BURN THE OWL
“Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch!
Moloch the heavy judger of men!”—Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems
Energized by the events of September 11, Richard spent the next few months training for his plan to infiltrate the Bohemian Grove. He had three goals going in.
First, he wanted to disrupt any satanic rituals he might encounter and save victims who were awaiting a fiery death.
He also wanted to create a media whirlwind with the raid that would blow the lid off the Grove. Imagine the Phantom Patriot, surrounded by news cameras, relieved sacrifice victims in the background, law enforcement shoving the nation’s most powerful men, now identified as baby-killers, into the backs of cop cars. At long last, Richard’s day of triumph!
His third goal, in case nothing else panned out, was to fill the Bohemians with fear by burning their sacred Great Owl of Bohemia to the ground.
Richard chose a January date for his raid rather than the July encampment because he thought it would help him go unnoticed. He reasoned that only the more hardcore satanic Bohemians would be bunking at the Grove this time of year, instead of the more casual members who were there to drink and go fishing. Richard didn’t have a particular reason for choosing the date, but later noted that some sources list January 20–27 as a period on the “Satanic Holidays” calendar marked for “abduction, ceremonial preparation, and holding of sacrificial victims,” as a listing circulated on the Internet alleges. The listing isn’t sourced and looks like it might be a leftover relic from the Satanic Panic.
Winter in the redwood forest was the perfect time for his mission, Richard reasoned. The Satanists would have their guard down.
Richard’s first step to planning his raid was to brush up on his firearm skills. He took a pistol course at a Thunder Ranch in Texas, then attended a three-day SCARS (Special Combat Aggressive Reactionary System) seminar in Salt Lake City. After that, he decided he would pack up and move from Austin to Carson City, Nevada. He traded in his RV for a pickup truck.
“Carson City was more or less the closest Nevada city to the Grove,” Richard explains about his destination. “I hadn’t picked a particular date to do the mission, so I needed a place to stay until then. There was also a chance I wouldn’t do it at all, and Carson City was a decent place to live.”
BEFORE HE LEFT TOWN, Richard stopped by the AC-TV studios to talk to Alex Jones about the Bohemian Grove. Richard was looking for confirmation that he was on the right path.
“I met him at the public access studio where he did his show in Austin. I felt I should meet this guy before I went to the Grove,” Richard wrote to me. “We discussed the Grove in general, but I didn’t say anything about going there. If I got arrested, I didn’t want him charged with conspiracy. At one point, he excused himself from the conversation, but he said he would be right back. At the time, I thought that AJ thought I might be an undercover fed. I decided to leave before he got back.”
On his way to Carson City, Richard had a nerve-racking moment. While approaching the Hoover Dam, he noticed that traffic had crawled to a stop and that the Highway Patrol was doing a vehicle check. His mind wandered to the back of his truck, where he had a container with his recently purchased arsenal—guns, a sword, crossbows, and lots of ammunition. All of this was legally acquired, but how to explain the Phantom Patriot costume?And what was with this roadblock? Richard felt a panic. Did they know? Was this set up for him? But the Highway Patrol looked at his driver’s license and waved him on. Richard passed the Hoover Dam and carried on to Carson City and found an apartment to rent.
During this period, Richard quit communicating with his friends. He kept all his plans for the Bohemian Grove to himself, fearing that if he talked to anyone about it, he would be incriminating them. With his family gone, and his few friends unaware of his location, he was alone in the world.
Lon had some contact with Richard while he was in Texas, “…but not a lot,” he recalled. He had noticed that Richard had been getting more heavily “into religion and the conspiracy stuff had become more pervasive” over the last couple of years, but the conspiracy talk didn’t alarm him.
“I’ve talked to people about conspiracy stuff before, and the thing is, everyone has them—some of the ideas are mainstream, and some aren’t. I had a buddy of mine who told me the same corporation that makes Play-Doh makes carpet cleaner, and it turns out it’s true!” Lon told me. “But is that a conspiracy or is it just a smart business move? When you get into the Illuminati and that stuff, you start to lose me, but it’s hard for me to fault someone who believes that stuff, that’s their truth, I just don’t see it.”
