FILE NO. 0186
Content warning: This case file describes the killing of Katie Gingerich, an Old Order Amish woman, by her husband in Rockdale Township, Crawford County, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 1993, in front of two of their young children. It also covers severe mental illness and, near the end, a death by suicide. The description of the killing is kept brief. Katie Gingerich and Edward Gingerich are named, as they have been in the public record since 1993. Their children are not named, and other relatives are described by their relationship to the couple. There are no photographs of the family, the children, the house or the scene.
Edward Gingerich: Illness, a Killing and a Verdict in Amish Pennsylvania
Legal status: Edward Gingerich was charged with criminal homicide after his wife’s death on March 18, 1993. In March 1994 a jury at the Crawford County Courthouse in Meadville found him not guilty of first degree murder, third degree murder and voluntary manslaughter, and guilty but mentally ill of involuntary manslaughter. He was not convicted of murder. On May 2, 1994, he was sentenced to two and a half to five years, with credit for time already served. He was denied parole in December 1995 and released on March 19, 1998, at the end of his sentence. In 2007 he was charged with concealing the whereabouts of his teenage daughter, who was missing with him for five days, and, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, pleaded no contest and received six months of probation and a $500 fine. In 2008 he pleaded guilty to a weapons violation for hunting deer with a rifle and was sentenced to three months in jail. He died on January 14, 2011. The Crawford County chief deputy coroner ruled the death a suicide.
A new settlement on Brownhill
Toward sunset on Thursday, March 18, 1993, paramedics waiting at a rural crossroads in Rockdale Township, Crawford County, about 30 miles south of Erie, saw an Amish man walking toward them down the road. He was carrying a little girl and leading a small boy by the hand. Behind him, in a farmhouse beside a sawmill, his wife Katie Gingerich lay dead on the kitchen floor. She was 29. The man was Edward Gingerich, a member of an Old Order Amish settlement known as Brownhill. When the first state trooper arrived, according to the Crime Library’s account of the arrest, Gingerich walked over and said, “I’m the bad man you’re looking for.”
The case is usually described in one line: the only Amish man ever convicted of homicide. That line is not quite how the sources put it. An Associated Press report in 1997 called the killing “the first of only two Amish-on-Amish slayings in the sect’s U.S. history.” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in 2011, called it “the only known case of a homicide committed by an Amishman.” The conviction was for involuntary manslaughter, not murder.
What makes the case more than a grim curiosity is the year before the killing. Gingerich had been hospitalized twice for psychosis. He had been given antipsychotic drugs and had stopped taking them. His wife, his family and his church had tried prayer, a chiropractor, an Amish healer and two hospitals. Afterward, a Pennsylvania jury refused to find him legally insane, but also refused to find him a murderer. His own community petitioned to keep him locked away, and other Amish communities petitioned to take him in. Eighteen years later, the settlement that had shunned him buried him beside her.
This file sets out what the available sources say. Where they disagree, and they often do, it says so.
The Gingerich family came to northwestern Pennsylvania from Canada. In the spring of 1983, according to David Lohr’s Crime Library narrative of the case, Edward Gingerich’s parents left their home in Norwich, Ontario, with eight of their sons and daughters and moved to a 150 acre farm in Crawford County, about 30 miles south of Erie. The nearest town was Mill Village. The Gingeriches were the first of seven Amish families to make the move to what became known as the Brownhill settlement. Edward was 18.
The settlement grew quickly. By June 1985, Lohr writes, it had 13 families and 93 people. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, writing in 2011, placed the community it called the Brownhill Amish in Rockdale, Crawford County, and the wire reports of the 1990s located the Gingerich farm in Rockdale Township.
Old Order Amish life is governed by a church discipline that members accept at baptism. Amish Studies, a reference site published by Elizabethtown College, describes baptismal vows as “a binding commitment to obey God and the teachings of the church for the rest of their lives.” Lohr’s account describes Brownhill as a group that drove horses and buggies, did without electricity and sent its children to one room schools through the eighth grade.
Sources: David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library (Internet Archive copy), chapters 1 and 2; Ann Rodgers, “Killer’s Amish burial gives closure,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 23, 2011; Associated Press, “Wife-Killer’s Pending Freedom Splits Amish,” Los Angeles Times, August 3, 1997; Elizabethtown College, Amish Studies, “Church Discipline” and “Regulations.”
A mechanic in an Old Order world
Every account of Edward Gingerich’s early life returns to machines. His father built a diesel powered sawmill on the new farm, and Lohr writes that Edward was eager to learn how it worked and soon impressed other Amish men with “his natural mechanical knowledge and skill.” Jim Fisher, the retired Edinboro University criminal justice professor who wrote the book on the case, “Crimson Stain,” described him on his blog as “a gifted young man” whose interests ran to science and technology, “disciplines that threatened the Amish way of life.” In Fisher’s words, he was “An excellent mechanic, he built engines from scratch and could fix anything that contained a motor.” The 1997 Associated Press report said he “was known for his intelligence and ability to fix machines.”
