On Christmas Eve 1985 a hunter found the body of a small boy in a ditch beside a farm road north of Chester, Nebraska, a village in Thayer County just shy of the Kansas line. He was dressed only in a thin blue blanket sleeper. Nobody in Chester knew him, no one anywhere had reported a missing child who matched him, and the doctors who examined him could not say how he had died. The people of Chester and nearby Hebron buried him themselves, gave him the name Matthew for the headstone, and called him Little Boy Blue. It took almost two years to learn that he was Daniel Eli Stutzman, nine, born September 7, 1976, at Apple Creek, Ohio, and that the man who had left him there was his father.
Eli Stutzman was born in 1950 into the Swartzentruber Amish, the most conservative of the Ohio orders, in the settlement around Apple Creek in Wayne County. In July 1977 his wife Ida, twenty-six and eight months pregnant, died in a fire in the barn on their farm at Dalton. Wayne County officials recorded the death as accidental. There was never a criminal case, but the fire became the first of the questions that followed Stutzman for the rest of his life. By 1979 he had left the order. He moved from state to state with Danny, took up with men he met through personal ads in The Advocate, and left the boy for months at a time with friends, acquaintances and foster families while he looked for work.
By late 1984 he was in Austin, Texas, doing construction and remodeling, and sharing a house with Glen Pritchett, twenty-four, whom he had met on a job and who worked for him. On May 12, 1985, Pritchett was found in a ditch south of Austin, shot in the head. Travis County sheriff's detectives questioned Stutzman, who said he wanted to clear his name, but they did not charge him, and he left Texas. Danny spent much of 1985 with a foster couple in Wyoming until his father collected him in December.
What happened next rests on Stutzman's own account, given in a Nebraska courtroom. He said he was driving east toward Ohio with Danny asleep in the back seat of the car, and that around midnight he reached back to wake the boy for his medicine and got no response. He pulled over. The boy's eyes had rolled back, his face was pale and there was no pulse. He said he tried mouth-to-mouth breathing, spent several hours with the body praying, and then, in his words, decided to leave him and let God take care of him. He told the Wyoming couple and others that Danny was back in Ohio and in school.
The Wyoming foster parents were not satisfied. After a magazine article about Little Boy Blue was published, they called the authorities in Nebraska, said the dead child sounded like the boy they had cared for, and sent a photograph and a report card. Lab results identified the body as Danny's in December 1987. On Monday, December 14, 1987, Stutzman was arrested in Azle, Texas, on a Nebraska warrant for felony child abuse issued by Thayer County Judge J. Patrick McArdle, with bond set at $500,000. He did not fight extradition.
The felony did not hold. Because the cause of Danny's death could not be determined, even after the body was exhumed, prosecutors could not prove a killing, and Stutzman was convicted instead of abandoning a dead body and failing to report a death, both misdemeanors. On January 11, 1988, aged thirty-seven, he was sentenced to a little more than a year. Arguments at the hearing turned on his upbringing: one participant said that for a man of his Amish background and eighth-grade schooling, leaving the body was not unnatural, while another said he could not comprehend anyone abandoning a son on a road.
When he had served the Nebraska term he was sent to Texas, tried in Travis County for Glen Pritchett's murder and sentenced to forty years. It is the only homicide for which he was ever convicted. He was paroled in 2005 after about fifteen years and died by suicide on January 31, 2007.
Two more deaths are laid at his door in the published accounts of the case. David Tyler, thirty-six, and Dennis Slaeter, twenty-four (also spelled Sleater), were killed in Durango, Colorado, in November and December 1985, in the weeks before Stutzman drove east with his son. Neither killing was solved and he was never charged with either. Ida's death remains classified as accidental and Danny's cause of death as undetermined. The true-crime author Gregg Olsen, whose 1990 book Abandoned Prayers first set out the whole story, put up billboards along U.S. 30 and other roads in Wayne and Holmes counties in late 2022 asking what really happened to Ida Stutzman in the barn in 1977. On the record he is a man convicted of one murder and suspected in up to four more deaths, one of them his wife's and one his son's.
1950: Eli Stutzman is born into the Swartzentruber Amish around Apple Creek, Ohio.
September 7, 1976: his son, Daniel Eli Stutzman, is born at Apple Creek.
July 1977: his wife, Ida, eight months pregnant, dies in a fire in the barn on their farm at Dalton; the death is recorded as accidental.
By 1979: he has left the order.
Late 1984: he is in Austin, Texas, sharing a house with Glen Pritchett.
May 12, 1985: Pritchett is found in a ditch south of Austin, shot in the head.
November and December 1985: David Tyler and Dennis Slaeter are killed in Durango, Colorado; neither killing is solved, and he is never charged with either.
December 1985: he collects Danny from a foster couple in Wyoming.
Christmas Eve 1985: a hunter finds the body of a small boy in a ditch north of Chester, Nebraska.
December 1987: lab results identify the boy as Danny.
December 14, 1987: Stutzman is arrested in Azle, Texas, on a Nebraska warrant for felony child abuse.
January 11, 1988: convicted of abandoning a dead body and failing to report a death, he is sentenced to a little more than a year.
2005: having later been convicted in Travis County of Glen Pritchett's murder, he is paroled after about fifteen years.
January 31, 2007: he dies by suicide.
Late 2022: author Gregg Olsen puts up billboards in Wayne and Holmes counties asking what really happened to Ida Stutzman.