Later Lon would share his “Richard File” with me, hundreds of pages of legal documents and personal correspondence, including his last communication with him before the raid: a Christmas card sent to Lon and his wife Julie, postmarked January 9, 2002, just ten days before Richard headed to the Bohemian Grove, and after he had arrived in Carson City. It had included a check.
“I’m going through a weird time right now. Yes Lon… weirder than usual,” Richard wrote to them, after thanking them for a card and explaining he had been traveling. “I inherited a large sum of money from Mom’s estate. This year, I decided that I would share some of it with a few friends, while they are still young and poor enough to appreciate it. I’m sure that you two ‘starving actors’ have bills to pay.”
After that, communication from Richard stopped.
“He didn’t want anyone in on his actions, where he was and what was going on. Probably smartly so, because he probably knew there were a few people who would try to stop him or tip people off if he did that,” Lon told me, pausing to reflect. “I’d have to call somebody if I knew he was going to do that, because I couldn’t stand the idea that someone got injured in that process on purpose or by mistake.”
On January 19, 2002, Richard decided it was time.
“I SPENT MY LAST ‘free day’ watching Mel Gibson’s The Patriot on VHS,” Richard says. Later, when questioned by detectives on who his role models were, Richard would tell them he had two: his mother and Mel Gibson, because of his roles in The Patriot and Braveheart. It’s likely he also identified with Gibson’s character in the 1997 thriller Conspiracy Theory, in which Gibson played a conspiracist who seemed like a paranoid crackpot until his theories began to unfold.
After watching the movie, Richard did an equipment check, loaded up his pickup truck and drove from Carson City up to the Bohemian Grove, about a four- to five-hour drive.
Richard entered the Grove around 9 p.m. that night wearing his Phantom Patriot costume with a Kevlar vest underneath. He was armed with a Crossfire MK-1 (a 5.56 rifle/12-gauge shotgun hybrid), a .45 caliber semi-automatic Glock pistol, a ninja sword, and a Kabar knife. In his backpack, he carried over one hundred rounds of ammunition, and a fireworks mortar tube and smoke bombs. In his truck, which he parked outside the Grove, were two crossbows and a billy club.
Later, while he was in prison, Richard documented his life-changing night and day inside the Grove by writing and illustrating a full-color, three-part autobiographical comic detailing his raid titled “Phantom Patriot: The Skeleton in America’s Closet,” part of a collection of comics he drew in a graphic novel called Prison Penned Comics.
Art created by Richard McCaslin shortly before his Bohemian Grove Raid.
Richard’s artwork could undoubtedly be defined as “outsider art.” However, his scrutiny of thousands of comic books has given him a strong working knowledge of how a comic book storyline works. His style is outsider art meets How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, the classic instruction book young comic artists have turned to for guidance since the late 1970s. His page layout is well organized, but there is something weird about his artwork. His characters have eerie oval bug eyes with giant luminous irises and almost always are frozen in looks of anger, shock, or confusion, captured in a toothy half-circle frown. Things like hair strands and leaves on trees are oddly symmetrical.
In the original version of the comic, drawn while Richard was still a Christian, the panels are jam-packed with Bible verses—one page lists eight different verses as a footnote. Other scenes incorporate Bible verses drawn as part of the landscape as if created by an enthusiastic editorial cartoonist. One panel, for example, has 2 Thessalonians 1:6–9 (in a nutshell: God is just and will give trouble to those who trouble you) floating inside of a gray storm cloud.
The first panel of Part Two of the comic, “Confrontation,” shows Richard clad as the Phantom Patriot sneaking through the redwood forest, holding his rifle and shining a flashlight on the path ahead of him. He has a thought bubble emanating from his head which contains a line from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: “I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately!”
Richard explains his massive arsenal in the comic:
Despite being heavily armed, it wasn’t my intention to simply kill any Bohemians I might encounter. Many of them probably deserved to die for their various crimes, but that was God’s decision, not mine. The weapons were for my protection, in case I was attacked by the Grove’s security forces; which I assumed would shoot me on sight, or worse. There was also a slim chance that I might actually catch the Bohemians in their criminal activity. If I could make a citizen’s arrest, without firing a shot, all the better.