The same accounts describe a young man uneasy inside the rules that framed his work. Lohr writes that he confided he had been thinking about leaving the faith but was not sure how, and that he “felt trapped in an entanglement of rules by which he no longer wanted to live.” English Wikipedia says he “was said to have been rebellious toward the Amish way of life from an early age.”
These are portraits drawn after the fact, by writers who knew how the story ended. None of them comes from Gingerich himself.
Sources: David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library, chapter 2; Jim Fisher, “Murder in Amish Country: The Edward Gingerich Case,” Jim Fisher True Crime; Associated Press, “Wife-Killer’s Pending Freedom Splits Amish,” Los Angeles Times, August 3, 1997; English Wikipedia, “Edward Gingerich”; Jim Fisher, “PRESS RELEASE: Upcoming Discovery Channel show on Amish murder and release of a new edition of CRIMSON STAIN,” Jim Fisher True Crime, May 2013.
Marriage to Katie
In the fall of 1985, according to Lohr, Edward met Katie, then 21, the sister of a coworker and a niece of the settlement’s bishop. Lohr describes her as “an energetic, hard working young woman who exemplified what it meant to be Old Order Amish.” Wikipedia reports that members of the community were apprehensive about the match, and that “The belief was that an unwaveringly faithful woman would be a good influence on the troubled young man and so the marriage went ahead.”
They married on December 2, 1986, a rainy day, Lohr writes, in a daylong ceremony attended by friends and family from Canada, western Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York. Katie’s uncle, the bishop, presided. In March 1987 Edward’s family built the couple a one-story house. A son was born in 1987, a second son in 1989 and a daughter in 1990.
Katie Gingerich appears in the sources mostly through other people’s eyes: as the faithful wife, the mother who arranged doctors and drivers, the woman who hid the rifles. Lohr, describing the 1994 trial, wrote that “The jury was left with very little knowledge of who Katie Gingerich was, or how she had suffered.” The available record leaves the same gap.
Sources: David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library, chapters 3, 4, 5 and 15; English Wikipedia, “Edward Gingerich”.
The first signs, a chiropractor and a burned mill
In the summer of 1988, Lohr writes, Edward built a machine shop next to the sawmill and spent the season buying motors and parts. By July his behavior had changed. “He seldom ate, began losing weight, and complained of recurrent dizzy spells.” Many elders, in Lohr’s account, thought he was faking illness to get out of work.
By then, Lohr writes, Katie had already made him an appointment with Dr. Merritt W. Terrell, a chiropractor in Cambridge Springs, about 15 miles to the south. Lohr’s description of the visit is flat and specific: a machine “revealed that he needed a toe pulling and a foot rub,” after which Gingerich paid $25, “was given a jar of blackstrap molasses for purifying his blood, and sent on his way.”
It would be easy to read this as a story about Amish suspicion of medicine. Lohr, in a footnote, warns against exactly that. “While most Amish groups do not oppose modern medicine, their readiness to seek health services varies from family to family,” he writes. “Nothing in the Amish understanding of the Bible forbids them from using modern medical services, including surgery, hospitalization, dental work, etc.” The Associated Press, reporting in 1994, described the same gap in different terms. “For a year before Katie Gingerich was killed, her husband had complained about being disoriented,” it wrote. “The couple begged their ‘English’ neighbors, who were barely more sophisticated on the subject than they, for help finding a doctor who could treat him.”
On the night of December 3, 1989, the sawmill burned. By the time fire trucks arrived, Lohr writes, it was too late, and Edward, Katie and several relatives watched it burn to the ground. An unmonitored fire in a wood stove was later found to have caused it. “Not only did the fire take the mill,” Lohr writes, “but it also took Ed’s refuge, purpose, and identity.”
The bishop allowed a new mill on two conditions, according to Lohr: Edward was to hire only Amish workers and not make the mill too modern. Construction began in April 1990. The new building was 150 feet long and 25 feet wide, and Lohr writes that Edward designed “a fully automated plant, which impressed Amish and English alike.” Fisher’s account puts the tension plainly. The modern sawmill and machine shop “put him in touch with a lot of local English people and put him at odds with the local Amish bishop.”
Sources: David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library, chapters 4, 5 and 6; Jim Fisher, “Murder in Amish Country: The Edward Gingerich Case,” Jim Fisher True Crime; Associated Press, “Amish Man Goes on Trial in Wife’s Death,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1994.
An evangelist, a can of solvent and a church night
In August 1990, Lohr writes, a young non-Amish man visited the sawmill hoping to sell logs. He was a born-again Christian, “and a man on a mission,” and in Lohr’s account he believed his calling was to rescue the Brownhill Amish from what he called the bishop’s cult. English Wikipedia, which names him, says he told Gingerich that unless he renounced his Amish faith and became a born-again Christian, he would go to hell, and that he and other evangelists who visited the wood shop “led him to believe that he was being confined and almost held captive by his wife, Katie.” He was a private person, never charged with anything, and this file does not name him.
