True Crime Campfire - Cleansed: An Amish Murder Story

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

It’s become a cliché in the telling of murder stories that someone will always say “This kind of thing just doesn’t happen here.” Somehow, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, we’re good at convincing ourselves that there are safe zones…places that are immune to the darker shades of the human soul. Most of us—at least, the ones who make a study of darkness—know better by now. But even for us, there are some communities that do seem unlikely to wind up on a true crime podcast. Unlikely, maybe. But nevertheless, here we are. Join us for a story of devotion, deception, lust and betrayal, against the unexpected backdrop of the Amish country. Sources:Investigation Discovery, A Murder in Amish Country, ep. A Twisted ConfessionInmate profile and criminal complaint against Samuel Borntreger: https://www.insideprison.com/state-inmate-search.asp?lnam=Borntreger&fnam=Samuel%20H&county=&st_abb=MO&id=2025969725Horror History: https://horrorhistory.net/2020/12/04/man-kills-his-wife-with-antifreeze-and-battery-acid/https://www.scribd.com/doc/295500611/Samuel-Borntreger-Criminal-Complaint?irclickid=35FTDSWZszbEW4P3jgQVdWKAUkD3r7z1sxfsw40&irpid=10078&utm_source=impact&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=affiliate_pdm_acquisition_Skimbit%20Ltd.&sharedid=huffpost.com&irgwc=1KTTN news: https://www.kttn.com/samuel-borntreger-could-face-additional-charges-of-child-abuse-and-sexual-misconduct/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/amish-minister-confesses-to-killing-wife-9-years-ago-cops_n_5697cf0de4b0b4eb759d6db3Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. It's become a cliche in the telling of murder stories that someone will always say, this kind of thing just doesn't happen here. Somehow, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, we're good at convincing ourselves that there are safe zones,

places that are immune to the darker shades of the human soul. Most of us, at least the ones who make a study of the darkness, no better by now. But even for us, there are some communities that do seem unlikely to wind up on a true crime podcast. Unlikely, maybe, but nevertheless, here we are. This is Cleansed, an Amish murder story. So, campers, for this one, we're in Harrison County, Missouri, January 10, 2016. A peaceful place with a peaceful place with a

level of violent crime almost 10 percentage points lower than the national average and a thriving population of Amish and Mennonite communities. It was an ordinary workday for county sheriff Josh Eccerson until his phone rang. It was one of his deputies. Sheriff, you better come over here. We just got a call from a detective in Kentucky. Guy just walked in off the street down there says he murdered his wife Anna 10 years ago. Happened here in Harrison County and the guy, he's Amish. Okay, that's got to be the weirdest call the sheriff's ever gotten in his career, right? And it wasn't a prank.

This guy, in full Amish garb, had just walked right into the police station in his current hometown of Somershade, Kentucky, and said he wanted to confess. He'd driven to the station in his horse and buggy. So, wow. Guess it was time for a road trip for the sheriff and his detective. And before long, they were sitting down in an interview room with the guy. 39-year-old Samuel Bortrager Samuel seemed surprisingly casual given what he was there to do,

confessed to a cold-blooded murder. I'm here voluntarily, he told him. I've got this burden, I want to get rid of it. Sheriff Eckerson actually knew Samuel. Not super well, but the county had hired the guy to do some woodworking for him a few years ago, building cabinets and desks and whatnot, so he'd met him then.

He seemed polite and friendly, or at least as friendly as the Amish ever get with the English, as they call us. mild-mannered, religious, obviously, given the community he belonged to. The guy had ten kids, five with his first wife Anna, and five with his second, who he'd married after Anna's death. Anna had died in 2006, and a few years after that, Samuel had picked up stakes with his new wife and moved to Kentucky, had five more children, too.

And now, seemingly out of the blue, here he was, a decade later, wanting to unburden his soul. And a pretty disturbing burden it was. Born Trager claimed he'd poisoned Anna, first with antifreeze, and when that didn't work fast enough, with battery acid. Anna Born Trager was, in the words of one good friend, a jewel. Kind, loving, generous with her time and energy. She was shy and soft-spoken, but she had a quiet strength about her too. She was beautiful in a fresh-faced, innocent way, and her whole world revolved around Samuel, their five children, all of which she had in the first six years of their marriage, and their Amish way of life.