Richard wandered around the giant redwoods until a path led him into the outskirts of the camp.
“For the next two hours I explored the empty grove, as my hopes of interrupting any occult rituals began to fade,” a caption box in his comic explains. The illustration below the caption shows the Phantom Patriot looking in disgust at his weakening flashlight.
“Way to go ‘Rambo,’” says the self-deprecating superhero. “You have plenty of ammo, but no extra batteries.” Now completely in the dark, with the moon covered in clouds and the branches of the towering redwoods, Richard decided he was at risk of getting lost, so he sought cover to hide out until sunrise. He found a nearby cabin and kicked in the door. The comic gives a sound effect of CRASH! as Richard storms the cabin.
“I don’t remember what camp it was. I tried to sleep, but it was fairly cold, so I mostly laid awake until first light.”
AS THE SUN ROSE, Richard ventured back into the Grove, and after wandering down a path, he soon found himself face-to-face at last with his great enemy “Moloch,” the Great Owl of Bohemia. It sat there ominously, staring blankly as the rising sun reflected off the lagoon in front of it.
“The Owl looked just like it did in Alex Jones’ video, except a lot crappier. You’d think a bunch of billionaires would spring for something a little more elaborate,” Richard says.
Up until this point, Richard had thought that the Great Owl of Bohemia was carved out of a giant redwood tree and had hoped to light it on fire and destroy it. But to his disappointment, he found it was made out of concrete. The statue is hollow on the inside. It’s wired for electrical use, and a door in the back opens the hollow body, which serves as a storage shed, holding the Dull Care effigies and other props for the Cremation of Care ceremony.
“I wish I had brought a sledge-hammer so I could have at least knocked down the altar,” Richard told me. Discouraged, he decided instead to leave a message as a warning—a piece of paper featuring his Phantom Patriot logo, a circle and slash through a Bohemian owl logo and the Bible verse Leviticus 18:21—“You shall not give any of your offspring to offer them to Moloch, nor shall you profane the name of your God; I am the Lord.” Richard would have this piece of paper returned to him about a decade later, neatly sealed in an evidence bag.
The calling card left by Richard on the Great Owl of Bohemia statue.
With no satanic rituals upended and no burning owl statue before him, Richard’s mission began to go off the charts.
“I hadn’t traveled halfway across the country just to walk out of the Bohemian Grove without causing some real damage,” he said. He broke into a nearby banquet hall, the one where Bohemians gather for dinner before the Cremation of Care. After making sure the building was empty, he found a bottle of degreaser. A panel in the comic shows him pouring a ridiculously large bottle of the chemical onto a table.
“I splashed some around the office and kitchen, then lit it,” the caption reads, and as the Phantom Patriot looks back at the flames, a thought balloon drifts over his head. “That should be enough to put the fear of God in these perverts!”
But Richard’s attempted arson was quickly doused as the building’s fire alarm blared, and the sprinklers were triggered to extinguish the flames. This spot could have been where Richard’s story ends. He wasn’t sure if he should fight or flee.
“I briefly considered making my ‘last stand’ against Bohemian security and the eventual SWAT team right there,” Richard says in the comic. “However, it dawned on me that if I were caught on the property, the corrupt local authorities might simply kill me and cover up the entire incident.” Alerted by the fire alarm, a Bohemian Grove maintenance worker named Bob Hipkiss initially spotted Richard and followed him as Richard marched in a “strutting stride” toward the resort’s gates and approached the security guard shacks. Hipkiss radioed security guard Fred Yeager, who was on duty. When Richard spotted Yeager, he pointed his rifle at him through the guard shack window.
Fred Yeager’s court testimony recalls the moment.
“Well, you know, I— I was— I was— all I could just say I guess maybe this is it, good Lord forgive me and I didn’t know what was going to happen. You know, I was pretty upset,” Yeager testified.
Richard had spotted Yeager’s phone and thought it might have been a gun. Yeager raised his hands. Richard stared at him with blank skull mask eyes, and then:
“Well, it was so strange,” Yeager told the court. “He looked at me and then he dropped his left hand from the weapon and raised it and waved, and I just stood there kind of transfixed, and then he turned on a left face and proceeded in the same gait that he approached.”
