Amish Confidential (16 page)

CHAPTER 17

SCHOOLED IN FORGIVENESS

I
t was the bloodiest day ever for the Amish in America. It also produced the greatest Amish lesson ever taught, and it all unfolded a ten-minute buggy ride from my family’s Lancaster County farm.

On Monday, October 2, 2007, Charles Carl Roberts IV walked into a one-room schoolhouse in the Old Order Amish community of West Nickel Mines. He arrived just before 10 a.m. There were twenty-six children at the school that day, plus the twenty-year-old female teacher Emma Mae Zook, her twenty-two-year-old pregnant sister-in-law Lydia, her mother Barbie, and three more visiting moms with infants.

A thirty-two-year-old milk-truck driver, Charlie was well liked in our part of the county. He wasn’t Amish, but he had lived and worked around the Amish for most of his life. His father was a retired police officer. He had a wife named Marie and three sweet young children, ages two to seven. He was constantly doting on them. He had finished his milk route that morning, making pickups at a couple of dozen Amish dairy farms. He’d grabbed a quick nap at home,
walked his older son and daughter to their school bus, hugged the children good-bye, stopped at a hardware store to buy some flex ties and driven his pickup truck to the West Nickel Mines School. As usual, the front double doors were open. The Amish aren’t big on locks.

Charlie arrived with a secret. What no one else knew was that for nearly a week he had been stockpiling quite an arsenal: a Browning twelve-gauge shotgun, a Ruger 30-06 bolt-action rifle, a Springfield XD nine-millimeter semiautomatic handgun, six hundred rounds of ammo, several cans of black powder, an illegal stun gun, some construction lumber, a hammer, a screwdriver, bags of nails and screws, K-Y Jelly and an empty five-gallon bucket.

Once inside the school, Charlie pulled out his handgun, abruptly stopping Emma Mae’s German lesson. He ordered the boys, who were dressed in their usual Amish dark pants and suspenders, to help him unload the truck. The boys did as they were told, while the gunman began sealing the building’s entrances with his lumber. He shoved a heavy foosball table toward the front double doors, but not before the teacher and her mother managed to escape.

Charlie was agitated. Things weren’t going as planned. He sent one of the boys outside to find the teacher and bring her back.

Charlie had a plan. He told the fourteen boys to leave. Next he told the four remaining adults, “You ladies can leave. Those with children.”

A nine-year-old girl, who spoke only Pennsylvania Dutch, didn’t understand Roberts’s English when he demanded: “Stay here. Do not move. You will be shot.” She innocently followed her brother outside.

That left a total of ten girls still in the schoolhouse. It was the girls he was interested in.

Charlie didn’t say anything the girls could make sense of. But he did rant a bit. “I’m angry at God and I need to punish some Christian girls to get even with him,” he said. “I’m going to make you pay for my daughter.”

The girls quietly huddled together, looking frightened in their long dresses, bonnets and plain shoes, not knowing that the whole outside world was about to fly into panic.

The teacher and her mother had already run to the farm of a non-Amish neighbor, Amos Smoker, and asked him to call 911. “There’s a guy in the school with a gun,” Smoker told the dispatcher at 10:35 a.m.

As the state police sped toward the school, Charlie bound the girls’ feet and ordered them onto the floor. Then he told them to get up again and stand in front of the chalkboard.

Hanging above their heads was a prominent sign that people would notice later. It was bordered by yellow-and-black smiley-face stickers and read: “Visitors Brighten Peoples’ Days.”

“Be quiet,” he snapped at the girls.

By then, police were roaring up White Oak Road with sirens wailing and were converging on the tiny schoolhouse. They didn’t want to rush the building for fear of what the gunman might to do to his hostages. They didn’t want to wait, fearing exactly the same thing. A trooper called out to him over the PA system of his cruiser, telling Charlie to toss his weapons out and let the girls go. They got no answer. Using his wife’s cell phone, Charlie did call 911, telling the dispatcher: “I just took, uh, ten girls hostage and I want everybody off the property or, or else.”

