Little Boy Blue: Sex, Drugs and Murder, in Amish Country

0:00 Warning, Kind of Murdery contains adult themes, explicit language, and descriptions of violence. It is not suitable for anyone, and we recommend you stop listening now. True crime with a dash of the paranormal, the garish, the strange in the darkly comic. I'm Zevin Odelberg, host of kind of Murdery, a podcast that's about more than just murder. It's my very own pocket dimension, home to a curated collection of bizarre and compelling stories, the unsolved, the unsettling, and the unbelievable. I cover it all just so long as it's kind of murdery.

0:44 It's true. It's all true, folks. I am zevn Odelberg, and this is kind of murdery. We're officially well ensconced in November here, the clocks have changed. This is an interesting month, isn't it. It's a time when some men try not to have orgasms, others grow beards, and we're all forcibly re educated that yes, in fact, pumpkin does go with everything. So those are my top line thoughts on the month of November, which really have nothing whatsoever to do with today's story, but they were musings that I felt compelled to share with you, and I did all right.

1:22 On to today's story, a story that begins on Christmas Eve nineteen eighty five, when a young boy's body is found frozen to death in a Nebraska cornfield. He's an Amish boy in fact. But that's really just the beginning. So if you are ready, please join me now as we uncover what truths we can and solve what mysteries we may. Kind of murders, little boy, blue, sex, drugs, and murder in Amish country starts now in the crisp silence of a chester in Aaska cornfield, as Christmas Eve dawned in nineteen eighty five, a solitary hunter was about to encounter a scene that would haunt the town's collective memory.

2:13 The hunter, accustomed to solitude and the unremarkable findings of nature, spotted an anomaly. Amidst the snow covered stalks, A seemingly innocent mannequin lay partly concealed by the winter's touch. Compelled by curiosity, the hunter approached, his breath visible in the cold air, his hands, steadying himself for what he assumed would be a mundane discovery. As he swept away the snow, a chill of a different kind took hold. For it wasn't synthetic hair and plastic he revealed, but the body of a small human child, enigmatically swaddled in a blue blanket, an eerie stillness surrounding it.

2:51 The hunter's tentative touch confirmed his worst fears. The body before him, once a vessel of young life, was now a frozen relic of a life stolen too soon. The peaceful little town was pierced by the macab reality that they were now the backdrop of a grim Christmas tale. A child whose laughter would no longer mingle with the jingle of holiday cheer, lay as a silent testimony to an unknown tragedy. The Hunter, in that moment transformed from a seeker of game to a discoverer of truths as he set off a cascade of questions that the frost laden fields of Chester were reluctant to answer.

3:27 Who was this child? How did they come to rest in such a forsaken state? The answers, like the boy, lay buried waiting for the thaw of truth. The discovery of the child's body turned the hunter from a mere witness to an urgent harbinger of a dark mystery that needed unraveling. His pulse quickening, he retraced his steps out of the cornfield, each footfall a heavy note in the otherwise silence expanse. He sought help, with the weight of his grim find pressing down upon him a burden that he could not bear alone.

3:58 The police officer, upon their prompt arrival, plunged into the investigative fray. Their professional detachment was strained by the young age of the victim, and they were driven by the conviction that somewhere, perhaps within the quiet homes dotted across the sleepy town, or beyond its borders, there was a void where this child had once existed. A family must be missing their little one. The sketch artist, with just a few strokes of his pencil, gave the boy a voice that his frozen lips could not muster.

4:27 His visage innocent and still was cast across the region, a silent plea for recognition. Meanwhile, the autopsy, a meticulous search for truth within the silent testimony of his body, yielded more questions than answers. There were no marks of violence, no sign of disease. His death was as much a mystery as his identity. As the community faced the stark reality of the child's anonymity, Chester found unity in collective mourning. They refused to let him pass from this world without a name, without dignity little Boy Blue that became the name.

