Amish Confidential (20 page)

PART III

BRINGING
IT ALL
BACK HOME

CHAPTER 23

CATCHING UP

T
he real stories of Amish life have a way of never quite ending. Let me get you get up to speed on what’s become of some of the unique people involved.

Fannie and Delila Miller are doing remarkably well now, safe with their family in Heuvelton, New York, putting the trauma of their roadside kidnapping mostly behind them. Valentine Byler, the man who kept the Amish out of Social Security, remains unsung and largely forgotten. Carrying on in Byler’s spirit, however, some Amish are seeking exemption from Obamacare. The clapers are still at it, just as obnoxious as ever, though thankfully they haven’t killed anyone lately while throwing rocks at Amish buggies.

Pennsylvania’s crackdown on puppy mills has forced some Amish out of that sordid business—or have they just gone underground? Animal activists say that poorly bred mill puppies are still flooding America’s pet stores.

An appellate court in Cincinnati overturned Sam Mullet’s hate-crimes conviction. The judges didn’t dispute that the beard attacks occurred or that the iron-fisted bishop was behind them, but ruled
that the “Barber of Bergholz” and his scissor-wielding followers were not motivated primarily by anti-Amish bias. “Faith permeates most, if not all, aspects of life in the Amish community,” the judges wrote in a 2–1 decision. Still, “Interpersonal and intrafamily disagreements, not the victims’ religious beliefs, sparked the attacks.”

Since the bishop was still convicted on other counts, he failed to win an immediate release from federal prison.

Even as Mullet sat in federal prison in Texarkana, Texas, there were signs that he still had a firm grip on his loyal followers. One of his grandsons, Dan Shrock, said the bishop was still running his eight-hundred-acre compound from prison. “Sam Mullet’s community is a cult. They don’t have freedom,” the young man said. “He has power over people’s minds, gets them to do things he wants them to do and believe in him. I’ve been there, my cousins have been there, and we know it, and it is true.”

In a rare interview, the bishop’s wife insisted her husband and his followers were being treated unfairly because of their unconventional lifestyle and conservative views. “They just want to talk about what we did,” Martha Mullet said. “Nobody talks about what happened to us. Nobody talks about the root of the problem.”

She never stopped defending the man she was married to for forty-nine years. “He’s a very gentle, loving man,” she said. “And yes, he can get stern, just like anybody else, but people say he has power. No, I don’t feel he does have power.”

But two months after that interview, the bishop’s wife died suddenly from cardiac arrest. The court refused Sam Mullet’s request for an emergency furlough from prison to attend the funeral in Ohio.

While the couple’s 18 children and 110 grandchildren grieved, there was one thing the Mullet family didn’t have to worry about:
money. The family sold oil and gas fracking rights to their compound in Bergholz in a multimillion-dollar deal that saved the farm. As his appeal presses on, he may forfeit his public defender and lose some of that easy money paying future legal bills.

None of this, however, has calmed the concerns of the bishop’s grandson. “I still worry a lot about my family,” Dan Shrock said.

T
he question of drug abuse still lingers heavily over Amish Country.

In the years after the Pagan-Amish drug bust, many parents kept insisting that drug abuse wasn’t a real problem in the Amish community. Just a few troubled kids, they said, and those sad cases could be dealt with quietly. Despite the vivid stories from the courtroom and in the media, most people slipped right back to the old, familiar denials. Drugs? Here? No way! Then, in May 2002, a documentary film called
Devil’s Playground
aired on the cable channel Cinemax. Shot on location in LaGrange and Elkhart, Indiana, the movie portrayed rampant drug and alcohol use among Amish teenagers and young adults. All of a sudden, parents were alarmed, and young Amish druggies were a hot topic again.

In September of that year, Norm Kauffmann, town manager of Shipshewana, Indiana, called a meeting of Amish parents to discuss issues raised by the film. Shipshewana, just outside LaGrange, is home to the third-largest Amish community in America.

While most of the parents in the room said the movie exaggerated the problem, almost everyone agreed there
was
a problem—and it definitely needed a fresh response. Out of that conversation grew the Amish Youth Vision Project, a unique set of initiatives that
have kept the Indiana Amish ahead of most other Amish communities in facing the drug issue.