He didn’t sound angry. He didn’t yell or scream. Lancaster County district attorney Don Totaro said Charlie’s voice sounded “flat . . . It’s almost like there’s no soul there.”

By then, a large and growing crowd had gathered outside—neighbors, parents, police, paramedics, a farmer with two large dogs.

Inside the school, the girls could see that Roberts was growing even more agitated. He was pacing and barking orders and mumbling to himself. Something was about to happen. That was obvious. Several of the older girls had a powerful suspicion about what that might be.

“Shoot me first,” said Marian Fisher, thirteen, the oldest one.

“Shoot me second,” said her eleven-year-old sister, Barbara.

And Charlie did.

One by one by one, starting at 11:07 a.m., he shot all ten of the girls at point-blank range, beginning with Marian Fisher and her sister and not skipping anyone. He fired more than two dozen rounds in all. He did it quickly and efficiently. Then he pulled the trigger one more time, shooting himself in the head.

“Mass casualty on White Oak Road,” one of the responding troopers shouted over the police radio at 11:10 a.m. as others tried frantically to force their way past Roberts’s heavy barricades. “Multiple children shot.”

The carnage was heavy. Marian Fisher and Naomi Rose Ebersol, seven, died instantly. Anna May Stoltzfus, twelve, was dead on arrival at Lancaster General Hospital. Lena Zook Miller, eight, and her sister, Mary Liz, seven, died the next day in their mother’s arms. Five girls, including Marian’s sister Barbara, were wounded but survived. Several of them, the doctors would say later, were saved because they had buried their heads in their arms.

When the troopers finally burst inside, the murder scene was a bloody, chaotic mess. Even some veteran law-enforcement agents had trouble absorbing it all. The crime-scene investigators kept walking outside to regain their composure and take a few breaths of fresh air.

“We had all these victims at the scene that we’re triaging,” state police commissioner Jeffrey Miller said later. “We didn’t know who they were. We just knew we had a young, female victim that was taken to hospital X.” The nurses had to take digital photos of the victims’ faces and e-mail them to the state police, who showed the photos to the teacher so the girls could be identified.

Word spread quickly across the fields and along the dirt roads of Amish Country. The Amish turned out. From all directions, men and women walked to the West Nickel Mines schoolhouse. They stood outside. They covered their faces, and they wept.

T
he Amish weren’t the only ones to suffer that day. For the stunned family of Charles Roberts, the loss and the shame were almost unbearable.

“I heard the sirens and heard helicopters,” his mother, Terri Roberts, said later. “My phone was ringing and it was my husband, and he said, ‘You have to get to Charlie’s right away.’ ” She heard the first radio reports in the car: a shooting at the West Nickel Mines School, not far from where she knew her son delivered milk. Her mind raced with possibilities. What if her son had been shot trying to rescue the children?

She pulled into Charlie’s driveway. Her husband was standing with what looked to her like sunken, swollen eyes.

“Is Charlie alive?” she asked.

“No.”

Losing an innocent child is excruciatingly painful. Losing a guilty one isn’t one bit easier. Terri Roberts’s initial reaction was that she and her family should immediately move out of town.

In the hours after the shooting, relatives of the young Amish victims began showing up at the killer’s mother’s door. Not in anger, but in love, and every one of them had the same message for her.

Do not leave. Forgiveness is genuine. We are all in this together.

“Is there anything in this life we shouldn’t forgive?” one of the Amish women asked.

Terri Roberts wasn’t quite sure how to answer. She could hardly believe her ears.

These peoples’ young daughters had just been shot and murdered. Her grown son—or some evil spirit that inhabited his mind and body—was responsible for that. Were the Amish really this understanding? Was their famous forgiveness really that strong? Could it overcome even mass murder?