4:59 It was a moniker inspired by the tragic tableaux in which he was found, and it became a symbol of the town's unwavering compassion. The residents, though few, demonstrated an outpouring of empathy that transcended the boy's unknown origins. A burial plot, funeral expenses, and a stone monument were not just offerings of charity. There were the town's way of adopting little Boy Blue into their fold, posthumously weaving him into the fabric of their community history. It was an act of communal respect, a declaration that though he was found alone, he would not be left unclaimed.

5:32 Chester had ensured that the boy, embraced by a blanket in death, would be enfolded by their care for eternity. The mystery of Little Boy Blue lingered like a persistent shadow over Chester, Nebraska, until a flicker of light emerged from an unexpected source. Readers digest the publication with its vast reach, carried the story beyond the quiet fields of Chester into the collective consciousness of the nation. The story of the boy found in the corn field, now shared with a wider audience, resonated with a profound echo, stirring memories and prompting action.

6:05 From the heartland of Ohio. A call punctuated the steady flow of incoming tips. The caller's voice, tinged with the recognition of a distant memory, brought forth the name Danny Stutsman. Little boy Blue looked like a boy named Danny Stutsman, and this boy, Danny Stutsman, had once lived in the simple tapestry of Amish life in Apple Creek, but had vanished from view, leaving behind an empty space in the community fabric. Simultaneously, a woman in the rugged expanses of Wyoming connected the haunting image with a child.

6:35 She knew, a child who had briefly found refuge under her roof. Indeed, she spoke of the same boy, a young boy named Danny Stutsman, and her testimony wove together the strands of Danny's last known months, a narrative thread that led to the business travels of his father Eli with a name and a possible narrative emerging from the shadows. The authorities sought the tangible truth that lay in the intricate patterns of Danny's palm print, which is an awfully fancy way of saying that they took Danny's palm print, which immediately brought clarity, the clarity of a puzzle piece fitting into place, and confirmed that indeed, little Boy Blue was Danny Stutsman, a child of nine whose life's journey had ended in the harsh embrace of winter.

7:18 A confirmed identity for little Boy Blue brought relief to a community that had shouldered the unknown, but it also cast a stark light on the absence of Eli Stutsman and Danny's father. His whereabouts became the next mystery, a puzzle that law enforcement set out to solve with the same determination that had cracked the silence around the boy's identity. Yet Eli Stutsman's trail was cold and meandering, a challenge that would test the resolve of those seeking justice for young Danny. You see, it was a near certainty that Eli Stutsman did not want to be found, but his own desires notwithstanding, Eli Stutsman was eventually located in azl, Texas after a protracted man hunt.

8:00 Following his arrest on charges of felony child abuse, Stutsman provided investigators with a narrative that raised many questions. He initially stated that while traveling from Wyoming to Ohio for the holidays, his son Danny, had become acutely ill and died unexpectedly in the truck. Later, he amended his story, suggesting that Danny had been suffering from an upper respiratory infection and had died in bed in his sleep. Contrary to what many of us might expect from a grieving parent, Stutsman's response to his son's death was to dispose of the body surreptitiously.

8:31 He recounted how he had prayed over Danny before leaving him concealed under the snow in a remote Nebraska cornfield, proceeding on his journey without alerting authorities or seeking medical assistance. This course of action led to his arrest and the subsequent charge as abandoning Danny's body and failing to report his death reflected a grave disregard for his son's welfare and rightfully had brought the full weight of the law upon him. Eli Stutsman's actions following his son's death were a web of contradiction and fabrications.

9:00 Rather than returning home for the holidays after Danny's alleged passing, Stutsman diverted to Salinas, Kansas for a personal encounter with a man he had met through classified newspaper ads. This detour into a hidden life was a stark departure from his strict Amish upbringing, where his lifestyle was not just frowned upon but forbidden. That lifestyle, of course, being that of a gay man. Despite the strictures of their beliefs, Eli's Amish community did show a level of acceptance, allowing him to visit whenever he wished without judgment.

