I was a matron in a boys’ school. It was in a country village and when I was off duty in the afternoon there was nothing to do but go for a walk, go into church, or have a quiet time in my room.
One day as I knelt by the fire, my elbows on the chair, I lost the sensation of having a body. I felt a presence across the room and to go nearer I had to pass through a white fire. My spirit did this without feeling anything but happiness and gratitude. The Presence said, “Remember this when you feel you don’t belong to you.” He looked at me and again told me to remember and I thought, “I could never forget.” Then I felt Him leaving, and said, “Won’t you come again?” There was a slight pause and He said, “Not like this,” and he was gone.
I was back in my body, gazing across the room, and I felt so full of joy and peace I felt my face must be shining like Moses’, but I looked no different.
Years later I had a bad time of anxiety and depression and felt that a high wall separated me from God. I was very unhappy—for a long time. Then I remembered what had happened years before and I think that helped the wall to disappear gradually.
On another occasion I was with a small group and we were finishing a devotional meeting with the Lord’s Prayer. Suddenly my spirit was up in the sky and huge clouds were separating to make a wide clear road. There was a noise like thunder and I asked what it meant—and it turned into a loud voice saying, “The Kingdom, the power, and the glory,” and I was back in my body to hear people say, “Forever and ever, Amen.” I never told anybody about this.
—SEEING THE INVISIBLE
ONCE TYLER HAD broken the ice by asking if anyone else had heard the voice in the car, the four policemen on the Spanish Fork Bridge began discussing the mysterious voice in earnest. Yes, it had been female. Yes, it had been telling them to hurry—that there was not much time. No, at the time of hearing it, no one had doubted that it was a live human being and that it was coming from the inside of the car.
No one, however, seemed ready to take the jump into explaining just how such a thing could be. After all, by the accepted rules that govern the world, what they were discussing—what they had experienced—was impossible. Group hallucination. That was the term Tyler figured someone would give it—some expert on a TV talk show.
But it hadn’t been a hallucination. Tyler was sure of it. It had been real. As real as the bite of the frigid water in the river, as real as the metal of the wrecked car that had cut into him, and as real as the slow throb at the back of his head where he’d banged it during the rescue.
Tyler decided right then and there that he wasn’t going to be quiet about what had happened. If someone asked, he’d tell the truth. After all, when was it ever wrong for a cop to tell the truth?
Within hours, the story of the miracle baby who’d survived a night in an upside-down car with only her dead mother for company was all over the news. First the local stations picked it up, then the nationals, and the following night Tyler found himself in the novel situation of sitting with Warner and two of the firemen who’d been present at the rescue, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper about the event.
The story, it turned out, had all the elements that make for broad public interest. There was tragedy, in the form of Jennifer’s death. There was hope, in the form of Lily’s all-but-inexplicable survival. There was heroism, in the form of Tyler and the other officers, firemen, and EMT workers who had braved the water to get Lily out. And there was, over and above that, the voice: the mysterious words urging the four officers on—telling them to hurry up, because there wasn’t much time. That voice, in turn, led to what seemed to be the most powerful element of all: the idea that somehow, through those long, dark hours of stark, horrific solitude, someone had been “with” Lily.
Who is with us? Are we alone, or are we not alone? More than all the other spark plugs for media attention, that was the key reason Jenny’s death and Lily’s survival became not just local or national news, but a world story. It was a question that resonated.
And pretty much overnight, Officer Tyler Beddoes found himself, to his surprise and perplexity, the poster boy for it. Six-foot-two, classically handsome but with a boyish, innocent look and curiously round head that made him look a little like a Peanuts character grown up, Tyler played well on camera. Down at the precinct his supervisor, dealing with the increasing flood of calls about the story, told Tyler, “You’re comfortable with this thing and you sound good. From now on I’m sending you out whenever I get a request for an interview.”
This was fine with Tyler. After ten years on the force he knew well enough what to say to reporters. He knew better than to tart the story up, to tell anything other than what he had experienced. The facts were always enough.
Plus, as a police officer, he was well aware of the fact that in the America of spring 2015, an inspiring story might be a nice change of pace for people. It seemed as if everywhere you looked, things were going badly, and going fast from bad to worse. The economy was still a wreck. Jobs were still down, and had been down for so long that it was starting to get hard to remember a time when they weren’t. All through the West, the unprecedented heat waves of the last few summers had farmers dreading what was to come this time around. The world, always going to hell in a handbasket, was showing signs that it was now doing so in a new, different, larger kind of way. There were weeks when it seemed as if nothing, absolutely nothing, positive was happening anywhere. If the mysterious survival of a baby in a creek bed would give people a little hope, Tyler was happy to step up and be the mouthpiece for it.