Maybe so.

The police and media were already asking the usual “why” questions. Why did this happen? Why did Charles Roberts snap? What would provoke a man who’d never exhibited violent tendencies to act so abhorrently? These were the most innocent of victims. These were children whose families he’d known.

His grandmother Teresa Neustadter spoke with the cluelessness that all Charlie’s relatives felt. “What is there to say?” she asked. “He was a good grandson.”

Nothing made any sense at all, though Charlie might have planted some clues in the four suicide notes he left for his wife and
children. He said he had molested two female relatives twenty years earlier, which would have made him twelve at the time. (When they were asked about this, the now-grown women said nothing like that had ever happened to them.) In one of the notes, he said he had been having dreams for the past couple of years about doing again what he did twenty years ago.

If he was worried about harming little girls again, why do something even more terrible to them?

In one of the notes, he mentioned the death of his own first daughter, Elise, who been born prematurely and lived just twenty minutes. That actually did occur.

But how did any of that explain a massacre? Was there something in the comment he made in the final minutes about his “need to punish some Christian girls”?

It all sounded like crazy talk, and the grieving Amish relatives really didn’t seem to care. They were moving forward. Their focus, they said, came right out of the Bible. To them, the Word of God seemed perfectly clear.

Hadn’t Jesus admonished in Matthew 5:44: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”? Hadn’t Paul taught much the same thing in Romans 12:18–21? “Live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves but leave it to the wrath of God . . . No, if your enemy is hungry, feed him.”

It’s true that many religions give lip service to the idea of forgiveness. Forgiveness and reconciliation are deeply embedded in the Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist faiths—and lots of others, too.

But how many people would do what these Amish families did—do it so quickly, so fully and with so little reservation or regret?
Immediately forgive the children’s killer and reach out with love and support to his devastated family? Not many, that’s for sure.

Soon after the shooting, Charlie’s wife, Marie, was at her parents’ house when she saw a group of Amish men approaching. She was nervous but her father said, “You can stay inside, I’ll go out and talk with them.” What she saw next she says she will never forget.

The Amish men hugged her father.

Terri Roberts was surprised when dozens of her Amish neighbors attended her son’s solemn funeral. They followed as he was buried in an unmarked grave in his wife’s family’s plot behind Georgetown United Methodist Church.

“There are not words to describe how that made us feel that day,” she said. “For the mother and father who had lost not just one but two daughters at the hand of our son, to come up and be the first ones to greet us—wow!”

She was surprised again when the grieving Amish relatives invited her and her daughter-in-law to attend the girls’ funerals.

They went, of course.

E
leven days after the shooting, the old schoolhouse was torn down. It was too painful for people to look at. Some Amish parents also felt their children would never be comfortable attending classes in a world-famous crime scene. Since Charles Roberts had taken his own life and wouldn’t be standing trial, there was no need to preserve any forensic evidence. A volunteer crew of Amish carpenters, alongside some of the grieving fathers, made quick work of the old school.

A new schoolhouse would have been easy to build for a people who can raise a barn in a single day. But the pain was fresh and no
one seemed in any hurry to build anything. Students returned, but for nearly six months their lessons were taught in a garage.

In the spring, a new school was finally constructed a few hundred yards away. This one was called the New Hope Amish School. By the time teachers and scholars (the Amish word for students) stepped into the new one-room school, most of the media had packed up their notebooks and microphones and driven their satellite trucks home—or, more likely, on to the next big human tragedy. Few in the Amish community were sad to see them go.

CHAPTER 18

GIRLS GONE

T
he Amish sisters were twelve and seven years old. The girls, Fannie and Delila, were keeping an eye on their family’s roadside farm stand while their parents and brothers and sister were up at the barn milking cows. There were fourteen Miller kids in all. Dusk was settling gently on upstate New York.

Then a white sedan pulled to a stop.

