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MATSON, MOWDER, AND THE WILLIAMS BROTHERS, 1999
I. An Education
California’s Tennessee-sized Central Valley doesn’t feel like the California of TV. Its northern end, the flat, well-tended Sacramento Valley, breaks into dreamlike oceanic hills that crest around Sutter Buttes, a huge volcanic island right at the center of the valley. Fields of trained kiwi fruit vines look exactly like vineyards. This farm country has an earnest middle-American beauty with a hint of Southern Europe thrown in.
On hot days the silence is so deep that a soft, unnameable swish can be heard in the background. It seems to come from all sides and fill the world. It’s a boring, ominous noise like a snake’s one-note crooning, impossible yet oddly familiar.
Here, opposite a peach orchard on Higgins Avenue, behind a listing white picket fence, a house is nestled among trees and organic garden plots. As neighbors recall, every so often a tall man in a sun hat strode off the property. Turning right toward Myers Avenue, he walked and preached to the world. He carried a staff like Charlton Heston’s Moses. Otherwise, he was dressed in jeans and boots like any boutique walnut or kiwifruit farmer from around here—Gridley, California. He didn’t seem completely crazy. An unpleasant, almost-aware-of-it smile sometimes formed in the white thatch of his half-grown beard. But you didn’t want to get caught on the listening end of his harangue. He’d park his gaze stubbornly on the sky or on the dusty margins of the road. He’d take a deep breath and continue his sermon right at you. Nothing as hackneyed as Repent, for the end is nigh! But neighbors suspected that was the gist of it.
Ben Williams may have been unlikeable but probably wasn’t dangerous. His wife Sally, ten or fifteen years younger, seemed laid-back, kindly, a touch fluttery, and not in the least overawed by her husband. She taught elementary school down in Yuba City. People said Ben had once worked for the US Forest Service, but now he simply ruled his one-acre Eden on Higgins Avenue. And occasionally preached like this to no one or everyone.
As Edens have to be, the place was cut off from the world. Planting screened the house from the road. Sally left to go to work, of course, but the family kept to themselves. Between the vegetable patches and berry bushes, chickens for laying and for slaughter, little needed to be brought in. As far as possible, the modern world was kept out. To Ben and Sally, even the conservatism of Reagan’s ’80s couldn’t disguise an America in full decline. Their two boys were homeschooled.
Some neighbors shook their heads when the older boy got it into his head to start preaching like his father. Matt was dark-haired, pretty, preternaturally self-possessed. He paced around spouting what sounded like Bible verses in a wild soprano. The stolid younger boy, Tyler, sometimes trailed him, and the family dog, Shadow, an Australian shepherd, sometimes shadowed Tyler. It was weird, but maybe it wasn’t that weird. They were enthusiastic about their religion. So what? Kids have to make their own fun in farm country.
Matt and Tyler seemed too odd to be popular with other children. In any event, their parents disapproved of contact with most outsiders. (Sally’s sweet expression could flutter into one of surprising toughness.) People from church were safest. Tyler sometimes joined kids a few doors down for a game of basketball. But on the whole life revolved around home studies, work in the huge garden, and services at whatever evangelical church the family attended at the moment. Though Ben threw himself into church life with near-incoherent passion, he was liable to break with a given pastor at the drop of a hat. The family would switch to a new church, until the next irresolvable conflict came up.
When they got older, the boys started going into Gridley to attend high school. Ben didn’t want them involved in school activities, so they came home as soon as classes ended. The social incommunicado was harder on Tyler than it was on Matt. Unlike his older brother, Tyler may not have had the imagination to participate in the family’s shared inner life of virulent religiosity, thrilling symbolic intuitions, and nightmarish political insights. Matt, on the other hand, flourished on Higgins Avenue. He was growing up the image of his father.
Neither parent was happy when Matt graduated high school and announced he was ready to go out on his own. But they couldn’t isolate him from the world his whole life. Matt joined the Navy and, after “nuke school” (shipboard nuclear power plant training) in Florida, he was stationed in Bremerton, Washington, across Puget Sound from Seattle.
On base Matt was considered strange. His mom’s indulgence probably meant he’d never had to regulate his intense enthusiasms. He could seem prissy about some things. Then again, he always sat too close. He forever touched arms and shoulders and backs. Out of the blue he’d say something fond about you right to your face. How could you respond to that? He just didn’t have a regular guy’s taut self-repression.
To American sailors in 1990, Matt’s behavior didn’t call to mind “homeschooled, isolated, doted-on.” It called to mind “gay.” A friend later said he got fed up always having to mutter, “Dude, back off. Gimme some room here.” So one day this friend asked what he and the others had been thinking. Was Matt gay or what? Matt was stunned. How could anybody ever think he was gay? He couldn’t leave it alone. He came back to it for months. “Why would you think that about me?”
Matt had a couple of things going for him. His unedited enthusiasms made for real charisma. Plus, in a gun-toting culture his easy relationship with firearms, especially his pet Glock 9mm handgun, earned him respect. His gun savvy had come from his father who’d often dismayed the neighbors on Higgins Avenue by standing on the porch to take potshots at starlings or scrub jays attacking his plums.
During this time a friend, Todd Bethel, took lurching videos of the California boy: Matt misfiring and frowning at the Glock somewhere in Olympic National Park, Matt in a room mugging gangsta-style with a fan of hundred-dollar bills cashed from his sailor’s paycheck. It looks for all the world like he was trying to become a regular guy.
And yet, Matt may have been feeling a subterranean tension. For him, the messy, painful conflicts of adolescence had never happened. He believed as firmly as ever that his father was right: those who walked with the Lord, the truly virtuous, were a besieged and minuscule band. The Navy and Bremerton were providing his first true glimpse of the immensity of the corrupted world out there. Raised on prayers, epistles, psalms, and gospel, the rolling rhetoric of scripture was very likely the language of Matt’s thinking.
After Thanksgiving, Matt put in for early discharge. Perhaps he was feeling the pull of family and Gridley. But just as he was about to leave, he met Kimberly Rogers at church. She was evangelical too. She found him irresistible.
To look at, you’d have assumed Matt was cocky or unpleasantly suave, but his awkward energy could charm. He was TV handsome, almost too refined-looking for Bremerton, like an admiral’s son incognito in the swarm of oafish, jug-eared sailors. Fine dark eyebrows crossing a wide forehead, fine nose, fine red mouth on an elfin chin, fine ankles, fine wrists, fine spiritual fingers, his body had been whittled down to the elegant essential.
Matt talked, Kimberly listened, they dated. Just like that, she was pregnant. Of course, she was going to have the baby. She wasn’t a murderer. But Matt’s intensity had started to make her uneasy. Already he made all the decisions. Her first real decision was not to marry him.
Many things suggest Matt was shocked by her refusal. It wasn’t just the sin. His shock must have been personal, like the appalled disbelief an artist feels when the work of a lifetime is shrugged off by critics. Kimberly was rejecting the masterpiece of the Gridley workshop—himself. His friends report that he was shaken—but they probably couldn’t guess the extent of it.
Things got worse. A little girl was born. Matt wasn’t about to keep this from his parents. Disappointing them must have crushed and terrified him.
On a personal website Sally reported with leathery cheerfulness that at exactly this time, the fall of 1991, “a time of personal crises,” she took up watercolors. She describes herself as forever at the easel singing “praise songs to Jesus/Yahshua” while she painted. Until recently the website still displayed and offered for sale her many paintings. She did a vase of red tulips that later won a prize. She painted crystalline views of Sutter Buttes in the distance. Selling a few of these pictures must have been a consolation. The family had never had much money. But her chief aim in painting, according to the website, was to glorify Yahweh. She’s been described to me around this time wearing a broad-brimmed hat and linen skirt and looking almost like an old-fashioned hippie. But she was a contradictory, Pauline sort of “hippie,” whose website would later quote the epistle to the Philippians, “whatever things are lovely . . . think on these things.”
After a couple of years at home, Matt left California a second time in 1993. He was twenty-five. He was going to try to jump-start his life by finishing college. He enrolled at the University of Idaho in Moscow, declaring a major in biology.
Moscow and its twin college town, Pullman, Washington, six miles due west, are in the Palouse, a vast prairie and one of the world’s most important wheat-producing regions. The hills of the Palouse look like one of Grant Wood’s surreal farmscapes. People say the Palus Indians, cousins of the Nez Perce, gave their name to the prairie, but an apt confusion with the French word for “lawn,” pelouse, might have been involved too.
Besides being farm country, a better fit for Matt than Bremerton, the Palouse had something else he may or may not have been aware of. For historical and geographical reasons, eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and western Montana are probably the whitest, most Christian part of the United States. The area is sometimes imagined as part of “Cascadia,” a fantasy all-Caucasian nation, by racist dreamers. Barring occasional bloodshed—the shoot-out at Ruby Ridge, for example—residents roll their eyes at the area’s tax protesters, racists, and UN-phobes. But in a conservative, deeply private, deeply religious region, madness and tolerated eccentricity can be hard to tell apart.
Matt Williams had been in Moscow only a few days and knew no one when he was approached by a team of kids from the cultlike Living Faith Fellowship. They introduced themselves with, I imagine, the hard-smiling friendliness that looks so false to skeptics like me. Matt, however, responded with enthusiasm. He joined up. Like his father, he was both driven to and despaired of belonging. In the Living Faith Fellowship he thought he’d found the perfect home away from home.
As part of church indoctrination, Matt was interviewed in depth, encouraged to confess his sins and failings. He later said he told them about his ruined relationship with Kimberly and about his illegitimate daughter. This information would have been entered on a standardized form. His photograph would have been paper-clipped to his file. Like most church members Matt wasn’t told anything about the church files.
Mistrustful of the outside world, the church involved itself in the private lives of its members, especially in their relationships and marriages. Associate pastors didn’t hesitate to suggest or discourage matches. Ex-members complain they were often berated and kept in a fog of self-doubt.
The church had a policy of protecting its flock from dangerous books. Members submitted to church leaders any books they intended to read. Though the process might take months, the book was vetted and either approved or rejected, perhaps with an inquisitorial, Why would you want to read this? Bizarrely, Matt felt right at home in an atmosphere others have described as a nightmare of manipulation.
In the fall of 1994, a group of disaffected Living Faith members began meeting, often at the home of Jeff and Ann Monroe in Pullman. To this day Jeff and Ann share an easy friendship unusual in couples. I interviewed them together, and their banter is charming. Back in the day both struggled to diet, yet forgave themselves for being overweight. They preferred focusing their energy on others. They agreed that something had to be done about the bewildered young people lured into Living Faith.
