ELLENBURG -- Darcy Manor took one last ride in the horse-drawn wagon he'd built with his own capable and loving hands.

Tuesday, as the murdered man's workhorse Belle stood patiently between the shafts, pallbearers slid Darcy's casket into the wagon and took seats on two benches built along each side.

"He had an Amish buggy," said lifelong friend Todd Jarvis as he held the horse before the funeral procession arrived at E.F. Drown Funeral Service on Route 11 in Ellenburg Depot. "He was afraid kids would fall out of it, so he built (the wagon)."

Jarvis and his brother Mike missed their friend's funeral at St. Edmund's Church a few miles away to ready Belle and the wagon for the short drive to Whispering Maples Memorial Gardens Mausoleum behind the funeral home.

"He would be so proud" to take that mode of transport, Darcy's uncle Alan Cardin told more than 400 mourners who crowded the church in Ellenburg Corners.

At least 50 stood outside in the rain, unable to hear the service but remaining anyhow.

Tears had fallen freely as Darcy's wife, Heather, and brother, Stacy, led the large family down the center aisle, as pallbearers accompanied the rain-spattered casket through the tightly packed throng that left just a narrow passage at the back of the church.

But laughter rippled as Cardin described the "retired men's club" that frequented Darcy's D.J. Repair Shop mornings and afternoons, friends and family who he put to work helping to weld, paint and varnish the wagon.

One time, as Darcy repaired a pickup truck hoisted up on the lift, Cardin said, one regular at the shop -- sitting just out of sight -- called him on his cell phone, pretending to be an auto dealer who wanted to buy that particular vehicle.

The "men's club" laughed at Darcy's confusion over the call.

"Next day," Cardin said, "he had a chair set up in the corner for "time out."

And cell phones were banned from the shop.

Cardin celebrated Darcy's life with other anecdotes, including one involving a baked ham that somehow fell to the floor as he was trying to carve it.

In his usual laid-back fashion, Cardin said, Darcy "picked the ham up, rinsed it off, put it back on the platter.

"Darcy looked at (his mother-in-law) Annie (Keddy) and said, This will be our little secret."