The second thread the defense would later pull was chemical. On the morning of March 17, 1992, Katie’s 28th birthday, Lohr writes that Edward was degreasing a diesel engine in his machine shop with a solvent called Gunk. “According to the warnings on the can, the solvent was to be used only if significantly diluted and in a well-ventilated area.” The 1994 Associated Press report confirmed that the defense planned to argue the fumes had affected him: “The workroom where he used solvents was not ventilated, neighbors said.”
The crisis followed within days. Lohr’s account, which reconstructs dialogue and should be read as the author’s narrative rather than a court record, describes a church night at Katie’s parents’ house at which Edward, without warning, told the whole congregation, including the bishop, that an English friend and spiritual adviser had opened his eyes to God and Jesus Christ.
On the morning of March 23, 1992, Lohr writes, Edward refused to get out of bed. The bishop, in the same account, told those present: “This man is not sick. He has been taken over by Satan. The only thing that can save him is prayer.” Later, Lohr writes, Edward woke abruptly, threw himself to the floor and ran around the room on all fours, howling. Those present began to consider that he was in fact insane and decided he should see a medical doctor, who prescribed tranquilizers.
The Post-Gazette’s 2011 summary of the same period is shorter and supports the outline. Katie and his brothers, it said, “had sought psychiatric help when he began seeing giant rabbits, howling like a wolf and raving that God and Satan were battling for his soul.” The bishop’s reported words are one man’s reaction on one morning, recorded secondhand. The next morning, an ambulance came to the house.
Sources: David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library, chapters 6, 7, 14 and 15; English Wikipedia, “Edward Gingerich”; Associated Press, “Amish Man Goes on Trial in Wife’s Death,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1994; Ann Rodgers, “Killer’s Amish burial gives closure,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 23, 2011.
Two hospitals in 1992
On the morning of March 24, 1992, Lohr writes, the Mill Village Volunteer Fire Department’s ambulance pulled up in front of the house. It took seven men to restrain Edward and strap him to the cot. At the emergency room of Hamot Medical Center in Erie, a doctor and two security guards met the ambulance. He was released on April 3, less than two weeks later, with prescriptions that Lohr lists as Pamelor and Navane, and a bill of $8,000.
English Wikipedia’s account of this period says he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and that the medication eased his hallucinations “but put him in a ‘zombie’ state that he disliked.”
On April 28, according to Lohr, Edward missed his fourth psychiatric appointment and stopped taking his medicine. “Despite warnings that he would most likely relapse without his medication, Katie supported her husband’s decision,” Lohr writes. In May he told her he had decided to shoot himself. She gathered his hunting rifles and hid them in the buggy shed.
On May 5, 1992, he woke “in frenzy,” and the family took him to a second hospital, this time across the state line: Jones Memorial Health Center in Jamestown, New York, chosen in Lohr’s account because Katie did not want him sent back to Hamot. The Post-Gazette, summarizing both admissions, said the family “hospitalized him twice, once hog-tying him to get him to an emergency room where he sent medical equipment flying once he was freed.” At Jamestown, Lohr writes, he was given lithium, Cogentin and Mellaril and attended therapy sessions. He was released on May 15, 1992, with new prescriptions and outpatient appointments.
Four days after the second release, Lohr writes, he stopped taking his medication again, and again Katie supported him. “She felt that the medicine was not helping and that the English hospitals had failed them once again.”
Sources: David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library, chapters 8, 9 and 10; English Wikipedia, “Edward Gingerich”; Ann Rodgers, “Killer’s Amish burial gives closure,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 23, 2011; Jim Fisher, “Murder in Amish Country: The Edward Gingerich Case,” Jim Fisher True Crime; Associated Press, “Amish Man Goes on Trial in Wife’s Death,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1994.
The healer’s warning
The sources say little about the following year. On March 16, 1993, Lohr writes, after a long talk with his father, Edward agreed to see another English doctor as long as he was promised he would not be put back in the hospital.
What happened instead, in Lohr’s telling, was a trip to an Amish healer. The healer was a 46-year-old Amish man from a settlement near Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, “rumored to be a special healer.” On March 17, 1993, Katie’s 29th birthday, an English driver took the couple on the 100-mile journey to see him. Lohr writes that Katie paid him $340, and that the healer turned to her and said: “Take this man to a hospital; he needs to be put in a mental ward. I can’t help him.”
If Lohr’s account is accurate, the day before the killing a healer from inside the Amish world, not an English doctor, told Katie Gingerich plainly that her husband needed a psychiatric ward. The healer is a private person, and this file does not name him.
Sources: David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library, chapter 10.
March 18, 1993
The next day was a wedding day in the settlement. The headman of the mill was marrying a local Amish woman, and Lohr writes that Katie decided not to tell her husband because of his condition. She planned to take turns with his brothers watching him through the day, so that everyone could attend part of the wedding and the reception. That morning, according to Lohr and to Fisher, she took him back to the chiropractor in Cambridge Springs. In Lohr’s version, the chiropractor told him: “Drugs are not the answer.”