Richard had made it out of the Grove and into a parking lot area, where he encountered the local fire marshal in his pickup truck, who was stationed just a mile down the road and was responding to the fire alarms. When he saw Richard, he turned around and took off.
“He doesn’t like my looks,” the cartoon version of Richard ponders as the truck speeds away.
Several minutes later, Richard reached the main road and could see his truck, but he had a significant barrier—four police cruisers were surrounding it. The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department had responded to the Grove’s 911 call and on the way, they motioned to two California Highway Patrol officers to follow them. Richard took cover behind a tree.
From a police report:
Man with a gun call, Bohemian Grove. I stopped my vehicle by a blue pickup truck parked on the side of the roadway. Since there were no residencies adjacent to the location of the truck, I considered that it might be involved in the incident. The subject’s position was approximately ten yards to the rear of the truck, and in a loud voice, I repeatedly ordered the subject from his place of concealment to the roadway. Subject was out of my view except for a small portion of his shoulder and head that would occasionally come from behind the tree. I could also see the condensation of the subject’s breath from behind the tree.
The four responding officers ducked behind their cruisers for cover. They continued to yell for Richard to drop his weapon and come out in the open. Richard didn’t respond.
“Oh yeah. He was very quiet there,” Officer Nenad Gorenec, of the California Highway Patrol, later told the court at Richard’s trial. “I mean I could not hear anything else but the deputies yelling and us yelling. It was extremely quiet. I didn’t hear a bird or anything. It was a very—very strange feeling in the whole area.”
Richard was facing the most critical decision of his life—should he engage, or should he surrender? Two of the officers began to close in on his position, moving from behind their squad to a giant redwood tree stump for cover.
“I had to make a decision now!” Richard says in the comic. “If the SWAT team from Santa Rosa or Sonoma rushed up here on a Sunday morning, I was certain they wouldn’t go home without my dead body.” After “a few tense minutes,” Richard decided to make his move.
“I decided to test the cop’s integrity by stepping out into the road with my rifle pointed down, but still at the ready. If they shot at me, I could probably take a few hits to my Kevlar vest and still return fire.”
Subject finally walked from his position, still carrying the rifle. When the subject came into view, I could see he was wearing a blue paramilitary uniform, a belt with what appeared to be a sidearm, I could see he was carrying an assault rifle with a high capacity banana-style magazine. Subject was wearing a full latex mask; the character of the mask was a skeleton skull. The subject slowly walked to the center of the road when he stopped, his rifle at a low ready, with the rifle held in both hands. He stood facing me, not responding or communicating, looking at the positions of the four officers on the team. He remained in this stance for approximately four minutes in defiance of my repeated commands to put the rifle on the ground.
“It looked like he was ready—ready to give us a hard time,” Officer Eric Wayne Haufler of the California Highway Patrol told the court. “Ready to play ball.”
Richard took a deep breath, his breath’s condensation pouring out of the mask in the January air. He stood in the middle of the small country road. The morning breeze flowed. His breathing was shallow and filled his skull mask, which grinned quietly at the officers. He stood with his feet spread in a ready stance.
“A couple more minutes passed until finally, one of the officers asked me what I wanted. To my surprise, I detected a wave of fear in his voice. In fact, all four cops seemed visibly shaken by my appearance,” Richard wrote.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Sonoma County is a relatively peaceful place, and up until now, the biggest threat to the Grove had been a few nosy journalists. The Sunday edition of the Sonoma County-based Press-Democrat was being delivered in the quiet of the morning at the same time as Richard’s standoff. The big front-page story, “Dejected Raiders left out in the cold,” was about the Oakland Raiders losing a playoff game to the New England Patriots. Weather predicted a potentially gloomy day: high 56, low 30, chance of rain.
A gunman in a skeleton mask was out of place.
“We’ve had protestors and stuff at the Bohemian Grove, but I’ve been here 24 years, and I’ve never seen—and I don’t think any of us will ever again see—a guy dressed like that come here in our careers,” Sheriff’s Lieutenant Bruce Rochester told the San Francisco Chronicle shortly after the raid. “Nobody’s laughing. The deputies were scared, and we’re all still scratching our heads.”
