You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mama Mea acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters. This podcast was recorded on It's just after Midnight On a warm summer night in July nineteen seventy seven, on a farm in Ohio, an Ida Stutsman wakes up her husband, Get up quick, there's a fire in the barn. She alerts him. She needs to save some milking equipment, She tells him before rushing towards the flames. He follows her, heading towards the
blazing building, but Ida doesn't survive. A neighbor helps Eli carry his pregnant wife's body from inside the milkhouse beside the burning barn. She collapsed from a bad heart, he'd later tell the coroner. The stress of the fire was too much for her. From the very start, there were holes in Eli's story, but the Stutsmans were part of the Amish community, the very nature of their insular world. When the suspicious nature of Ida's death went unspoken for
many years. After his wife's death, Eli left the Amish way of life and took the couple's young son, Danny, with him. Within a few years, at the age of nine, Danny died too. In fact, there was a trail of bodies that could be linked back to Eli Stutsman. But he always had a story, an excuse, a version of events he spun so confidently. But the truth always has a way of revealing itself, and eventually some of Eli's
stories at least caught up with him. I'm Jemma Bah and this is True Crime Conversations a Muma mea podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. The Amish are a distinctive Christian subculture of about two hundred thousand people who mainly live in North America and are primarily known and recognized for their simple living and conservative, old fashioned clothes.
They follow the basic tenets of Christian faith and live their life according to the Bible, but within their world there are various subgroups, the most conservative being the Swartz and Trouber Amish, who live in central Ohio. They use wood stoves for cooking, windmills for water, and primarily live off the land. To visit one of their farms, you'd feel like you'd been transported back in time by a
few centuries. They rarely talk to outsiders, which is why author Greg Olsen had his work cut out for him when he started his investigations into Ida's suspicious death for his latest book, The Amish Wife, especially given he was dredging up an alleged crime that was more than forty five years old. But slowly, with the help of his researcher Robin Lasson, a story of cover up, lies and an investigation that never stood a chance started to reveal itself.
An alleged crime that had been buried in silence and secrets became impossible to ignore. To talk us through their findings, Robin joins us. Now, so people might have heard about the Amish community, but today we're talking about a particular subset within that who are even more conservative. Can you tell us about that? Who are this subset of the Amish community.
That is the Schwarzin Trooper sac the Amish, and they, unlike other sects of the Amish, do not allow any battery operated devices. So when they're driving or with their buggies and their horses, they do not allow any type of battery operated devices. For reflectors on the back of them, you have to use certain types of pins to pin your dresses, as well as certain types of pins to pin the men's shirts. So it's the lowest order.
So is the idea that you're living I guess like the olden days.
Yes, the more simplistic your life, the closer you are to God.
And is that the way Amish more generally are living their lives as well. It's just that some of the sections or factions do take a little bit more of the mod cons of modern life.
Yes, some of them do and others don't. Some do drive cars, Some are more modernized, some are not. They will ride on a bus for a vacation. They will not have a car themselves, but they have a driver for their entire community.
And is the Amish community quite prevalent in Ohio where this story is set.
Oh, yes, there are a lot. That's the thing over in Ohio. When I first went over there, I couldn't believe it. It was as if I stepped back in time two hundred years. It was amazing. And the funny part is they're just like us. They make jokes, they love their children, they love their family, they cook, they clean. They just don't have the modernization of their homes that
we do. With television and washer and dryers. So, for example, when you walk into an Amish family's home, the only thing you'll hear is probably the ticking of a clock, which sounds eerie because when you walk into someone else's home, you may hear a refrigerator running or their dishwasher, But when you walk into an Amish person's home, you only hear the tick of a clock. For the most part,
there's nothing else running. So they're all over in Ohio and it was amazing to be able to go over there and see all these individuals for who they are, not just what we think they are.
You said that some Amish drive cause, but do they interact with the outside world in terms of you know, hospitals, police stations, schools.
