Edgar Awards Countdown: The Amish Wife

the one about a mysterious death the author can't get out of his mind

In the weeks leading up to the Edgar Awards ceremony, I’ll be reading and and reviewing the six books nominated for the “Fact Crime” category. This is the fourth installment: you can read about highway serial killers here, the cold case murder of an Atlanta socialite here, and the intersection of dynamite, anarchists, and the surveillance state here. The awards will be announced April 30th!

Apparently Gregg Olsen, the author of The Amish Wife: Unraveling the Lies, Secrets, and Conspiracy That Let a Killer Go Free,¹ is quite the well-known name in the true crime universe. He’s written over thirty fiction and nonfiction titles, but this book is intimately related to one he wrote thirty-five years ago: Abandoned Prayers. In the earlier book, he traces the discovery of a young boy’s body in Nebraska straight to his father, a formerly Amish man who had been hiding a double life of excessive drug use and dangerous sex. The man, Eli Stutzman, only pled guilty to abandoning his son’s body, and never copped to the murder (though he did go to jail for killing his roommate, and after serving fifteen years, he would die by suicide in 2007). What Olsen has not been able to shake is the suspicion that Stutzman also murdered his pregnant wife Ida in 1977, and passed it off as an accident.

Eli’s explanation for Ida’s death, that she was trying to save farm animals from a burning barn and had a “weak heart” that succumbed to the smoke and the stress, never sat right with Olsen. And as he revisits his contacts from researching the first book, he discovers more and more people (the sheriff on the scene, the coroner) who appear to have conspired in Eli’s coverup. The reason: the men were hiding their sexuality in a community and time that would not only have been unaccepting, but outright dangerous for them. By the end of the book, Olsen has amassed a damning portfolio of evidence that Eli likely murdered his wife at some point during the day, and then set the fire and posed her body. Shortly after, Eli took their son Danny on the cross-country journey that would eventually end in his young son’s own suspicious death.

The premise of the book is compelling: an author revisiting his own work because of the haunting impact it had and continues to have on his life, despite his lack of connection to the people (or the religion) involved. And Olsen does not shy away from including his personal obsession throughout the reinvestigation, as well as his thoughts on writing true crime. He talks about how his influences (Jack Olsen and Ann Rule) led him to research meticulously due to the former, and not shy away from pathos due to the latter.² He defines his role as “a writer, a listener. My job is to tell the truth as I find it.” That “as I find it” is important. Olsen does not position himself as delivering the definitive account of what happened to Ida, and further claims that no true crime writer can provide such an account:

So many things will never be known. That’s really the bitter true of true crime writing. We can never know for sure what truly happened. Not all of it. Sure, forensic science and witness statements can give us an excellent idea of what transpired, but that’s only part of the how. Not the why. Not the reasoning behind the act. Forensics can’t tell what the perpetrator was thinking as he or she took someone’s life.

Agreeing so wholeheartedly with Olsen’s approach, I wish I enjoyed reading the book more. There’s something about the tone with which he describes his “cold oil slick” coffee and his gin and tonics that felt superfluous and performative to me. He seems to be creating a bit of a character for himself—the seasoned and hard-boiled reporter with a soft spot for women and kids—that doesn’t quite jibe with the emotional authenticity which supposedly inspired him to return to this story. I don’t doubt his motivations, but his messy emotions don’t come through in the prose the way, well, Ann Rule’s do.

But I quite appreciate a veteran writer’s reflections on the genre. In another passage discussing his understanding of his role, he tells his research assistant “true crime writers are gatherers first,” and I think that’s an interesting and rich image to invoke, especially when defining true crime writing that does not come from someone directly impacted by the violence being described. And perhaps my obstacle to truly connecting with this book is that very distance.

On a scale of 1-10, with 1 being me drinking chicory coffee on a spring morning at Cafe du Monde in New Orleans and 10 being me as Otto in A Fish Called Wanda opening a safe I expected to be filled with diamonds only to find it empty,

how annoyed will I be if The Amish Wife wins the Edgar? 7

1. For those of you keeping track at home, at 12 words this book is so far the runner-up to the arguably more prestigious competition of longest subtitle from a Fact Crime nominated work. The Infernal Machine is still in the lead with 13 words.

2. He also spills the little bit of true crime tea that these two authors hated each other.