Amish Confidential (13 page)

If the judge was hell-bent on imposing punishment, Mullet said, he would like to serve the sentences of the others, who included four married couples. “Let these moms and dads go home to their families, raise their children, I’ll take the punishment for everybody,” he said.

There was actually a lot of altruism going on in the courtroom. One defendant, Lester Miller, asked the judge to spare his wife, Elizabeth, “to put her sentence on me,” so she could look after their eleven children. Several defendants then asked the judge to give them all or part of Mullet’s sentence.

But when Judge Polster began to speak, he didn’t seem too swayed by all the defendants’ pleadings. And he didn’t sound ready to move off the court’s usual “you did the crime, you do the time” approach.

This was a case of profound importance, the judge said. “Anyone who said this was just a hair- and beard-cutting case wasn’t paying any attention.”

The judge made clear he wasn’t buying Mullet’s attempts to minimize what had happened. These were serious and damaging assaults.

“The victims didn’t suffer long-term physical injury,” the judge said, but they were left with “emotions and scars for the rest of their lives.”

He addressed all sixteen of the defendants.

“You did more than just terrifying them,” he said of the victims. “You trampled on the Constitution, particularly the First Amendment.” The Amish, if anyone, ought to know better than that, the
judge said. “In my opinion, it was particularly reprehensible because each of you has benefited from the First Amendment to the Constitution,” which guarantees freedom of religion.

“Each of you has received the benefits of the First Amendment, and yet you deprived your victims of the same,” the judge said.

While some of the codefendants did apologize, the judge said he couldn’t help but notice that Mullet never had. “I’ve concluded you deserve the harshest, longest sentence,” the judge told him. “The attacks would not have occurred but for you. You ruled the Bergholz community with an iron fist. Your law was the law.”

Sitting in the courtroom listening to the judge address her brother, Barbara Miller held a jacket to her face, hiding whatever emotion she felt.

And then the judge let loose.

He sent all sixteen of them to jail.

Mullet’s fifteen followers, including the six women, all got more than a year in jail. The terms ranged from a year and a day to seven years, depending on exactly what roles they had played.

Judge Polster sentenced Mullet, who had turned sixty-seven, to fifteen years in federal prison for coordinating the bizarre beard-and-hair-cutting attacks. It was less than the life in prison prosecutors had asked for. But for a sixty-seven-year-old man, several people in the courtroom noted that fifteen years might be close to the same thing.

He was out of the realm of Amish forgiveness now. The federal courts are a far more punitive place.

CHAPTER 14

DON’T CLAPE ME, BRO!

T
hey call it
claping,
though there’s still some debate over where the word comes from.

The Amish have theories. Probably, the English people and the Mennonite people have theories, too. In Amish Country, everyone has theories about everything, whether the theories make any sense or not.

Some people say
claping
comes from the sound a stone makes when it hits the side of an Amish buggy.

Clape!

Maybe so. Others say it comes from the fact that when the English kids aren’t hurling stones or rocks or chunks of construction debris at slow-moving Amish buggies or Amish people just walking down the road, sometimes they toss hard lumps of clay.

Those sting just as much. There’s a lot of clay in Amish Country, and some of it really is hard as a rock.

To me though, the most likely explanation for the word is the meanest one: that it’s a scrunched-together version of an ugly anti-Amish slur. The Amish are
clapes.
Clay apes. Farmers. Dumb people out in the sun digging in the dirt. So harassing them for fun—stoning
an Amish buggy, blowing up an Amish mailbox, breaking Amish windows, trashing an Amish barn—falls under the cruel sport of claping.

What jerks!

When I was growing up in Lebanon County, it was the conservative Black Bumper Mennonites—so named because they are allowed to drive cars but only if they are painted entirely black, even the bumper—who were the worst. A lot of English people have trouble telling Black Bumper Mennonites from Amish, and I can understand why. They also speak Pennsylvania Dutch. Most dress plain, although if you look closely you can see some differences in style. Like the Amish, they are taught to be nonviolent.

That wasn’t my experience of them, though. I remember being in a buggy and having a black car full of Mennonites cut in front of us and slam on the brakes. I don’t know who was more startled, us or the horse. Once we were blocked from moving, they leaned out of the windows and pelted us with eggs.

This was happening all over the county. I couldn’t understand why people who looked like us, sounded like us and mostly lived like us could be so mean and ignorant. I guess they thought they were better and cooler because they had cars. This was especially upsetting to the Amish adults because the adults in the two communities got along pretty well. But it got so bad that Amish preachers decided they needed to have a meeting with the Mennonite preachers. That didn’t accomplish too much. The Mennonite leaders said they had no way of knowing which kids were responsible. Unless someone confessed, they couldn’t do much about it. Of course, no one confessed.