Later, Christine Stallings, the prosecutor in this case, would remember a day when she went to pick up a cabinet from Samuel at their house. Anna was out in the front yard with the kids, playing some kind of follow-the-leader-type game. They were all barefoot, Anna included, walking single file like a mama duck with her ducklings, and they were all laughing. And when Samuel came outside to help Christine load up the cabinet, he looked over at Anna and gave her a big wink. It was kind of not very Amish-like, I thought, Christine said. was a flirty, kind of sexy little moment, and it surprised her. It stuck with her. And now, here was this same man confessing to murdering Anna. Nobody had suspected any foul play in Anna's death,

despite how young she was, only 26 when she died on December 4, 2006. As Sheriff Eckerson now quickly determined, the cause of death was listed as liver failure, and according to the report, Anna had been having health problems for some time. She'd had five kids. in six years, and several of those were by C-section. Life isn't easy for Amish women. It's a lot of hard, manual labor, everything done by hand and from scratch. Like I'm talking butter churning, washing clothes with one of those old hand-crank washers, milking cows, the whole nine yards.

And every time Anna had one of those C-sections, she was expected to jump right back into her daily responsibilities. For somebody already struggling with health issues, that would be, recipe for disaster. So at the time, Anna's death was viewed as a tragedy, but nothing more than that. Nobody seemed suspicious. But now, 10 years later, here was this chilling confession from Samuel, delivered in a friendly, casual tone that clashed horribly with the subject matter. Samuel sounded like a guy chatting over the back fence with his neighbor, talking about a fishing trip or something. It's jarring to listen to.

Now, why I got an idea like that, I don't know, Samuel said. The devil hit me. He'd put antifreeze into her tea, he said, but he'd expected it to work a lot faster. After a week and a half or so, Anna was violently sick, but still conscious and talking. He wanted to, quote, put her out of her misery, he said. So a day or two later, he brought out the battery acid. Oh, God. Antifreeze is a bad enough way to go.

it creates these evil little spiky crystals all throughout the body. First, you start to feel drunk. People will act kind of giddy and silly and incoherent. But then things start to get real bad, real fast. Awful nausea and GI distress, horrible pain. Eventually your organs will start to fail in mass. I can't even imagine what kind of havoc battery acid would create. Yeah, I don't even want to think about that.

Ugh. Samuel was being pretty open. about the methods he used to kill Anna, but he didn't seem to want to offer up a motive, just the devil hit me, which, you know, probably wouldn't hold up in court. So, Eckerson's first step was to, A, try and corroborate what Samuel was telling him about the way Anna died, and B, figure out why he'd killed her in the first place. And while he was at it, he was curious to find out why Born Trager had suddenly decided to come clean about all this 10 years after the fact. I mean, if he'd murdered Anna, he'd murdered Anna, he

gotten away with it free and clear. Why would he turn himself in now? It was just bizarre. Yeah, and it's not like it is in the movies. You actually cannot arrest somebody just because they confess to a murder. Not necessarily anyway. You have to have some evidence that their story is true because people really do sometimes confess to shit they didn't do for all kinds of reasons. And in this case, you've got a body that's been buried for 10 years and a total lack of forensic evidence. The first step for investigators was to figure out the motive. They talked to some of the people in the Amish community where Samuel and Anna lived back in 2006, but it didn't really get them anywhere. This is an insular, self-contained culture,

and they don't tend to like outsiders coming in and asking questions. Yeah, I guess we should probably give a thumbnail sketch in case anybody's not familiar with the Amish. They're a religious group, Christians, and they basically opt out of modern life. They, don't use electricity, cars, computers, they basically live the way people did in the 19th century. They get around in horse and buggies and they dress in modest clothes like the kind you might have expected to see 150 years ago. The women wear these little bonnets and long dresses, the men tend to have long beards. Fun fact, they're called Shenandoah Beards. They look like they would be called Shenandoah Beards. That's like exactly correct. And although a lot of times