Edward learned of the wedding and wanted to go. “I have to go to the wedding,” Lohr has him shouting. “It’s the only way I can save my soul.” The Associated Press summary in 2011, citing the Erie Times-News, put the motive in the terms Gingerich himself later gave: he “said he killed his 29-year-old wife with a kitchen knife to exorcise the devil and because she planned to attend a wedding without him.”
The Post-Gazette’s account of the afternoon is the plainest. “He had been severely depressed and threatening suicide on March 18, 1993. That afternoon he kicked Katie to death in front of two of their three children.” The 1994 Associated Press report gave the outline that, it said, remained undisputed: “The couple argued and Katie Gingerich sent the oldest child, a boy of 5, to a brother-in-law’s house for help. The two younger children stayed and apparently were watching as she was slain.” Fisher gives the two younger children’s ages as three and four.
Their oldest son ran for help through the snow, barefoot, Lohr writes, about half a mile to his uncle’s house. The uncle rode to the nearest English farm, a few minutes away, and the 911 call was made from there. The paramedics were told to wait at an intersection until troopers arrived.
As the sun set, Edward Gingerich walked down the road toward them, carrying his daughter and leading his younger son by the hand. Katie Gingerich was dead in the kitchen. Trooper Robert Rowles of the state police was the first officer to reach the intersection. Gingerich told him, in Lohr’s account, “I’m the bad man you’re looking for.”
Several sources describe her injuries in detail. This file does not. It is enough to say that she was beaten to death and that her body was mutilated, and that at trial the medical evidence reached the jury through a pathologist and a drawing rather than photographs.
Sources: David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library, chapters 11, 12 and 14; Jim Fisher, “Murder in Amish Country: The Edward Gingerich Case,” Jim Fisher True Crime; Associated Press, “Pa. Amish Man Who Killed Wife In Frenzy Found Dead,” Fulton County News; Ann Rodgers, “Killer’s Amish burial gives closure,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 23, 2011; Associated Press, “Amish Man Goes on Trial in Wife’s Death,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1994.
“Lord Willing”: the statement
After he was read his Miranda rights, Lohr writes, Gingerich signed the waiver form not with his name but with the words “Lord Willing.” The first interview was not recorded. He was driven to Cambridge Springs and arraigned, and by one in the morning he was back in an interrogation room with a tape recorder on the table.
The recorded statements that Lohr quotes are fragmentary. “Yeah, but in our religion we will not have done that,” Gingerich said at one point. Asked why he had killed her, he said, “Yeah, I know. Why did I kill her? I felt it was a gain.” At another, “for some reason, I think we could still save her.” And: “Im so lost, I dont know what to say.” Lohr’s own judgment was that “Most of his statements were bizarre and incomprehensible.” He was taken to the Crawford County Jail at about two in the morning.
The record of his custody before trial is not consistent. His trial lawyer, Donald Lewis, wrote in 2013 that on the night of his arrest Gingerich was housed in the Crawford County Jail. Lohr and the Associated Press say he was taken to Warren State Hospital for evaluation, and the AP reported that “He was moved in July to the Crawford County Jail, where he remains without bail.” The Post-Gazette, in 2011, wrote simply: “In jail he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.” His sentence was later credited from May 19, 1993, a date the sources do not explain.
Sources: David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library, chapters 13 and 16; Don Lewis, “The Amish Murder Case,” Don Lewis, Mystery Writer, February 2013; Associated Press, “Amish Man Goes on Trial in Wife’s Death,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1994; Ann Rodgers, “Killer’s Amish burial gives closure,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 23, 2011.
Katie Gingerich’s funeral
Forty-one hours after Katie Gingerich’s death, Lohr writes, Amish mourners from Ontario, eastern Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and Indiana began arriving at her father-in-law’s farm. More than 200 friends and relatives came. The bishop, her uncle, preached a sermon of about 45 minutes. There were no flowers and no eulogy. “The tone was hopeful, yet full of admonition for the living,” Lohr writes, and “respect for Katie, not praise, was expressed.” Her casket was carried by buggy to the Amish cemetery down the road from the Gingerich farm.
Her three children went to live with Edward’s parents. The Deseret News, carrying an Associated Press report in March 1994, quoted their grandfather saying he overheard them discussing their mother’s death. “The children talk about it,” he said. “They say, `Dad was sick.’ ” In the summer of 1993, according to his father’s later testimony reported by the Meadville Tribune, Edward gave him a letter asking him to raise the children.
Katie’s father died on May 9, 1994, a week after Edward was sentenced. Lohr writes that he got up from dinner, told everyone that he wished he could see his daughter, went to bed and did not wake up. He was buried next to her.
Sources: David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library, chapters 13 and 16; Associated Press, “Amish Feel They Can Do Little in Wake of Killing,” Deseret News, March 21, 1994; “Gingeriches face trial for allegedly concealing teen,” Meadville Tribune, May 30, 2007.