There was nothing unusual about any of this. The girls often helped around the stand, waiting on customers and arranging the displays of vegetables, fruits, jams and other products from the family farm. But in the car, authorities said, were Stephen Howells Jr., age thirty-nine, and his twenty-five-year-old girlfriend Nicole Vaisey—and
normal
isn’t the word anyone would use for them. The car windows were open, and the girls noticed a dog.

“You want to pet the puppy?” the man allegedly asked. “His name is Kaleidoscope.”

The girls did love dogs. This one, a golden retriever–Doberman mix, was leashed in the backseat on the driver’s side. So the girls leaned in the open window to get a better look.

Something seemed off to Fannie. She didn’t know exactly what, but she motioned to her little sister as if to say, “Let’s get out of here.” It was then, the authorities believe, that Stephen Howell reached around from the front seat and yanked both girls into the car, stepping on the gas and speeding away.

I
n many ways, the Amish make perfect targets.

They live in isolated communities, ride around in slow-moving vehicles, and they walk great distances, often alone. Though their lives are mostly insular, they do rely on outsiders for help. “May I use your telephone?” “Do you know what time it is?” “Can I rent some space in your garage?” Amish children play together for hours with little adult supervision. Physical security is the last thing on Amish peoples’ minds, and when something bad occurs, the Amish are famously slow to alert outside authorities, preferring to settle as much as they can strictly among themselves.

The good news in this case is that the girls’ parents, Mose and Barbara Miller, realized quickly that their daughters were gone and promptly walked to a neighbor’s house, where they telephoned the police. The police activated the New York State AMBER Alert, announcing that two girls had vanished around 7:20 p.m. on August 13, 2014, from their family farm stand on State Highway 812 at Mount Alone Road in the small Amish farming community of Heuvelton, twenty miles from the border with Canada.

“Fannie Miller is about 12 years old with brown hair and brown eyes,” the alert read. “She is approximately 5-feet tall and weighs about 90 pounds. She was last seen wearing a dark blue dress with a blue apron and black bonnet. The victim is also cross-eyed. Delila
Miller is about 6 years old with brown hair and brown eyes. She is approximately 4-feet tall and weighs about 50 pounds. She was last seen wearing a dark blue dress with a blue apron and black bonnet. She has a round scar on her forehead and is missing front teeth.”

The AMBER Alert generated worldwide publicity, and the media descended quickly on upstate New York. In a matter of hours, hundreds of civilians had volunteered to help search. Crime victims, everyone agreed, don’t get much more sympathetic than these two. But still, the hunt got off to a rockier start than it should have. There were no photographs of the girls.

When the state police asked the Miller family for photos of the missing girls, the parents said they didn’t have any. The Amish, as the police should have known, don’t believe in being photographed.

“What about a sketch artist?” one of the lead investigators suggested.

Frantic as the girls’ parents were, even that seemed to cause them some distress. The parents weren’t sure about the Amish teaching on realistic drawings. Did those carry the same vanity risk as photographs?

The police found a sketch artist who could speak Pennsylvania Dutch and did the best they could. The Millers finally agreed to release a sketch of the older daughter—but not the younger one, and valuable hours were lost.

By the time the volunteers fanned out across St. Lawrence County and the media satellite trucks arrived from Boston, New York, Syracuse and Montreal, Stephen Howells and Nicole Vaisey had already driven the girls to their home in Hermon.

Neither Howells nor Vaisey had a criminal record. They both had respectable-sounding jobs—he as a registered nurse in a wound-
treatment center at Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center in nearby Ogdensburg, she as a professional dog groomer. But this was one creepy duo, if the stories police and prosecutors would later piece together are even halfway true. St. Lawrence County district attorney Mary Rain called the couple “sexual predators.”

Once they got the girls back to their house, the sisters were “handcuffed together at the ankles and handcuffed to the bedpost because they were scared they were going to go out the window and flee,” said Detective Sergeant Brooks Bigwarfe.