I believe it depends on each individual family and what sect they are part of. I know that there are different Mennonites that will interact with the social norms, say going to a hospital and what have you. A lot of times when there is an emergency they will call on it, But when it comes to police, they like to in a way give their own justice amongst themselves. And they're very forgiving individuals. So if they don't need
to call the police, they will not. But if they have to call, say someone to come and help them, if there's a fire or someone has injured themselves, they will call for help in those situations. But when it comes to their own justice, they would prefer to do that themselves.
And I'm assuming that in this very strict faction that we're talking about today, they're even less likely to reach out to those kinds of places.
Absolutely, yes, that is correct.
Most people have preconceived notions about the Amish. They've got a very distinctive look. You can usually spot an Amish person by the way they're dressed. But how does the reality that you've experienced, you've got to know a lot of Amish people through this investigation, how did it differ from the stereotypes that we often see.
I think it goes back to any stereotype of any individual. You're scared, you're nervous, you don't want to be judged. However, I can say when I first met this Amish community, when I went to go do all of these inner with Greg, They're giving you something to drink, and they're making jokes and they're so welcoming, and before you know it, the conversation's very organic and natural. They ask and answer questions just like we do. But you wouldn't think that
if you hadn't met any of them. I think there's a preconceived notion that you know they're so godly they don't want to talk to anybody on the outside. However, they're very welcoming. They're very kind, they're sweet, and their children, oh my gosh, their children are just adorable. They run, they laugh, they play, and when they come and see someone that's got a cell phone or a watch on,
they look at you almost like an alien. But they're so kind and sweet, and at the end of the day you realize you're both humans with the same needs and same wants, where we all just want to be accepted and loved throughout life, and that's who they are at their core. They're good human beings.
What can you tell us about Ida Stutsman. She's the main character of this story, and I'd love to know a bit about her background. How did she grow up, where was she from, what was her life like before she met her husband.
She grew up in Ohio along with Eli, and they were part of the same sect, and she had met Eli when she was really young and fell in love with him. Eli kind of won in a sense, so his royal oats if that's such a thing still, But back then that's what he wanted to do. He went out, he experienced things, and then Ida still waited for him. She loved him. She thought that he was the be
all and all. He was handsome, he was kind, he was generous, and it broke her heart when he ended up leaving the Amish, but she still stayed with all of her faith and all of her hope that he would come back to her, and eventually he did. And Ida was one of several siblings, grew up in a loving family. She had lots of nieces and nephews, and by all accounts from everyone that knew her, she was
just sweet. She was kind, she was generous. She would do anything for you if you needed it, and that's how the Amish work, and she embraced the Amish life, and that's who she was at her core, was just a lovely human being and wanted to be a mother and wanted to be a great wife.
Did her family have the same opinion of.
Him in the beginning, No, they didn't. They thought in today's terms. She could do better because Eli had a little bit of a past where he had lied about certain instances that had taken place, as well as just his reputation not necessarily being a womanizer, but gossiping. You know, there were times where he would tell other friends of friends. And then again, I want to preface this. It's like the game of telephone. You tell one person, they tell another.
The story can change. But the general consensus was he had talked about Ida and their sexual experiences or the way that they try to interact physically with one another, and they didn't like that. The way that Ida was she was very conservative, just like the faction of her Amish community, and so her family did not agree with her wanting to be with Eli. But at the end of the day, Eli came back into the fold and they gave them their blessing for them to be married.
Let's talk about that time that he left the Amish, because it was nineteen seventy two and he went into the modern world. I guess what did he do in that time period.
He did a lot of different things. He did seeing dated other people, He got a driver's license, started going out to bars and gambling. Things of that nature where you wouldn't think that he would have done it because of the strict faction that he was in. But he did,
and I'd sat back waiting for him. And in the book Abandoned Prayers, it touches more on what Eli did during those times, and there's several different accounts of what he did or may not have done, but the general consensus was he pretty much partied.