9:33 This time, when he arrived in Apple Creek in time for Christmas, Stutsman faced questions about Danny's whereabouts. His response was a series of lies, telling his family that Danny was on a ski trip in Colorado. As inquiries persisted, the stories grew more elaborate and disparate, ranging from tragic accidents to peaceful living among the Amish in Ohio. The inconsistency of his tales raised suspicion among the authorities Stutsman's nonchalant attribution of his deceit to a personality disorder did little to allay their concerns.

10:05 To the law enforcement officers, Stutsman appeared as a man wearing a mask of fatherly affection, beneath which lay the potential of a far more sinister nature. Despite their suspicions of Stutsman's deeper involvement in Danny's death, the investigators faced the significant challenge of bridging the gap between intuition and evidence. Proving guild in a court of law required a firm foundation of facts, something that Stutsman's labyrinth of lies and the chilling lack of direct evidence made difficult to construct.

10:34 The case, as complex as it was heartbreaking, demanded not only the dedication of the investigators, but also a breakthrough that could cut through the tangle of Stutsman's various stories. The complexities of the case against Eli Stutsman only deepened as investigators continued their meticulous work With no direct evidence of foul play in Danny's death. The charges levied against Stutsman were comparatively minor, failure to report a death and the illegal disposal of human remains. His guilty plea in January nineteen eighty eight resulted in an eighteen month sentence, a resolution that felt inadequate against the backdrop of a child's unexplained death.

11:11 Inadequate to say the least. Yet the authorities were not content to let the story end there, good thing, because neither am I. They were driven by a conviction that Stutsman was concealing more of his dark past, a belief that propelled them to dig deeper. Their persistence paid off when their search expanded, looking for other possible victims, and in doing so, they uncovered disturbing patterns. You see, Stutsman's nomadic existence was beginning to appear less like a man simply inclined to wander and more like a calculated strategy to avoid the consequences of nefarious deeds.

11:47 His itinerant lifestyle facilitated a pattern of using others, only to abandon them when they ceased to serve his purpose, if that was indeed his design. The scrutiny into Stutsman's history revealed a haunting echo of tragedy. The death of his wife Ida in nineteen seventy seven, under circumstances as tragic as they were suspicious. Ida's death added a layer of macabre intrigue to the Stutsman family narrative. She died amid a barnfire while heavily pregnant, in what had been explained away by Stutsman as a desperate, failed attempt to save the farm equipment.

12:21 He claimed that his heavily pregnant wife ran back into a burning building to save farm equipment. Sure, the accounts seemed like a stretch at the time, or at least it would have to me if I was investigating, But now now viewed through the lens of Danny's death and the Stutsman's labyrinth of lies, it cast a deeper, darker shadow of doubt onto the true nature of that earlier tragedy. Yes, whether or without the freezing of Danny Stutsman, I would tend to believe that pregnant women are pretty aware of the emerging life inside of them and would be highly unlikely to put themselves and the baby at risk to rescue farm equipment.

12:57 The law enforcement official with a growing dossier of Stutsman's unsettling past, were piecing together a pattern that suggested a man capable of far more than neglect and misdemeanors. The death of his wife, now linked with the death of his son, suggested a disturbing trend, one that they were determined to investigate to its fullest, no matter where it led. In the wake of his wife Ida's tragic death, those who knew Eli Stutsman witnessed his descent into a profound depression. His grief was compounded by the strictures of his Amish community, a lifestyle that seemed increasingly incompatible with his true self.

13:30 In the years that followed, Stutsman's contempt for Amish tradition began to manifest overtly. He defied community norms by adopting modern clothing and even went so far as to install electricity in his home. By nineteen eighty two, the tension between his personal desires and the expectations of his community reached its apex, Stutsman, declaring his intention to leave behind the Amish way of life, relocated to Colorado with his six year old son, Danny. This decision was unsurprising to those from really year, with Stutsman's inner conflict and his struggle to conform to a life that rejected modern conveniences and emphasized humility.