Counsel and the insanity defense
Donald E. Lewis did not set out to take the case. In his own 2013 account, one of Gingerich’s English friends called him the day after the arrest and asked whether he and others could hire him. He declined. Several days later the Crawford County President Judge, P. Richard Thomas, asked him to take the case as court-appointed counsel. “When a favor is asked of you by the president judge of the county it’s a good idea to comply.”
The facts of the killing were never going to be contested. Lewis put it without ornament: “The fact that Ed had caused the death of his wife was not at issue. He killed her.” The only question was his mind. On October 2, 1993, Lohr writes, the defense told the court at a pretrial discovery hearing that it would rely on insanity. Under that affirmative defense, Lewis explained, he carried the burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that at the time of the homicide his client could not understand the nature and quality of his actions or could not tell right from wrong.
Lohr writes that the lawyers weighed two explanations for the psychosis: inbreeding in the Amish community, or brain damage from prolonged exposure to the Gunk fumes. In January 1994 the defense hired Dr. Lawson F. Bernstein Jr., a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. After reviewing the confession and interviewing Gingerich, he concluded, in Lohr’s paraphrase, that Gingerich “lacked the mental capacity to appreciate the nature of his act and therefore could not discern right from wrong.”
In February the prosecution sent the psychiatric reports to Dr. Phillip J. Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. His reply, as Lohr quotes it, gave the Commonwealth little: “It is my opinion that the authors of the reports had a reasonable basis for concluding that Mr. Gingerich was severely ill and did not know the wrongfulness of killing his wife at the time of the homicide.”
Before trial, Lohr writes, the prosecution offered a plea: guilty but mentally ill of third degree murder, with a ten year sentence and parole eligibility after five. The defense believed the Commonwealth would lose at trial and turned it down. The settlement, meanwhile, kept its distance from both sides. “The Amish community treated both the defense and prosecution with hostility,” Lohr writes, “and every member refused to testify unless subpoenaed by the court. Ed, it quickly became apparent, had been shunned.”
John Burkoff, a University of Pittsburgh law professor, told the Associated Press that the defendant’s background might help him. “It’s counterintuitive to think of the Amish as violent, and so the defense will have that going for it.”
Sources: Don Lewis, “The Amish Murder Case,” Don Lewis, Mystery Writer, February 2013; David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library, chapter 14; Associated Press, “Amish Feel They Can Do Little in Wake of Killing,” Deseret News, March 21, 1994.
The trial in Meadville
The sources do not agree on the day the trial began. Lewis wrote that Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Edward Gingerich went to trial in the Crawford County Courthouse on Monday, March 21, 1994, and the Associated Press reported that jury selection began on a Monday. Lohr dates the start of the trial to the morning of March 24, which may mark the opening statements after the jury was chosen.
The head prosecutor, Douglas Ferguson, opened briefly, Lohr writes, stressing that Gingerich had not been legally insane and should not be excused. Lewis, in Lohr’s account, told the jurors: “We are about to hear testimony that will stay with us forever.”
The Commonwealth’s case was short. Its first exhibit, Lohr writes, was “a childlike drawing depicting Katie’s corpse produced specially for the jury,” and in Lohr’s judgment the prosecution “had made a dire misjudgment in keeping the crime scene photos from the jury.” The first witness was Dr. Karl E. Williams, a forensic pathologist who had not performed the autopsy but testified to the reports. Katie’s mother, under subpoena, testified for the prosecution. A brother of the defendant described the day of the killing and read the statement he had given to the state police that night. An English sawmill customer testified to Gingerich’s state of mind, and two state troopers described the arrest and the confession.
What the prosecution did not call is the part Lohr dwells on. It produced no psychiatrist to say Gingerich was sane, no toxicologist to answer the solvent theory and none of the Mill Village paramedics who had been at the scene. Lewis’s own tally matches the shape if not the exact numbers: 21 witnesses in all, only seven of them for the prosecution. Among his own, he wrote, were two psychiatrists, a toxicologist and a psychologist. “The prosecution offered no witnesses to contradict the defense.” Lohr counts fourteen defense witnesses, “twice as many as the prosecution.”
For the defense, Dr. Bernstein testified to the psychosis, and Dr. John J. Spikes, a toxicologist from Philadelphia, testified, in Lohr’s words, “that the Gunk fumes had caused organic brain syndrome, a condition, which existed at the time of Katie’s murder.”
Sources: David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library, chapters 14 and 15; Don Lewis, “The Amish Murder Case,” Don Lewis, Mystery Writer, February 2013; Associated Press, “Amish Man Goes on Trial in Wife’s Death,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1994.
Guilty but mentally ill
Lewis closed first. “One who has been responsible all his life doesn’t do something like this,” he told the jury, in Lohr’s account. Ferguson conceded that Gingerich may have been mentally ill when his wife died, but argued that insanity was something else entirely. “Katie Gingerich’s death was no accident; it was murder.” The judge then explained the degrees of murder and the legal definition of insanity.