Jeff and Ann’s group started posting warnings about the church on bulletin boards at university campuses. By winter a full-fledged battle for student sympathies was underway and made it into the local papers.
Cult or not, Living Faith reacted to the negative publicity like a simple-minded tyranny. The church dispatched shock troops of student-believers to rip down fliers at all hours. A flier freshly stapled to corkboard at, say, two in the morning vanished within an hour.
Matt Williams in particular threw himself into the defense of Living Faith. He later said how much he’d loved the quasi-military midnight campus patrols. For him, the strongest and best beliefs involved action. But it seemed the strength of a belief meant more to Matt than its content, because in two weeks he switched sides, won over by a book (Churches That Abuse) and by a Christmastime meeting at Jeff and Ann’s house. He went from tearing fliers down as a good soldier of the Lord to putting them up with equal joy as a fiery partisan of the truth.
Once Matt left Living Faith he needed a new object for his wild devotion, and he focused on Jeff and Ann. They were charmed and taken aback. It was as if a hyperarticulate puppy had entered their lives. Matt started calling the Pullman couple his spiritual father and mother (as the leaders of Living Faith had been called). He asked advice on every aspect of his life: work, love, belief. Jeff became “Pastor Jeff.” Some days, Jeff told me, he was sure it was all just playful admiration, a flirty, childlike bid for affection. Then Matt would bow his head and soberly confess that he hoped Jeff would find him a wife, and Jeff realized that, incredibly, this wasn’t a game. Or was it that nothing separated play and earnestness in Matt’s mind?
Matt’s open-hearted sensitivity could be eerie, like the time he called Jeff following a party to ask after a person he thought had seemed unhappy. He gave friends poems, thoughtful presents like Christmas ornaments of little mice in calico, cookies. He placated the whole world the way a brilliant little boy will placate a doting mother when she’s sad or distracted. His generosity was all the more impressive because he was the poorest person Jeff knew. Matt was living on about a hundred dollars per month, including his seventy-five-dollar-a-month rental at a Moscow trailer park.
But Matt caused problems too—puppylike problems of too much enthusiasm, or so it seemed at first. Matt was now anti–Living Faith with a vengeance. Others in Jeff and Ann’s circle were unnerved by his intensity. His with-us-or-against-us absolutism made him a divisive figure. A crazy suggestion to assassinate church leaders was just—crazy.
More disturbing still, a girl Matt dated briefly confided in Jeff that her relationship with him had been miserable. It wasn’t only churches that abuse. Matt had been like a one-man, domestic Living Faith Fellowship. He’d immediately established complete control over the girl’s time, activities, and thoughts. Even as he railed against the church, he seemed oblivious to his own manipulative behavior. And he was erratic. Sweet, haranguing, apologetic, hysterically funny, cruel, in moody syncopation. It was scary.
After hearing from the girlfriend, Jeff was horrified. He’d introduced Matt to another girl he knew. Now he regretted it. Now he understood why the date hadn’t even lasted the whole evening. Yet Matt claimed to long for a simple, Christian married life. He sometimes talked about it in a way that made Jeff feel a sense of pity. Dream and likelihood were worlds apart.
As it had with the sailors in Bremerton, it did cross Jeff’s mind that maybe Matt was struggling with his sexuality. There was the time Matt—very hesitantly—said that he’d gone hiking naked with a friend. He asked whether Jeff thought that was gay. Matt got the awkward question out in his docile, what-should-I-do voice, and “Pastor Jeff” tried reassuring him. To Jeff, Matt’s physical ebullience—his frequent hugging, for example—ultimately seemed more infantile than closeted. The pressing issue for Matt was acting human, not acting heterosexual. And nakedness by itself wasn’t at all unusual for him. He was, in an exuberant, Edenic way, a naturist.
Physical perfection—purity—besotted Matt. He left pots of tap water sitting so the fluoride would settle out. After abruptly turning vegetarian, he became adept at “food combining,” a faddish, complicated nutritional system meant to ensure perfect health. He came to believe drinking so-called “colloidal silver” could boost his immunity, perfusing his body with naturally antibiotic silver particles. Jeff and Ann had some old silver-plated cutlery. Matt got battery, wires, silver spoon, and alligator clips arranged in a circuit and started brewing the omnipotent silver ion solution. From there, he went on to kombucha tea. Soon everyone in Jeff’s circle seemed to have a bucket of the stuff fermenting under their sink. The kombucha “mother” was a brownish mat of bacteria and yeast growing on the surface of the tea. With the unsqueamish tenderness of the true gardener, Matt would peel a layer from the living “mother” whenever he wanted to get a new batch going.
Around this time Matt self-published a forty-eight-page booklet entitled Optimum Health and Longevity. In the breathless voice of crackpot religious pamphlets, he condemns caffeine and television. He explains that AIDS can be transmitted in saliva and aerosols. Not so puppylike suddenly, he inscribed a copy to Jeff and Ann, May you continue to shed those evil chains. The perverters of truth shall die.
Matt’s fads didn’t just involve health and nutrition. Those were the easiest to talk about. His greatest intellectual thrills were ideological. He flirted with the fundamentalist King James Only movement after reading about it online (the movement maintains the King James translation of the Bible was divinely inspired). In the spring of ’95, Matt got hold of a book that sparked a political craze for tax avoidance. The book, by Lynne Meredith (now in federal prison for conspiracy to defraud the IRS), claims the government has no constitutional right to collect taxes. It’s written in a style Matt favored, an expository crazy-quilt of typefaces and quotations.
Matt started trolling the Internet daily and debating a fellow student, Karney Hatch. Hatch told me Matt would argue with an ever-reappearing smile and constant eye contact. He backed up his points with lightning biblical citations. Of course, what the Bible said proved nothing to Karney, raised an atheist, and even Matt seemed to understand that his fundamental argument—which was an argument from faith, after all—had to emanate hypnotically from his eyes, his lips, the peace of his expression, from the unstoppable music of his words, as much as from their meaning.
Most of Matt’s friends describe his years in Moscow as a decline into extremism. In his spiky handwriting (he was forever writing letters, journals, pamphlets), Matt once wrote Jeff Monroe, “I engaged three Mormons (actively) in ‘combat’ the other day. They are jumping onto the Ecumenical (bowel) movement . . .” As a fundamentalist Christian, Matt considered Mormonism beyond the pale. Here he’s mocking the Mormon willingness to engage with other faiths. But he writes, and thinks, in conceptual curlicues. His sentences become a chopped salad of capitalizations, parentheses, and ironic quotation marks. The sentence quoted above breaks off with a long dash, so he can address Jeff directly: “—shift gears: It is nice to have friendships (rare) in which the members of such can speak into each other’s life via exhortation.”
It’s hard not to frown at the revealing strangeness of Matt’s wording there. Isn’t “exhortation” how you speak to a crowd or a flock, not a friend? And isn’t speaking “into” another’s life a lot less intimate than just speaking “to” a friend? It sounds lonely.
The small trailer park where Matt was living was just off the University of Idaho campus, across South Main (State Highway 95) from the Business Tech building. As he spent more and more time at the trailer, junk accumulated on a porch addition he’d built. Matt had some heated exchanges with his landlord, who thought the place was starting to look trashy. (Like his father, Matt was touchy about his rights.) An avid recycler, Matt had gathered shards of a broken mirror. He fitted them into an esoteric design on the outer wall of the porch. The design was a crowned sword with an extrawide “N” for a hilt, a Wolfsangel turned on its side. When Jeff visited he recognized this as a symbol of the “Christian Identity” movement. It explained a troubling reference Matt had made to “mud people” when talking about African American football players.
Jeff was becoming increasingly worried about his friend. Printouts of bizarre Internet articles were stacked three feet high in the trailer. A weird steplike block of wood sat in front of the toilet. Matt had learned to draw the Hebrew tetragrammaton (“YHWH,” in English letters, it’s read as “Yahweh” or “Jehovah”). He hung versions of it all over the walls. Money was a bigger problem than ever. He’d sold his CDs. His friends had pulled back.
In 1995 Matt saw the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart. The macho kitsch of Braveheart has a quasi-pheromonal effect on many young men of Matt’s stripe. After seeing it, he felt compelled to bike all the way to Pullman to talk to Jeff and Ann about the movie—and his life. He came in, sat on the couch, and spoke to them in a semicoherent monologue that made Jeff and Ann feel they might as well have been house cats. Rehashing Gibson’s story of masochistic self-sacrifice, of masculine honor, Matt worked himself into such a state of yearning ambition that he broke into sobs several times. When he abruptly got up to leave, Jeff and Ann were so stunned they didn’t know what to say to stop him. Or if they wanted to. (Braveheart foreshadows in a glorified form some of the later events of Matt’s life. It’s hard not to imagine that Matt often thought he was living this silly dream of manliness and insurrection. The movie, which won five Academy Awards, has a crudely propagandistic antihomosexual story line.)
When his brother Tyler made an extended visit to Moscow, Matt went into a manipulative frenzy. Jeff and Ann describe a weary and shell-shocked younger brother, an ever-inadequate member of Matt’s personal Living Faith Fellowship. In a thickening mist of fatality, Tyler probably couldn’t grasp the tyranny he lived under at his brother’s trailer. He had to read the books Matt told him to read. After getting out of the shower one time Tyler shut the bathroom door. Hypervigilant, Matt demanded to know why. Tyler answered that he needed to take a dump, of course. Through the thin trailer wall Matt then told Tyler exactly how to do that. Naked astride the little toilet, Tyler obediently lifted his feet to that strange block of wood. Only when you raise your feet, Matt explained through the wall, is your spine curved enough to ensure a proper, natural bowel movement. You should always do it that way. Feet on the block, knees raised, Tyler’s gut tensed as ordered.
Tyler told Jeff and Ann this story. They repeated it to me. It sounds like madness. Who needs to be in charge of the way another person takes a shit? According to Jeff the story came out sounding flat and sad. Worse, unaccountable tears welled up in Tyler’s eyes. The way Jeff and Ann smiled and held themselves with house-of-cards breathlessness may only have made the moment worse.