14:06 For Stutsman, the Amish rejection of technology like electricity and telephones felt like a rejection of his identity, particularly of his forbidden sexual orientation. He had lived a dual existence in Apple Creek, Ohio, simultaneously a family man and secretly seeking companionship from men through personal advertisements. Detectives investigating Stutsman's past considered the possibility that Ida's death in the fire might not have been an accident, especially in light of his clandestine activities and the pressures of his double life.

14:36 Through their inquiries, investigators learned of Stutsman's skill as a leather craftsman, a trade that often kept him on the road. Rather than burden himself with the responsibilities of childcare. During his travels, he frequently relied on the goodwill of others to look after Danny, who was remembered as a compliant and trouble free child. The family from Wyoming, who had last provided a home for Danny, recounted that Stutsman had returned for his son a few days before Christmas. He told them of plans to take Danny to Apple Creek to visit family, a story that ended with Danny's disappearance and the subsequent recognition of his face from a reader's digest article, forever changing the narrative of the Stutsman family.

15:13 Eli Stutsman's time while Danny was in the care of the Wyoming family was not spent as the itinerant craftsman he'd portrayed himself to be. Instead, he was immersed in a hedonistic lifestyle, engaging with various men he met through personal ads. His demeanor, described as soft spoken and amiable, facilitated these encounters, but for some the experience of meeting Stutsman would take a dark turn. In Austin, Texas, the death of twenty four year old Glenn Pritchett presented a grim case. Found in a ditch, Pridgett had been executed with a gunshot to the head, with Stutsman abruptly leaving town around the same time, he became a prime suspect in the murder.

15:52 As the legal net began to titan, Stutsman, perhaps sensing the impending danger, took his son Danny and embarked on a fugitive journey. They drifted through New Mexico and Colorado, ultimately pausing in lymem and Wyoming. The following month saw Macobb pattern emerge. In Durango, Colorado, the body of thirty six year old David Tyler, an acquaintance of Stutsman's, was found shot in the head in his pickup truck. The timing and connection to Stutsman were too stark to be ignored. The death of Dennis Slater, a psychology student, followed shortly after, found in a liquor store basement the scene of his murder, with homophobic slurs written in blood on the walls, pointed to a hate crime.

16:31 Witnesses reported seeing someone resembling Stutsman near the liquor store before Slater's murder, adding another suspicious link to Stutsman's chain of associations. Less than three weeks later, the tragic discovery of young Danny Stutsman's body in a Nebraska cornfield added to the burgeoning trail of death that seemed to shadow eli Stutsman's movements. Confronted with this series of violent deaths, each with a thread leading back to Stutsman, investigators were compelled to act. They resolved to confront the man who had become the focal point of these tragedies, seeking answers to a growing list of grim questions.

17:07 Their next step was to sit down with Stutsman for what was sure to be an intensive interrogation as they worked a piece together the truth behind the suspicious deaths and determine his involvement, if any, in these crimes. Eli Stutsman was released from Nebraska prison after the eighteen months he served for failure to report a death and improperly disposing of a body, but his taste of freedom would be brief curtailed by the long arm of Texas law enforcement. Despite his assertions of innocence regarding Glenn Pritchett's death, the evidence amassed against him led to a charge of murder.

17:41 The subsequent trial culminated in a guilty verdict, and on July thirty first, nineteen eighty nine, Stutsman was handed a substantial sentence of forty years for the murder of Glenn Pritchett. Well, forty years sounds like a pretty righteous outcome for a terrible terror story full of heinous crimes, but the justice systems gears turned, and in an outcome that many would find startling, Stutsman was released after serving just thirteen years of his forty year sentence. His re injury into society after being convicted of such a serious crime a murder, and linked to several other suspicious deaths, including that of his own wife and son, raised eyebrows, to say the least, and likely caused considerable concern among those who had followed the grim saga of Stutsman's past.

