PROLOGUE
California Delta, August 7, 2000.
A skier crashed over the waves, rocking down the North Fork of the Mokelumne River on a large personal watercraft. Spray from the wake danced into a clear blue sky, sparkling like diamonds in the bright sunlight. The Mokelumne River ran down from the forested western slopes of the Sierra Nevada range, crossed the fertile Central Valley and exited into a thousand-mile labyrinth of waterways in the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta.
Behind the personal watercraft, man-made levees enclosed the river, and the landscape appeared not so much like Louisiana, but like the Netherlands. In fact, it was a little bit of Holland right in the heart of California, minus the quaint windmills. All the other superlatives applied, however. Incredibly rich soils produced an abundance of crops, including tomatoes, asparagus, corn, sunflowers, almonds, pears and an array of others. The soil was so rich, in fact, made up of decomposed tules, that if it was set alight, it would burn for days, if not weeks.
And not unlike Holland, whenever a levee broke, the water came crashing in, to reclaim an island—not with saltwater, but freshwater, to make it a haven for bass, crawdads, catfish and scores of other fish and marine life. It was these fish and the recreation potential that annually brought a legion of outdoor enthusiasts to the California Delta. The twisting rivers and sloughs were a watery haven for fast speedboats and personal watercrafts, sedate houseboats and sailboats, and intrepid windsurfers. In fact, the junction of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers was one of the best windsurfing areas in the world. It drew enthusiasts from as far away as Europe and Australia.
These miles of often-mysterious waterways had also lured one of the twentieth-century’s great mystery writers to its shores—Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of countless Perry Mason mysteries. Spending part of each year at Bethel Island, the prolific Gardner wrote dozens of courtroom dramas that eventually sold millions of copies and turned into the popular Perry Mason television series, with its star Raymond Burr.
In his leisure time, Gardner spent days out on the Delta, exploring its channels and sleepy towns. He wrote of one area, The Meadows, in his book Gypsy Days on the Delta: “This is a really beautiful part of the Delta country, uninhabited islands bordered with huge trees, the waters fairly well sheltered, the scenery a yachtsman’s delight.”
The Delta was indeed a sort of pastoral Arcadia, and had witnessed one of the most colorful and romantic scenes in California history. In 1832, the French Canadians, of the Hudson Bay Company, and Native Americans worked together as trappers along the sloughs of the Delta. Captain Michel Laframboise presided over an encampment on the eastern shores of the region. Miss A. J. Allison wrote of the encampment and its inhabitants: “They formed themselves in Indian file, led by Mr. Laframboise, the chief of the party. Next to him rode his wife, a native woman, upon her pony, quite picturesquely clad. She wore a man’s hat with long black feathers fastened in the front and drooping behind her gracefully. Her short dress was a rich broadcloth, leggings beautifully embroidered with gay beads and fringed with tiny bells, whose musical tinkling could be heard at several hundred yards distance. The trampling of the fast-walking horses, the silvery tinkling bells, the rich handsome dress and fine appearance of the riders, whose numbers amounted to sixty or seventy, had a quite imposing appearance.”
This Arcadian scene in the Delta was soon to vanish, however. The richly clad cavalcade of trappers brought not only prosperity to the region, they brought smallpox and other diseases. A few years later, trapper Ewing Young wrote of the Delta Indians: “The poor creatures knew no remedy. They resorted to their charms and flocked to sweat houses and there, in groups of several hundreds, would dance frantically around a blazing fire and thus while dancing around, the malady would seize them and they would fall down in agonies of death till the sweat houses could contain no more. So impregnated was the atmosphere with the effluvia of decomposing and putrifying bodies that it was almost impossible to navigate the rivers.”
In the year 2000, almost 170 years after the plague years of the 1830s, the California Delta waterways would once again become rivers of death. An event would occur that would eclipse Perry Mason’s most sensational cases. It would beggar description, becoming more ghastly and more bizarre, until it took on an air of nightmarish unreality. The trigger of the event was floating just beneath the murky waters of the North Fork of the Mokelumne River, like a sea mine, ready to explode upon an unsuspecting world.
On a big loop of the Mokelumne, near the Lighthouse Resort and Rancho Marina, Steven Sibert, a skier, slowed down when he caught sight of a dark object bobbing in the water ahead. At first glance, it appeared to be only a clump of floating vegetation, not an uncommon sight in the area. Large drifts of water hyacinth sometimes broke loose and floated on the waters. When Steven Sibert came closer, however, he saw that the object was not vegetation. It was a duffel bag.
Surprised and curious, Steven Sibert opened the duffel bag and stared at it in horror. Within its sodden interior were dismembered human body parts.
Steven Sibert had no way of knowing at the time that the body parts weren’t from some gangland slaying—they were much more bizarre and unbelievable than that. The victims in the duffel bag had been struck down by a man who proclaimed himself to be a prophet of God. He believed he had been given a commandment by God to declare war on Satan and usher in the millenial reign of Jesus Christ’s Second Coming.
The young prophet had taken the name Jordan, as if aware that he was crossing over the river into a wilderness of his own devising. He was at war with the established order of the Mormon Church, at war with the United States government, and at war with Satan and all his minions. In his quest for righteousness, he had two disciples to help him in his grandiose plans to transform America. If America had to be transformed by blood sacrifice, then he was willing to take whatever measures he deemed necessary.
The young man may have called himself Jordan, but in reality he was thirty-year-old Glenn Taylor Helzer. He had been a devout Mormon, National Guardsman, successful stockbroker, prophet and now murderer.
As Steven Sibert gazed down on the severed body parts, he witnessed the fruits of Glenn Taylor Helzer’s unholy sacrifices.