* * *
Somehow Matt had gotten into Christian Identity ideology. That mirror mosaic sword is its symbol. Amid the tangle of beliefs we avoid thinking about when we lump together skinheads, neo-Nazis, antiabortion madmen, racialist theorizers, right-wing Christian cultists, and all their kind, Christian Identity has, at least, a better story than most. Adherents tend to use the “correct” names “Yahweh” for “Lord” and “Yahshua” for “Jesus.” They feel an affinity for Hebraisms partly because Identity’s central, dumbfounding belief is that the Israelites, the Ten Tribes, the people biblical prophecy is about, the “Chosen People,” are not the Jews but the “Germanic, Nordic, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and allied races”—in other words, Aryans. Everything is backward. Conventional biblical history is a case of mistaken identity.
Some prolix Identity types retail tedious magical scholarship to prove that modern Jews are descended from the “Khazars” of “Khazaria,” a kingdom thriving between the Volga and the Don (or in Gog and Magog) during a shadowy stretch of the first millennium. But for many the story begins at the beginning.
God created the “beasts of the field.” That accounts for “mud people”—all people of color. They’re not human beings and have no souls. The history of real people begins in the Garden of Eden. Just after Adam inseminated Eve, Satan came to her in angelic form and inseminated her again. The Adamic seed produced Abel; the satanic seed, Cain. Satan, through Cain, is the forefather of the Jews. The Jews escaped destruction during the flood and have been waging a bitter war on humanity ever since. They’ve almost won. The imminent apocalypse will begin with a racial holy war because the Messiah can’t return until the world is cleansed of abomination.
Identity’s “Church Fathers” in the United States are Wesley Swift (1913–1970), Nord Davis Jr. (1931–1997), Ted Weiland, and Pete Peters (who now abjures the term “Identity”). Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge believed in or had some loose connection to Identity. (Loose connections are usually all you get in a subculture of messy-minded loners.) Identity’s star turn came as the “state religion” of Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations (their flag bore that crowned sword and Wolfsangel cross, and they were among the first to propose an all-white homeland in the Pacific Northwest, the so-called “Northwest Territorial Imperative”). Allies of Butler helped form “The Order,” the group that assassinated Alan Berg in Denver on June 18, 1984. Believers in Identity may be more prone to violence than other racist and religious nuts, because they see themselves as an “Eleventh Hour Remnant” of the Chosen People. Their holy war is always just beginning.
It’s tempting to laugh at that Garden of Eden story. Like most extremists, Identity types are often more clownish than scary. A large measure of their dignity is reflected back on them by the alarmists and self-important law-enforcement officials whose careers depend on an enemy. Still, it’s sobering to imagine Identity from the inside.
For many of us, Adam, Eve, and Satan carry no more emotional punch than Astarte or Baal. Most of us have only encountered anti-Semitism as a fading middle-class vice. To a believer in Christian Identity things look different. You’re out in farm country. Everything is slow. You’re full to bursting with language, but the world is mute except for that uncanny snakesong. The truth comes to you with a little jerk of certainty. You’ve never met any Jews, but they’re everywhere in the Bible, history, and the news. How have they managed to be uniquely persistent, as every other nation fell and every other race mongrelized? They even look—the pure-bred ones—like Satan: the nose, the dark eyes, the mercantile grin. 1 Why is so much always made of the Holocaust? Why is the United States such a toady for Israel? Why is the worst American cultural sin anti-Semitism? It all makes sense if the far-off metropolises of the world are controlled by a multimillennial secret society, a partially satanic race.
Those cities are in chaos. Children are regularly strangled, dismembered, and vacuumed from the wombs of ignorant girls. Race traitors interbreed with soulless mud people. Drugs, filth, and abomination are embraced by urban orgiasts. You’ve never met a self-proclaimed homosexual, but it’s obvious homosexuality has nothing to do with desire, certainly no desire a normal person could feel. Homosexuality is “Gay.” It’s a big-city cult of makeup, disgraceful clothing, lasciviousness, lisping sarcasm, and decadence. Its goal is an end to generations, an end to history. It’s the preeminent invention of the Jews, a cult of sterility and death. This universal city—Pandemonium—is the enemy of a tiny, rural, outgunned, outwitted, Braveheart-like band of yeomen Christians. It all makes sense: you’re at war.
II. The War
Early in 1997, the Williams family moved to a larger property an hour and a half from Gridley in Palo Cedro, east of Redding. Palo Cedro and Redding are at the far northern end of the Sacramento Valley, where the terrain begins rising toward the high country around Mount Shasta. But the property really wasn’t so different from Gridley. The new house was on Oriole Lane and backed up on Cow Creek. The family set about recreating Eden.
Over several years, neighbors watched the property slowly disappear as new planting came in. Ben tended golden delicious apple trees. Sally later wrote on her website that “her son” (my instinct says Matthew) planted a pineapple quince especially for her. She did a painting of it. A bed of black hollyhocks was put in where she could see and paint them from her window. As they had in Gridley, the family raised ducks and chickens. Banties were a favorite, because, again according to Sally’s website, she liked their colorful, flowerlike plumage and fierce motherly instincts.
During his first years in Redding, Matthew becomes hard to pin down. On the surface, there’s not much to tell. He worked at a nursery briefly. Then he and Tyler started a gardening and lawn care business. Tyler was living on Oriole Lane with Ben and Sally, but Matthew took an apartment in a motellike complex on the 1900 block of Hartnell Avenue in Redding, ten or fifteen minutes away. He joined the Redding Certified Farmer’s Market and set up a booth there on market days. It was a natural extension of work he’d done in Idaho at the Moscow Food Co-op. The people who met him found him unfailingly polite—“nice, educated, smart . . . quiet, mild-mannered,” one market acquaintance was later quoted in a newspaper story. He enjoyed sharing his considerable knowledge of botany and horticulture.
But something more was going on in Matthew’s life. In January or February of ’98, he was spotted selling literature in the lobby of a Redding hall where Militia of Montana founder John Trochmann was giving a speech. Trochmann, a bald man with the dandified white beard and glare of a Confederate cavalry officer, was then traveling the country giving lectures about Y2K (remember, the dreaded year-2000 computer apocalypse?). When the organizer of the event, Larry Wampler, was later phoned by a Los Angeles Times reporter and asked how well he knew Matthew Williams, he said, “I had no influence on him. John Trochmann had no influence on him.” (Wampler suddenly interrupted the interview, saying, “The FBI is at the door.”) Though they may not have known him any better than the farmer’s market crowd, Matthew obviously had connections with the political fringe.
In April of that year, a Redding Record Searchlight columnist got a letter from a reader bemoaning the “folly” of integration. It came from Matthew. He wrote that strength through diversity “is a great lie that should be obvious to anyone observing modern America.” He wrote another letter to the founder of the National Alliance, William Pierce, author of the notorious race-war saga The Turner Diaries. A draft of that letter was later found by the FBI.
Matthew hadn’t fallen completely out of touch with his old friends from the Palouse. They got letters too, disturbing ones. “Dearly beloved, I have just finished the most exciting and relevant Bible Study of my life! A special person shared IT with me and I want to share IT with the special people of my life . . . I reckon that thee shall be blessed by this greatly.” He mentions Pete Peters, Ted Weiland, and Nord Davis Jr. by name. He even praises the infamous, zombielike Okhrana forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. He suggests his friends arm themselves in preparation for imminent unrest. You can almost sense his excitement about this fantasy. The widely reported nervousness over Y2K can only have made his millennial emotional knowledge feel more certain.
In December, Matt tried to reach that college friend, Dan Martin, who’d gone with him on the naked hike back in Idaho. A mutual friend told Matthew that Dan had finally left the Living Faith Fellowship and begun a new life. “He came out.” Dan Martin was now working with the Stonewall Health Project in Moscow. He’d found a circle of gay friends. Matthew responded as if Dan had been in a car accident. He reportedly cried.
Just before his family moved to Redding, Matt would also have learned that Kimberly Rogers, the girl he’d asked to marry him, the mother of his daughter, had finally married another man. Maybe that, or his thirtieth birthday in 1998 or the news about Dan Martin, helped precipitate what happened next. But all three events could just as easily have been irrelevant to someone like Matt who was immersed in faith and a growing sense of mission. Jeff Monroe told me he sensed that Matt had given up on normal life, perhaps on life altogether, even before he left the Palouse. Yet he was still dreaming. Three months before the crimes, he wrote Jeff a letter mentioning a new girlfriend in Colorado. Matt called her “my Rocky Mountain lass.”
* * *
It was 1999. For most people the millennium was an enjoyable curiosity. Maybe it meant something, maybe it didn’t. Certainly, it gave a boost to the “Preparedness Movement,” those who awaited some kind of social or natural calamity. Preparedness was the term of choice, because by now everyone knew “survivalists” were bunker-happy kooks. Preparedness was a natural for Matthew, though it could have been more than just a timely fad. (The buyer of the old Williams house in Gridley reported that for years he received all kinds of survivalist literature addressed to the former occupant.)
In Matthew’s case, at any rate, the calamity was going to be RaHoWa, in-the-know shorthand for “Racial Holy War” (and the name of a popular Canadian white supremacist band with two discs issued by Resistance Records). 2
On February 19, Matthew drove down to Sacramento to attend a “Preparedness Expo” at the Cal Expo state fairgrounds. In later interviews he would point to this visit as the start of everything. Hoping to meet like-minded people he clipped a small sign to his backpack: The White Race, the Earth’s Most Endangered Species. The “endangered species” tag line is something of a trademark for the National Alliance, the flagship white separatist organization at the time (the one founded by William Pierce, who wrote The Turner Diaries and to whom Matthew had addressed a letter). It’s a best seller for them on all kinds of merchandise.
Matthew had a good chance of finding a brother in belief at Cal Expo. Years later, online, I discovered a short memoir of that year’s expo by a man who’d moderated a panel. The man describes ex-sheriff and right-wing activist Richard Mack responding “to the critics of ‘right-wing conservative wackos’ who accuse us of racism and bigotry. He called to the stage . . . an Hispanic woman, a black woman, a native American man, a pacific islander man, and a Jewish woman.” On the same panel Joseph Farrah “addressed the morass of the mainstream media”; Terry Reed, author of the underground CIA exposé Compromised, talked about Clinton corruption; Bo Gritz burned a small UN flag, his usual stunt; and Dr. Len Horowitz spoke about the dangers of AIDS, Ebola, and “emerging viruses.” The panel moderator waxed enthusiastic on his blog, “The people I met and saw covered a wide spectrum of society. From the guy who makes his own Colloidal Silver to the guy who bought a nineteen-thousand-dollar item at a charity auction . . . from the mother of a pilot concerned about anthrax vaccines, to the man moving his family to avoid the worst case scenario of Y2K. They were all different, yet all the same.” There’s no knowing whether Matthew attended this panel, but it’s tempting to imagine he’s the one described as making his own colloidal silver.