And I think this is an important pot to bring in now, because he wasn't just having relationships with women, was he.
No, he wasn't. And you know, it doesn't matter whether you're gay, straight, bisexual, trans anything of that nature. However, with Eli, he was gay, and I can't speak for anyone else, but I can understand how it possibly would have been hard for him to be himself and not Era, let alone, in that religious faction. That's the thing. It was not accepted, it was not tolerated, and even back then in the seventies, the thing was it still wasn't tolerated in the United States.
So Noah, was his sexuality accepted in the Amish community or outside of the Amish community.
No, it wasn't. And it's a conundrum when you look at it because you're upset with this man through the crimes that he committed, and yet there's a bit of humanity and compassion for maybe the life he lived. You're not saying that you're giving an excuse for the crimes.
But in that day and age, I think it was hard for anyone in America to be openly gay, let alone in a strict faction of the Amish community, which is the lowest order of it that is not even accepting of using batteries, let alone of same sex relations.
But in the end, he had his fun, I guess in the modern world, and decided to go back to the Amish community and get married to Ida.
He did. He came back and got married to Ida, and prior to getting married Ida, he had to get their family's blessing, like we talked about, and they weren't for it, but that's what Ida wanted, and so they did the normal thing that was allowed back then, which was both parties that were getting married had to take tests, medical tests to make sure that they didn't have any
diseases so to speak. Nowadays, that's not required that back then they did actually require that, and so we don't know what Eli had However, when he came back to announce whether his test came back clean or not clean, he said that he had bad blood, but he was going to go to someone that would fix it, and
in the end that's what he did. I just came back completely fine, but Eli's test did not, and so he went back to someone and he was given a tea that then changed his blood and made it pure again.
Reading between the lines, what are we talking about sexually transmitted diseases? What was in his blood?
Yes? Yes, okay, some states years ago. I don't think there are many now that require this. But when a man and a woman wanted to get married, they had to go and take a test or venereal diseases so that way they did not spread anymore. And that was required back in Ohio, in the county that they lived in at the time, and they did that, and Eli's came back tainted or with some type of infection.
And he managed to get the test overlooked.
Well, it wasn't just overlooked. What happened was what he said and what we have received in interviews, and a lot of this stems back to Greg's original race that he did in his first book. That he ever did abandon prayers. What he said he did was he went to a natural path that gave him a tea that cured him right, and then he retook the test and everything was fine.
It feels like that story is giving me a taste of the lies that Eli liked to spin exactly. So, they get married, they get pregnant pretty quickly. Was that a happy time for them as a couple? Was married life everything I'd hoped it would be.
Unfortunately No. On the outside looking in, everyone thought it was perfect. She had this perfect husband, she was pregnant, she was getting a house, and she was starting a family. But when you look beyond the confides of just what's on the outside, there was a lot more going on,
just like what we see on Instagram to date. And I think she still put up a front of that in the beginning with her relationship with Eli, because I think it stems back to also, you know, girls, we fight with our parents, we want to be with them, but once we find out that our parents what they said, I told you so, you don't want to admit it. You want to believe that that person you fell in love with is still there, and you weren't wrong and
Ida behind closed doors. The thing was Eli was very absent. He wasn't there for her. He wasn't a partner in her day to day life. And it's very evident through interviews as you see the progression of Ida's life with Eli first getting married to him, being excited to the tragedy that fell upon her. Later on, you could see the progression of it where she started to become unhappy and saw Eli for who he was versus what she hoped he would have been for her.
So she was raising this some Daniel or Denny as he was known, basically by herself.
Basically by herself, she was and I'm a mother. Your kids are your life, so you'll do anything for them. However, when your partner is absent, I think that adds a different element to it, where you want them to be present, not just for your own peace of mind, but also
as that parent. Their belief is a child should have two parents, They should be there, they should be teaching them, And she was teaching him, but she also wanted him to teach him the things that maybe she couldn't that Eli could, whether it was building a milk cow or he was so little, but still just being around a father. She wanted that for her son, and she didn't get it.