While he stood there in the road, Richard’s mind wandered back to his apartment in Carson City. He had left little behind—his comic books and a collection of photos of himself posing in various superhero costumes over the years. On the kitchen table, he had left a will. He named his friend Lon as executor of his estate. There was also artwork Richard had drawn of the Phantom Patriot raiding the Bohemian Grove, priests making a sacrifice to the Great Owl statue in the background. There was a poem he had written about his journey titled “The Battle of Bohemia.” Next to this was an autographed picture of a beautiful young country music star, Chely Wright, whom Richard had met the year before. He was in love with her. Attached to the picture was a note with a Bible verse Richard had handwritten—Mark 8:36, “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and loses his own soul?”
Now, the police car lights flashed silently in front of him. The giant, ancient redwood trees towered over the scene on both sides of the road.
“I wasn’t really scared. I was prepared to die for the cause,” Richard wrote to me. “This’ll sound stupid, but at that moment I wondered, what would Chely think of me?”
BATMAN AND MINNIE PEARL
THE SECRET SERVICE FILE includes an analysis of the search of Richard’s apartment in Carson City the day after his raid. The report notes that “the apartment was neat and clean, the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets were empty and there was no food.” In the sparse apartment, they found comic books, weapons, and a Bowflex machine in the living room. They found a notebook labeled “Phantom Patriot Missions” on his coffee table which logged his symbolic appearances and had poems written in it. Next to the journal on the coffee table was the Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove documentary on VHS, as well as a Bible, and self-defense and martial arts training videos.
On his bookshelf, they found provocative reading material, and made a note of three titles: 101 Things to Do Til the Revolution: Ideas and Resources for Self-Liberation, Monkey Wrenching and Preparedness, by Claire Wolfe; a guide to living off the grid titled Bulletproof Privacy: How to Live Hidden, Happy and Free!written by a survivalist with the pseudonym Boston T. Party; and Knights of Darkness: Secrets of the World’s Deadliest Night Fighters by Dr. HaHa Lung, who specializes in ninjutsu and other fighting techniques.
Most attention-grabbing was a display on the coffee table.
During the search of his apartment, I found a photograph displayed on one of the tables in the living room. The picture was autographed… Although I wasn’t familiar with Chely Wright, it appeared she was a celebrity. What was disconcerting about the photograph is that it appeared to be set up as some sort of shrine. Below the photograph was ‘Phantom Patriot’ artwork inside a plastic bag.
LATER, I WOULD MEET Richard in person. By then, I had been corresponding with him for over a year. While driving around the hilly streets of San Francisco, he casually asked if I had heard of a singer named Chely Wright.
“No,” I replied.
“Oh, she’s a country music singer,” he told me. I replied that I wasn’t very knowledgeable about country music, being more of a rock ‘n’ roll guy myself. He said that he had had a “weird experience” with her. The thought got lost in the day—a lot was going on. Later, he mentioned Wright and a “date” he had with her again in an e-mail. This time I was curious enough to consult Google. I paired “Richard McCaslin” and “Chely Wright” and searched. I got one hit. It was an entry in a column called “Country Beat” for MTV.com, dated June 13, 2001. It read:
Dinner with Chely Wright went for $14,500 at her celebrity auction and benefit June 12 at Nashville’s Wildhorse Saloon. An avid Wright fan, Richard McCaslin, made the winning bid for dinner with the singer at the Nashville restaurant of his choice. The event raised money for Wright’s Reading, Writing, and Rhythm Foundation, which provides musical instruments for schools.
Oh shit, I thought. What now?
DURING RICHARD’S DOWNWARD SPIRAL and while shuttling around state to state looking for work and opportunity, he happened to catch a music video on Country Music Television one day in 1999. It was a video for a hot new single, “Single White Female,” by Chely Wright. The smash hit was soon number one on the country music charts. The video features a sophisticated and sexy-looking Wright and her entourage singing the bouncy hit on a city bus while transit riders contemplate their relationship status.
