A Murder in Amish Ohio: The Martyrdom of Paul Coblentz

By David Meyers and Elise Meyers Walker

In the summer of 1957, a young Holmes County farmer was gunned down in cold blood. There was little to distinguish this slaying from hundreds of others throughout the United States that year except for one detail: Paul Coblentz was Amish. A committed pacifist, Coblentz would not raise a hand against his killers. As sensational crimes often do, the "Amish murder" opened a window into the private lives of the young man, his family and his community--a community that in some respects remains as enigmatic today as it was more than half a century ago. Authors of Wicked Columbus, Ohio's Black Hand Syndicate and others, David Meyers and Elise Meyers Walker unravel the intricacies surrounding one of Ohio's most intriguing murder cases.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781439672167

David Meyers

A graduate of Miami and Ohio State Universities, David Meyers has written a number of local histories, as well as several novels and works for the stage. He was recently inducted into the Ohio Senior Citizens Hall of Fame for his contributions to local history. Elise Meyers Walker is a graduate of Hofstra University and Ohio University. She has collaborated with her father on a dozen local histories, including Ohio's Black Hand Syndicate, Lynching and Mob Violence in Ohio and A Murder in Amish Ohio. They are both available for interviews, book signings and presentations. The authors' website is www.explodingstove.com, or one follow them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and RedBubble at @explodingstove.

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

Every man must give an account of himself to God, and therefore every man ought to be at liberty to serve God in that way that he can best reconcile to his conscience.

—John Leland¹

In the summer of 1957, a farmer was murdered in Holmes County, Ohio. There was little to distinguish this slaying from hundreds of others that occurred throughout the United States that year except for the ethnicity of the victim. He was Amish. As sensational crimes often do, it opened a window into the private lives of the young man, his family and his community—a community that, in some respects, remains as enigmatic today as it was more than half a century ago.

For many Americans, the Amish murder was a revelation. Unless they lived in rural parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana or a few other states, they may not have had any exposure to these peculiar people with their plain manner of dress and their simple lifestyle. Even if they did, it was unlikely they knew them well. The Amish tend to keep to their own kind, having intentionally withdrawn from the larger society—from the world. At least, they try. But sometimes the world won’t be denied.

For years, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, has been known as the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country—Pennsylvania Dutch being a shorthand term for the descendants of early German-speaking immigrants. This included such religious groups as Lutheran, German Reformed, Moravian, Schwarzenau Brethren (Dunkards), Mennonite and Amish. After National Geographic magazine published an article about the region in 1938, many East Coast city-dwellers were prompted to make an occasional excursion there. And by 1955, roughly twenty-five thousand people per year were visiting Lancaster County. Sixty-five years later, that number tops 8 million.

One of a series of WPA posters that promoted Pennsylvania tourism. Library of Congress.

Holmes County, Ohio, by contrast, had virtually no tourism to speak of back then and continues to lag well behind Lancaster County. Despite being the locus of the largest Amish settlement in the world, it has about half as many visitors. As sociologist Donald Kraybill observed, In 1957, Amish-themed tourism was still in its infancy and few Americans even knew of the Amish, let alone anything about their culture and beliefs, so journalists arriving in rural Holmes County struggled to interpret the story for their readers.²

For many, reader and reporter alike, it might as well have been a foreign country. Different customs, different lifestyle, different manner of dress and even a different language: Pennsylvania German. It was like stepping back in time. But what they found particularly puzzling was that the Amish expressed no hatred toward the killers and no desire for retribution. To quote one Amish man, We do not engage in revenge; that is for God.³

Incredibly, the Amish seemed to be as concerned about helping the perpetrators and their families get through the sad ordeal as they were the victim’s family and themselves. So they prayed for them, hoping that God would forgive their sins. And they reached out to them, inviting the parents of the killers into their homes and visiting the murderer in prison, before returning to the privacy of their own families and community.

There was a similar reaction nearly fifty years later when ten Amish girls between the ages of six and thirteen were gunned down on October 2, 2006, at a schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. Five of the victims died, and five others were wounded when a local milk truck driver barged into their one-room school and shot the children in cold blood. The world was horrified and then astounded—horrified by the senseless slaughter of innocent little girls and astounded that the Amish community again responded not with anger, but forgiveness.

Although grief-stricken by their loss, the Amish reached out to the family of the gunman, recognizing that his widow and children were grieving, too, and were victims as well. The Amish community would have willingly cooperated with the judicial system only to the extent necessary to allow it to carry out its function, just as they had back in 1957. However, in 2006, there was no trial because the shooter took his own life. A half century before, there were two—both for murder.