And divorce was that something that was allowed in her fection of Amish.
Divorce was never an option in that community, unfortunately.
So in nineteen seventy seven she was pregnant again with her second child. She was twenty six, so still quite young. But she died in the July of that year. I want you to take us to the day, the day before the night. What happened during that day in the laid up to her death.
So that day Eli had to go into town and he went in his horse and buggy. He had left Ida and Danny at home alone, along with their farm hand, which was another farm hand boy named Eli, but he was there with Ida and the baby. And Eli was coming home late that afternoon. According to police reports, it was around supper time, so this would have been around four or five in the afternoon, and as he's coming down the road to his home, he sees lightning strike
his barn on his property. He hurries back home as fast as he can, and all the while Ida and the other farmhand, Junior, are on the property. And Ida had seen that there was lightning and whatnot, but nothing on the property. But she did ask the farman to come inside because he had been on the ladder and working, and this was a young boy that she didn't want injured, so she had him come inside. Shortly after, Eli comes home and says there was lightning that struck the barn.
He tells everyone this, and you know, it's this big, elaborate story, and Junior goes into the barn with him as well, and it's almost as if Eli is trying to get Junior to believe his lies. See look here, the glass is broken. See the smoldering of the hay. There was a fire here, that's where lightning struck. Things like that, And even the farmhand at the time didn't believe it, even though he was a young boy. He
thought it was so strange. And through this time Eli had claimed that he was going back every thirty minutes to check on the barn to see if the fire had smoldered, or just to check on the fire of the embers, even though there wasn't any. He told that to the police later on, and that evening, Tim Blausser, an attorney that he had met through a family friend, came over to the house to draft their will.
Strange timing.
Yes, that's the thing. It's so coincidental that an attorney that he meets through a friend of a friend through a place that he's working comes over to the house that evening and is like, Hey, let's go out and do your will while your wife is sitting here.
Okay, So they have this weed story about Latining hitting a bomb, They ride up their wills, and then seemingly they go to bed. What happens next after midnight? Let's talk about it through Ali's eyes? What does he say happened next?
So Eli claims that he woke up, and I would like to say Eli has multiple different stories of what happened that night, but the one that stayed consistent was he woke up around midnight to Ida waking him up saying there's an explosion at the barn. There's a fire, and he wakes up, goes downstairs, and they both go to the barn and they attempt to put out the fire. However,
Ida does not survive that. And then the farm hand Junior, comes down and sees Ida on the ground and sees Eli running, and Eli tells him, you need to go get help, go to the neighbor's house and do this, call the fire department, all of these different places. However, never mentions once that his wife is dead on the ground. And the boy finally asks and says, Eli, what about Ida. She's not moving. I think she's hurt, and he says, okay, fine, go at it and call the paramedics. It was almost
an irritation the way the farmhand described it. He was irritated that he even asked about his wife. And so that is the event of what Eli said happened. However, after Greg's investigation through his book, that's not what took place.
You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me Jimma Boss. Up next, we discover how more deaths are linked to Eli Stutsman, including that of his own son. Let's talk about some of the holes in a life story.
First of all, there's a.
Lot of conversation about what Ida was actually wearing when she was found dead on the floor. Why was that significant?
That was significant because after the paramedics had found her dead, the thing was she was dressed in her day uniform, which can take anywhere from six to ten minutes, depending out how good you are on penny and they don't wear that to bed. They have nightwhere that they wear, just like us, we have nightgowns. We don't sleep in our normal clothes. So for Ida to wake up from a dead sleep at midnight, get dressed in her day clothes and go down and fight a fire doesn't make
any sense. And every Amish woman that we spoke to about that had said no Amish woman would get dressed for that. They would run down in their NightWare to help mitigate the fire.
Because assuming the nightwear would still be modest, so it's not like they would be worried about that.
