P. L. Gaus’s Ohio Amish Journal

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 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.

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.

There’s a country lane I know south of Fredericksburg, Ohio, just over the Wayne County border into Holmes County, where in the stretch of a few short miles, there are a dozen different types of Amish and Mennonite families living on adjacent farms, in a wide pastoral valley where there are few electric lines or TV antennas to mare the horizon. The gravel of the road there is perpetually laced with the thin, wispy lines made by buggy wheels, and the pace of life is as slow as a team of horses pulling a plow. I was there last December, on a cold and raw day when the sky was white with overcast, and the families were all tucked inside with fires burning in their wood stoves. I was just out for a drive, looking for the kind of stories I use in my Ohio Amish Mysteries, and I thought maybe I’d see something or meet someone interesting. I wasn’t disappointed.

In the farmyard of a Schwartzentruber family, nosed up against the red bank barn, there was a postal service truck, stuck in the mud about twenty yards down a steep slope from the road. I could see the tracks of the truck in the mud, tracing down into the barnyard and spinning this way and that, showing the evidence of all the maneuvers the postal lady had tried in order to run her truck back up the drive. But there the truck sat, sunk into the mud, and obviously going nowhere. I decided to watch. It was exactly the sort of thing I go looking for in Holmes County – the type of little story I like to gather for the mysteries I write. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for twenty years.

I stood up on the road and watched for a while. The driver tried several times to get the truck headed the right way up the hill, but she always found herself nosed back up against the rough red boards of the barn. I called down to her once to offer encouragement, and she said, “I think they’ll come out to help.” She meant the Schwartzentrubers inside. Those are the most conservative of all the Amish sects, living as close to the earth as they can figure out how to do. They don’t often go to town, and they don’t have much use for us English. I’ve spoken to the father there a couple of times, and the mother and grandmother of the family have sold me produce from time to time. The children are taught not to speak to people like me, and although they smile a lot when I say hello, not one of them has ever said a word in reply. So, I thought the mail lady was overly optimistic about their helping her up the hill. In all, I stood there about fifteen minutes, waiting to see what would happen. That’s usually the best way to travel in Holmes County, standing in one spot for a while. Tourists don’t know that, and they miss a lot by hurrying from one shop to another. I have leaned to wait.

Eventually, the Schwartzentrubers sent out a lad of about fourteen years. He was dressed in plain Amish denim, and he wore his black winter hat and pair of high muck boots. Without speaking, he walked into the barn, hitched a team of horses to a block with a hook and chain, and drove the team out into the winter day with a whip. He hooked his rig to the rear bumper of the truck, snapped his whip, and coaxed the horses to pull the truck around to face up the drive. That’s when I got my camera out.

Next, he unhitched and came around to the front bumper with his team and hooked on again. He never said a word. He just snapped his whip, marched that team up the drive, and pulled the truck out onto the gravel lane, with the postal service lady sitting behind the wheel. He kicked his hook off the bumper, put his team away, and went inside. They had sent a boy to handle a man’s job, and he apparently had thought nothing of it. That’s just how it is on an Amish farm. The children work, too.

I don’t know, yet, how I’ll use that story in one of my mysteries. I tell about it when I give talks to literary and library groups, and I like the reaction that the story always gets – the lad who reversed the Postal Service Slide. And it wasn’t particularly unusual. Rather, it is perfectly common in Holmes County. The Schwartzentrubers live a hard life intentionally, and a boy of fourteen is expected to know how to handle a team expertly.

But I will always enjoy the exasperation on that lady’s face as the horses pulled her truck out of the mud, and I will always remember how that young fellow did the job without saying a word – like you’d expect from a Schwartzentruber. They’ll tell you, if you can get one to talk, that God expects us all to live on peasant farms.