18:31 The shadow of his previous actions would undoubtedly linger, both for him and for the communities affected by the tragedies associated with his name. In the later stages of his life, Eli Stutsman's story continued to be one of complexity and contradiction. Residing in Fort Worth, Texas, he occupied a one bedroom apartment and mingled with a dubious circle of acquaintances, drug addicts and sex workers. While open about his stint in prison, he hid the true nature of his incarceration, attributing it to drug offenses rather than to the murder conviction that had actually confined him.

19:05 Stutsman's personal history, as he recounted it, varied depending on the audience. To Sami was a lifelong bachelor, to others, a bereaved widower with a son raised by grandparents, a son with whom he claimed to be in regular contact. He was plagued by financial instability as his efforts to sustain himself through his leather craft were insufficient. The specter of eviction loomed, exacerbated by his addiction to cocaine and the physical and emotional toll of living HIV positive. On January thirty first, two thousand and seven, the final chapter of Stutsman's troubled life came to a close.

19:38 Concerned friends discovered his lifeless body in his apartment, leading to a coroner's inquest that concluded suicide by self inflicted knife wound. Stutsman's estrangement from his roots was crystallized in death. As the Amish community in Apple Creek declined to claim his remains, the state stepped in and Stutsman was laid to rest at Cedar Hill Memorial Park in Arlington Tech. Despite the official ruling of suicide, there were those who suspected foul play, citing the dubious nature of his associates and unexpected bloodstains found away from where his body was discovered.

20:10 Skeptics questioned the narrative that he had wandered around the apartment before succumbing to his injuries on the couch. Investigators however, remained steadfast in their conclusion, pointing to the scene of his death under a comforter with the television still on, as indicative of a solitary and deliberate act. They argued that the nature of the wound allowed for a slow bleed, which would have enabled him to move around before settling down to face the end of his life. The tale of Eli Stutsman is a tapestry woven with threads of mystery, suspicion, and the unresolved.

20:41 Convicted for the murder of Glenn Pritchett, Stutsman was also a figure of interest in a series of deaths that presented more questions than answers. The nineteen seventy seven fire that claimed the life of his wife Ida and their unborn child remained a cold case, with the insular nature of the Amish community presenting obstacles to a thorough investigation. The death of his son Danny, known poignantly as Little Boy Blue, was another sorrowful chapter that law enforcement in Nebraska couldn't conclusively close.

21:10 The absence of trauma on the boy's body left authorities with little recourse but to leave the case open, awaiting new leads that never came. The connections to David Tyler and Dennis Slater, both of whom Stutsman knew and both of whom meant violent inns, only deepened the aura of suspicion surrounding him. Yet the lack of concrete evidence rendered the cases against him tenuous, leaving a trail of speculation in their wake. The true extent of Stutsman's crimes, if indeed there were more than the one for which he was convicted, remained shrouded in the shadows of the unknown.

21:39 His itinerant lifestyle and clandestine meetings spread across the map suggest the possibility that his involvement in criminal activities might have been far more extensive than the record states, which is kind of a non specific way of pointing out that Stutsman could possibly have been involved in any number of unsolved murders and deaths across any number of states over the decades. He was only convicted of one murder, but his association with so many mysterious, strange, and unnatural deaths over the years suggests that there could be many more instances of violence that he committed but with which he was never associated.

22:21 But enough about Danny Stutzman's terrible father. Despite the enigma of his life and the grim speculation that follows his name, the legacy of Little Boy Blue endures as a testament to human compassion and community spirit. The people of Chester, Nebraska responded to the tragedy of his death with an outpouring of love and respect, ensuring that though abandoned in life, he was embraced in death. It's in this spirit that the memory of the Boy in the Blue Blanket persists, a reminder of the profound impact one small life can have on the hearts of many.

22:55 Before I let you go, given the subject matter of this story, I'd like to offer you just a quick reminder of the free three digit lifeline number nine eight eight that you can call anytime twenty four hours a day, seven days a week to receive immediate counseling for substance use, mental health, or suicidal thoughts. So if you find yourself in a dark place, please do call ninety eight. Please do remember that you are loved and the world is a better place with you in it. Until next time, I'm Zevan Odleberg, and this has been kind of murdery