TV shows and movies will really romanticize these communities. We don't want to do that here. Now, I can't imagine it's an easy life. And the Amish have been criticized rightly, I think, for their treatment of women and children and animals, sadly, like running puppy mills and stuff. And I'm talking about internal criticism from people who've grown up in those communities and been responsible and brave enough to speak out about the problems. So while I'm not Amish, you're not Amish, there are volumes that we don't know about Amish life. We also don't want to treat it like, oh, it's a sweet, innocent way of life, because it sounds like it's a lot more complicated than that. I'm sure there are good things and bad things about it just as there are with any

culture. And I mean, it's not like our hands are clean either, the English world, as they call us. We certainly do live in a society. Right. But, you know, it's a community with some real problems. And I bring that up because I think some of those problems are really highlighted by this case. So the investigators initially didn't get a lot out of the Amish folks they interviewed about Samuel and Anna Bornrager. These are not people who tend to go to the cops with their problems. They prefer to handle stuff internally. So Sheriff Eccerson decided to go straight to the top and talk to the bishop. When he told them about Samuel's confession, the bishop seemed shocked. The Bortrager's had a good marriage, he insisted. Samuel loved Anna. She loved him. This must be some

kind of awful misunderstanding. And when the investigators got hold of Anna's death records, they thought maybe the Bishop was right. The report showed damage to Anna's liver, and she had that telltale jaundiced skin you usually see with liver disease, but there were no signs of kidney failure, which is what you'd see with antifreece poisoning. So what did this mean? Well, there's only so much you can tell from a piece of paper. The investigators wanted a thorough autopsy to look for signs of antifreeze poisoning and battery acid in Anna's system. But she'd been buried for 10 years, and they didn't expect the bishop to like the idea of exhuming her body. They were right about that.

Exhumation is forbidden in the Amish belief system, but they sat the guy down and told him, look, we have to know if this confession is for real, and this is the only way we're going to do it. We'll show her every possible respect, and we'll have another proper burial for when we're done, and grudgingly, the bishop agreed to send some men around to help with the exhumation,

and Anna's body was sent to the local medical examiner for an autopsy. But toxicology didn't yield. anything useful, and there was no sign of those evil little crystals that antifreeze creates in the body. Whatever killed Anna Born Trager, it wasn't ethylene glycol. The obvious answer here was that

Samuel's confession was bogus, just a bizarre lie. But why would he do that? It didn't make sense. And there was something about the guy, something in the creepily cheerful way he described the murder, that made Eckerson really want to keep looking into the case. Samuel Bornstager won right.

and Anna's family deserved to know the truth about what happened. For the moment, the investigation had hit a dead end. But then, five months in, they got a phone call from a guy called Eli Born Traker, Samuel's brother. Eli had loved Anna like a sister, and he'd been carrying around about five Anvil's weight of guilt for ten years now. He was ready to let it go, even if it meant betraying his brother. According to Eli, the bishop's song and dance about how great and loving the born Trigger's marriage had been was a big, fat lie. Some of the neighbors had told Sheriff Eckerson that Anna was always sickly, but as

Eli now pointed out, she'd had one baby after another for six years straight. Some of her pregnancies were rough, and most of the births had been by C-section. English doctors don't recommend you have more than three C-sections because of the havoc it plays on your body. And despite all that, she'd still gotten up out of bed every day to do the yard work and the laundry and the cooking and the cleaning and the canning and the child care. Oh, my God. But after the fifth baby, Anna just couldn't do it.

She had to stay in bed for about a month after the birth. And this frustrated Samuel. She wasn't healing fast enough for him. Yeah, we're those good strong birth and hips, Anna. The housework's not going to do itself. You know, not for nothing, Sam I am, but a C-section is major surgery. We English heathens usually have you rest for about six weeks after one of those. So up yours, Dickweed.

Yeah, let's cut him open and tell him to hop to it the next day and see how he handles it. All right. So according to Eli, Samuel brought in a woman from another Amish community to do Anna's chores and take care of the kids while Anna recuperated, basically a live-in maid slash nanny. Her name was Mary Yoder. Samuel knew Mary from his cabinetry shop. She worked for him there, and according to Eli, they raised quite a few eyebrows with the way they interacted. they were flirty, not just Amish flirty. Like, we're not talking about a brief glimpse of an ankle and a shy giggle.

We mean flirty, flirty, unmistakably flirty. It was super inappropriate. Ugh, this old story again, it's a tale as old as time. The wife gets sick, she's out of commission for a few weeks, and boom, a fair. Asshole couldn't wait six weeks for Anna to feel better before he started, you know, plowing some other woman's turnip field or something. raising another woman's barn milking somebody else's cow

that one might be a little too on the nose so anyway now Mary was spending even more time around Samuel in his own house no less and it didn't take long for the bishop to find out and the bish was not happy he punished them by sending Mary to a community in Indiana and excommunicating Samuel for three months

Yeah, I didn't know you could excommunicate somebody for like a few months. And like, I guess after that three month probation period, everything's just all good again. God's like, okay, you served your time. Come on back. It's just so weird. It's like a spiritual timeout. Sorry. So my brother was such a bad kid that my mom, when he had to go to timeout, he would just leave.