Whatever muck claping bubbled out of, whether the clapers are English or Mennonite, clapings are almost always made up of the same four combustible ingredients: A carload of bored teenag
ers, usually though not always male. A quiet country road. Peals of stupid laughter. And little regard for consequence. A claping attack typically ends with the sound of squealing tires and the gnashing of Amish teeth, as the giddy clapers burn rubber out of there and their irritated targets wonder to themselves: “When will these dad-gum idiots finally leave us alone?”

In between, if everyone is lucky, no one gets badly hurt. Feelings and maybe a little property are the only things that get bruised. The clapers return to the back roads in boredom. The Amish return to their usual chores. The claping is chalked up to a uniquely Amish Country version of adolescent pranking, bothersome, no doubt, but fairly harmless most of the time.

But if you keep taunting people with firecrackers or rocks, eventually someone is going to get hurt. One dreadful night in eastern Indiana, a baby was killed.

L
evi Schwartz, age twenty-seven, dressed in black pants, white shirt, black jacket and black, wide-brimmed hat, was at the reins of his lantern-lit buggy, driving his wife and six children home from a Tupperware party at his brother-in-law’s house. This goes back a while to a humid Friday night in rural Adams County, Indiana, on August 31, 1979. About nine thirty, Levi and his family were heading north on Tile Mill Road outside the town of Berne when his wife, Rebecca, let out a piercing, “
Ow!
”

She was holding the baby, seven-month-old Adeline, and something hard—a chunk of tile, it turned out—smacked her left hand.

The wife hadn’t seen anything, but her husband caught a quick glimpse of a red pickup truck speeding past them in the opposite
direction with three or four people inside. He couldn’t make out faces in the darkness, but he definitely saw the truck.

The baby didn’t seem to notice anything. She hardly stirred at all. Maybe she stretched a little like she was coming out of a dream. Only when the Schwartzes got home and lit a kerosene lamp did the mother see the puddle of blood in little Adeline’s ear. The child was dead by the time her husband ran to a neighbor’s house, borrowed the telephone, called the county’s central emergency switchboard and waited for the ambulance to arrive.

As is often the case with the Amish, the family didn’t summon the sheriff about the baby’s death. There was a single emergency dispatcher handling medical, fire, police, everything, so an Adams County sheriff’s deputy arrived at the Schwartzes’ house around ten thirty.

He asked what had happened. Levi provided a bare-bones account, including a basic description of the pickup. The deputy put that out on the radio. Shortly before eleven p.m., a deputy marshal in nearby Geneva stopped a vehicle matching the description, a red pickup. Inside were four young men, ages eighteen and nineteen, all recent high school graduates: Linn Burkhardt, Lynn Rich, Kevin Rehm and Thomas Wilkins. They had no criminal records. They hadn’t been drinking or drugging that night. They all came from decent, local families. They had no firearms in the truck, though the deputies did find a fifty-pound nylon feed bag with thirty-three white rocks, ten ears of corn and ten pieces of red field tile, the square kind used in the main “field” area on a flooring job.

Before daybreak, all four had signed statements admitting they’d been cruising around the county in Burkhardt’s pickup and at least a couple of them had thrown things at Amish houses and vehicles.

Or as one of the young men allegedly put it: “We decided to go out and get some clapes.”

The investigators were sneaky or smart, depending on your perspective. They got the kids to admit the claping before any of them were told that a baby had been killed.

T
he following week, all four boys were charged with reckless homicide and released to their families on $10,000 bond. It wasn’t that severe a charge, considering there was a death involved, and it started an immediate debate around town. Was this a freak, tragic accident or something darker? Everyone in Adams County seemed to have an opinion. By and large, most local people were pretty sympathetic to the defendants. “They’re good boys,” people said, “all from nice families.” No one out-and-out condoned what they’d been doing, but almost everyone made a point of saying they unquestionably didn’t intend to kill anyone.

The Amish certainly weren’t out for blood. The families of some crime victims demand vengeance or the harshest possible punishment, but the Schwartzes were the opposite of that. They weren’t demanding anything at all. Only reluctantly had Levi and Rebecca agreed to an autopsy. It found what everyone expected it to: Baby Adeline suffered a skull fracture and brain injury and died almost instantly. When asked about the frequency of local kids harassing the Amish, Levi allowed there was nothing new about that. It’s “been going on for some time,” he said. “They throw at buggies, windows, mailboxes . . . It’s gone on for as long as I can remember.”

As the investigators poked around, some disturbing details came out. Those local kids Levi said were harassing Amish families? It
turned out that three of the four young men admitted they’d done this sort of thing previously, and the deadly attack on the Schwartz buggy was anything but spontaneous that night.

When questioned after his arrest, Kevin Rehm admitted vaguely that he had thrown things at the Amish “three or four times before.” But written statements from three of his coworkers at Economy Printing added some ugly detail to that. He’d often come to work on Monday mornings, they said, bragging of his claping adventures from the weekend. He seemed especially proud of the night he’d hit an Amish kid with a corncob. There was blood all over the kid’s face. Another time, he talked about tossing a wooden plank at an Amish while driving by at seventy miles an hour.

