Eli Stutzman, born into a Swartzentruber Amish community at Apple Creek, Ohio in 1950, left the Amish life after the death of his pregnant wife Ida in a barn fire at Dalton, Ohio in July 1977. Wayne County officials recorded her death as accidental. He then drifted between states with his young son Daniel, leaving the boy with relatives and acquaintances for months at a time. Dennis Slaeter, twenty-four, is also named in the record.
Danny, 9, was found dead in a ditch in Thayer County, Nebraska, on Christmas Eve 1985, and went unidentified for two years, known as Little Boy Blue. Stutzman said the boy had died of a chest infection in the car and that he had left the body at the roadside. The cause of death was never determined even after exhumation, and he was convicted only of abandoning a body and concealing a death. He was subsequently tried in Travis County, Texas, for the shooting of his former roommate Glen Pritchett, 24, and sentenced to 40 years in 1989. He was paroled in 2005 and killed himself on January 31, 2007.
Five deaths are attributed to him: Ida, Danny, Pritchett, and David Tyler, 36, and Dennis Sleater, 24, both killed in Durango, Colorado, in late 1985. Only the Pritchett murder produced a conviction. Ida's death was never classified as a homicide, Danny's cause of death is officially undetermined, and the two Durango killings remain unsolved. The author Gregg Olsen has campaigned since 2024 for Ida's death to be reclassified. On the record as it stands he is a man convicted of one murder and suspected of four more, and the entry is flagged accordingly.