, it seems that this year will set some records for cold temperatures and snow fall.

So I was out in Holmes County a couple of days ago to see how Amish people there are coping with the snow and cold, and I got this shot of a new parochial school on Salt Creek Township Road 601, just south of Fredericksburg, Ohio. There is an outhouse in the background, and the two-room building sports its plumbing on the outside front left corner, namely a hand spigot. Note also the belfry and the chimney for the wood-burning stove. Then the school has an anteroom or mudroom for coats and boots, attached to the front of the one-room school. This is one of the newer schools in the area. Its neighbor Leeper School has been there since the thirties, and with the Amish population in Holmes County growing as it is, I expect there will someday be still another school nearby.

But have a closer look at the left front corner of the school.  See the sleds?  Right.  The Amish kids take sleds to school these days. Did you ever do that? Like me, you may have ridden a bicycle to school, but I doubt you took a sled. There might be twelve to fifteen scholars attending this new school, and there are six sleds left outside in the snow. So, that’s a good percentage of the children from that neighborhood. Take a sled to school? If you were Amish, you wouldn’t think anything of it.

If you’re like me, you are worried. Times being what they are, we are worried about the economy, we are worried about the election, and we are worried about global conflict. It’s an almost irresistible sense of worry that draws us to the news reports each day to learn what the latest crisis has been. Or to learn what has become of our retirement accounts. Or to listen to the presidential debates to try to decided who should be our next president. I think it is an affliction—this modern, electronic, hyper-sense of doom. And I often wish I were immune to it. Like the Amish are.

For the most part, the Amish people of Holmes County, Ohio, where I have set my Ohio Amish Mysteries, don’t have retirement accounts. They mostly don’t even have any money in the banks. They aren’t paying interest on a credit card, and they don’t ever worry about the Stock Market. They are immune.

The Amish people of Holmes County don’t vote for President, so they are not caught up in the frenzy of national politics. In fact, they don’t vote for any office that has control over life and death, because they do not believe in killing of any kind. So since the president has the authority to make war, they don’t vote for president. They don’t vote for sheriff, either, or for anyone who might carry a gun. They are pacifists of the first order, and they will not participate in any aspect of killing, not even to vote. So they are immune, you see, from the political frenzy that grips so many of us English.

Amish people also do not worry about global conflict. They are fatalists for the most part, much like the dwarf Enos Erb, a character in my sixth Ohio Amish Mystery, Separate from the World, where I examined the near-Zen nature of their devotion to God’s will in their lives. Global conflict? Why worry? It is in God’s hands.

So, the Amish have immunity. They live separate from the world, and they are immune to troubles like finances, politics, and war. That sounds pretty good, I think. You’d almost think that living Amish might be better. But the conversion is nearly impossible. Few of the English who have tried to live Amish have ever succeeded.

And that’s the story line in the new story I am crafting now, the seventh Ohio Amish Mystery. I don’t have a title, yet, and my editors have always proved better at giving a new story it’s title, anyway. I’ll just call it OAM-7 until they tell me what title I should use. In the meantime, I am wondering and writing about a thoroughly English fellow who has decided to give it a try—to become Amish—to try to find the immunity that these days seems so alluring.