I received a hardcover copy The Amish Wife by Gregg Olsen in the mail. I'm not certain if it was directly from the publisher Thomas & Mercer or from the publicist Jennifer Musico, who has sent me quite a number of e-books. I finished The Amish Wife on December 23. I am writing this review on 12/24. It was about a real life monster.
Apparently, the first book that Gregg Olsen wrote about killer Eli Stutzman, Abandoned Prayers, isn't very different from The Amish Wife except for containing details about Stutzman's sex life. So readers who really don't want to know those details, would be better off reading The Amish Wife. I'm one of those who will probably never read Abandoned Prayers.
The Amish Wife states that the Amish believe that saying negative things about someone reflects poorly on the speaker. Jews also believe this. It's called Lashon Hara. (This is Hebrew for "evil tongue".) This belief is probably why Amish were unwilling to say things they knew about Eli. Olsen calls Eli "an Amish fabulist". I understand "fabulist" to mean someone who tells stories that are either not completely true or absolutely false. The stories with elements of truth are the most insidious because listeners need to determine when the fabulist is lying.
Olsen tells us that the only way a marriage could be ended in the Amish community was death. He believed that Eli killed his wife, Ida. Eli was evidently gay and wanted out of his marriage. So Olsen thinks the fabulist manufactured a story about her death that would allow him to evade responsibility for it.
Eli was the one who reported his wife's death to the authorities. His story about his wife being woken up by a fire in the barn and then wanting to milk the cows instead of rushing to get them out of the barn is a real doozy though. I don't know how anyone could have believed that. Ida's death was officially an accident.
Eli also made up stories about his son, Danny. At the age of two, he allegedly wrote a note that he had fun on the beach. I don't know of any brilliant two year olds who can write. I learned to write at age six in first grade like most children. A two year old could theoretically learn to write, but there are prerequisites for writing. I read online that children need to learn to draw to develop manual dexterity before they learn to write. This makes sense to me. Obviously, they also need to learn the alphabet.
At the age of nine Danny was found in a ditch frozen to death on Christmas Eve. As I write this paragraph, it's still Christmas Eve 2023 and therefore the anniversary of that poor child's death. I wanted to cry when I read that. He was supposedly a brilliant prodigy at two, but it looks like Eli couldn't be bothered with Danny seven years later. I wish that Danny had been removed from Eli's custody before that happened.
I found Eli Stutzman's mug shot at a website called Daily Crime for those readers who are interested. He looked like the sort of person who didn't care about anyone or anything. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 1985, but was released in 2005. Stutzman committed suicide in 2007. Good riddance!
I can't say that I enjoyed this book, but it was eye opening that this happened in the Amish community. I suppose that the Amish are like everyone else. They run the gamut of personalities. Some Amish people try to behave decently toward their fellow human beings, and there may be a few who perform notable acts of benevolence, and then there are the people whose lives are horrors like Eli Stutzman. I could never write one book about Stutzman, let alone two. I wouldn't want to live with Stutzman's terrible actions for the length of time it would take to research and write about him. This book was about terrible events. It was well-researched and convincing, but I would be very happy not to encounter such a monster in the pages of a book in the foreseeable future. True crime isn't a genre that appeals to me. I hope my next read deals with people who don't make me feel sick.
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