Matthew says he met someone at the Preparedness Expo. The person noticed the sign on his backpack and invited him to join an unidentified organization. His new friend explained that initiates had to take part in a group activity. Matthew says that four months later he and eight other guys from south Sacramento (no one exchanged names) met at a strip mall in the capital city at around two a.m. Homemade firebombs were passed out.
There’s reason to believe Matthew made this story up. Whether he really had underground connections is a good question, though. He knew Larry Wampler, at least in passing, and his background makes it look like he could have been either a joiner or a loner at this stage. But even if he did meet someone at Cal Expo in February, no shadowy organization invited him on a secret mission. That isn’t to say he hadn’t started thinking about a mission himself, about action, about resurrecting the thrill of his midnight campus sorties for the Living Faith Fellowship.
The movie The Matrix opened on the last day of March 1999. A drawing Matthew made in prison and entitled “The Destruction of the Magog MATRIX” contains imagery suggesting he saw the movie. The nothing-is-as-it-appears-to-be paranoia, the Christlike central character, and the gorgeous violence all would have been intensely appealing to Matthew watching from his own looking-glass world.
A month later, it begins. April 20 was Adolph Hitler’s birthday. Anti-Semitic fliers were found at four high schools around Redding, California. Unknown at the time—Matthew and Tyler Williams did the leafleting. No one could remember anything like it happening before. The episode got shocked local news coverage.
Meanwhile, Hitler’s other birthday remembrance that year eclipsed this provincial case of nasty leafleting. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot up Columbine High School on the same day. The Hitler’s-birthday connection kept being talked about after the Colorado school massacre. As was the killers’ decision to wear trench coats, which some thought was inspired by costumes in The Matrix. It’s worth imagining what went through Matthew’s mind as he watched, heard, or read about this: there were others like him out there. He was part of something larger. This really could be the beginning of the Apocalypse in America. 3
While he was following news coverage of Columbine in May and June, Matthew was making war plans. He started on the Internet. It’s easy to find recipes for homemade incendiaries online, from a sugar/potassium chlorate mixture to rough-and-ready napalm made from gasoline and Styrofoam or gasoline and dishwashing liquid. Matthew opted for a straightforward accelerant, a two-to-one mixture of gasoline and oil. He and Tyler filled one-gallon black plastic jugs of Mobil Delvac 1300 Super with the mixture. They used up most of a case of the motor oil. They did the work at their parents’ Palo Cedro property in a shed or chicken coop. Dog hairs and bantie feathers were later found stuck to the oily mouths of the jugs. The brothers stored the filled jugs in a wooden crate lined with an old copy of the Redding Record Searchlight.
Except for the most primitive examples (a two-liter plastic soda bottle slipped over a gun muzzle), most Internet designs for homemade silencers follow a perforated tube-within-a-tube pattern. You can use PVC pipe or radiator hose or motorcycle brake tubes. The damping material can be steel wool or cotton or Chore Boy sponges or rags. You can get fancy with a lathe and washers, but Matthew didn’t bother. His silencer was fitted to a .22-caliber automatic, not his Glock.
Around June 16, the brothers bought a new black crowbar and a black pry bar. They would wear blue mechanic’s jumpsuits on their mission. In an interview later, Tyler said Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder came up now as possible targets.
Gary Matson was fifty. He had a mustache, wire-rimmed aviator glasses, a tonsured-looking baldness with a flyaway fringe of blond hair, and the untidy wardrobe of a gardener. He seemed in serious need of gay style advice. He would have shrugged. The son of a college professor and a knowledge geek himself, he was too busy reading botanical journals, teaching, gathering material for a book on local flora. He was a resolutely local and neighborly sort of public figure.
He’d had a hippie phase, hair to his shoulder blades. Back then he fathered a daughter, Clea, with his wife Marcia Howe. The couple started a food coop, People of Progress, and later helped found the Redding Certified Farmer’s Market. Gary was the force behind a children’s natural history museum in Caldwell Park in Redding where Marcia became director. Through People of Progress Gary started a community garden on the Sacramento River. He got a ten-acre arboretum going on city-owned property. He earned a little money on the side with a specialty nursery.
Winfield Mowder, who was ten years younger, lived with Gary in a ramshackle property on rural Olive Street in an area called Happy Valley, south of Redding. They’d been together fourteen years. Winfield worked at Orchard Hardware Supply in Redding while he studied for a higher degree at Chico State. He was bearded, chunky, an environmentalist nerd like Gary, a cheerful eternal student to Gary’s natural teacher.
Gary Matson and Matthew Williams probably met when Matthew joined the Redding Certified Farmer’s Market. By all accounts they never knew each other well. Still, they must have had a few conversations. Gary may have taken Matthew to Olive Street, shown off what he was growing there, or loaned Matthew a book. A market acquaintance was later quoted: “I believe Matthew talked about how intelligent Gary was.” Whether Matthew ever met Winfield isn’t known. He learned the two men were gay, though.
Olin Gordon, an elderly man from Olinda, right next to Happy Valley, considered hiring Matthew and Tyler. The fifteen dollars an hour Matthew asked for sounded steep. Just shooting the breeze, the eighty-six-year-old recalled wondering, “You know Gary Matson—does the same sort of work?”
“Yeah, I know him,” Matthew answered. “He’s a homosexual.”
Gordon tried to explain it to a reporter later. He was old enough to remember when saying something like that amounted to a serious charge. Even now, it felt odd hearing it in normal conversation. Whose business was it?
Redding is so conservative that Gary’s daughter never dared tell her religious classmates about her father and Winfield. Maybe there were no other obvious gay people in town. Maybe Gary was the only out gay man Matthew encountered there. Regardless, when Matthew felt he had to make a “judgment” on homosexuality, Gary was the one.
* * *
Matthew and Tyler’s “war” was to have more than one front: homosexuals, abortionists, Jews. Matthew had assembled a list of nationally prominent Jews on his computer.
The brothers must have practiced. The night of the first attack would involve split-second timing. They’d have to drive from address to address without making a false turn. Just choosing the first night’s targets had to involve research.
As the brothers waited for the day they’d chosen, the oddly elegiac alertness of soldiers probably came over them. Matthew would have seen three days of front-page articles in the Record Searchlight about the capture of Kathleen Ann Soliah in Minnesota. If nothing else, the story proved that it was possible to live underground for twenty-three years, marry, have a family. Heartening for someone about to become a fugitive.
Friday, June 18 had symbolic weight. On that date in 1984, “The Order” assassinated the radio host Alan Berg in Denver as part of their own legendary racial holy war. A little after midnight Matthew and Tyler left Palo Cedro and took I-5 south to Sacramento, a two-and-a-half-hour trip. The freeway runs through downtown Sacramento, hugging the eastern bank of the Sacramento River. Passing the vivid yellow-orange Tower Bridge, aglow in streetlight at that quiet hour, the brothers headed into south Sacramento and got off the highway at the Sutterville Road exit. They drove north on Riverside Boulevard, which doubles back along I-5 for a while before veering right to pass in front of William Land Park.
They pulled the car into the shadow of one of the great trees near the park entrance. They would have been on the right side of the street. On the left, on a triangle of land cut off in back by the I-5, was Congregation B’nai Israel’s synagogue complex—sanctuary, chapel, education wing, courtyard, and library. The famously progressive B’nai Israel was founded in 1852; it’s the oldest congregation in Sacramento and one of the oldest in the American West.
Matthew used the crate in which they’d stored the oil jugs. He packed several of the jugs inside, tossed the crowbar on top, and scuttled across the street. Park, synagogue, and neighborhood were utterly deserted. It was a quarter past three in the morning.
Matthew set the crate down by a metal door just off the street, a door he’d likely examined already. He used the crowbar to pop it open. The alarm sounded at three nineteen a.m. He described it to a reporter later. Though he was denying Tyler’s involvement at the time—claiming instead that he worked with those eight unnamed guys—his description of the moment was probably true: “I was real nervous. Getting caught was a real issue. Just the excitement of it, coming in and having the alarm go off, and I knew I was crossing the Rubicon. It was the cusp of my life where I was putting faith in my beliefs.” The immediate reality may have been darker, terrifying and exhilarating. He was on Satan’s ground.
He grabbed the jugs and hustled through the library. He smashed a window to get out of the locked vestibule and found the sanctuary. You can imagine him in there. When he unscrewed one jug, the cap jumped from his fingers. It was found later. With a sowing motion of the arm he poured the sputtering liquid from the jug. He splashed a piano, the benches, the walls. He ran to the front of the sanctuary and splashed the bimah. He ignited the fires with an electronic stick lighter. After an irritating crackling like loose wax in the ear came the wonderful thud and windy heat. He tossed the plastic jug aside, though he’d meant to take it with him.
On his way back out he doused the library. This time he did a more thorough job. The sanctuary fire was already beginning to burn out. Here he soaked the books and got a real fire going. This building would be gutted. Again, he dropped the jug. He ran out, leaping past the crate, though he’d meant to take that with him too. From the moment he left the car to the moment he jumped back in, only three or four minutes had passed. The burglar alarm registered automatically at three twenty-four a.m. The brothers were gone.
Congregation Beth Shalom, another Reform synagogue, is on El Camino Avenue in Carmichael, at the other end of Sacramento, an off-white stucco A-frame facing the street. A big flame-shaped sign carries the congregation’s name (House of Peace) in Hebrew. The best way to get there from B’nai Israel is to go north past the Riverside Water Treatment Plant and take the eastbound Capitol City/El Dorado Freeway. Exiting the freeway you have to cross the river and take one of the big streets north to El Camino. Or the brothers could have turned around and gotten back on the northbound I-5, then traveled one of the major arteries east as if they were heading to Cal Expo. Either route takes just over twenty minutes. There was no traffic, but they would have avoided speeding. The timing just works out. The Beth Shalom alarm registered at three forty-eight a.m.
The shul of the Kenesset Israel Torah Center is four miles from Beth Shalom on quiet Morse Avenue. The alarm at this Orthodox synagogue went off a bare ten minutes after the Beth Shalom alarm. That means Matthew must have broken in, set his fire (Beth Shalom suffered mostly sprinkler damage), and traveled the four miles on El Camino and Watt Avenue within that time. It’s possible. The shul suffered mostly smoke damage. Still, the building had to be replaced. Here, Matthew remembered to take in some of his anti-Semitic fliers and scatter them around. His palm print was later found on one. The brothers were back in Palo Cedro by six thirty a.m. Friday morning, unless they stopped at Matthew’s Redding apartment to recover.