The jury rejected both positions. “We find the defendant, Edward D. Gingerich, guilty of involuntary manslaughter but mentally ill,” the foreman said, as Lohr records it. Lewis set out the full verdict in 2013: not guilty of first degree murder, not guilty of third degree murder, not guilty of voluntary manslaughter, and guilty of involuntary manslaughter, which he described as a misdemeanor. Edward Gingerich was not convicted of murder. The finding of guilty but mentally ill meant, in Fisher’s explanation, that he “would receive psychiatric care while serving a fixed term in prison,” rather than being held in a mental institution until doctors judged him fit for release.
Fisher, who wrote the book on the case, thought the jury got it wrong in the other direction. In his view it had refused to find Gingerich not guilty by reason of insanity “in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” Later summaries garbled the result; the Associated Press in 1997 had him “Found guilty of involuntary manslaughter but insane.” The verdict, as Lohr, the Meadville Tribune and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette all report it, was guilty but mentally ill of involuntary manslaughter.
Sources: Don Lewis, “The Amish Murder Case,” Don Lewis, Mystery Writer, February 2013; David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library, chapters 14, 15 and 16; Associated Press, “Amish Feel They Can Do Little in Wake of Killing,” Deseret News, March 21, 1994; Jim Fisher, “Murder in Amish Country: The Edward Gingerich Case,” Jim Fisher True Crime; Associated Press, “Wife-Killer’s Pending Freedom Splits Amish,” Los Angeles Times, August 3, 1997; “Gingeriches face trial for allegedly concealing teen,” Meadville Tribune, May 30, 2007; Ann Rodgers, “Killer’s Amish burial gives closure,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 23, 2011.
The petition and the sentence
In Brownhill the verdict was not received as mercy. “To the Amish community, Eds verdict was an insult,” Lohr writes, and the bishop, without telling Gingerich or his lawyers, drafted a petition. Lohr gives its text: “About Ed Gingerich We like Ed Gingerich, but absolutely dont trust him and are seriously afraid of him because of what he did. We want him to stay in Warren County mental ward, (for good).” Sixty people signed it, Lohr writes, including Edward’s own father. The Post-Gazette later wrote “Nearly 60”; the Associated Press in 1997 said 50, and the prosecutor “more than 50.”
The sentencing hearing was held on May 2, 1994. After a psychiatric evaluation was presented, Lohr writes, the prosecution handed the bishop’s petition to the judge. Gingerich’s statement to the court was one sentence long: “All I can say is, Im sorry to all the community that this has happened.” He was sentenced to a minimum of two and a half years and a maximum of five, with credit for time served since May 19, 1993, which made him eligible for parole by late 1995. Lewis wrote that it was “the maximum sentence allowed by law” for the offense. Fisher, writing years later, said the judge “sentenced him to four years.” The term reported by Lohr, Lewis and the Associated Press is two and a half to five years.
Sources: David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library, chapter 16; Ann Rodgers, “Killer’s Amish burial gives closure,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 23, 2011; Associated Press, “Wife-Killer’s Pending Freedom Splits Amish,” Los Angeles Times, August 3, 1997; Don Lewis, “The Amish Murder Case,” Don Lewis, Mystery Writer, February 2013; Jim Fisher, “Murder in Amish Country: The Edward Gingerich Case,” Jim Fisher True Crime.
Prison, and a church divided over forgiveness
In November 1994, Lohr writes, Gingerich said he had been visited by God and forgiven. He wrote about it soon afterward: “It makes me feel like singing and to shoot (sic) for joy,” he wrote. “I do not shout because of my surroundings, but I do sing something I have not felt like or done in the last perilous few years.” He was denied parole in December 1995.
Where he served the sentence is itself disputed. Lohr names the State Correctional Institution at Cambridge Springs. The Associated Press, in 1997, said he “works in the carpentry shop at the state prison in Mercer,” and Fisher describes a minimum security prison near Mercer. The Post-Gazette wrote in 2011 that he “served his five-year sentence in the prison ward of a mental hospital.” The available records do not settle it.
By the summer of 1997 his coming release had split the Amish world around him. His own Old Order congregation had, according to the Associated Press, excommunicated him, the sect’s severest penalty, because he had adopted the beliefs of the New Order, a less conservative branch that put more emphasis on salvation in Christ and used telephones and electricity. An Old Order bishop declined to explain the group’s position. “We try to be a quiet group,” said the bishop, who was also Katie Gingerich’s uncle.
Two dozen New Order members, meanwhile, told the authorities they were willing to live near him. One who visited him in prison put the case for them: “If Edward would have killed my sister or sister-in-law, it would be a lot harder, but if you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven.” The prosecutor who tried him described the New Order’s interest without judgment: “Others felt because of the way their society is they had a duty to help him.” The Post-Gazette later reported that other Amish communities had petitioned for his release, saying their ministers had visited him and found that medication had restored his sanity and that he was profoundly sorry. They offered to take him in and supervise him.