According to Howard Goeringer, a specialist in nonviolence, Amish culture is embedded in the German word ‘Gelassenheit.’ It means submission, self-surrender, yielding humbly to the sovereignty of God and trusting in the Holy One’s power to deliver His children from evil and death.⁴ Under this doctrine, the Amish are prohibited from engaging in ruthless competition and aggressive confrontation expressed in divorce, lawsuits, domestic violence, war, and the like.⁵ For the most part, they do not look to the court system for redress, although they are appreciative of the government’s efforts to keep them safe.

Because the Amish are not an immutable group, a little bit of knowledge about them is almost as bad as none. The original church has subdivided many times over the centuries due to doctrinal disputes. The Coblentz family, whose son, Paul, was slain, were Old Order Amish. They are at the conservative end of the Amish spectrum, just a tad more liberal than the Andy Weaver Amish (or Dan church) and still farther removed from the extreme right Swartzentruber Amish—the plainest of the ‘Plain People,’ to quote anthropologist Karen Johnson-Weiner.⁶ Within these larger groups, there are numerous church districts, each overseen by a bishop. But beyond that, there is little in the way of formal organizational structure.

Since their arrival in the United States 250 years ago, few Amish are known to have been murdered—either by outsiders or by other Amish. However, in 2009, a Mennonite woman who was having an affair with a member of the Andy Weaver affiliation shot her lover’s wife to death as she was sleeping. This occurred in Apple Creek, Ohio, roughly ten miles from the Coblentz home.

It likely came as no surprise that the husband was complicit in the crime. Twice during his ten-year marriage he had left has family to live as the English—the Amish term for non-Amish people. But both times, he repented of his sins and was taken back by both his church and his wife in the spirit of forgiveness. However, he then recruited the Mennonite woman—who was one of several lovers he had taken—to commit the murder.

Owing to the troubled state of her marriage, the Amish wife had consulted a counselor. In one of the last letters to her counselor, she wrote of her husband, I often think of Christ’s words. ‘Forgive him for he knows not what he does.’⁷ If death had not silenced her, she likely would have said the same thing even after she was slain. That is the Amish way.

Among the most easily recognizable ethnic groups in the country, the Amish are a large and complex subculture. Like other religious separatist groups, they are responding to the biblical injunction Come out from among them and be yet separate, saith the Lord.⁸ They aren’t trying to change the world—only keep it at arm’s length so they can maintain their own norms, customs and lifestyles in their individual communities. It hasn’t been easy, yet the Amish continue to grow and prosper. It has been projected that the Amish in Holmes County will be in the majority by 2030.

My daughter and I have written this book in an effort to provide a glimpse into the Old Order Amish culture by focusing on those points where it intersects with our own—the culture of the English. We chose the murder of Paul Coblentz as the vehicle because so little has been written about this particular crime, although it was arguably the key event in the twentieth century when it came to opening up the Amish way of life to outside scrutiny. In doing so, we also hope to correct some of the errors that have subsequently crept into the narrative while shedding some light on the plain folks, as they call themselves.

Admittedly, we are outsiders looking in. But so are most people who write about the Amish. In popular media, they have been overly romanticized because of their perceived virtues or overly disparaged because of their insistence on maintaining traditional gender roles. Publicly, men are dominant, but privately it may not be that simple. They expect to help their husbands, Johnson-Weiner has written. [I]ndeed, the prayer covering every Amish woman wears indicates that she ‘accepts the position in which God has placed her as her husband’s helpmeet.’⁹

In practice, however, the husband manages the farm (i.e., supports the family financially), while the wife manages the home, including the children and the garden. The wives typically are listed on deeds, most control the checkbook and they share in all financial decisions. Some Amish women even run their own businesses. And when it comes to church, in many respects Old Order Amish women have greater power and status in their church communities than many ‘English’ or non-Amish women—even though they cannot serve as ministers.¹⁰

In 1905, Sabina, A Story of the Amish—the first Amish romance novel—was published. Written by Helen Reimensnyder Martin, it tells the story of a pretty and (as it turns out) clairvoyant Amish maid who is haunted by a face of strange ugliness which appears from time to time as a warning of impending disaster to herself or family.¹¹ Other than the Pennsylvania Dutch setting, the book has little to recommend it. However, it was a precursor to a genre of romance novels now known as bonnet rippers that have proliferated since the release of Witness, the popular Harrison Ford movie, in 1985.¹²

Many have criticized Martin for her harsh portrayal of the Amish, particularly the men, through the lens of feminism. One of them, Joseph Yoder, was prompted to write his own novel, Rosanna of the Amish, in reaction to Martin’s work, as well as Ruth Lininger Dobson’s 1937 novel Straw in the Wind. Published in 1940, Rosanna was a fictionalized and sympathetic account of his mother’s life and, to some extent, his own. According to Julia Spicher Kasdorf, his biographer:

Sabina, A Story of the Amish was the first Amish romance novel. Authors’ collection.