This time people noticed. The synagogue arsons were national news. The city was appalled. Because the fires seemed nearly simultaneous, the early impression was that a squad of arsonists had fanned out through the city. Rewards were offered, a unity rally was held in the Sacramento Community Center, the FBI gathered evidence, and B’nai Israel started accepting replacement volumes for its ruined library and holding summer services in a recently opened courtyard.
People studied the fliers left behind. “The ugly American and NATO aggressors are the ultimate hypocrites. The fake Albanian refugee crisis was manufactured by the international Jewsmedia to justify the terrorizing, the bestial bombing of our Yugoslavia back into the dark ages.” The author was referring to the bombing campaign against Serbia. The campaign had been prompted by the flight from Kosovo of almost half a million people in fear of ethnic cleansing. The author’s passions had been excited by a terrifying but remote and hard-to-fathom event. Like any underground extremist, his truth was simplified and inverted. What connection could he have found between the synagogues of Sacramento and the mosques of Tirana? This combination of intensity and obscurity is typical of Matthew.
The usual suspects were questioned by reporters. William Pierce in West Virginia knew nothing about it. Matthew Hale, then running the World Church of the Creator out of his father’s basement in East Peoria, Illinois, said his organization didn’t promote violence, though it was hard to object to someone torching the “dens of the serpent.”
Matthew and Tyler laid low through the weekend and the next week. For the first time Matthew could view his actions projected on the screen of genuine notoriety (not just an article about Living Faith in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, not just a self-published health guide). This was national. Q-scored faces spoke with expressions of compassionate woe, local TV reporters interviewed congregants. The inevitable inaccuracy and the artificial emotionalism of American news must only have reinforced Matthew’s delusion that the world was a Matrix-like lie. He couldn’t be touched. What he didn’t believe in wasn’t real. Far from having the slightest twinge of remorse, he started compiling an additional list of prominent local Jews. The list was afterward found on his computer by the FBI. Following the name of a man who’d offered a reward for the arsonists’ capture, he noted, “Yidbizman, $10,000 on us.” He later said the first attack emboldened him.
The brothers waited through a second weekend. All this time, eleven days, they only had themselves to talk to about what had happened. Did they debrief in a military fashion? Discuss upcoming plans? Did Ben or Sally ever mention the Sacramento attacks? Did the parents notice their sons seemed . . . silent? Energized?
* * *
On the last day of June, a Wednesday, Winfield Mowder and Gary Matson had dinner with Gary’s father, Oscar, a widower for seven years now. Oscar once taught German, French, Spanish, and English at Shasta College but he was best-known as a vintner. The family business, Matson Vineyards, founded in 1984, was the oldest in Shasta County. It was east of Redding, a stone’s throw from the Williams place in Palo Cedro.
Gary and Winfield left at about eleven and headed home to Olive Street in Happy Valley. Sometime during the first hours of July 1, Matthew and Tyler drove their father’s Toyota Corolla hatchback over to Olive Street, probably taking the exact same route Gary and Winfield had driven earlier.
The couple’s house, an unselfconsciously rundown trailer with a big one-room living space added on, was about halfway along Olive Street. Coming from the south, there were indeed neatly spaced olive trees growing on either side of the road. Farther along, the withered-looking trunks of eucalyptus raised their feathery crowns much higher against the starry sky. A waning gibbous moon had been full two nights before. The earthen roadsides were dry and yellow. The air smelled of eucalyptus and the vaguely horsey dust of a long, intensely hot day.
Matthew and Tyler probably pulled off onto a dirt road or alongside an olive grove; they wouldn’t have driven right up to the house. They let their eyes adjust to the darkness. Olive Street is rural, unlit, with a number of widely separated houses (none as ramshackle as Gary and Winfield’s).
As it was described to me, you entered the house and found yourself in the main living space. Kitchen and bathroom were in the trailer section. Matthew may have known the layout already. Directly opposite the door was a big, roughly built loft bed running sideways along the far wall. There were flimsy bookshelves with more books and botanical journals scattered across the floor. The place was a mess, either waiting for a big cleanup or, more likely, treated with indifference by the intellectual couple.
They were asleep in the loft bed, naked, Winfield on the near side, Gary by the wall. Maybe they stirred at the sound of the door opening. Maybe not. Tyler has said he didn’t remember either of them sitting up or saying anything. Whatever the plan had been, Matthew acted precipitately. He got a foot or two inside the door. This was it. He raised the .22 and started firing. The silencer made a prim farting sound, but the brass shell casings pinged and danced on the floor. Matthew pumped about fifteen shots into the two men. All Tyler remembered was a soft groan or sigh when the bodies deflated slightly and relaxed into death.
Matthew may have used an entire clip, normally ten to fifteen shells. If so, he had to put another clip in. He moved a chair to the foot of the loft bed. He stood on the seat, steadied himself, and fired several more times into the motionless bodies—kill shots. Just to be sure. Atomized blood spit back from the close-range wounds and flecked the silencer. Matthew jumped down. (There has been speculation that Tyler fired some or all of the shots, because his prints were found on the gun later. I’ve tried to contact him several times with no success. My hunch is that Matthew would have taken the lead throughout.)
The brothers went through the pockets of the pants Gary had slung aside before going to bed. They took his car keys and a Visa card. As part of the plan—unless they were improvising on the fly—they were going to take Gary’s bronze Toyota Tercel wagon. But what if someone noticed it was missing? They did something that probably felt clever—even brilliant—given the panicky state they were in.
Gary and Winfield had an old answering machine, the kind with a miniature cassette tape for the outgoing message. The brothers erased the message and recorded a new one. Matthew coughs a few times to mimic illness then mumbles, “Uh, hi, this is Gary . . .” Cough, cough. “Gary” says he isn’t feeling well. “We’re going to, uh, visit a specialist friend in San Francisco for a week.”
The brothers were too wired to replay the message to make it sure it sounded right. Otherwise, they would have noticed that lagging spools or sticky buttons had caused a problem. When the tape is played, you first hear, “Be-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-ep!” Then Tyler’s voice, “—make it any longer than you have to.” And only then, Cough, cough. “Uh, hi, this is Gary . . .”
A couple of things about this message . . . First, it’s ludicrous. The childish pretense of illness and the equally childish “specialist friend” and gay men/San Francisco association make for a ridiculous ploy. Only someone with a contemptuous or unrealistic streak a mile wide could think it passable. Did Matthew believe his victims were rarely telephoned, marginal, friendless? Did he think callers would shrug when they heard a message like that? Did he think the unprepossessing shanty they lived in meant Gary and Winfield would be considered socially disposable?
Far stranger (even if recording that message was part of the plan from the beginning), Matthew chose to impersonate Gary moments after killing him, a man with whom he shared more than a few points in common. (Both were gifted horticulturists. Both had a BA in biology and the instincts of a teacher. Both were overqualified for the labor they loved as nurserymen/gardeners. Both had one daughter.) No matter how rushed, how nervous, how frazzled, how drunk on glory, how numbed by exhilaration, some kind of existential weirdness must have flickered through Matthew for an instant when he said, “This is Gary.”
That’s not him, Oscar Matson thought as soon as he heard the message. He’d phoned the next morning. Worried, he asked his son Roger, an enologist at the vineyard, to check on Gary and Winfield. By one o’clock, Roger was at the Olive Street house, probably calling out and hearing the nervousness in his own voice. He noticed the car was missing. He pushed open the door, saw several shell casings and, looking up, the bodies in the loft bed.
Tyler had taken their father’s car back to Palo Cedro. Matthew had driven Gary’s either to Palo Cedro or to his Hartnell Avenue apartment in Redding. Over the next day the car must have been a source of worry. The fact that they had it, and might as well use it, may have hastened the next attack.
If Matthew was able to sleep at all that morning, he was up by three p.m. at the latest. He had no reason to believe the bodies had been discovered two hours earlier. But he seems to have been in a hurry now, expanding his plans. At three he called Dillon Precision Products Inc. in Scottsdale, Arizona. Dillon is the country’s premier maker of reloading equipment. The Dillon 550 and the Dillon 650 may be the best machines available for making cartridges, a thriving hobby among people who are cost-conscious, finicky, or private when it comes to their ammo. Besides the press, you need a proper set of dyes for the caliber cartridges you want to make. You can take used shell casings, recharge the case with gunpowder, and seat and crimp a new bullet. Matthew ordered one of the machines along with some expensive accessories. He also ordered two classic black-leather gun belts, waist size 32" for himself, 34" for Tyler. The total came to $2,276.09. He used Gary Matson’s Visa card and gave a Mailboxes Etc. box number as the delivery address. The initial weirdness of impersonating Gary may have passed by now.
Sometime after midnight, Matthew and Tyler headed back downstate to Sacramento. They started out in two cars, parked one somewhere, and continued on in Gary’s Tercel wagon. They’d already chosen a target, but they wanted to act at once and get rid of the car. Or else, after killing two people the night before, continued warfare felt paradoxically more bearable than time to reflect.
They got to Sacramento at their usual action hour, three a.m. They drove to a shopping center called Country Club Plaza on the corner of El Camino and Watt Avenue. This is exactly halfway between Beth Shalom and the Kenesset Israel Torah Center. They’d passed the shopping center at around three fifty-six a.m. twelve nights before. Now they were back, a military-style runaround tactic. Behind the shopping center on Butano Drive is the Country Club Medical Center, on the second floor of which was the Choice Medical Group, an abortion clinic, tonight’s target.
This time Matthew used the pry bar. He had trouble getting the green aluminum door to pop open, so he smashed an upper pane of glass. The laminated glass shattered but hung from the frame. Matthew threw one of his lighted incendiaries inside. He smashed windows at two of the building’s three other entrances and chucked in more Molotov cocktails. He had one left. Running behind the building he threw it into a green garbage bin.
It was three twenty. A sanitation worker pulled a truck around the back of the building and saw the bin in flames. Startled by motion, he spotted two men in jumpsuits getting into a boxy car. Under the deceiving parking lot lights the car’s copper paint job was an indefinite muddy color. And anyway, it was gone before the garbage collector registered what was going on. The fire department came. The fire was out within twenty minutes. The Choice Medical Group offices hadn’t been touched.
