Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy by Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt, David L. Weaver-Zercher Page B
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intruders, Cleo Peters, shot Paul twice at close range. The robbers then fled, first in a stolen truck and later in a stolen car. A cross-country manhunt eventually cornered the two in Illinois, where they shot a county constable before surrendering to police. The subsequent murder trial flooded rural Ohio with reporters and photographers. The case even appeared as a feature in a true-crime magazine.
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. They were particularly puzzled by the fact that the Amish “revealed no hatred against the fugitives” and that “no wish for vengeance was expressed by any member of the dead man’s family.”
Reporters focused much of their attention on Coblentz’s father, Mose, who spoke freely with them before and during the trial. Mose seemed to express the grief typical of any parent in that situation “as he wondered aloud how he could go on after everyone left and he would be alone to think of his loss.” But he astonished observers by going to visit his son’s killer, Cleo Peters, in prison. Afterward, Mose reported that the meeting was emotionally very difficult for him, but in the end he had managed to tell Peters, “I hope God can forgive you.”
The state was less generous, and the killer’s speedy trial ended with a death sentence. At that point, Amish people from Ohio and elsewhere began to write letters to Ohio’s governor asking for clemency for Peters. An Ontario Amish man admonished readers of the Amish correspondence newspaper The Budget, “Will we as Amish be blameless in the matter if we do not present a written request to the authorities, asking that his life be spared?” As letters piled up on the governor’s desk, he commuted Peters’s sentence seven hours before the scheduled electrocution.
The Amish did believe that the crime should carry consequences. They had not interfered with the state’s rendering of justice—the widow, Dora Coblentz, had even testified at the trial—but they were reluctant to have an execution carried out in their name. Mose Coblentz and other Amish close to the family reported that they pitied Peters, whose time in the Air Force, it was said, had led him to drinking and delinquency. When Peters’s parents came to Ohio for the trial, several Amish families invited the couple for dinner, approaching them as fellow victims of their son’s actions.
In another case, two decades later, that garnered heavy media attention, including a feature article in Rolling Stone, the assailants were well-known to their Amish victims. Four non-Amish teenagers from Berne, Indiana, spent a warm, late summer night in 1979 harassing area Amish—a frequent activity for them. Riding in the back of a pickup truck, they threw stones and pieces of tile at the windows of Amish homes and into passing buggies. This night their projectiles hit a buggy occupied by Levi and Rebecca Schwartz and their seven children. One chunk of tile bounced off Rebecca’s arm, causing her to hold seven-month-old Adeline, who was wrapped in her lap, closer.
The attack was particularly unnerving because it happened after dark, so the Schwartzes hurried home. Arriving at their modest farm without further incident, Rebecca gave baby Adeline to an older daughter while she helped the younger children out of the buggy and into the house. Taking off their coats by lamplight, the family discovered that Adeline was dead. The piece of tile thrown into the buggy had struck the infant in the back of the head and, as examiners later concluded, killed her instantly and silently.
Within an hour, police had arrested the four assailants, aged eighteen and nineteen. “The boys were caught soon after,” wrote Adeline’s maternal grandmother in the next week’s
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. They were particularly puzzled by the fact that the Amish “revealed no hatred against the fugitives” and that “no wish for vengeance was expressed by any member of the dead man’s family.”
Reporters focused much of their attention on Coblentz’s father, Mose, who spoke freely with them before and during the trial. Mose seemed to express the grief typical of any parent in that situation “as he wondered aloud how he could go on after everyone left and he would be alone to think of his loss.” But he astonished observers by going to visit his son’s killer, Cleo Peters, in prison. Afterward, Mose reported that the meeting was emotionally very difficult for him, but in the end he had managed to tell Peters, “I hope God can forgive you.”
The state was less generous, and the killer’s speedy trial ended with a death sentence. At that point, Amish people from Ohio and elsewhere began to write letters to Ohio’s governor asking for clemency for Peters. An Ontario Amish man admonished readers of the Amish correspondence newspaper The Budget, “Will we as Amish be blameless in the matter if we do not present a written request to the authorities, asking that his life be spared?” As letters piled up on the governor’s desk, he commuted Peters’s sentence seven hours before the scheduled electrocution.
The Amish did believe that the crime should carry consequences. They had not interfered with the state’s rendering of justice—the widow, Dora Coblentz, had even testified at the trial—but they were reluctant to have an execution carried out in their name. Mose Coblentz and other Amish close to the family reported that they pitied Peters, whose time in the Air Force, it was said, had led him to drinking and delinquency. When Peters’s parents came to Ohio for the trial, several Amish families invited the couple for dinner, approaching them as fellow victims of their son’s actions.
In another case, two decades later, that garnered heavy media attention, including a feature article in Rolling Stone, the assailants were well-known to their Amish victims. Four non-Amish teenagers from Berne, Indiana, spent a warm, late summer night in 1979 harassing area Amish—a frequent activity for them. Riding in the back of a pickup truck, they threw stones and pieces of tile at the windows of Amish homes and into passing buggies. This night their projectiles hit a buggy occupied by Levi and Rebecca Schwartz and their seven children. One chunk of tile bounced off Rebecca’s arm, causing her to hold seven-month-old Adeline, who was wrapped in her lap, closer.
The attack was particularly unnerving because it happened after dark, so the Schwartzes hurried home. Arriving at their modest farm without further incident, Rebecca gave baby Adeline to an older daughter while she helped the younger children out of the buggy and into the house. Taking off their coats by lamplight, the family discovered that Adeline was dead. The piece of tile thrown into the buggy had struck the infant in the back of the head and, as examiners later concluded, killed her instantly and silently.
Within an hour, police had arrested the four assailants, aged eighteen and nineteen. “The boys were caught soon after,” wrote Adeline’s maternal grandmother in the next week’s
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