The bad news is that the problem hasn’t gone away yet. The good news is that caring people are still fighting the good fight every day with a distinctly Amish approach. Traditional treatment programs like DARE would never work with Amish kids, in part because they come to drugging and drinking in their own uniquely Amish ways.

“Most programs assume a gradual trajectory into alcohol and drug use,” says James Cates, one of Youth Vision’s founders, “a stolen cigarette here or there, a beer or two on the sly. They do not assume the first experience will be a party with peers at age sixteen, which may last all night and involve heavy drinking, and that this can be the norm for drinking for several years.”

Thanks, Rumspringa!

“The Amish learn at a very early age to keep a flat expression and not portray emotion when they’re dealing with the English and they’re uncertain,” Cates says. “It takes someone who’s Amish and been around it for years to be able to interpret what’s going on behind the mask.” Since there are no Amish doctors or psychotherapists, the group counseling sessions are led by English therapists. But each session is co-led by an already baptized young Amish person. The combination has proven highly effective.

D
on’t go looking for a memorial plaque at the site of the old West Nickel Mines School. The property is open pasture now, where horses graze and five flowering pear trees stand in silent tribute to what happened there. That’s the only hint of the horror of October 2, 2006, when a deeply tormented man shot five Amish schoolgirls to
death and wounded five others before taking his own life. For almost a decade now, children from the area have been attending the New Hope Amish School. It is equipped with sensors that will alert the teacher to any visitors. The driveway is paved, making it the first Amish school in Lancaster County that doesn’t have a dirt or gravel entrance.

“Each one of the kids remembered the shooter spinning his tires and the sound of gravel moving under the wheels,” said John Coldiron, a local zoning official. “Everyone decided the kids wouldn’t have to deal with that sound again.” Another thing that makes this new school unlike any other Amish school I’ve ever seen is that the front door has a lock on it. But even so, the building hasn’t really become a fortress. That would be its own kind of defeat.

The dead girls have never been forgotten, of course, and probably never will be: Naomi Ebersol, Lena Miller, Mary Miller, Anna Stoltzfus and Marian Stoltzfus Fisher, the thirteen-year-old who said, “Shoot me first.” The injured carry on with stories of triumph and tragedy. Barbie Fisher, Marian’s eleven-year-old sister who said, “Shoot me second,” had lingering issues with her right arm. But after shoulder surgery, she was strong enough to pitch in softball games again.

Esther King, who was thirteen at the time, returned to school in the months after the shooting, graduated and has been working on the family farm. Rachel Stoltzfus, eight years old when she was shot, also returned to school and now seems to be thriving. Sarah Stoltzfus, who was twelve at the time, had the most miraculous recovery. With a bullet lodged in the side of her brain, she was not expected to survive. But she got better quickly and returned to school. Her last serious symptom was impaired vision in her left eye. But even that cleared up over time.

The youngest victim, Rosanna King, who was six years old when the shooter entered the schoolhouse, has had the toughest road. She too was shot in the head. Her brain injury was so severe, she was removed from life support at the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and sent home to be with her family. But all these years later, surrounded at home by her mother, father, sisters and brothers, she presses on. She does not walk or talk. She has frequent seizures. But she sits up in a wheelchair and seems to recognize family members. Among the regular volunteers who still help with her care is Terri Roberts, the mother of shooter Charlie Roberts. She has become a familiar presence in the victims’ families’ lives. A tall, thin woman with spiky gray hair, she comes to the Kings’ house most Thursdays, helping to bathe Rosanna and read her stories.

Her enduring presence in this circle of tragedy seems to bring comfort to everyone.

Money poured into the fund that was created after the school shooting, more than five million dollars. Some of it came from well-off donors. Twenty African churches donated one dollar each. The money continues to cover medical costs and physical therapy. Some of it helped the Kings outfit their farmhouse to accommodate Rosanna’s wheelchair. Though the donations eventually slowed to a trickle, some donors have named the Nickel Mines Accountability Committee in their wills.

In the years since the shooting, the families of the victims have continued to be strong voices for forgiveness and peace. So has Terri Roberts. She and the children’s parents speak at meetings and conferences. They’ve hosted psychologists from Russia and religious leaders from Israel and help others confront senseless tragedy around the world. They have reached out to the families at Virginia Tech,
Sandy Hook and other mass school shootings. They talk about ready access to firearms. They discuss the culture of violence in America. They describe the awesome power of forgiveness, something they know a lot about. Each place they’ve been, they’ve tried to remind everyone that the family of the perpetrator often suffers as much as the families of the victims, perhaps even more so. Either way, they are locked in tragedy together.