Nothing was reported on the Redding murders for several days. Investigators thought it was a local case, ugly but not earth-shaking. No connection was made to Sacramento, of course. And no connection was made between the clinic firebombing and the synagogues. Not that every article didn’t mention both or ask the question, “Any connection?” At one point, investigators suspected the owner of the clinic building was responsible himself—insurance fraud. Also, three different jurisdictions were involved: ATF at the clinic arson, FBI at the synagogues, and the Shasta County Sheriff’s Department on Olive Street.
Something feels incomplete, exhausted, about the clinic attack. Even so, Matthew and Tyler were probably confident of their safety. With no reason to believe the Olive Street scene had been discovered, they may have thought their answering machine ploy had worked. They tried to rest. But they weren’t finished. This was still just the beginning.
The evening of that same day, July 2, in Chicago, “August” Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, until recently a member of the World Church of the Creator and a close associate of church leader Matt Hale, started shooting Orthodox Jewish men walking home from Sabbath services. It was the start of a three-day spree. After wounding six in Chicago, Smith drove to Skokie and murdered ex–basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong. If Matthew or Tyler napped that afternoon, they may have woken up to breaking news about these racist attacks and thought, If this isn’t the beginning of a racial holy war . . .
Smith threaded a path between Illinois and Indiana over the next two days, killed a Korean student, shot or shot at six others, then shot himself while being chased on I-57 near Salem, Illinois. He was captured in a messy struggle during which he shot himself again. He died in a hospital. It was the Fourth of July.
One small item didn’t make the news: California police discovered Gary Matson’s Tercel wagon at two p.m. on July 3. The car was abandoned in Oroville, California, a little up-country from Gridley. When officers opened the car, they noticed a strong odor of gasoline.
Many murder cases are easy to solve. Forensics is about proof not clues. The killing of Gary and Winfield, however, was genuinely mysterious. Even after the car was found in Oroville, investigators had a difficult time imagining a story line. The victims were paradigmatic innocents, beloved and without an enemy in the world. Just when the police were at a loss how to proceed, they were alerted that Gary’s credit card had been used. The reloading equipment had shipped. Dillon gave the authorities the delivery address.
Yuba City (where Sally Williams once taught elementary school) isn’t far from Oroville. So that seemed to fit. The Mailboxes Etc. store was in the Feather Down Shopping Center, a sprawling pink strip mall, its façade hinting at ’80s postmodernism. On a hot Wednesday afternoon, July 7, cops showed up to ask about “Gary Matson’s” box. The man at the counter looked up from his computer screen. With a shrug of surprise, he gestured through the plate glass: well, there they are! Two young men had just gotten out of a Corolla hatchback and were approaching the store.
Shouting, guns drawn, officers pushed open the door. Matthew and Tyler took a few steps back toward the car. Other policemen materialized. With a glance of assessment, they too drew their guns and aimed at the young men. All were close enough to hear Matthew quietly ask Tyler, “Well, partner, what are we gonna do?”
The capture was a matter of dumb luck for the police and startlingly abrupt. If any of the officers had doubts, they disappeared as soon as the suspects were searched. The police found that Matthew was wearing a bulletproof vest. He had his Glock on him. Tyler was carrying a 9mm handgun, as well. Inside the car were two assault rifles, two more handguns, a shotgun, a pry bar, a crowbar, a homemade silencer speckled with something, blood it turned out. On the floor by the driver’s seat, an extra set of car keys was found—Gary’s. And they found Gary’s Visa card. The card was the pretext for arrest: possession of stolen property.
The capture took place at four thirty in the afternoon. Then a grueling full day’s worth of legal procedures began. Matthew and Tyler weren’t booked in the Shasta County Jail until one fifteen a.m. Bail was set at two million each. Obviously, the authorities had more on their minds than possession of stolen property.
III. Escape
The Shasta County Jail was built in 1984. A boxy eleven-story building of stained concrete, it’s fittingly ugly for a prison, a heavy-browed, slit-eyed modernist mug of a structure. Inside, mottled concrete floors as dark as pumice have been rubbed smooth by jail-issue slippers and flip-flops. The cinder-block walls are painted the color of dirty pollen. The paint’s been scratched away from pipes and vent covers by anxious prisoners. Scablike patches of metal show through. Prison clothing comes in two colors, pale tangerine for T-shirts, socks, briefs, and slippers; black for the pajama-like pants and a V-necked pullover. In the visitor’s room and dayroom the seats are immovable discs of stainless steel projecting from under stainless steel tables. Visitors are allowed the usual telephone conversation through a glass window.
On Thursday evening, July 8, Sally Williams finally got to speak to Matthew.
“I still love you,” she told her son at once.
“I love you too.”
Sally sighed. “I don’t know. It looks real bad.”
Matthew diverted her. Or maybe he couldn’t help himself. What’s a mother for, if not complaint? He said they took some cash and tools from him. They had him on suicide watch. They also took away his socks. He was freezing. (The building had been refitted in ’97 to operate two chillers on hot days, part of an energy-efficient HVAC system.)
Matthew tried to reassure her. “Our forefathers have been in prison a lot—prophets, Christ.”
Sally told him she’d start looking for a lawyer.
“Don’t bother,” Matthew shot back. “I plan to represent myself from Scriptures.”
“I don’t think you did what they say you did,” Sally said earnestly.
“What do they say I did?”
“They say you took out two homos.” Sally said she couldn’t imagine him doing something like that.
Matthew responded callously, “Why wouldn’t you think I’d do that?” He continued, “I had to obey God’s law rather than man’s law. I didn’t want to do this. I felt I was supposed to, though . . . They’re not doing the death penalty a whole lot here anymore. I’m probably looking at twenty, forty years. I don’t think I’ll serve that, though.”
He seems to be equating assassination with a bar fight gone wrong, but he likely couldn’t grasp what even those numbers sounded like to a mother. Or what they could mean for a man.
Matthew said, “I think God put me here as a witness. A lot of people will hear. They call what I’ve done bad . . . I’ve followed a higher law . . . People will hear it. They might think I’m insane . . . I see a lot of parallels between this and a lot of other incidents in the Old Testament. They threw our Lord Savior in jail.”
* * *
Only after Matthew and Tyler were captured did the investigation finally come together. What was a Redding newspaper, the one lining the crate left at B’nai Israel, doing in Sacramento? Why the odor of gasoline in Gary’s car? When Matthew’s Hartnell Avenue apartment was searched (after the street was blocked off for fear of explosives), investigators came across reams of hate literature, more weapons, the list of prominent Jews.
At Palo Cedro, a crate like the B’nai Israel one was discovered, plus Mobil Delvac 1300 jugs identical to those left behind by the arsonist. Dog hairs and chicken feathers were collected. A blue jumpsuit of Tyler’s was found, and fibers linked it to the upholstery of Gary’s car. Paint and glass powder on the pry bar and crowbar were examined.
As the forensic evidence fell into place, dread rippled outward. Just how big was this thing? Matthew and Tyler had successfully conjured at least the impression of a war.
There’d been another murder in Happy Valley a month earlier. A mistaken report got out that the victim had been shot, so the killing sounded like the Olive Street murders. And if Matthew and Tyler weren’t involved in that one, what about the young man who’d gone missing in the Pullman-Moscow area back when Matthew was living in the Palouse?
More alarming than the stray unsolved case was the illusion of conspiracy. A lot remained unclear about Columbine. The Southern Poverty Law Center and other activist groups had been warning that extremists might engage in year-2000 domestic terrorism. Benjamin Smith’s Midwestern racist spree had coincided precisely with the Williams brothers’ attacks. Matthew’s letter to William Pierce and World Church of the Creator literature were found along with everything else at Hartnell Avenue. Could this be part of a nationwide plot cooked up by the odious Matt Hale or someone like him?
Hate groups, by their nature, can thrive without conspiracies, without organization of any kind. The same sacred texts are available to everyone: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The Turner Diaries, Resistance Records’ music, old issues of Racial Loyalty, Nord Davis’s Star Wars, handbooks on incendiaries and silencers and explosives, Israel: Our Duty, Our Dilemma. Like the kit houses the Sears catalog once flogged all over America, kit ideology can be mailed or downloaded anywhere. Some of the things Matthew did—leafleting high schools, sharing important books, dropping the leading inquiry (“What do you think of black people?” he once asked Jeff Monroe)—come straight from the racist playbook for recruitment, instructions he might have read somewhere and followed with soldierly fervor. A much-discussed theory even describes how concerted action is generated without organization: the “propaganda of the deed” is supposed to galvanize sympathizers into acting on their own. Matthew was probably convinced it would work for him.
Matthew shaved his head before his first court appearance, a preliminary hearing on July 13. The hearing lasted five and three-quarters hours. Ben and Sally attended, sitting impassively. Prosecutors played a scratchy recording of the July 8 prison conversation (quoted above from newspaper accounts). Sally and Matthew had overlooked a posted warning that conversations could be recorded. Spectators gasped at Sally’s “They say you took out two homos.” Fleeting as it was, there was the proof of hatred. Afterward, someone shouted at Sally that Gary and Winfield had been better men than her monstrous sons . . . The calm of proceedings like these sometimes feels outrageous. The formal repression of the courtroom must have made grief almost unendurable for the friends and family of Winfield and Gary.
* * *
Strangely enough, this was only the start of the most important part of Matthew’s life. It wasn’t denouement. Though he was thirty-one, like many adolescents he’d lived a fantasy life so far. Now, just when his fantasies seemed to have come true, he was also facing the disillusionment of real life. Real life ends up out-arguing all of us. You can’t catch its eye and charm it. And this wasn’t the usual real life of jobs and disappointment, it was imprisonment, the relentless, hard-hearted, small-minded necessity of the law.
Matthew’s emotions apparently whipsawed between intoxication with his fame and the petty humiliations of life in the Shasta County Jail. Unlike in movies, real life doesn’t cue your doom with music. Early on, the familiar-from-TV routine of prison, the apparently humdrum personalities of the inmates and prison staff, the sheer banality of it all, may have led Matthew to believe this was going to be a breeze. He thought he was the smartest guy around, and maybe he was. He was prey to a cocky adolescent hilarity. One of the first things he sent from jail in July or August was a credit card application on which he described his “employment.” He wrote, “My brother and I were captured by occupation storm troopers while we were on a supply mission. We are now incarcerated for our work in cleansing a sick society.”