The Old Order position, in the general terms Amish scholars use, is less cold than it looks from outside. Elizabethtown College’s Amish Studies program notes that “Expulsion from the church can lead to a lifetime of estrangement from family and friends,” but that the faith also keeps “an open back door for wayward members who want to return with a contrite heart.” Fisher, who had once been close to Katie’s parents, defended Brownhill in 2011: “They have forgiven Ed, they just haven’t forgotten what he did. That violent homicide left them fearful.”
Sources: David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library, chapter 16; Associated Press, “Wife-Killer’s Pending Freedom Splits Amish,” Los Angeles Times, August 3, 1997; Jim Fisher, “Murder in Amish Country: The Edward Gingerich Case,” Jim Fisher True Crime; Ann Rodgers, “Killer’s Amish burial gives closure,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 23, 2011; Elizabethtown College, Amish Studies, “Church Discipline.”
Release, 1998
On March 19, 1998, at 34, having served his full sentence, Gingerich was released, according to Lohr. The Meadville Tribune later put the time served at “five years and one day,” and in another story at “just over five years.” Fisher wrote that he left custody “without any strings attached.”
He did not go home. “Not welcome back in Brownhill, Ed moved to Harmony Haven, in Evart, Mich., a community for troubled Amish,” Lohr writes. The Post-Gazette describes “an Amish mental health facility in Michigan,” and says that after an incident there he moved to “an Indiana psychiatric unit for Amish who need constant supervision.”
Sources: David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library, chapter 16; “Gingerich charged after missing daughter found,” Meadville Tribune, April 22, 2007; “Gingeriches face trial for allegedly concealing teen,” Meadville Tribune, May 30, 2007; Jim Fisher, “Murder in Amish Country: The Edward Gingerich Case,” Jim Fisher True Crime; Ann Rodgers, “Killer’s Amish burial gives closure,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 23, 2011.
Back in Crawford County, 2007 and 2008
In February 2007, the Post-Gazette reported, Gingerich returned to Crawford County and rented a house among the Brownhill Amish, wanting to reconcile with his family and especially his children. An Amish friend from another community told the paper that a visiting nurse gave him his medication, that he saw a psychiatrist every two weeks and that a caseworker monitored him. Two of his brothers and his two teenage sons reconciled with him and were shunned along with him. His daughter, who lived with his parents, was forbidden to see him.
On April 18, 2007, according to the Meadville Tribune, he persuaded the 17-year-old to leave with him. The community, the Post-Gazette wrote, “was terrified that he would kill her as he had her mother.” State police found the two on April 22 at a camp in the Allegheny Mountains near Kane, in McKean County, and she was returned unharmed to her grandparents. Gingerich was arraigned before District Magisterial Judge Amy Nichols on three felony charges, concealment of the whereabouts of a child, conspiracy and interference with the custody of children, and held on $100,000 bond. Two of his older brothers were charged with conspiracy. On May 29, Magisterial District Judge Lincoln Zilhaver held all three for trial. His defenders, the Post-Gazette reported, said he only wanted a chance to reconcile with her before she joined the church and would be required to shun him. He pleaded no contest and was sentenced to six months of probation and a $500 fine. The available sources do not record how his brothers’ charges ended.
In 2008 he was back in court. Because of his 1994 conviction he was barred from possessing a gun, and he had been reported, the Post-Gazette said, for hunting deer with a rifle. He pleaded guilty to a weapons violation and, the Associated Press reported, was sentenced in Crawford County Court to three months in jail.
Sources: Ann Rodgers, “Killer’s Amish burial gives closure,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 23, 2011; “Gingerich charged after missing daughter found,” Meadville Tribune, April 22, 2007; “Gingeriches face trial for allegedly concealing teen,” Meadville Tribune, May 30, 2007; Associated Press, “Amish man who killed wife gets 3 months for gun violation,” The Daily Item.
The last year, and burial beside Katie
Early in 2010, Fisher wrote, the brothers and the sons asked to return to the Brownhill church, and the bishop agreed on one condition: they would have to sever their ties with Edward. They did. “He felt that rejection,” a cousin told the Post-Gazette. He moved in with cousins in another town, where non-Amish neighbors protested, and in the summer of 2010 with George Schroeck, a non-Amish friend and lawyer who had once represented him, and Schroeck’s wife near Cambridge Springs. A nurse came every two weeks to give him antipsychotic injections. “I never saw Ed delusional. I never saw him wigging out,” Schroeck said. But he had fallen into a deep depression, which Schroeck blamed on the break with his sons and brothers, and another friend reported that he had stopped taking his antidepressants. On January 13, 2011, Schroeck took him to a doctor.
Edward Gingerich died the next day, January 14, 2011, in a barn. The Post-Gazette gave his age as 44 and the Associated Press as 45. The Associated Press, citing the Erie Times-News, placed the barn in Rockdale Township; the Post-Gazette and Fisher place it at Schroeck’s home outside Cambridge Springs. Crawford County Chief Deputy Coroner Scott Schell ruled the death a suicide.
If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988 (Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, US).