The shooter’s mother opens almost every talk the same way. “Our son Charles was responsible for the Nickel Mines tragedy,” she says, her voice often quaking as she relives the horror. She always ends on a hopeful note with a lesson she learned from her Amish neighbors: “We need to allow forgiveness in our hearts so we can be whole.”

It’s a lesson, Terri Roberts says, she has finally made her own.

“I have found a lot of people want to focus on the darkest day in their life instead of all the good that there is,” she says. “Through God’s grace, I feel that we can move forward in anything in life, no matter how dark our darkest day is.”

CHAPTER 24

KELLY’S GIRL

T
he story of Kelly McGillis’s
Witness
visit stuck with our family for a very long time. Given how jumpy the Amish are about outside attention, you knew someone would have to object to her unexpected appearance in our lives.

Someone did.

Our bishop, Sammie Kaufman.

Kelly came to us through an English neighbor who was working with the movie people. He knew how eager she was to learn first-hand about the Amish. After Kelly had been with us a few days, planting crooked rows of potatoes and copying my mother’s Pennsylvania Dutch accent, the actress’s photo ran on the front page of the local newspaper, the
Intelligencer Journal
.
That afternoon, Bishop Kaufman showed up at our house.

“She cannot stay here,” the bishop told my mother.

My mom was a naturally hospitable woman. She’d been happy to welcome the curious visitor from Hollywood, pleased to open our home and share our lives with her. Kelly couldn’t have been a better-behaved guest. She seemed genuinely charmed by us and
respectful toward our culture. She explained that her character in the movie, Rachel Lapp, was an Amish widow whose son had witnessed a murder. Harrison Ford was her co-star, she said, and he’d been “Indiana Jones” and “Han Solo.” Those names meant nothing to our Amish family. But this Mr. Ford, it seemed, would be playing the detective trying to solve the murder that the Amish boy saw. Kelly wanted her portrayal to be as real as she could possibly make it.

The bishop was having none of it.

“She’s an
actress
,” he said, the word coming out as if he had said
heathen
or
adulterer
. “You know what actresses do.”

My mother looked at him and said nothing.

“They call attention to themselves,” the bishop said. “Sometimes with millions of people watching.” In the bishop’s view, I suppose that was almost a mortal sin.

Bishop Kaufman and the other local bishops, it seemed, had decided to forbid all the Amish people of south central Pennsylvania from cooperating with
Witness
in any way. No renting property to the location scouts. No taking work as set builders or horse wranglers. No appearing as extras in the film.

The local Amish leaders didn’t seem to have any particular objection to the movie’s premise, script, cast or crew. The problem seemed to be that these Hollywood people had come to Pennsylvania Amish Country to make a movie set in the world of the Amish. That they couldn’t abide.

“This is not something we can support,” the bishop said.

My mother was sad to hear that. She hadn’t meant to offend anyone. Kelly was gracious and understanding when my mother explained to her what the bishop had said. “I don’t want to get you
or your family in trouble,” she told my mother as she collected her things to leave.

They agreed to stay in touch amid the thank-yous and the good-byes.

The movie production continued all around us. Actors were hired for all the Amish roles. The famous barn-building scene was filmed on a farm owned by an English family, right across the road from our house. When the movie was ready for release, it had its world premiere at the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster. This was a very big deal. A searchlight swept the sky over Lancaster. The arriving stars and dignitaries climbed out of limousines and walked a red carpet on North Prince Street. Governor Dick Thornburgh was there. He was a Pennsylvania governor who supported Amish-themed productions instead of issuing statements against them. Many other local politicians and civic leaders came. The hometown crowd was wildly enthusiastic. Harrison Ford didn’t make it. He was off somewhere filming another movie, but Kelly McGillis came. Everyone said she looked beautiful, and even some of the Amish noticed that.

Several of the out-of-town movie critics commented on her Pennsylvania Dutch accent in the film. They said her speech sounded highly authentic, and I think I know why. Kelly said that my mother had been a great role model, and she also told a reporter that “the youngest child, a four-year-old, spoke only Dutch. So it was a great learning experience trying to communicate with him.” I knew I was that four-year-old. Most of the critics, including the one from the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, really liked the film. I’ve seen it quite a few times since it first came out. I’ve liked it every time. The movie starring our houseguest was a blockbuster hit.

