Residents grapple with teen’s disappearance six months later
Amish teen Stolzfoos disappeared last June
BIRD-IN-HAND — There are reminders of Linda Stoltzfoos — the 18-year-old Amish woman who vanished during a walk home from church here last June — all over Lancaster County. Some smack you in the face. Pass by a hotel on one of the side road, and the sign in front doesn’t speak to whether there’s free HBO or Wi-Fi access. Instead, it simply says, “Prayers for Linda Stoltzfoos.”
Head into a convenience store to gas up your vehicle, and there’s one of the missing-person flyers that wallpapered Lancaster County this summer, a smiling Stoltzfoos peering into the camera, frozen in happier times. Others just pop into your mind. You find yourself driving behind a wagonload of Amish schoolchildren on a late December day, a team of horses leading them to the homes of elderly community members for Christmas caroling. You think, not too many years ago, how Linda Stoltzfoos was probably on that wagon.
The reminders jumped off the wall and into the face of mid-staters again Monday. On the six-month anniversary of Stoltzfoos’ Father’s Day disappearance, county prosecutors and police said they now felt they had enough of a case to bring homicide charges against Justo Smoker, the 34-year-old ex-convict whois already facing kidnapping charges in the case.
For many, it was a final blow they had long been expecting in a case that still sticks out as one of the worst of the worst.
’This has never happened’
It is exceedingly rare, local police say, for the Amish to be victims of violent crime.
There was, of course, the notorious massacre of the school children at the West Nickel Mines School in Lancaster County in October 2006, when a gunman barricaded himself in an Amish school with 10 female students, killing five and wounding five others before shooting himself.
That incident has taken its place with the likes of Columbine and Sandy Hook as one of the most notorious mass shootings in United States history.
Yet Matt Hess, a lieutenant with the East Lampeter Township Police Department, said the 2020 reality is that crimes of personal violence against the Amish are still exceedingly rare. Stoltzfoos’ disappearance this summer was the first case like this that he can remember in his 15 years on the force, “and even speaking to those whohave been here 25 years or more, this has never happened.”
East Lampeter, home to the village of Bird-in-Hand, is the department with jurisdiction over the Stoltzfoos case. Andeven to the police, it stings. “I mean, what have the Amish ever done to anyone?” Hess asked Wednesday.
They are known, to those who share their hometowns and highways with them, for being peaceful, quiet, mind-yourown business kinds of people — always noticeable because of their distinctive plain dress and the ubiquitous horse-and-buggies — but primarily only because of their devout adherence to their own code.
Most people here are quite fond, and even protective of, the Amish. So for a case that already checks most parents’ worst fears, this somehow seems that much worse.
“They’re al l friendly. Non-combative. Very turn the other cheek,” said Scott Bocian, who lives just up the road from Stoltzfoos’ family home.
It was Bocian’s surveillance camera system that, according to court documents in Smoker’s case, first gave police their biggest lead: a red Kia sedan with key identifiers, and a driver, to find.
“You could see it happen on the video. You could see him get out of his car, walk up to the road, grab her and force her in the car. It was all on tape,” Bocian said.
Like many people, Bocian said Wednesday he was holding onto hope as the months passed that the kidnapping would have a lesser-of-two-evils ending, meaning, in his view, that perhaps Stoltzfoos had been captured by some kind of human trafficking ring and was being held against her will somewhere, but that she might still turn up alive.
That’s a strange and terrible thing to wish for any person, muchless an 18-year-old woman. But under the circumstances here, Bocian said, it would beat the alternative.
But those hopes have faded in the wake of Monday’s announcement of homicide charges by Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams.
“I just sort of expected this,” said Pamela Rutt, a 65-year-old resident of the Smoketown area of East Lampeter, said of the latest Stoltzfoos developments as she loaded groceries from the nearby Kauffman’s Market. “The longer it went on, it seemed this was probably the direction it would move.”