Matthew became the demonic darling of reporters. No matter how silly, contemptible, or emotionally disconnected, everything he said was treated with gravity. Since it’s unbearable for most of us to think that evil has silly, contemptible, and emotionally disconnected causes (though it almost always does), reporters, in spite of themselves, inflated Matthew’s importance. His immaturity was painted as satanic levity. Although in his own mind he was playing Braveheart and made an effort to get that image out there, he must have known he was swimming against a tide of disapproval. He wrote frequent letters to the Redding Record Searchlight and the Sacramento Bee. One included a plaintive-sounding, “I’m not a hate-filled man.”
At the same time, Matthew had always been eager to please. His instinct was to reward anyone smitten with him. It’s hard not to think he unconsciously played to the “monster” expectations of the reporters who were suddenly so interested in him. Jeff Monroe recalls seeing courtroom footage of Matthew smirking into the camera, eyes going narrow like a comic book villain’s. I don’t know this man, Jeff tells me he thought in shock. It didn’t occur to him that “Evil Matthew” and the old “Endearing Matthew” of the Palouse were equally unreal, the operatic sham behavior of someone who hasn’t grown up, who doesn’t know himself at all.
Matthew was prepared to say anything to entertain his audience and did. He confessed. His lawyer was exasperated. Despite a passing whim (a joke?) to appear in court in a Nazi uniform and wearing a toothbrush mustache, Matthew was determined to stick to his plan of representing himself from Scripture. It felt like a bold and idealistic stand, and it demanded confession. But confessing was probably also a way of reassuring himself that his own foolishness—his crime—had been a coherent intention all along. Because if he started gleaning that it wasn’t . . . Bizarrely, confessing likely postponed any horrible “real life” understanding of what he’d done.
Gary Delsohn and Sam Stanton were reporters for the Sacramento Bee. On November 4 they came to the jail to interview Matthew and found him smug and relaxed. Delsohn held the phone in the visiting room. They were talking in circles. Fed up with the verbal sparring, Stanton tells me he grabbed the phone and demanded, “Did you do it?”
Matthew wasn’t going to pause or appear the least bit unsure of himself. He answered at once, “Absolutely.” He told the two reporters, “I’m not guilty of murder. I’m guilty of obeying the laws of the Creator.”
Stanton and Delsohn had gotten the headline they wanted and continued to follow the case doggedly. They weren’t the only ones fascinated by the case. Dateline NBC and 60 Minutes did segments on the Williams brothers. Matthew was interviewed a great deal. Famously, he and Tom Brokaw had a heated exchange during an interview. There was no breaking through Matthew’s glibness. It must have given the young man a sense of triumph to get under the skin of the star newsman from Babylon on the Hudson. Brokaw was faced with the brick wall pseudosophistication of an overgrown, self-convinced adolescent.
Matthew was famous. He was contacted by the cultural lurkers drawn to grisly notoriety. In December he sent a drawing to a collector of memorabilia of famous killers. In some ways he was having fun. He decorated the envelope with a glowing key and the racist catchphrase “fourteen words” transliterated into runes. (“Fourteen words” refers to a credo dreamed up by The Order’s David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”) Matthew delighted in getting secret messages past the jail censors. He became furious when he learned that Ann and Jeff Monroe had spoken to the FBI and viciously sent them an article on obesity, adding a series of biblical citations that amounted to a death threat. It was the last they ever heard from him.
He was famous, but he was also powerless. He was kept in “administrative segregation.” Ad-seg is highly controlled imprisonment away from the general inmate population. A fellow inmate told me deputies gave Matthew a hard time. Perhaps they spread rumors about him and tried to create conflict. Perhaps they laughed at his beliefs or passed along the by-now-widespread speculation that Matthew was gay himself. The fellow inmate told me deputies continually wrote Matthew up for petty violations of jail rules—having too many pairs of socks, too many letters, being disrespectful. He says Matthew was kept in more or less permanent lockdown with these violations.
Matthew’s name changed in prison. After the crimes he became known in police papers and court filings by the name on his birth certificate, Benjamin Matthew Williams. Tyler was James Tyler Williams. Newspaper articles had to explain repetitively that the brothers went by their middle names. But in prison Matthew accepted that he was Ben now, exactly like his father. Deputies and inmates called him Ben, and he started signing drawings and letters “Benjamin XIV Williams” or “Benjamin Matthew XIV Williams,” sometimes specifying, “Rev XIV.12.” (“Here is the patience of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.” Revelations XIV is a vision of the angels of the Apocalypse with whom Ben apparently identified himself.)
But prison began to wear him down. In November the Shasta County DA McGregor Scott decided to go for the death penalty for both brothers. When Stanton and Delsohn interviewed him again on January 6, Ben appeared nervous. His hand shook when he held the telephone, and when they asked about the death penalty decision, he admitted, “Tyler has been pretty upset about it.”
The arsons were first to come to trial in federal court. The murders wouldn’t be dealt with in state court for a year or two. The frenzy of media curiosity abated. Prison, even if it hadn’t seemed so awesome initially, must have started to look far more imposing with the dimension of time factored in.
The tedious courtroom routine quashed Ben’s theatrical attempt to defend himself from Scripture. His lawyer had the impossible job of representing someone who’d quite sanely admitted the crimes he was accused of. In fact, the Bible was the only defense in this case. Ben was right about that.
An effort to bring religion into the trial may have been behind a bizarre episode a few days after Father’s Day. On Sunday, June 18, 2000, Oscar Matson, seventy-seven now, turned a page of the Redding Record Searchlight and found the following ad illustrated with a dove holding an olive branch:
Congratulations! The family and friends of Benjamin Matthew Williams are proud to announce that he was ordained Reverend by Christ’s Covenant Church. This honor was bestowed as recognition of his decade of diligent studies in Ancient Wisdom and Truth and for his spiritual works benefiting our fellowship and community. Reverend Williams: May your knowledge and faith continue to grow during your current persecutions and trials.
The newspaper hastily apologized for running the small ad. Reporters tracked down the purchaser—Ben’s lawyer. If he meant to set up an argument that religious freedom or religious mania were somehow behind the crimes, it was wasted effort. The courts wouldn’t allow a defense based on the holy book of a five-thousand-year-old desert tribe.
Ben made at least one friend in jail. Twenty-four-year-old Paul Gordon Smith Jr., known as PJ, was in ad-seg too. A ward of the court since he was five, PJ had spent most of his life in institutions of one kind or another. Now he was charged with the gruesome murder of a young woman. In ad-seg, prisoners are usually allowed out of their cells for an hour a day unless they’re in lockdown. Ben and PJ got to talking in the common area and hit it off at once, according to PJ.
PJ says he never bought into Ben’s constant talk about religion, nor did he get Ben’s visceral revulsion for homosexuality. They became friends because they were starved for intelligent company. They talked science. Or Ben would describe episodes of his Edenic childhood, and PJ couldn’t help envying what sounded to him like an ideal family life. Time began to loom large. A year passed. The federal trial was drawing to a close.
Even though some of Ben’s letters and drawings reflect strict Christian Identity beliefs, PJ is adamant that Ben’s beliefs were free-form and more diverse and, most interesting, that they were changing. Ben talked and wrote about American Indian spirituality, Druidic religion, even Wicca. Similar references had appeared in the old pamphlet “Optimum Health and Longevity.” Ben’s hatred of homosexuality itself may have been wearing thin. One wonders whether his beliefs weren’t supremely incoherent all along. He may always have been too impatient to let his beliefs gel before inspiration became action. Or maybe his beliefs were fundamentally exterior to him: a book, a mentor, a father, a mother. Those of us hoping to figure it all out may be trying to attribute logic to notions of honor, self, and world as wild as love. But PJ claims that prison was changing Ben to the core. He says at the end Ben didn’t even consider himself Christian.
And while he acknowledges the irony that the worst homophobes do sometimes turn out to be gay, PJ says simply, “Ben wasn’t gay.” The idea that he was came up because it always comes up. It strikes some people as perversely fitting.
That old hiking friend from the Palouse, Dan Martin, also gave the idea a boost. In the early months after the crimes and before dropping out of sight, Martin gave an interview to the gay magazine the Advocate. The article reports that Matthew (as he was known in Idaho) went skinny-dipping and wrote poetry with his best friend, who later turned out to be gay. “You do the math,” the article suggested.
Both the Bee reporter Sam Stanton and Jeff Monroe to this day wonder whether Matthew was confused about his sexuality. Both mentioned it to me. But Stanton and Monroe are straight. For them, there’s a vengeful neatness to the story if Matthew/Ben was gay. And Dan Martin, who is gay, probably always saw his friend through a lens of fondness. Also, he was remembering a time when his own sexuality wasn’t clear to him. Nothing but hope or innuendo says Ben was gay. He wasn’t. However upsetting the realization—and we’re right to be upset, because this is an authentic instance of hatred that can’t be psychologized away—an idea of what’s right, not simple emotion, caused him to kill.
According to PJ the subject was in the air from the start. Both were up for the death penalty, and soon they started talking about escape.
The jail was beginning to show its age. In addition to revamping the air-conditioning system, authorities were making other improvements. A catwalk had been added to the second tier of the ad-seg “pod,” 3C. A secure door was placed right in front of the upstairs shower. From there, the catwalk led to the “mod,” the control area for corrections officers. With the new catwalk built, officers had direct access to both levels of the pod and wouldn’t have to climb the stairs inside the housing unit to reach the upper tier.
In any ad hoc design, compromises are made. It was hard for observant prisoners not to notice that the new catwalk leading to the mod also led right to an exterior window over the jail’s garage. If you could get through the secure door, somehow get past security cameras, somehow break the window, somehow get safely down to the garage roof, then to the street . . . That was the plan.
PJ tells me Ben was impatient. He seemed to think all they needed to do was get into the mod. Then everything would work out. PJ was more cautious. They had to study the mod schedules and weather reports. There’s a hint of wistfulness in PJ’s description of their planned route. They meant to use side roads to drive up to the Oregon/Nevada/California border. They’d go in summer, because winter wouldn’t allow for easy movement. Still, they’d have to watch for good weather throughout Idaho and up into Canada. They decided the smart, counterintuitive destination would be someplace remote, not a densely populated area. Behind the plan one can almost hear Ben’s romantic descriptions of the wilds around Ruby Ridge, his dreams of freedom and solitude in nature. PJ says he kept having to rein in Ben’s impulsiveness.
The plan involved a classic element of prison breaks—the rope of sheets knotted together. Late one evening Ben was allowed out of his cell for a shower. He stuffed his clothes on top of the sheet rope in a paper bag and got into the shower wearing only briefs. He didn’t shower. He waited past the time he was due back in his cell. Another inmate, Harold Seems, was up for the next shower. PJ assures me Seems took a shower with Ben standing right there the whole time. But Seems later testified that he was in his cell when he heard the following whispered exchange as Ben and PJ walked past:
PJ: Have you got it?