“A single white female…” Wright sings, smiling, “is looking for a man like you!” Many men thought that perhaps Wright was addressing them personally and developed an infatuation with her. Richard was one of them. He thought she was a “beautiful woman” and he could “relate to some of her lyrics, specifically about being lonely,” he told the Secret Service, adding that “he fell in love with her.”
After talking briefly back and forth, Richard sat down and wrote a 23-page handwritten account he titled “My Memories of Chely Wright.” He made a photocopy of the entire letter and mailed it to me in a manila envelope. It was instantly apparent flipping through the pages that this was not merely an account of a “weird experience” or a “date” but a celebrity stalking and that Richard was still unhealthily obsessed with the country star and his encounter with her.
After seeing Wright’s video, Richard went to see her perform in concert a couple times, traveling to catch shows by her in Louisville, Kentucky and again in Belton, Texas.
He had just developed the Phantom Patriot persona, and in May 2001, he returned to Zanesville to collect his inheritance. It was an ugly homecoming. Richard writes:
2001: May: Put together Phantom Patriot costume and gear. Return to Zanesville to collect inheritance. Discover “discrepancies” in tax forms and other paperwork. Government took almost half of it! Cousin Beverly had (illegally) increased her “cut” as Power of Attorney. She was a notary public and worked for a judge (co-signer). She had probably been planning this since Dad died. I was staying (temporarily) at “old maid” cousin Kathy’s house. She tried to borrow money from me, to pay off the house, even though she had plenty in the bank. I bought an RV and left town without telling anyone.
Richard found out about the Chely Wright Fan Club party she would be at in Nashville in June 2001 and made it his next destination. His parents deceased, his inheritance in his bank account, he was planning his first visit to the Bohemian Grove for July 2001. But the chance to meet Wright gave him pause. If he could meet her, he was sure they would “hit it off,” he told the Secret Service.
“I was already planning my Bohemian Grove mission, but the summer encampment was still a month away,” Richard wrote. “I knew that the odds of me getting shot or arrested in there were high. So in a way, meeting Chely in person was on my ‘bucket list.’”
WRIGHT’S ASCENSION TO COUNTRY music superstar is a classic Cinderella story. Born in 1970 to a poor family in the small town of Wellsville, Kansas (with a population of about 1,600 at the time), Wright practiced singing country songs while chopping and stacking firewood with her siblings. Her grandmother would send her audio recordings of the Grand Ole Opry. Saturday nights consisted of family and friends gathering in the living room to sing together.
Wright began to climb up a ladder of success. Her early performances were at parties, nursing homes, and “clubs and honky-tonks at age 11.” At 17, still in high school, she landed a gig as a cast member in the Ozark Jubilee show in Branson, Missouri, a Southern tourist destination. After that, she landed a spot in the Opryland USA revue show Country Music USA, in Nashville, where she portrayed country comedian legend Minnie Pearl.
Wright signed a recording contract and released her first album, Woman in the Moon, in 1994 on Polydor Records. By her third album, Let Me In, she moved to MCA Nashville, and produced a Top 20 country hit, “Shut Up and Drive.” It wasn’t until her fourth album, 1999’s Single White Female, that her career launched into star status. She started collecting awards by the armload from the Academy of Country Music and Country Music Television and the Country Music Association Awards.
In 2001, Wright was still riding the crest of that wave. That year she was voted by People magazine as one of the “50 Most Beautiful People of the Year,” and she released her third (and last album) with MCA, Never Love You Enough. Often noted as being a kind-hearted and generous person, Wright founded a charity called Reading, Writing, and Rhythm, devoted to music education. The foundation helps provide musical instruments and other equipment to schools in need. Wright was honored for her contributions in 2002 by the National Association for Music Education. By all appearances, it was a great time to be Chely Wright.
WRIGHT’S JUNE 12, 2001 fan club party was at the Wildhorse Saloon in downtown Nashville, an evening filled with performances by Wright and her country music co-stars. Later in the evening, an auction to benefit Reading, Writing, and Rhythm took place with items like a guided tour of the Country Music Hall of Fame by Wright (which sold for $2,000) and a pair of orange boxer shorts worn by country star Darryl Worley (which managed to fetch $550). But the most coveted item was the dinner date evening.