According to Bigwarfe, Howells and Nicole Vaisey had been on the lookout for little girls to grab. “She called it a shopping trip,” said the sergeant. “They wanted to make the two girls their slaves.”

And the kidnappers weren’t planning to stop with these two, District Attorney Rain said. “There is no doubt in my mind that if they were successful, they were going to continue with future acts,” the prosecutor said.

“There was the definite potential that there was going to be other victims from these two,” St. Lawrence County sheriff Kevin Wells agreed. “They were looking for other opportunities to victimize.” According to the sheriff, Howells and Vaisey weren’t targeting the Amish in particular. They were simply seeking “opportunities.”

B
y the time the girls had been held for nearly twenty-four hours, the story of the kidnapping in Amish Country had exploded everywhere. The AMBER Alert and the hard-charging media had done their jobs—and then some.

The kidnapping was front-page news in the
Watertown Daily Times
and
Daily Courier-Observer
. The
New York Times
,
the
Bos
ton Globe
and the
Montreal
Gazette
all flew people in. The story was saturating the radio and the TV news—and not just on the local channels. CNN and Fox couldn’t seem to get enough. The Millers didn’t have television on their farm in Heuvelton. But Howells and Vaisey certainly did at their house in Hermon. The story was creating an uproar and attention that no one could possibly have bargained for.

It seems the kidnappers got spooked.

“They decided to drop the kids off in an isolated area,” reported Sergeant Bigwarfe from the sheriff’s office. Vaisey went first, scouting the area around County Route 20 in nearby Richville to make sure no police or civilian searchers were lurking around. When she reported all was clear, Howells drove Fannie and Delila to a dark spot in the road and shoved the two frightened girls out of the car.

As quickly as he’d grabbed them, he let them go.

It was dark outside. The girls didn’t see any houses at first, but after walking for a couple of minutes, they came up to one. The lights were on. They rang the bell, not knowing who or what they might find.

An English couple answered the door. Their names were Jeffrey and Pamela Stinson. They were understandably startled by what they saw.

Two wet and cold little girls in Amish dresses, perfectly well mannered, with fear just dripping out of their eyes. The younger one didn’t say much.

“Do you know where 812 is?” the older girl asked Jeff Stinson. “Can you take us to 812?”

“Yes, of course,” his wife answered for him. “We know where that is.”

Like everyone in St. Lawrence County, the Stinsons had heard
about the missing Amish girls. They understood immediately that these had to be the girls on the news. The wife told the girls to come inside.

Her husband asked if they were hungry. They said they were. He cut up a watermelon he’d just pulled out of the garden. The girls devoured it in less than a minute.

“Can you take us home?” the older girl asked Jeff Stinson. “We want our mom and dad.”

“We sure can,” he said.

And so he did. He didn’t think twice about what might happen if someone saw a grown English man riding at night across St. Lawrence County with two Amish girls. He piled the girls into his truck and began the fifteen-mile drive home.

“We never gave any thought about the implications or dangers,” he said later. “We knew they had to get home.”

As they rode along through the darkness, Stinson couldn’t help but notice that a car seemed to be following them. He could only imagine who might be driving. He wondered if the truck was about to be shot at. He ticked off the miles in his head. The mystery car stuck with them until just before they reached the Millers’ home. Then it sped away.

T
wo days later, the police arrested Stephen Howells and Nicole Vaisey. Each of them was charged with two counts of first-degree kidnapping and assault, crimes that carry a possible twenty-five years to life in prison. Both defendants pleaded not guilty. District Attorney Rain said more charges were likely on the way.

Outside a preliminary court hearing at the St. Lawrence County
government building in Canton, Nicole Vaisey’s lawyer, Bradford Riendeau, worked hard to portray his client as another of Howell’s helpless victims. She was a woman desperate for attention, he said, with a boyfriend who liked sadomasochistic sex. “She was in a master-slave relationship,” the lawyer said. “She appears to have been the slave, and he was the master. She’s not as culpable as he is.”

