An Amish man who killed his wife in 1993 says he has since had a religious conversion and is forgiven.

Ed Gingerich, 34, spent four years in prison after being found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and being deemed mentally ill. He had been sentenced to 2 1/2 to 5 years.

He told police he killed his wife to excise the devil and because she planned to attend a wedding without him. He had stopped taking medication for paranoid schizophrenia.

Gingerich, formerly of Cambridge Springs, was released in 1998 and lives in Harmony Haven, an Evart, Mich., community for troubled Amish. He works in a machine shop.

Jim Fisher of New Wilmington, a former FBI agent who wrote a book about the murder, said Gingerich believes he had a religious experience while in prison and now considers himself forgiven.

"In November of 1994 he had an epiphany," Fisher said. "He had a vision and Jesus came to him and forgave him."

Gingerich wrote about the experience in prison, soon after he said it occurred.

"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."

Fisher believes Gingerich is still mentally unstable, and said Gingerich has displayed the anger in Michigan that caused him to kill his wife, 28-year-old Katie Gingerich.

"According to the victim’s mother and others that I have interviewed in the Amish community, he frightened an Amish woman who was up there visiting," Fisher said. "Ed’s handlers up there refuse to go into the details, except to admit he had a relapse and his old personality returned."

Don Lewis, Gingerich’s defense attorney, said Gingerich is fine as long as he takes medication to control his schizophrenia. Lewis said he recently talked to Gingerich on the phone and Lewis believes his client’s conversion is sincere.

"That’s one thing he is not. He is not a liar," Lewis said. "I don’t criticize the family about their feelings, but they are the wrong people to ask."

Fisher said Harmony Haven recently provided him with a two-page statement from Gingerich in which Gingerich talks about his past troubles and new sense of peace.

But Gingerich does not mention his wife or children, who now live with his parents. Fisher said Gingerich is extremely self-absorbed, an opinion he formed during a 90-minute meeting with Gingerich that was set up by Lewis.

"I wanted to see what kind of guy he was, and I didn’t like him," Fisher said. "He was whiny, self-serving and narcissistic. I had a sense right then that this guy would be closer to what I would call a criminal personality rather than an Amish person."

Most Amish are pious and have a "live and let live" attitude, Fisher said. Fisher, an Edinboro University of Pennsylvania professor, has lived for years near a group of Amish in New Wilmington.