We stayed in touch with Kelly over the years. She had a huge
burst of fame in the late 1980s, and not just for
Witness
. She had leading roles in
Top Gun
with Tom Cruise and
The Accused
with Jodie Foster. One critic called her “a siren with brains.” I’ll bet she liked that. For a while there, Kelly McGillis, our sweet boarder, was one of the top young actresses in Hollywood. Then her fame faded, as fame often does. She stopped getting big-budget roles. After living for a while in Key West, Florida, she moved to the tiny town of Mohnton in Berks County, Pennsylvania, a short drive north of Lancaster, where she lived quietly in a five-bedroom 1910 farmhouse and supported local theater. One night, she gave a talk at EPAC, the Ephrata Performing Arts Center, a fund-raiser for the community-theater group. She spoke with real candor about her life.

“When I was doing
Witness
,”
she said, “I was so scared, I started drinking. I was in a movie opposite Harrison freakin’ Ford, Indiana Jones, and I was terrified all the time. I think God brought me back here for a do-over.”

After several tries, she told the audience, she had managed to quit drinking. She’d gotten divorced for the second time. She had a great relationship, she said, with her two grown daughters, Kelsey and Sonora. She’d been working with substance abusers at a halfway house. She was much calmer now, she said, taking only occasional acting jobs. She had just turned fifty.

“I still love acting,” she said that night. “But now I know it’s acting. It’s no longer life-and-death to me.”

When it came time for questions, my brother Samuel stood up.

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

Kelly smiled and said of course she did.

He reminded her how they had such fun on the farm together and what happened with the bishop. “The Amish bishop came and told
us you had to go because you were an actress,” my brother told Kelly and the audience, many of whom had never the story. “And during the barn-raising scene, right across from our farm in Strasburg, you took me and my brother down to your camper to have a beer.”

Actually, I had never heard that part before. Kelly, perhaps just being discreet, said she didn’t remember anything about it.

“I thought maybe after
Witness
,”
Samuel said,
“you might come back and marry an Amish man.”

Well, that was not going to happen now, though not for any of the reasons my brother might have suspected. The following year, Kelly came out as a lesbian. She said her sexuality was something she’d been coming to grips with since she was twelve years old. Now she’d found a woman to share her life with. Melanie was her name. She worked as a sales executive in Philadelphia.

After a long, winding journey, Kelly’s life seemed like it had finally stabilized. Knowing some of the difficult times she’d been through, hearing about her new balance made me feel really happy for her. My brothers were happy, too. As far we were concerned, she was a wonderful person who deserved all good things—
even if she was an actress
! Two years later, Samuel was thrilled when, one day out of the blue, he got a call from Kelly. She asked if it would be okay if she came by for a visit.

“Love to see you,” Samuel told her. “So would my mother.” They laughed about not telling the bishop she was coming by.

When she showed up, Kelly was her usual open, friendly self. She asked about the family and told my mother how young she looked. She asked how my mother could’ve possibly kept up with fifteen children. “Two’s enough for me,” Kelly said with a laugh.

She said she had some good news she wanted to share: She was
getting married and she wanted us to be there. “We’ll have a nice reception,” she said. “I’d be honored if you guys could come.”

“We’d love to,” my mother said before Kelly ever had a chance to mention who her spouse-to-be was. “That’s so kind of you.”

Everyone was happily catching up, and Kelly didn’t get into specifics about who she was marrying. I guess my mother, in all her enthusiasm, didn’t think to ask. She was just thrilled about Kelly’s good fortune. Even after Kelly left that day, Samuel and I never brought up the topic. Why complicate things with a debate over modern marriage? Love is love, and my mother loved Kelly, even if the Amish church was still nowhere close to officially blessing same-sex unions.

Samuel and I talked about it. We decided—I’m not sure if this was right or not, but it’s what we decided—we wouldn’t lay any of this out for our mother. We’d just take her to Kelly’s celebration and let her see for herself.

Sadly, Samuel got a call from Kelly a few weeks later, saying the big event had been postponed. I don’t know all the details, but Kelly has since moved to North Carolina, where she’s teaching acting, I hear, and doing well. My sweet Amish mother still doesn’t realize how close she came to her first gay commitment ceremony.