The settlement that had shunned him took him back in death. His brothers met with the bishop, and the funeral was held at a brother’s home; the bishop preached. “There were Amish folks who came from far and wide on short notice. They came from other states,” said Bob Cranmer, a former Allegheny County commissioner and a neighbor. An Amish friend told him the gesture “was more for the family than it was for him.” The cousin said simply: “They buried him right next to Katie.” Schroeck, with whom he had lived, was less consoled. “It would have been much better had they taken the living Ed back and treated him with some Christian kindness,” he said. The cousin declined to sort it out: “He is in the hands of a righteous judge.”
Sources: Jim Fisher, “Crimson Stain Epilogue Update,” Jim Fisher True Crime, September 23, 2011; Ann Rodgers, “Killer’s Amish burial gives closure,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 23, 2011; Associated Press, “Pa. Amish Man Who Killed Wife In Frenzy Found Dead,” Fulton County News.
What the record leaves open
- The date of the killing is March 18, 1993, in nearly every source; one Fisher post gives March 19.
- The trial start: Lewis gives March 21, 1994, Lohr March 24.
- Where he served his sentence: Cambridge Springs, Mercer, or a prison ward of a mental hospital.
- His age: reports of 44 and 45 at his death do not match the birth date on Wikipedia.
- Where the barn stood: Rockdale Township, or outside Cambridge Springs.
Sources: as cited in each section above.
Frequently asked questions
Was Edward Gingerich convicted of murder?
No. Edward Gingerich was charged with criminal homicide after his wife’s death on March 18, 1993. In March 1994 a jury at the Crawford County Courthouse in Meadville found him not guilty of first degree murder, third degree murder and voluntary manslaughter, and guilty but mentally ill of involuntary manslaughter. He was not convicted of murder. He was denied parole in December 1995 and, according to Lohr, was released on March 19, 1998, having served his full sentence.
What did the verdict of guilty but mentally ill mean?
The jury refused to find him legally insane, but also refused to find him a murderer. In Jim Fisher’s explanation, the finding meant that he “would receive psychiatric care while serving a fixed term in prison,” rather than being held in a mental institution until doctors judged him fit for release. Fisher, who wrote the book on the case, thought the jury had refused to find him not guilty by reason of insanity “in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
Was he ill before his wife’s death?
Yes. In the year before the killing he had been hospitalized twice for psychosis, and he had been given antipsychotic drugs and had stopped taking them. His wife, his family and his church had tried prayer, a chiropractor, an Amish healer and two hospitals. Lohr places the admissions at Hamot Medical Center in Erie in March 1992 and at Jones Memorial Health Center in Jamestown, New York, in May 1992. English Wikipedia’s account of this period says he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
What sentence did he receive, and where did he serve it?
On May 2, 1994, he was sentenced to two and a half to five years, with credit for time already served. That is the term reported by Lohr, Lewis and the Associated Press; Fisher, writing years later, said the judge “sentenced him to four years.” Where he served the sentence is disputed: Lohr names the State Correctional Institution at Cambridge Springs, the Associated Press and Fisher point to Mercer, and the Post-Gazette wrote of “the prison ward of a mental hospital.”
Citations & Sources
Sources
- David Lohr, “Edward D. Gingerich: The Only Amish Man Convicted of Murder,” Crime Library
- Associated Press, “Amish Feel They Can Do Little in Wake of Killing,” Deseret News, March 21, 1994
- Associated Press, “Amish Man Goes on Trial in Wife’s Death,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1994
- Associated Press, “Wife-Killer’s Pending Freedom Splits Amish,” Los Angeles Times, August 3, 1997
- “Gingerich charged after missing daughter found,” Meadville Tribune, April 22, 2007
- “Gingeriches face trial for allegedly concealing teen,” Meadville Tribune, May 30, 2007
- Associated Press, “Amish man who killed wife gets 3 months for gun violation,” The Daily Item
- Associated Press, “Pa. Amish Man Who Killed Wife In Frenzy Found Dead,” Fulton County News
- Ann Rodgers, “Killer’s Amish burial gives closure,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 23, 2011
- Don Lewis, “The Amish Murder Case,” Don Lewis, Mystery Writer, February 2013
- Jim Fisher, “Murder in Amish Country: The Edward Gingerich Case,” “Crimson Stain Epilogue Update” and “PRESS RELEASE: Upcoming Discovery Channel show on Amish murder and release of a new edition of CRIMSON STAIN,” Jim Fisher True Crime
- Elizabethtown College, Amish Studies, “Church Discipline” and “Regulations”
- English Wikipedia, “Edward Gingerich”
Images: Wikimedia Commons, credited in each caption.
Image credits
- Image: Nicholas, via Wikimedia Commons (from Flickr). CC BY 2.0.
- Image: Dtbohrer, via Wikimedia Commons, from United States Census Bureau data. Public domain.
- Image: Doug Kerr, via Wikimedia Commons (from Flickr). CC BY-SA 2.0.
- Image: Andre Carrotflower, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
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