The drawbacks of modern American instant celebrity, however, soon made themselves apparent. “I can’t look at those tapes,” Tyler told me about the recordings that his mom, Pam, had made. “All those clips of me talking on the TV shows—I’m too afraid I’ll look like an idiot. I think it might also look like I’m trying to grab all this attention for myself for what happened. I’m not, though. The other guys were fine with me being the one to tell the story. Harward, he said no way to the media stuff from the start. He’s real private, and the last thing he wanted was his face on TV stations all over the world. DeWitt and Warner were the same way. They were like, ‘You want to talk to all those cameras, go ahead.’ So I just ended up being the one telling the story of what happened again and again. It was crazy. But I don’t regret it, at least not yet. I mean, what I say happened really did happen. We heard that voice. It just seemed to me like it was a message the world should know about. It means something. Especially when the rest of the story, the story of the mom, was so sad. I was helping make other people feel better. And I wasn’t lying to do it. I was telling the God’s-honest truth about something just crazy that happened, and that I was there for, and that three other guys who are rock solid and reliable were there for, too. So even though it was weird and right away I started getting these phone calls about movies and God knows what and I thought, ‘What am I getting into here?’—even so, at bottom I was making people feel better. And there just didn’t seem to me to be anything wrong with that.”
Making people feel better—or perhaps more simply, helping them—had been an aspiration of Tyler’s for as long as he or anyone who knows him can remember. Tyler and his brother, Zack, four years older than he, grew up in Benjamin, a small suburb of Spanish Fork, in a house next to his maternal grandparents, Anna and Donald. Behind the two rambler-style houses there were alfalfa fields where Tyler’s grandparents’ sheep and cows and goats grazed. There was a good amount of space between houses in the neighborhood, but not so much that Tyler and his brother felt isolated. Many of those houses had kids, and Tyler enjoyed the kind of three-dimensional, nondigital childhood that is becoming so rare in America these days. He had no PlayStation, iPhones were years away, and his favorite game was cops and robbers with the other neighborhood kids. Tyler always played the cop.
Like most of the population of Spanish Fork, Tyler’s grandparents were Mormon. They went to the regular Sunday meetings but never tried to cram the faith down Tyler’s throat. Tyler’s granddad had done graduate work at UCLA in forest ecology, and the general attitude Tyler absorbed from his parents and grandparents was that the world is a good place and that it is everyone’s job to lead a good, responsible life, taking advantage of what God has provided but respecting it, too, and helping others do so as well.
The result was an environment in which God hovered, for Tyler, somewhere in the background, with not too many tangible attributes other than the obvious ones a kid would imagine. He was good, he loved his creation, and he wanted people to do and live right. Life was worth living, and other lives deserved honoring and protecting. As for the small points, the doctrinaire arguments about what made one church different from another, Tyler didn’t spend too much time worrying about all that. Who needed all that fine print? The world was a good place, people were generally good, too, and the evidence for that was all around. Maybe that was all you were going to know about how things worked on earth, but maybe that was all you really needed to know.
Tyler seemed to have absorbed a good bit of this basic philosophy from his dad. Tyler’s mom and dad were both raised Mormon, but his mom was much more active in the church than his dad was. “He was supportive of the faith, no question,” said Tyler. “But he had a problem with the whole middleman thing. Did God really need some complicated set of self-appointed experts telling people what he was like and how he wanted humans to behave? My dad was always at my basketball games and my football games. He was the best dad you could ask for. Some folks—the real down-the-line LDS (Latter-Day Saints) people—said he wasn’t living right, that they didn’t hardly ever see him in church, you know, all that stuff. Dad knew they said as much, but that was okay. He knew what he knew; he had no doubt that there was a God up there, and he felt like if he wasn’t perfect in God’s eyes, he probably wasn’t alone in that. After all, if going to church made you a good person and not going made you a bad one, then ‘good’ and ‘bad’ must have had different meanings than he thought they did. I know how he feels. You know—some people are all hugs and kisses on Sunday and jerks the other six days of the week. That’s not the way my dad was when I was growing up, and I think that lesson meant a lot to me.”
One thing that struck me about Tyler right away was his combination of forthrightness and courtesy—the way his native honesty was matched by a deep concern that he not wound anyone with his words. Many people are guarded when they speak to writers—as well they should be. But Tyler wasn’t guarded during our initial talks so much as careful. He was not—as he might have put it when in a particularly forthright mood—looking to cover his own rear end. However, he was always anxious that something might slip out that would end up hurting someone’s feelings. And that sentiment seemed to extend to the Mormon church itself, which Tyler treated as a beloved if sometimes irascible uncle. It was there, it had always been there, he liked it fine, and if he didn’t spend as much time with it as some others did, well, that was just how it was.