She and others saw those worst-case fears affirmed Monday.
“With our filing of the homicide charge today comes a conclusion agreed upon by all the investigative agencies in this case that the evidence establishes that Justo Smoker kidnapped and killed Linda Stoltzfoos,” the district attorney said.
Adams said she was moving now — even though Stoltzfoos’ whereabouts remain a mystery — based on accumulated evidence that includes:
Six months of no solid leads from national criminal databases about Stoltzfoos’ disappearance, as well as no signs of activity in Stoltzfoos’ bank account.
As-yet-undisclosed reports by at least three other Amish women that they had been followed by a car matching the description of Smoker’s earlier in the weekend of Stoltzfoos’ disappearance.
Physical evidence and witness testimony that places Smoker with Stoltzfoos, at the location where articles of her clothing were later found, and then thoroughly cleaning out his car later on the date of Stoltzfoos’ disappearance.
Efforts to reach Linda Stoltzfoos’ family were not successful.
For other Amish who were willing to speak to a reporter — a concession from community traditions that seemed proportionate to the crime at hand — Monday’s announcement was an expected period on a sentence that still, at times, leaves them gasping in disbelief.
Their agreement to speak, however, came on the condition that their names not be used, in keeping with the Amish practice of avoiding putting oneself in front of the community.
As much as violent crime is an unwanted but daily staple of American life, “you’d never think it would come into this area,” said one Beechdale Road neighbor of Stoltzfoos’ family. “Everything’s so peaceful. There’s hardly any traffic going by here on a Sunday except horse and buggy traffic.
“And I don’t know how this happened that nobody [in those horse and buggies] was traveling the road the same time as she was walking home from church,” he added.
Court documents in Smoker’s case seem to shed some light on that lull in church traffic. They note that Linda Stoltzfoos had stayed behind at her church that Sunday for some conversation with another member before heading home.
’Trying to help each other’
To an outsider, Amish life here may look unchanged, six months later. The Beechdale Road scene of the crime is just a few miles east of downtown Lancaster, but with enough working farmland knit together to still present a rural, even bucolic, face.
But close observers say there have been some subtle but significant changes in some daily routines.
“They definitely lost a lot of trust in English people. They are definitely no longer walking by themselves,” Bocian said of his Amish neighbors. “They are now doing a ‘buddy’ system and that’s going to go on for who know howlong. ... It’s all of them. A lot of people take advantage of the Amish from what I see.”
“Very few people would walk by themselves now. Especially ladies, or girls,” the Beechdale Road resident offered.
A second Amish resident who agreed to talk with a reporter noted that where his one schoolage granddaughter used to get a ride part way to school and then walk the rest, she has now moved to taking a public school bus that takes her directly to the school building door.
A woman shopping at Kauffman’s who identified herself as a conservative Mennonite on Wednesday noted that after reading about the police’s discovery of some of Stoltzfoos’ clothing behind a business on Harvest Road in Paradise Township — a part of her regular walking route — she’s changed her circuit.
“It’s so unusual for these country roads not to feel safe anymore,” she said, explaining that even before the Stoltzfoos case people in the community had been spooked by reports of men exposing themselves to Amish girls.
One thing it hasn’t changed? The Amish’s reliance on their faith to bind them up and pull them through.
“I”d say it’s had a tremendous impact. We’d spend hours talking about it, and a lot of times not getting past first base just trying to figure out Why? Why? Why?” said another Amish man who lives on Stumptown Road.
That has evolved, he said, into a familiar way of coping.
“We’re trying to help each other out. We’re probably all praying for Linda and the family, and we’re hoping that some good can come out of it.”
Of course, in Amish fashion, that good doesn’t stop at seeing Smoker convicted and put behind bars for the rest of his life.
“We need our justice system to fight crime,” the Stumptown Road resident said. “But for me, I just hope the community can and will forgive Justo Smoker for the crimes he did. And hopefully, being forgiven, that he may come to see the light.”