Shout out to my brother. Hey, Tyler. So my mom had to put him in a like a car seat in the house to put him in time out. And now I'm picturing Samuel in God's car seat in timeout. But I digress. Correct us if we're wrong. But I think what this means is you're basically shunned for that excommunication period. Like nobody's supposed to talk to you or invite you over for dinner or anything.

It's basically like go stand in the corner and think about what you did. Which for some people may not be punishment at all. So Samuel served his three months. in time out, and then the bishop let him come back. Less than a month later, Anna Borentriger was dead. And just a few months after that, Samuel married Mary Yoder. Now, this was pretty suspicious all by itself, but Eli had more. He said, my brother asked Mary to marry him two weeks before Anna passed. And Mary, she was already pregnant when they were married. So, wow. Okay. Apparently did have a pretty strong motive for killing Anna.

If you take the whole Amish element out of it, this is basically every episode of Dateline. Of course, if you're going down that route, you have to consider that Mary Yoder had motive too. Could she have been involved? After talking to Eli, the investigators felt more confident than ever that Anna's death was, in fact, a murder,

even if Samuel had been lying about the specific method. Might not have been antifreeze, but they were pretty sure it was something. So they decided to map out a timeline of Anna's illness. Now, there's something else about the Amish that threatened to complicate the investigation, namely that they don't tend to use a lot of typical medical care. They'd rather use herbal treatments and home remedies than medications, and they use chiropractors for primary care instead of medical doctors.

Anna and Samuel had used a local Amish chiropractor named James Port. He'd tried various treatments to try and manage Anna's health, including rolling magnets across her body to, quote, take the impurities out of her. Yeah, boy. Poor, poor Anna. Just real quick, you have a liver for that. So if somebody is telling you that they can flush the impurities out of your body,

they're probably selling you snake oil. Yeah, so, shockingly, this didn't do anything for Anna, but it did give Samuel an idea. Evidently, watching this chiropractor work on Anna got Samuel thinking, Hey, that doesn't look hard. I could do that. news slash he could not So without any training or anything

He started offering his own Chiropractic services to the women of the community And y'all His methods were not what you'd call conventional His whole thing was stretching you out As long as he could get you He'd get these poor women up on this homemade table That he'd rigged up attach ratchet straps to him

And pull Now I haven't seen a picture of this thing but it sounds like a medieval rack, basically. Like, I'm picturing some kind of crank probably to, like, tighten those ratchet straps and stretch these poor ladies out. Just terrifying. Yeah, the ratchet straps did the work for him. So he's tying this industrial tool to just, like, women.

Like, that's an off-label use if I've ever heard one. Yeah, these were not medical ratchet straps. No, no. Jesus, no. There's no such thing as a medical ratchet strap. And if there is, there's no run. Run. Don't go to that doctor. No. So sometimes he would stretch them out so badly that their clothes would rip.

And surprise, surprise, some of his patients were seriously hurt. And that wasn't the worst thing he did. Sometimes while he had a woman strapped to this table, he'd tell her he needed to apply a special herbal remedy to her chest, and then he'd just grope them while they lay there strapped to this flipping medieval torture device. That's going to be traumatic for anybody, but for an Amish woman, conditioned to modesty her entire life, I imagine it's a whole other level of humiliation, especially since he was setting himself up as a doctor, basically, a person they could trust with their most intimate medical issues. Eventually, the investigators would talk to multiple Amish women who'd fallen victim to Samuel's fake doctor scam and ended up injured or sexually violated.