Yes, it's not a tank top and like what we wear, you know, things of that nature, especially in the middle of July when it's hot here. But that's saying if your house was on fire, you stripped all your pajamas off, got on all your day clothes, that you would wear your pair of jeans, your T shirt, your sweatshirt along with your shoes and socks, and put your hair up in a bot. Yeah, that's what they're saying she did in an emergency, and she didn't.
What about the lamps or the lights on in the house.
That was another part that was very interesting, which is what led Greg to get further into this investigation. Because they have the lamps in the house kerosene and oil and whatnot that are only lit until they go to bed. Everyone had gone to bed at nine, but when the farm hand woke up, it's approximately twelve to twelve thirty. So pretty soon after Eli's story of when he says this started taking place, all the lamps in the house
were lit. And that was a big thing because everyone turned their lamps off, especially when they're going to bed. When sunset is around nine nine thirty, the lamps are off, they're going to sleep, the children are asleep, there's nothing to do. So around twelve to one am, why are all the lamps in the house on. Now? The farm boy went to bed earlier that evening, the same time that Ida and Eli should have went to bed. His door was closed upstairs. There's no way he would have
known what was or what was not going on. However, when he woke up, every lamp in that house was lit. And why so?
I feel like even just these few clues that we've spoken about, surely they would have sparked the interest of police or any investigators. Did they come to the scene.
That not they did, and unfortunately none of these parts were ever really investigated. There were multiple witnesses. Ida's body had been moved several different times. When the farm hand left, Ida was right in front of the milkhouse, but when the neighbor showed up from across the street, Ida was now inside the milkhouse and Eli and that neighbor had
to actually get her out and carry her. So there were so many different stories, and yes police did show up, but unfortunately we don't know why they didn't further the investigation. And I think that is one reason why Greg wanted to look into this further. Why wasn't it investigated, Because even now, when you say it out loud, it sounds like a common sense thing to ask, why is this person's story different than your story? No one asked that.
So was her death put down as just accidental file took her life.
It wasn't even fire. It was undetermined or accidental, and not even fire, but it was the stress of the fire. They said that Ida had a bad heart, yet the doctor, doctor Lehman, who was her doctor her entire life, had said she had never had a bad heart. However, when she died he was out of town, which also raises questions did Eli know that that's the thing? We don't know. We're trying to piece together a puzzle that unfortunately a lot of people have passed away on and it's trd.
You kind of work your way from the outside of a puzzle where you get the frame and you piece together. Okay, this section's red, this session's pink, this one's white, this is black, this one's got some spots, and you go through and you try and pieces together the best you can when you're researching it. Because the thing is doctor
Lehman knew Ida she did not have a bad heart. However, Eli said she had a bad heart, and that was taken at base value or for his word with the detectives at the time in the sheriff's apartment.
So it wasn't an autopsy or a corona or anyone that determined that it was.
Ali Eli was the one that said it. However, the individual there was a sheriff. He was the head of the entire shriff's department there. This was Sheriff James Frost, and he ended up being the main investigator, lead investigator for Ida's death and said it looks like this is just natural causes. And there was the corner and when Ida was brought in, there was never really an autopsy done. They don't do that, but they were able to draw blood and look at her and determined what was the
cause of her death. And according to Eli's statements, the coroner at the time, JT. Questell, had surmised that Ida had died of a bad heart due to the stress of the fire and being pregnant. But that's what it was left at. No one went further to investigate the claims of Eli's statement of Ida having a bad heart at all.
What did you discover about Eli's relationship with these authority figures.
What we found out was there was a source and I won't name him, but it was stated that Sheriff Frost was gay and used to go to Eli's house and enjoy himself with other men and other individuals.
So he was in a relationship with Eli.
And that's the thing. We believe there was one or at least there was something there. At least from what we have research and what we have found out, there was definitely some relationship going on. We don't know if that did play a factor in Ida's death, one can assume.