“Like some people went to a show every week, he went out and got Amish,” one coworker said. Another said he’d warned Kevin someone might get hurt. Rehm supposedly answered: “So what? They’re just clapes.”

Thomas Wilkins told investigators in his confession that at about five that fateful afternoon, he finished his farm job and stopped by the service station where Lynn Rich worked. “He said something about, well, throwing stuff—claping is what he said. He asked if I wanted to go out with him.” Wilkins, Rehm and Rich climbed into Burkhardt’s red pickup, threw the feed bag in the back and hit the road. Before they ever came across the Schwartz family buggy, they’d torn a forty-five-mile swath across Adams County. They threw a rock at Jerry Girod’s buggy, tearing a hole in the back. They pelted more rocks at Eli Weaver’s buggy. They hit Andrew Hilty’s house. Another rock busted a screen door and whacked Mary Shelter on the shoulder. She was sitting in her living room. As Jake Byler rode in his brother’s buggy, something hit him on the hand. As well as the
investigators could determine, the boys in the red pickup had hit four buggies, nine houses and an Amish school.

And why did they do all this? Tom Coolman, the Adams County sheriff, tried to probe that with Linn Burkhardt.

“What is the purpose of throwing objects at Amish?” the sheriff asked.

“I don’t even know,” Burkhardt said.

“For fun?”

“No, not really.”

“You don’t really have an answer for that question?”

“No, I don’t.”

The sheriff said later he thought 30 percent of local high school students had been claping at least once. Since the Amish so seldom report these incidents, the sheriff added, there wasn’t much his people could do. “Some of the Amish had just stopped going out at night to avoid attacks,” he said. “It makes it hard for us to enforce the law if they won’t tell anyone what’s happening.”

A state police sergeant said Lynn Rich told him the whole thing was partly the county’s fault. “He didn’t want to sound like he was trying to make excuses,” the sergeant said, “but if there were more things to do in Adams County, he and his friends wouldn’t have to find their own entertainment.”

R
eporters swept into Adams County, giving the Amish another limelight they’d have much preferred to avoid. The story was all over national TV, how a prank gone bad in Amish Country had left a baby dead and an Indiana county facing tough questions. (Ultimately, a TV movie would even be made about the case.
A Stoning in Ful
ham County
, based on the Schwartz case but with all the names changed, starred Ron Perlman, who went on to be a big deal in
Sons of Anarchy
, and a much-younger Brad Pitt as one of the youths in the pickup who felt torn over what he had done. “Religious beliefs clash with the law when an Amish infant is killed in a rural community!” the trailer said.)

The coverage sure made outsiders pay attention to the larger issue. It was the first time many people had ever heard the term
hate crime
used in connection with the Amish. Yes, harassing the Amish because they are Amish is a hate crime! For many non-Amish people, the death of baby Adeline and the arrest of those four boys was the first time that picking on the Amish was ever openly discussed at all. It was the kind of behavior that makes some Amish people want to turn the other cheek and makes others of us want to rise up in vigilante outrage.

In fact, there was nothing new about any of this. Amish people have been living with this for centuries. The claping back in Germany and Switzerland—persecution, it was called at the time—was far more severe. Not to downplay anything that’s happened in America, but in those days, the Amish were martyred
on purpose
.

Various experts have been studying modern claping over the years. Credit professor Brian Byers and his colleagues at Ball State University for coming up with the first official definition. “Claping is a verb for predatory crimes perpetrated against the Amish by non-Amish persons, usually adolescents, rooted in anti-Amish biases.” I’d say that’s about right. They offered some subcategories, too. Along with claping, there is “dusting,” speeding past an Amish buggy to irritate the occupants with a cloud of dust. There is “flouring,” unleashing a bag of flour on Amish buggies while driving past, and
vandalism directed at Amish property, such as blowing up mailboxes and turning over outhouses.

I can tell you all that stuff has happened where I live too, and the clapers can be fairly creative. One night in my early teen years, I was riding with my parents and several of my brothers and sisters when a group of Mennonite kids in a pickup truck attacked our buggy with giant globs of yogurt. Yes, yogurt. It did no real damage, but it made an awful mess. The bright white globs sure stood out against our flat black buggy. We needed brushes to scrub it off when we got home.

Byers did interviews with non-Amish people who admitted to claping. He was struck, he said, by the “group nature” of claping. One of his subjects said it would be “sick” to clape alone. Another person said: “It was a kind of male bonding . . . It kind of drew us all closer because we went out and did something.”

Personally, I always thought claping was less of a problem in Lancaster and Lebanon counties than in some other parts of the Amish world. In the places where I’ve lived, there have always been lots of Amish around. The Amish and non-Amish work side by side, whether it’s guys on construction sites or women and girls cleaning English peoples’ homes. We volunteer together at the local food banks and fire companies. We bump into each other in the store aisles and even on the streets downtown. You can’t say the two communities, Amish and non-Amish, are fully integrated—not even close, but we’re not total strangers, either. That has to help.