They couldn't believe what they were hearing. I mean, this is not exactly what you expect from an Amish cabinet maker. Dude was a pervert and a predator. In fact, it seems very clear to me that he's a sexual sadist, right? Oh, absolutely. There's no reason for him to do something this methodically evil unless he was getting his butter

turned to it. Yeah, and in KCL aren't familiar, a sexual sadist, fortunately a very rare species of creepo, gets their sexual jollies out of causing fear and pain to other people. And I'm not talking about the S part of BDSM here, okay? I'm talking about real non-consensual fear and anguish and suffering. That's how they get their shitty little rocks off. A few famous examples are David Parker Ray, the toy box killer, Bob Redella, Fred and Rosemary West, and Randy Kraft, which unless you're pretty desensitized,

I would not recommend going down any of those rabbit holes because sexual sadists are the scariest people in the world. And Samuel's one of them. Like, I mean, my dude was torturing women on a homemade rack. Yikes. Yeah, and something I've noticed is that sexual sadists really do tend to be, like, ingenious that's not a compliment with their tools. they're creative when it comes to getting themselves off it's bizarre again like Whitney said

do not look them up if you're squeamish but every single one of those murderers Whitney just mentioned had a tendency to build their tools and equipment to their own specifications it kind of makes sense because you're not going to find anyone willing to make them but that little detail always gets me like their sadistic creativity and I think it's part of the fun forum is planning and fantasizing it's horrible And apparently, his second wife, Mary Yoder, was also one of the women that fell victim to this. Mary's brother told the prosecutor that when Mary went to him for treatment, Samuel told her her uterus was out of place and he needed to get it back into proper alignment. Now, how you could tell that just by looking?

I can't imagine, but these are not people who learned sex ed in school. So I'm sure it was easy for him to convince her. And according to Mary's brother, this was how Samuel tricked his sister into sex before marriage. So thinking about putting him through the wood chipper Yeah, just wait, it gets worse Like a lot worse Yeah, Sammy Boy needs the extra slow wood chipper Like the one that's kind of broken

With the extra rusty blades Here, Samuel, your nuts are out of alignment Let me help you with that with a sledgehammer Sorry, sorry, sorry, violence is wrong, campers Please do not sledgehammer, please do not sledgehammer hammer anybody in their testicles or put their penis in a sausage guillotine or fling them into the side of a mountain with a handmade trebisee with the TCC logo on the side or you know for example violence is wrong okay now the lawyers are happy so if the investigators weren't already

convinced that Samuel Bortriger was a super robo mega creep who definitely killed his wife they were convinced now. The problem was they still had zero hard evidence. Even with Eli's insights, everything was highly circumstantial. And Eli wasn't the only one with secrets to tell. Remember the whole thing about nobody ever suspecting Anna's death was anything but natural? Turns out, not so much. Eventually, members of her family admitted that they'd always had their suspicions, especially when Samuel got married again so fast. Yeah, but they didn't really know what to do with those thoughts. I mean, again, this is not a community that tends to engage with law enforcement. Although now that the cat was out of the bag, people did seem willing to talk. Another member of the

community sent Sheriff Eckerson a letter during the investigation claiming Samuel had once confided in him about committing a crime. So plenty of people had been aware that there was something off about Anna's death, but nobody had any proof. And then, finally, the case broke wide open. Sheriff Eccerson found out that not long before her death, somebody in her family had been worried enough to take Anna to a real hospital. Those records still existed, and they were explosive. Anna told her English doctors that she'd been taking acetaminophen, Tylenol, or as the Brits call it, paracetamol, around the clock, for days and days.

Now, as y'all may already know, an overdose of acetaminopin can be a disaster for your liver. Anna didn't realize that. So when her loving husband kept bringing it to her dose after dose, she just took it. She assumed he was trying to help her feel better. Acetaminopin poisoning actually fit the facts of the case perfectly. Remember, when they autopsied Anna's body, they didn't find any evidence of antifreeze, but they found a ton of liver damage. So Samuel had poisoned Anna. He was just lying about what with. Samuel had come in allegedly to cleanse his soul about Anna's murder, but when Sheriff Eccerson confronted him about the acetaminophen and the affair, shit got a little too real for our boy. Apparently, it hadn't occurred to him until now

that he'd have to face, I don't know, consequences and stuff. When this finally dawned on him, Sammy started backpedaling quicker than a Tour de France video on Rewind. That's just floors me It's like, hey Sam, buddy Little something you might want to know about the English world When you kill somebody in cold blood out here We don't just put you in spiritual jail And tell everybody they can't have you over for dinner

For three months We put you in real jail Like with bars and shit Like what did he think was going to happen He was just going to walk in and be like Hey, I thought you should know I killed somebody a few years ago And I've kind of been feeling like an asshole about it