If the world wasn’t a completely perfect place, Tyler got his first really solid taste of this fact in a sad but classic way. He got his first dog, a spaniel named Lucky, when he was nine.
“We’d had other dogs, but Lucky was specifically my dog,” Tyler told me. “I took care of him, fed him; he was my responsibility. We were pretty much inseparable. We lived on a dead-end lane. One guy, a neighbor, always drove like a bat out of hell. Mom and Dad would get frustrated. You know, ‘That so-and-so needs to slow down, there’s kids playing on this street.’ ”
One day Lucky happened to be in the road when the neighbor sped by, and he got hit. Tyler saw the whole thing. He ran down and held his dog, still panting but fatally injured, and watched, helpless, as he died in his arms. The guy got out of his car. “Sorry, kid,” he said. “I’ll buy you a new one.”
“My mom was there,” Tyler said. “She was bawling. Not so much because of Lucky but because she could see what witnessing that had done to me. I cussed that guy out like crazy, called him a bastard and a murderer. You know, something like that, when you’re a kid, can really shake your picture of things. At least that’s what it did with me.”
Tyler’s parents tried to comfort him in the usual way parents do in such circumstances. “They were like, ‘When you die you go to a better place. . . ’ Stuff like that. But I wasn’t so sure I believed it. I wanted to believe it, but I just wasn’t so sure I did anymore. I mean, here I named my dog Lucky, and just by doing that I figured I’d made sure he was going to be a lucky dog. I learned a lesson about the difference between words and reality that day.”
On TV, the 1990s and early 2000s were the time of the forensic cop, and Tyler got hooked on shows like CSI and Forensic Files. He loved watching the forces of good team up with science to solve the most seemingly unsolvable crimes. He loved the way the smallest, most ridiculously easy-to-overlook detail could lead investigators to criminals who’d thought they’d gotten away with (usually) murder. A single hair, a piece of filament from the back of a van, or some other minute thing would turn out to be a finger pointing across hundreds of miles, and maybe years, directly at the bad guy. Those shows were Tyler’s first hint that if the world didn’t make total sense, then this wasn’t something people just needed to stand by and watch. Praying to God might work for some, but Tyler gravitated more to the cops, detectives, and forensic specialists on these shows: people who saw that the world was often a pretty bad place, and instead of asking God how come he’d made it that way, stepped in to do something about it.
For Tyler, “good” and “bad” were not the only polarities of which the world was made. Those forensics shows often carried with them a hint of mystery—a mystery that lingered even after the crime had been solved and the malefactor had been caught and sent off to jail or the electric chair. The world didn’t hold just good and bad. It held the ordinary and the mysterious, that sense that there was always something left unsolved even after all the questions had been answered. . . . If Tyler didn’t possess much of a religious streak, he did possess a bit of a philosophical one, and those crime shows satisfied that side of him, too. Even when you got to the bottom of things, it seemed, there was usually still something left. Why was the world—all the world, the way it was? Even when an episode of CSI or Forensic Files tied up the specific case in question, those other, larger questions still remained.
Tyler’s mom had a brother named Eddie. “He was as big as me,” Tyler told me. “Your typical all-American kid, I guess you could say. He was real athletic. He went to play college baseball at Dixie State U in St. George, Utah, on a scholarship. Things were looking real good for him. So one day he notices this bump on his leg. Just this little thing, something you’d hardly even give any thought to. Except that it wouldn’t go away. It turns out that it’s bone cancer. Nineteen years old, and he’s got cancer. It hit my grandparents like a ton of bricks. In a couple of months he went from being the healthiest-looking guy you’ve ever seen to a ghost. The doctors didn’t give him a long time to live, so he came home to die. Grandma shared the story of his last day with me. He was on a lot of painkillers, and he was lying in the living room, all hooked up to stuff. By that point the cancer had metastasized and it had destroyed his corneas. So on top of everything else, he was totally blind. But on that day, he suddenly looked up to the corner of the room and said, ‘Hey, Mom, he’s here to get me. Can I go?’
“Grandma asked him, ‘Who’s here, dear?’
“ ‘James Taylor,’ my uncle Eddie said.”
“James Taylor?” I asked just to make sure I’d heard correctly.
“Yup,” Tyler said. “Eddie said, ‘James Taylor is here to get me.’ That didn’t make a whole lot of sense to Grandma either, but she said, ‘Honey, if that’s what you want to do, you can go.’ And she kissed his forehead. And just like that, he went.”