Ben: Yeah.
PJ: We’re going to have to kill him.
Ben: As quick as we can.
(Seems had to overhear that neatly self-incriminating conversation through a heavy cell door and before the supposed murder weapon was even made, though “it” could refer to a drain cover. The court didn’t put too much stress on this part of his testimony.)
At that hour, the jail’s main-floor control room was manned, but only individual “prowlers” walked though the pods from time to time, making sure prisoners were where they were supposed to be, handing out medications, or escorting inmates from place to place. According to the deputy in the control room, PJ was let out of his cell between eleven fifty p.m. and one fifteen a.m. At that point he was given extra time to take a shower. So after about quarter past one, Ben and PJ were hiding in the shower together.
There, in wild silence, using his outdoorsman’s skills, Ben fashioned a unique tool or weapon to break the window or assault a deputy. A six-inch perforated drain cover had been unscrewed from the floor of his cell but left in place until tonight. A haft was constructed out of rolled paper stiffened with old bars of soap and ballpoint pen refills. Ben folded this around the drain cover, making sure the ends were long enough to provide for a good handle. Using lengths of torn sheet, he sewed the haft to the grill of the drain cover and wrapped the handle tightly. He had to be careful to make the haft secure. Only the curved edge of the drain cover showed past his elaborate weave of knots and ragged stitches. PJ describes him in the shower sewing in feverish haste. The result was a kind of tomahawk. I’ve seen a photograph of it, bloodied.
The prowler that night was a new guy, the unlucky Timothy Renault, who, incredibly, had had another inmate escape on him two weeks before. Renault was tall, slender, jug-eared. He was only twenty-three and probably still fretting about the coming investigation into the escape. Ben and PJ pressed themselves against the steel walls of the shower. The shower curtain was transparent but so thick and scratched and filmy it was opaque in the shadow. They couldn’t see Renault, but they could hear the catwalk door buzz open a mere three feet away. They recognized him by his voice when he keyed the mic at his shoulder to tell control that he’d left the mod. They let him pass. He wasn’t the usual guy—too slender, and the plan was to have PJ put on the uniform in case cameras could see them after they bluffed their way into the mod. (As it turned out, the light was so low that cameras wouldn’t have made anything out.)
As Renault walked past the cells, he glanced through the tall, narrow windows in each purple-painted door. A letter-sized envelope was wedged in the window frame of Williams’s cell, and it looked like the light inside was draped. Renault peered in. It appeared somebody was in the bed. Two envelopes blocked the window of PJ’s cell, but someone appeared to be under the blanket in that bed too. The envelopes were a common trick to block light from outside so inmates could sleep.
Ben and PJ let Renault pass a second time. By the third round, it was clear there was no one else to choose. They could hear a tapping from nearby. That would be the cell right next to the shower. It belonged to Harold Seems. Renault’s footsteps stopped. He went back past the shower and approached Seems’s cell in answer to the tapping. They heard the young deputy ask a question.
Seems later testified that he was at his cell’s window, frantic. He gestured toward the mod door. “Get out of here! Get out of here!”
When the situation registered, Renault spun around and made for the mod door. The shower curtain flew open. PJ ran to block the door. He saw Renault key the mic at his shoulder just as the first blow came from behind. PJ and Ben wrestled the deputy down.
Already PJ realized it was too late. He figured Ben hadn’t heard the crackle of the mic. He watched his friend chopping in a fury. The radio popped to life asking for a repeat. Still, Ben went on chopping, as if completely possessed by the need to make this work. He and Renault wrestled. The drain-cover blade thudded on bone and clanged against the concrete floor. Lubricated by blood, Renault’s hands and boots skated along the floor. According to PJ, Ben’s briefs and body were covered with blood. He was a cannibal nightmare, pre-Colombian, pre-Christian, pre-everything.
PJ could hear the elevator now. He knew escape was a lost cause and hurried away from the scene along the upper tier. When the first deputies burst in and spotted him, he raised his hands. A deputy testified that he immediately said, “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t have anything to do with this. I didn’t do anything.”
Ben had nearly killed Renault. The young man’s skull was fractured in several places, his eye socket and jaw and a tooth were broken. Intracranial bleeding could have injured his brain or caused death. Nine pieces of titanium had to be fitted into his skull to repair the damage. PJ tells me Ben probably thought the deputy would go down with a single blow like on TV. The expectation fits with Ben’s dreamy way of seeing the world. Maybe they both thought it would work, but their experiences with murder had been different. PJ knew murder could be hard. When he’d killed, it had been a grueling and horrific act. Ben’s murders had been unwontedly easy. He may well have believed—envisioned how—this would be as simple as a scene in Braveheart. When reality disappointed him this time, he never recovered.
After the failed escape, PJ was sent to High Desert State Prison. Ben remained in ad-seg and became despondent. It’s unlikely that he regretted the attack on Renault. He was as blind as ever to the lives of people around him. But failure itself may have eaten away at him. He wrote in a letter that he felt God had abandoned him because the escape hadn’t succeeded.
Ben’s amoral religiosity, as well as his image of a disappointed God, inevitably recall his father. Three years earlier, during that first pretrial hearing, the reporter Sam Stanton had peered over the elder Ben Williams’s shoulder as the courtroom listened to the scratchy recording of his wife’s initial prison conversation with their son. Stanton told me how he’d seen the old man taking notes on three-by-five cards. “No critical thinking!” he wrote energetically, marking the exclamation point with a punch. Exactly like his son, he was an unforgiving judge.
Now more than ever, Ben experienced loneliness, disregard, and hopelessness. His world was his cell. The painted cinder-block walls, the ledge of a bed spanning the whole cell’s width, another ledge for a table, a fluorescent light fixture with no on/off switch, a stainless steel console with a tiny sink on top and a seatless toilet angled from the corner. That was it. The prowler started bringing him Klonopin (clonazepam), a sometimes habit-forming antianxiety medication.
The attack on Renault was an open-and-shut case. The state got the entire arrest/trial/conviction out of the way before the Matson and Mowder capital murder case even began. On Halloween, October 31, 2002, Ben was convicted of the attempted murder of Timothy Renault. He was due to be sentenced December 2 and was facing life in prison. He’d already gotten thirty years for arson in federal court. The Matson and Mowder trial was scheduled to begin December 10. In that one, Ben was facing death.
Now Ben becomes invisible for a moment as if a crucial scene’s been snipped out. Who knows what he was thinking? It’s tempting to imagine a sense of responsibility was beginning to leak through the massive dikes of his mind. But it’s easier to believe his agony was as uncomprehending as ever. A kind of ecstatic self-pity. For the purposes of a story he needs to come to, wake up at least for a moment. But sometimes a splendid pointlessness floods imagined constructs like stories. Nothing ends the right way. We just back off. The protagonist comes to appear as small and mute as a guppy struggling on the floor beside its tank. History or Story are overwhelmed by the eternal drone of Nature.
Ben was about to undergo some tests—a brain scan, among others—in connection with his defense in the upcoming Matson and Mowder trial, though he can’t have felt there was much point in any defense now. For the brain scan he was abruptly ordered off Klonopin on November 7. Withdrawal from Klonopin can be hard for some people, but Ben had nine days to adjust.
Happiness almost always feels contingent or tentative, but despair carries a kind of certitude, even if you try to tell yourself it’s only a chemical thing (not the kind of reassurance that would have occurred to Ben Williams anyway). November 16 was a Saturday. Ben spent the evening reading the Bible in bed. He was last observed at one thirty a.m. When he set his Bible on the ledge table, he left it open to the 22nd Psalm, the most abject of all the Psalms of David:
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? . . .
But I am a worm, and no man;
a reproach of men, and despised of the people.
All they that see me laugh me to scorn:
they shoot out the lip, they shake the head saying,
He trusted on the LORD that he would deliver him:
let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him . . .
Ben had crafted his last tool. He’d broken the flexible blade from a plastic razor. He remounted it with string between a pair of ballpoint pen refills. Because it was hard to handle, he tied the blade to his wrist to give it traction for cutting.
He was naked except for the jail-issue tangerine briefs. I imagine he was so inclined to nakedness because our natural state reminded him of Eden. He wore an amulet on dental floss around his neck, a silver dollar–sized package of tin foil containing two Bible verses, a seed, a tiny piece of soap, and a crumb of chocolate.
He stuffed cardboard under the cell door. He spread his blanket behind the stainless steel sink/toilet console. He sat on the floor with his back against it—the only place in the cell where you were a little hidden from the window. He cut himself, beginning with his arm, leg, or neck—who knows?
The blade was hard to manipulate. It was narrow. It wasn’t easy to cut deeply. He seems to have made several attempts to get at the carotid artery in his neck, but muscle and tendon probably writhed under the pressure of the blade. He drew long slices up his arm. The surface veins bled for a while, but the flow kept trailing off. He may have cut himself twenty or thirty times by now. He’d lost a lot of blood. He would be cold, trembling with chills, queasy, dizzy. He would be starting to go into shock. But he was still awake.
It’s impossible to know if any thoughts or images broke through. Does a suicide grieve for himself or the world? Here he was, naked and covered in sticky blood again, his own this time, not Renault’s. Was that a kind of atonement? Was this punishment or self-sacrifice?
Soon he’d cut himself forty or fifty times. Because he was in shock and the nerves of his skin were starved for blood, the cutting likely hurt much less. He pressed an inch deep where he could, but he was trembling badly. He kept at it.
Maybe it came down to stubbornness. Suicide, too, was a matter of honor. He wasn’t going to fail at this. He couldn’t. How would it look to his father and the world? Far from meaning he was sorry for his life, this was the only way to prove he’d been serious all along. He wasn’t going to fail. He kept cutting. Around the seventy-fifth cut he managed to sever an artery. The blood poured out to the rhythm of his heartbeat, which soon abated and eventually came to a feathery stop.
DA McGregor Scott, who viewed the lacerated, marble-white body after it was discovered at six thirty in the morning, was reminded of what he’d read of the bodies found at Little Bighorn. After battle, Indians mutilated the bodies of their enemies so they couldn’t pursue them, or continue fighting, in the afterlife. Ben’s suicide had everything to do with this life, however—like they all do. He’d ended the ultimate argument by torturing himself to death. Probably not from guilt so much as in a last magniloquent refusal to be proved wrong.