Just wanted to get that off my chest bye Like It's so well weird. But I mean, maybe when you grow up that insulated from the rest of the world, you really don't know anything about it. Is it possible he really didn't understand what was going to happen? Like, he would have had Rumspring at this point, right? Where like teenage Amish kids are allowed to experience the outside world for a while and then decide if they want to come back. Yeah, I would think so. Well, didn't he watch one singular episode of Law and Order during that time or like

something? CSI Miami? CSI, New York, CSI, Las Vegas, I don't know. CSI, the Amish country? CSI Amish. Actually, now that I think about it, though, he strikes me more of like a real housewives kind of guy or like maybe Jersey Shore. Oh, yeah, a total snooky stand. But I see what you're saying seriously. It's bizarre that he wouldn't know enough about the English world to understand that like prison is a thing.

Yeah, but I mean, look at what. happened to him when the bishop found out about his affair with Mary Yoder. He got put in time out for a few months, told to repent, and that was basically it. Maybe that's what he thought would happen here, that the confession itself would be enough. Or maybe he didn't think a woman's life was valuable enough to warrant real punishment. Oh, God. Ouch. That's a fucking awful thought. Anyway, whatever Samuel had been expecting, it clearly wasn't this. Now that prison time was staring him in the face, he immediately started trying to take back his confession. Oh, no, no, no.

I'm recanting. I didn't understand what I was confessing to. Huh? He's lawyered up, a rare move for the Amish, and the attorney moved to have the confession thrown out on the grounds that Samuel didn't understand the possible consequences of making it. Basically, hey, look, if I'd known how serious this whole murderer, thing was, this murder of a woman thing was, I never would have admitted to it. Which sounds ridiculous, but it made the prosecution real, real nervous, as if the judge throughout that confession, their case would be dead in the water. So, investigators threw a

Hail Mary. They reached out to some other medical examiners, a distinguished group with various areas of expertise, and they all agreed that there'd be real value in re-exuming Anna, this time to get samples of her fingernails and hair. Of course, Anna's people were horrid. terrified at the idea of disturbing her body again and who can blame them. So the investigators appeal to them. Look, Anna was one of your own and we feel certain this man killed her and she died a torturous slow death. This was wrong and he deserves to pay for it.

They also explained that when the case went to trial, members of the Amish community would have to testify, including Anna's children, the youngest of whom was about 11 years old. But if Samuel had confessed to what he did, if he'd be willing to take a plea, then all that could be avoided. They wouldn't need to exhumana again, and there wouldn't be any trial. Justice could be served with the least possible amount of damage to the innocent people involved. Samuel, of course, was sitting in jail at this point, under a $250,000 bond. His lawyer had tried his damnedest to get it lowered, even brought in an Amish neighbor to testify that the community wasn't afraid of him and didn't think he was a danger. Yeah, well, forgive me if I don't

necessarily trust y'all as character witnesses for this guy who spent years playing Marquis de Sade right under your noses. Also, the character witness had only lived in that particular community for about a year and hadn't known Anna. He hadn't even really known Samuel. So he was just some dude that shared a zip code. And probably had a Shanandoah beard. Yep. Yep. They were beard bros. That was about it. Beard bros. So, the prosecutor pointed out that as an Amish man, Samuel had no birth certificate, no social security number, and no ID to track him with. It'd be the easiest thing in the world for him to go on the lamb. Unfortunately, the judge saw the wisdom of that, and Samuel stayed right where he was in a cell at the county jail,

which is where, after a lot of soul-searching, the bishop and a handful of other Amish leaders met with him and told him, it was time for him to be held to account for what he'd done to Anna. It's time for you to take responsibility, they told him. And Samuel, Miracle of Miracles, obeyed. Once again, he sat down with investigators, and this time he gave a full confession. He wasn't in love with Anna anymore, he told him. He wanted to be with Mary.

But, of course, divorce just isn't done in the Amish world. So for weeks, he gave her acetaminophen. Dose after dose, day after day. Way, way too much. day by day your liver began failing and liver failure is one of the worst ways to die i mean think about it your liver's job is to filter out impurities right so when it stops functioning your body basically starts poisoning itself you feel nauseated you throw up you're an excruciating pain your skin and eyes go yellow in the later stages you're confused and disoriented you might have tremors or

uncontrollable twitching it's just god-awful and samuel watched her go through that for weeks. When she didn't die fast enough form, he started putting antifreeze in her sweet tea, too. But despite this bullshit, Anna is sickly narrative everybody seemed to have in their heads. This girl was a fighter. The antifreeze didn't do it either.