But that's the thing. Greg He plays Devil's advocate for all of his books, all of the crime zy researches, because you have to be objective and so Yes, although Sheriff Frost shows up at Eli's house, who was gay and Sheriff Frost in the end turns out to be gay, does not mean that there was a releaseship or that there wasn't one. But according to sources that we have and that we've interviewed, it seems that it was more likely than not there was one between them.
Let's talk about what happened after the file, because Ali and Dunny eventually ended up leaving the amage community, didn't they Where did they go? What did they do with the next few years?
They did? Eli for the next few years leaves. He goes to Colorado and goes down to Florida and sees family, and he did everything with his son and met people and lived in multiple different places. But by the time May nineteen eighty five came around, that's when the body of Glenn Pritchett was found, and I think that's when people started realizing that maybe there's a little more to Eli's stuts than what we feel.
So who was Glenn and what happened to him and how was he related to Ala.
So when Eli ended up going to Texas, he met Glenn Pritchett who was his roommate. And Glenn was twenty four years old, was a nice young man. He was in the military, and around May twelfth, nineteen eighty five, he was found on the side of the road shot to death. No one knew why this would happen or who would want to harm him, but as time went on, it would be learned that that's who Eli was. He was the type of person to hurt individuals.
Was he a suspect in that death when it happened.
At the time, he was, but they never knew if it was him or not. They knew that it was a roommate, but he just said, oh, he owed me money, and so he ended up leaving and skipping town and never paid the money back. So no one ever thought to really look further into the investigation for it.
So Glenn was found dead in the May, and then in the December of that same year, another body was found. Tell me about little Boy Blue.
Yeah, that's a sad one and a tough one. I know for Greg that was tough, because that's one thing that really drew him into his first book at Brandon Prayers finding a little boy in a blue sleeper. And I think any of us as parents, we know what those little sleepers look like with the footies at them, and they zipped all the way up from the ankle
all the way up top to the neck. He was found in a ditch in Nebraska by a hunter, and unfortunately, he ended up being dubbed a little Boy Blue, and he wasn't identified until two years later, and he was identified as Eli Stutsman's little boy.
In Amongst all of this, before little Boy Blue was identified as being Donny, wasn't Eli sending letters back home pretending that Danny was alive when obviously he wasn't, but we didn't know that yet.
Yes he was. He had sent letters written as if he was Danny himself. It's pretty sick to think about it that a father would pretend to be their child and pretend that they were alive. But he did. He pretended Danny was live. He sent letters back to his family members and loved ones saying Danny was well or speaking as Danny writing as Danny saying that I'm alive, I'm well, I'm playing soccer and going on a ski trip.
And yeah, Eli did that, and no one at the time had any idea that Danny was even dead.
So when little Boy Blue was identified as being Donny, what was Eli's excuse? How did he explain what he'd been doing for the last year.
It wasn't until the Reader's Digest came out and a member of the Amish community, which was part of the community that was a little more lenient, they had a television, they had the Readers Digest, and they knew who Eli was, and there was a story about the little boy found in Chester, Nebraska, a little boy Blue, and they had put the picture up of the little boy that was a drawing of him, and someone had said, oh my god, I think that looks like Danny. That could be Danny.
And no one had heard from Eliay or Danny in a long time, or at least seen him, And so they called up the local Chaff's department and Chester, Nebraska to report what they had seen in the Reader's Digest, and they gave a picture of Danny that they had had, and sure enough, the sheriff there was like, oh my god, this looks just like the composite of a little boy
that we found, little Boy Blue. And so as time goes on, they start to piece it together that Eli Stutsman was a suspect in Glenn Pritchett's death, his roommate, and at that point they realized that there's more deaths that he's connected to.
Okay, so we've got quite a lot going on here, But focusing on Danny for a second, is Eli arrested for murder in that case? Because obviously it's looking very suspicious. He's been lying about his son. This little boy's being found, it's now being identified as being Danny. Surely he's arrested.