The lawyer mentioned something about homemade sex tapes.

“You’ve heard of
Fifty
Shades of Grey
?” he asked a local TV reporter. “This was the fifty-first shade of grey.”

T
he following week, after the girls had a chance to get settled at home, Jeff and Pam Stinson took an evening drive to Heuvelton. The whole Miller family warmly welcomed them inside.

Fannie and Delila were doing about as well as could be expected, said their mother, Barbara Miller. “We feel relieved we have them,” she said, adding almost apologetically, “It’s still not like it was.”

The girls hadn’t spoken much about the ordeal, said one of their twelve siblings, a nineteen-year-old sister, Mattie. “It just makes it scarier for them.”

Citing his Amish views on forgiveness, the girls’ father, Mose Miller, said he wasn’t angry at the couple who had kidnapped them. He felt sympathy, he said. “It’s sad,” he explained. “They must have ruined their whole life.”

There were a lot of thank-yous and handshakes on State Route 812 that night. The Stinsons left with a big bundle of flowers and a large bag of fresh vegetables.

But that friendly visit between English and Amish, family to family, rescuers and victims, isn’t where this story ends. As the criminal
case inched its way forward through the St. Lawrence court system, the Miller family of Heuvelton seemed to feel they should do something more for the Stinsons of Richville.

As the Stinsons saw it, they hadn’t done anything extraordinary. They had simply acted as any decent people would. Two cold and hungry sisters had rung their doorbell one night. They invited the girls in. “We just brought the children back to their parents like they needed to be, as soon as possible,” Pam Stinson said.

“If those are my children,” her husband added, “that’s what I hope somebody would do for us. If they were our daughters—we have girls—somebody would have brought them back to us.”

But the Millers wanted to do something. Finally, they came up with an idea.

The Amish are famous for their barn raisings, where the whole community turns out to help a neighbor who has suffered a fire or some other calamity. But Jeffrey and Pamela Stinson didn’t need a new barn. They had, however, recently lost a garage while they were away on vacation in Maine. As best as anyone could figure, a stray cat had knocked over a battery jump-start box. Their garage went up in flames.

To the members of the Miller family, that could mean only one thing: a garage raising at the Stinsons’ place.

“They won’t take no for an answer,” Jeff Stinson told his wife, Pam. What choice did the Stinsons have?

They said “sure” and “thank you” and watched in awe as a big mob of Millers and friends, dressed in traditional Amish garb, descended on the Stinson yard like an army of fire ants and built a spacious new garage at greased-lightning speed.

But what about the other house, the one in Hermon where How
ells and Vaisey lived before they were taken off to jail? The house where they’d shackled the two young girls and held them against their will? That house was a chilling reminder to everyone nearby. It was creepy, the neighbors agreed, just glancing that way.

“You can’t help but look over there,” said next-door neighbor Jamie Matthews. That modest country home was suddenly looking like a diabolical House of Horrors. “You just shake your head in disbelief,” Matthews said.

The house was getting famous, Matthews noticed. “We’ve witnessed hundreds and hundreds of cars that drive by at twenty-five, thirty miles an hour,” he said. “You know what they’re doing. They’re looking at the property. They’re curious.”

The people who lived nearby said they really didn’t know this couple who’d been all over the papers and the TV news. “They kept to themselves,” said neighbor George White. “They weren’t out and about. It was a shock. We just don’t understand.”

The neighbors all agreed they ought to do something, they just didn’t know what. Then Jamie Matthews heard the Amish kidnapping House of Horrors was for sale. A light went off in his head. He would buy that house, and then he would tear it down.

“It’s important,” he said, “not only for us but for the community to change the looks of that property.”

He didn’t hesitate another minute. He called the Realtor and offered the asking price, already planning the demolition in his mind.