So Samuel went to Plan C, and seriously, content warning on this next part because it's fucking awful. Yeah. Plan C was the battery acid, which he drew up into a syringe and injected into her rectum. y'all i have heard some rough stuff okay in 20 plus years of true crime but this is one of the top

10 worst things i have ever heard of in my life like it must have been excruciating beyond words and in that same infuriatingly casual like almost cheerful tone of voice that he'd used in his first confession samuel talked about that he said at one point he accidentally spilled a little of the acid on his own hand he said oh how that burned but I did it multiple times. It had to be painful. You think? God, that poor girl,

she must have been screaming bloody murder. I can hardly stand to think about it. Yeah, this guy's a sexual sadist. There's no doubt about it. And I am just fantasizing about a sausage guillotine right now. Yeah, he's a piece of shit. When he finished his god-awful confession, the investigators asked him why the hell he'd come forward in the first place.

He would have gotten away with this, free and clear, if he hadn't. Oh, yeah. Two reasons, Samuel said. One, he had to repent if he was going to get into heaven someday. But also, he wanted to become a minister and eventually a bishop. And if he was going to do that, he had to do a sort of personal inventory of sin. It was part of the process. Now, this might sound all nice and pious, but remember, a bishop is a position of

real power and authority in the Amish world. What he says goes, for a man like Samuel who was willing to kill his wife rather than loose face in his community, who got off on torturing women on a homemade rack, power is everything. His confession was not about guilt. In his mind, it was just a stepping stone to power. And maybe that's why he didn't go to his own bishop with a confession. he's already been punished for his sexual sins once and then he's supposed to confess to murder

after he worked so hard to become a minister? No, a confession to the English will do. Yeah. Samuel's confession scored him a plea deal. Second-degree murder and a chance at parole instead of first-degree murder and the rest of his life in prison. He was sentenced to 25 years, 85% of which he has to serve before he's eligible for release. That is 21 years and three months. in a maximum security facility.

He'll be about 60 when he gets out. And you've got to figure, it's not going to be an easy time for him in there. As one of the prosecutors told investigation discovery, he won't do well in prison. Yeah, he looks like a slapped ass in his latest mugshot, so I can not imagine he's enjoying himself in there. Not that anybody does. I mean, prison sucks, but... There is something to be said about the, like, community.

Like, most former inmates talk about how important it is to not be a loner in the prison hierarchy. Like I can't imagine he's going to make friends. Probably not, no. The investigators never found anything to suggest Mary Yoder, Samuel's second wife, was involved in Anna's murder. I hope she's been able to find some peace and move on with her life. I know they're not supposed to divorce, but surely when your husband is a convicted killer, there's like a little wiggle room there. You think, I hope so anyway. I wonder how she feels about him now. Oh, and by the way, campers, if you're thinking that this case must be a total fluke, that this must be the only murder in the history of the Amish people, boy, are you mistaken?

There's a whole series on investigation discovery about Amish murders. It's called Murder in Amish Country. It's one of our sources for this episode. Oh yeah, and as bizarre as this case is, it's not even the worst one we've researched. And we don't say that to be like, oh, the Amish are bad. We say it to point out that the whole murder doesn't happen here, a cliche, is just never true. This shit literally happens everywhere to people in every single walk of life. And I just think it's important to know that.

And it's interesting, too, that although Samuel and Anna Borenchager grew up in a culture that's really foreign to most of us, the motivations behind this murder are the same ones we see all the time in spouse murder cases. Like we said earlier, take away the buggies and bonnets, and you've just got another episode of Dateline. Yep. Look at Scott Peterson or Chris Watts or Dr. Martin McNeil. their motivations had nothing to do with religion but they were the same at their core they wanted out of their marriages but they didn't want to lose face

they didn't want to give up their golden boy reputations so murder won out over divorce exactly and by the way it's possible that Samuel may face some additional charges for child abuse and sexual misconduct there are a few articles from like

2016 2017 about that but we weren't able to find anything since so it's possible that it got dropped, but it's also possible that those investigations are still going on. And I hope so, because those women he abused in his creepy little chiropractic clinic deserve justice too, and certainly so to his kids if he treated them anything like he treated his wife. So if we hear anything on that, we'll keep you posted. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as

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