Yes, he's a resident as a Texas and charged with concealing a death and abandonment of a body and connection with his son's death, Danny. And he ends up receiving an eighteen month prison sentence, and he's also convicted of Glenn Pridget's murder and is sentenced to forty years in prison for that death of Glenn Pridgett.
So why wasn't he convicted of murder for Danny?
Because they couldn't confirm when they found the body. Unfortunately, as decomposition goes and nature and animals and rodents, there was no way for them to confirm what caused the death of Danny. Eli has different stories that he was sick, he was on medication, he was in the back and then fell asleep and just didn't wake up. There's another story where the exhaust was broken on the back of the car he was driving at the time and so
it leaked into the back seat. There's multiple different stories, but that's Eli's m O. Every time someone dies, he has five or six different stories of what happened. I mean when his wife died, Ida was saving puppies, she was taking the milk bats out, she was saving kittens, and none of that was true. So who's to say what the real story is Except for just Danny and Eli, they're the only ones that we'll ever know.
So there's convictions in place for Denny and for Glynn. You mentioned other murders. Who are they.
Yeah, there's two other murders that he's suspected of. He's never been charged unfortunately, but that's due to the lack of evidence and it is circumstantial. It's Dennis Leader and David Tyler both murdered and during Colorado, and their murders are still unsolved till this day.
And what was his involvement with them? He knew both of them as lovers, as friends.
That's one thing we don't know for sure. It is suspected as lovers, it's suspected as friends. But that's the one thing. It seems wherever Eli goes, there's murder that follows.
We have his.
Roommate, Glenn, We've got his son, we have his wife. Now we have Dennis Leader as well as David Tyler. It doesn't take it rocket scientists to understand that there's a pattern of behavior here. But in the way the criminal justice system works, you have to have evidence. It's not just the story you can tell.
So when these convictions came through for Dunny and Glenn, was Ida's case ever reopened or ever suggested to be reopened?
Unfortunately? No, That is what Greg is trying to do with this story. Greg wants Ida's case reopened and her death reclassified as homicide or unnatural causes.
I mean, with so many decades later now, so it didn't happen at the time.
Yes, And that's the thing, it did not happen back then, but that is what caused this entire book to be written. Ia Gingrich's brother, Dan Gingrich came forward to Greg and said, I found some letters that you should read that Eli had wrote to his family or to multiple different people that he had kept over the years, and Greg said, okay e. Whenever he met him, and Daniel Gingrich wanted justice for his sister, which is something very uncommon that
the Amish do. They don't reach out to law officials or authority figures like that to get justice. They do that within their own faction, their own sect, their own religious way. But because Greg was so close with him from the first book that he had wrote about Eli and Ida and all the other murders and just Eli's line, he felt he could reach out to Greg and so
he did. And that's why Greg wanted to write this book about Ida as well as Danny, to show the inconsistencies in Eli's story with everything he's ever said, and to have the Sheriff's department finally reopened that investigation and label her death as undetermined or unnatural, whichever one that they can do.
The elephant in the room for me is do we need to be looking at the Amish community and seeing them as being potentially complicit in this crime in terms of the alleged murder of Ida, because if more people had spoken out, potentially Dunny might not have died or Glenn might not have died well.
And a lot of people asked that question, and the same thing that happens with our communities that we live in. No one's going to think their husband or their brother or their uncle is capable of things like that, and so you don't jump to that conclusion. I believe it comes back to not just loyalty, but the same way we would never think that someone we love could be capable of that. I don't think Eli's parents thought that
he was capable of it. I don't think his friends thought that he was capable of killing someone, because at the time of Ada's death, yes, he had lied about things, but he had never murdered someone. So I don't think there was consensus among them that he initially murdered Ada. I think it was afterwards when people start talking and looking at the bigger picture, then maybe there could have
been some inclination of suspicion. But I don't think anyone ever really knew wholeheartedly that he was capable of it until after the story about Little Boy Blue came out and they found out that Eli was capable of it because the murder of his son, that the Amish community was able to piece together what Eli had done and realize, oh, my god, maybe he is responsible for Ida's death. And I think that's when people started coming forward from the
Amish community. So I don't think that they were trying to protect him more or less. They just didn't know. They didn't understand that someone was responsible for that in their own community.