Essentially homeless and alone, thoughts of Wright were a welcome distraction in Richard’s life, and so he navigated his RV toward Nashville.
“Chely initially met the fans one-on-one, to sign autographs. A little ‘something’ passed between us as we shook hands, and I was smitten.” Richard wrote. Next, he recalls, there was a buffet dinner for the fans and Chely performed, joined by fellow country stars like Brad Paisley, Richard Marx, and Rascal Flatts. Wright was romantically linked to Paisley at the time. The two had met in 1999 and recorded a duet together in 2000, “Hard to Be a Husband, Hard to Be a Wife.” They began a short on-again, off-again frustrating relationship.
“There was an awkward tension between Chely and Brad Paisley. Word on the floor was that they had broken up a month or two before. Had a window of opportunity opened up for me?” Richard wrote on the duet performance that evening.
After the country stars performed, the charity auction began. Bidding on dinner with Chely Wright shot up to $5,000, then slowed as it approached $10,000.
“Something inside me said, ‘don’t stop!’ I finally topped the bidding out at $14,500,” Richard says.
The auctioneer sent an assistant to get Richard’s personal information, and the house lights came up. “Everyone around me was gawking at me like I was a rock star,” Richard says. “Two or three guys near me shook my hand. It was kind of cool, but a little embarrassing.” Richard met Chely Wright’s fan club president, Chuck Walter, and was hustled backstage to talk to Country Music Television.
“They stared at me like I was a zoo animal,” Richard says of the CMT crew. “I can’t remember everything that was said in the interview, but I believe the term ‘Chely’s #1 fan’ was mentioned.”
Richard didn’t get to speak to Wright that night. He talked to Chuck Walter and arranged to do a money transfer the next day.
IT TOOK A COUPLE of days to set up the date. Richard parked and set up at an RV park and waited.
“I used that time to buy a wooden plaque, paint it, and lay out a romantic poem I had written in sticker letters. I decided to wear my Marine Corps dress blues uniform on the date. I might only get one chance to impress Chely, so I was going to make it count.”
Finally, after much anticipation, the big night arrived. A limo swung through the RV park and picked up Richard around 7 p.m. Inside the limo were fan club president Chuck Walter, Wright’s publicist Shane Tarlton, and Chely herself.
“(She) was wearing a black cocktail dress, slightly above the knee. For some odd reason, she seemed a little thinner than before and visibly tired. At the time, I thought this was due to her hectic schedule.”
Wright’s schedule that week was indeed hectic. She was participating in several events centered around Nashville that featured country stars called “Fan Fair Week.” Besides her charity show and auction, the next day she presented at another charity event for Gilda’s Club at the Country Music Hall of Fame, then walked across the street to present an award at the TNN and CMT Country Weekly Music Awards. The day after that, she played in the City of Hope charity softball game, and all this before getting ready to kick off a 30-city tour. Wright was also harboring a gnawing secret about her life, weighing down heavily on her, but few people knew about it. It would come out later. Years afterward, Richard would form his own elaborate theory as to Wright’s tired appearance.
At first, Richard says that the date went well. Wright was “thrilled” with his uniform, telling him that her brother was also a Marine.
“To my surprise, Chely even suggested that it might be cool if I met him sometime. At that point, I thought, ‘this is more than just a celebrity making small talk with a fan. She genuinely likes me!’”
A police report notes:
The dinner is very impersonal so that the winner won’t get the wrong idea. [Chely Wright Fan Club representative Mark Jones] mentioned that Chely is a people person, he described her personality as making people feel comfortable around her, she is very unassuming. Richard McCaslin was the winning bidder last October [sic] 2001. McCaslin had dinner with Chely Wright. Jones said he thought McCaslin thought the dinner was more than a charity event.
As they talked in the back of the limo, Wright threw Richard a curveball when she asked if his parents were still alive. After a stunned silence, their deaths still raw in his mind, he answered, “No.” The conversation returned to normal. They talked about their shared experience in theme parks. Wright had portrayed Minnie Pearl at Opryland and Richard had been Batman at Six Flags. They spoke of workout habits and music.