Yoder used Rosanna to address three commonly misrepresented areas of Amish life. First, he portrayed Bishop Shem Yoder, Rosanna’s Amish stepfather, as strict but gentle instead of greedy and cruel. Second, he showed that the Amish find joy in labor and are not merely workaholics. Third, he did away with the dumb Dutch stereotype by making his characters astute and sensible.¹³

To be Amish is to reject hochmut, the German word for pride, arrogance and haughtiness, and embrace demut, the German word for humility. This comes at the expense of individualism. The Amish strive to submit themselves to the will of God as expressed through the group norms established by their local church. Such a stance puts them out of step with the larger American culture—deliberately so. But it also sometimes leads to confusion, misunderstanding and cultural insensitivity.

We briefly mentioned the Coblentz murder in a previous book, Central Ohio’s Historic Prisons. To our surprise, a handful of Amish people came up to us at a book fair, picked up copies of the book and began searching through it until they found the story. As one Amish gentleman told me, the Amish do not feel it is proper to read about themselves, but they are interested in reading about other Amish. While we do not assume this volume will find a readership among the Amish, we have done our best to treat them fairly and hope they would agree.

The Amish aren’t magical creatures, nor do they possess special powers. They are simply human beings. And as human beings, they are not perfect. Nor do they pretend to be. They would be the first to tell you so. Neither my daughter nor I would want to be Amish, but we are glad we live in a country that grants them the freedom to practice their faith in accordance with their conscience.

When writing about true crime, you run the risk of re-victimizing those who were most harmed during the commission of the original crime (i.e., Paul’s widow, Dora, and his daughter, Esther). We know that Dora would prefer not to be discussed in this book. But we would be unable to tell the story without doing so, and we feel the story is an important one. Instead, we have withheld Dora and Esther’s married names to at least provide them with that degree of anonymity. Similarly, we have omitted the names of children born to the perpetrators of the crime. We ask that you, our readers, also respect their privacy.

DAVID MEYERS

Chapter 1

THE SUMMER OF FEAR

The devil dances in an empty pocket.

—Amish proverb

Death came for Paul Coblentz about an hour before midnight on July 18, 1957. At the age of twenty-five years, seven months and nineteen days, the thread of his life was measured and cut. All that remained were a ghostly white corpse, a grieving family and too few memories. It had been as sudden as it was senseless. And it was almost unprecedented.

A young Amish farmer, Paul had retired for the night to the basement living quarters of his unfinished, one-story home. Built against a hill, it overlooked State Route 241—or Millersburg Road—an eighth of a mile away. Paul and his father, Mose, had started constructing the house three years earlier upon the publication of his marriage banns to Dora Yoder.

Together, father and son tended the family’s 150-acre dairy farm.¹⁴ Most Amish families would till less than half that amount if the ground were fertile and they weren’t afraid of hard work. However, as Paul’s friend and Dora’s second cousin, John Miller, later wrote, Everyone worked willingly.¹⁵ They believed it brought them closer to God.

All that long, hot summer day, the two men had toiled in the fields harvesting wheat. Once all the grain was reaped and threshed, Mose planned to take his wife on a vacation trip out west.¹⁶ They likely would stop to see their eldest son, Roy. In Amish families, the youngest son typically inherits the family farm, so Roy had bought a place of his own near Independence, Iowa, where there was a large Amish settlement.¹⁷ Two other sons had passed away. That left two daughters still living at home—and Paul.

At the time of his death, the little house where Paul Coblentz and his family resided was just a basement. Author photo.

It was Thursday night, about half past ten. At least one lamp was burning in their unimposing home. Paul was eating a late snack of breakfast cereal, while Dora was working in the kitchen, preparing the following day’s noon meal to feed the threshing crew that would be arriving in the morning.¹⁸ Their infant daughter, Esther, was sleeping peacefully in the bedroom. Suddenly, the family dog started barking wildly in the yard. Awakened by the noise, Esther began crying.

As Dora went to comfort her, Paul stepped outside to investigate. Minutes later, a short man, gun in hand, entered the house. He was wearing a handkerchief tied over his mouth and nose. Dora met him in the kitchen, carrying Esther in her arms. The intruder asked the young woman if they had any horses. She replied that they did, but they had been turned out to the field for the night. He then ordered her into the living room, just off the kitchen, and told her to sit down in a rocking chair. At this point, his companion, a tall man, walked into the kitchen, holding Paul at knife point.

The intruders were English (i.e., non-Amish). Dora later described one of them as almost six-feet tall and slender, wearing dark clothes and a cap similar to those worn by policemen—by which she may have meant a motorcycle cap.¹⁹ His companion was "about