But then coming forward once they had the paces of the puzzle, it didn't do anything.
It didn't help, No, it didn't. That's the thing. Many people back then in the late eighties had talked about what they knew about Eli and the Knight of the Fire and what he was capable of and even in his history, and whether it was they felt they weren't listened to, or whether it was law enforcement enough to convict him. Right now, I can't speak for all of them. Neither can Great, but it's one of those things where it does call into question why wasn't it looked into further?
Why wasn't it looked into at that time when he was convicted of concealing the body and abandoning a body. Why wasn't Ida's death reopened, especially with all these Amish individuals coming forward, which is something that isn't done in that community. But they did. They came forward, but maybe they weren't taken seriously. I don't know, because a lot of those individuals a part of the original investigation, unfortunately,
have passed away and so we'll never know. And all we have now are a lot of police reports as well as a lot of interviews from individuals from that time. But then again, over time, you know, people's accounts of things can change, which is unfortunate, and a lot of them have passed away as well.
What ended up happening to Eli? You said he got forty years, He served thirteen and then he got out. What happened to him?
He served thirteen years, and when he got out, he ended up moving to Fort Worth, Texas And January thirty first, two thousand and seven, was when he was found dad in his apartment and he had committed suicide.
So we're obviously not going to see Eli put behind buzz by reinvestigating Ida's case. What is your hope, What is the hope of justice for her? In looking at this case again.
When I first got hired with Greg, this was just supposed to be short. It wasn't supposed to be something big or a huge book. However, with the call from AIDA's brother wanting the help in helping to solve his sister's murder, with the new information that was brought forth, it inspired Greg to move. This was the first book he had ever written, the first case he had ever investigated, and it has a part of him that I don't think anybody will ever be able to understand except for Break.
This is something that has consumed his life. Even when he's in the middle of writing another book or a story, he always comes back to this. And even though Eli is dead, like you said, there's no justice we're going
to be able to see. However, I think what Greg, as well as Dan Gingrich, what they want to see is the Sheriff's department there take accountability for not opening up that initial investigation and reclassifying Ada's death as undetermined or unnatural, something to show she didn't die of natural causes. And for us, we can all look on the outside saying no It's just a piece of paper that's says one thing, whether you know the truth or not. But
for some people that's the point of it. They want it changed on paper, and who are we to judge what they want for their own justice and closure?
Do you think it'll ever happen?
I hope it will. I know there is that part of the book where Greg and I we go to the Sheriff's department and I say a few choice words, which I won't say right now, but I said a few choice words. They refuse to talk with us, But I know Greg is working really closely with the department over there right now, and hopefully that happens. I wouldn't hold my breath, but it doesn't mean I can't hope.
And lastly, I just wanted to ask what Ida's story means to you. You're a mom yourself. You've mentioned that a few times, and that seems to be a big connector here we've got a mom of a young kid, she was pregnant, she was twenty six, she had a whole life ahead of her. Does her story stay with you?
It does. As moms we try and be as perfect as we can or our children or not just her husbands, but we just want to do good. And the thing is Ida just wanted to do good. She wanted to be a good mom, she wanted to be a good wife, and she was murdered for it. And her story deserves to be told. And that's why I do this, even though they don't have a voice. As hard as it is to hear it, it was harder for them to live it. And that's my motto.
Thanks to Robin for assisting us to tell Ida and her son Danny's story. True Crime Conversations is a mom and mea podcast hosted and produced by me Jimma Bass, with audio design by Scott Stronik. Our executive producer is Lift Proud. Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week with another true Crime Conversation. E