Reason First: The Amish Perdition- Murderer Edward Gingerich

The Amish are some of the most peculiar people in the United States of America. They occupy pockets of over 22 states and abide by strict guidelines according to their faith. But the strangest thing to happen, perhaps, by an Amish person was to murder.

Edward Gingrich crushed the skull and disemboweled his wife in the sight of his own offspring in Rockdale Township on Thursday March 18, 1993. The male claimed to be “the devil” and the treatments of toe rubs, molasses, and “liver pills” proved to be insufficient.

The weird state of this sect which recognizes the unknown and unknowable in explicit and exact terms saw its first killing via Gingerich. The medical community found that Gingerich had been mentally ill that he should be found “guilty of involuntary manslaughter but mentally ill.”

The real question is if this had been a Protestant, Catholic, or God-forbid, an atheist, would the outcome had been the same? Gingerich brutalized his own wife. He took the time to stack up her entrails beside her lifeless body.

He deliberately extinguished someone who was supposed to be his highest value. As an Amish man, he may have been shielded from the full brunt of the law. The judge sentenced him to two to five years imprisonment. Two to five years. After leaving an Amish mental facility in Michigan, Gingerich moved back to Pennsylvania and kidnapped his own seventeen-year-old daughter in Cambridge Springs. Again his sentence remained light: six months probation and a $500 fine. Could this have happened to a non-believer or to anyone outside the confines of the Amish way of life?

Gingerich clearly knew what he was doing as he treated his bride like a piece of livestock ripe for the slaughter. He showed no remorse until his body had been found hanging back and forth in 2011 in a barn in Cambridge Springs. He had written in dust “please forgive me.”

His ugly soul and actions actually had affected his mental state even beyond being criminally insane. Had this been any other belief system or lack thereof, what would the punishment had been?

Gingerich most likely would not have had the chance to take his own life if he were given paper clothes and stripped of his bed sheets in a maximum security prison, or at least an extra vigilant hospital for mentally unstable, convicted criminals.

By stating that the faith is above the law goes against the tenets and principles of this country. America should punish those who commit heinous crimes whatever their religious background. He had malicious intent despite his mental makeup. He knew what he was doing. For him to be given such a light sentence is horrific when drug kingpins get life in prison for manufacturing and distributing narcotics, a victimless “crime.”

If the Amish had not experienced murder in the decades that they had been on this continent before Gingerich came along, then they should be investigated even further. Were other murders covered up? Did deaths slip through the cracks?

What Gingerich did was reprehensible. His way of showing his wife and children love remained chilling. Whether he had a mental issue or not should serve as the basis for criminal justice academies the world over. The Amish appear to be a docile, modest, and highly productive sect. For a murderer, at one time, to be in the midst seems like a contradiction. Gingerich made history for all of the wrong reasons. His way of dealing with the pseudo medicine that the medic, Dr. Merritt W. Terrell prescribed turned out to be disastrous. If only he had received real, psychopharmacological treatment.