“Then she said something that caused me to seriously reconsider my Bohemian Grove plans. Chely suggested that she might be able to put me in one of her upcoming videos. The look in her eye and the tone in her voice told me that she wanted me to hang around Nashville for a while… and not just for work,” Richard wrote of his interpretation of the moment.
The limo arrived at the dinner destination: Ruth’s Chris Steak House.
“I offered Chely my arm, and she eagerly took it.” They walked in, followed by Wright’s fan club president and publicist.
“CHELY CLAIMS TO HAVE been a vegetarian since 1999, but she wasn’t a vegan that night… although we did share a side dish of peas. Chely took three or four bites of her meat, then offered me the rest. You better believe I ate it. I knew a girlfriend/boyfriend bonding moment when I saw it,” Richard recalled.
After finishing the steak, the entourage headed back out to Chely’s limo.
“As we were leaving, Chely latched onto my arm and snuggled up to me. That was the proudest moment of my life! Outside the restaurant, we ran into one of her old producers. She introduced me to him like I was actually somebody.” Richard was in seventh heaven.
“Once we were back in the limo, I gave Chely the flat gift box. She asked, ‘Is it lingerie?’ I wasn’t expecting this, and all I could say was, ‘No.’ Chely then asked if she could open it. I was already blushing, and the poem was kind of sappy, so I said, ‘Wait ’til you get home.’”
“This seemed to cool her jets considerably.” Richard describes the rest of the trip back to his RV park as “uneventful” and that Chely appeared “distracted.”
“I could feel my chances with her slipping away, but I didn’t know why,” Richard admits.
Wright casually put down the padded armrest between them.
“I looked up at Chely as if to say, ‘What’s up with this?’ She didn’t respond.”
As they approached their destination, Richard asked if he would see her again.
“Chely hesitated, then to my surprise, she answered, ‘yes.’ She instructed (Walter) and (Tarlton) to secure a ticket and backstage pass for the next night’s show. Our eyes met, and I decided to test her. I leaned in a little; stopping at the armrest. Chely hesitated again, then reached over and gave me an awkward hug. I said, ‘goodnight’ and got out of the car.”
THE NEXT DAY, a hopeful Richard showed up at the convention center where Chely was performing. He wandered the center until he found Walter and Tarlton and asked for his backstage pass.
“(Walter) coldly responded, ‘we didn’t bring it.’ Both of them simply looked away from me. I was being blown off, but I didn’t know if it was their idea or Chely’s. She arrived shortly afterward, but dozens of people were already following her to the convention booth, and dozens more were on the way.”
Richard looked on helplessly as Chely and her growing crowd of fans blew past him in the hallway.
“Even if I could speak to her, I wasn’t sure how she would react. Eventually, I decided to go back to the RV park and figure out what to do next.”
The next few days must have been a depressing stretch for Richard, feeling rejected and alone in an RV park somewhere in Nashville, and this awful feeling peaked four days after his date with Chely Wright, on his 37th birthday.
“I developed severe stomach cramps. I tried to tough it out for a couple hours, but it got worse. Finally, I drove myself to the hospital; throwing up in the rental car once. It turned out that what I thought was food poisoning was actually a nervous breakdown.” The doctor prescribed some pills.
Recovering in his RV, Richard decided he would attempt to see Wright again. One more chance. He chose to attend an upcoming concert on her tour, about two weeks away at Dollywood. Richard drove to Zanesville, “messed around a while, then headed south again to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee for Wright’s show on July 7.” He bought a seat in the fifth row, to the right of the stage.
“McCaslin then wrote a letter to Ms. Wright informing her that he would be attending the concert and advising of his seating information,” Richard’s Secret Service file reports.
He brought along a note he hoped to slip to Wright that read “Remember me, Chely” with his name and number on it “and folded his old Marine Corps dog tags into it,” according to his Secret Service file.
At the Dollywood Celebrity Theater and Entertainment Park, Richard watched the show, and, he says, Chely saw him. “Chely didn’t look directly at me until the last song. I was shocked when she glared at me like I kicked her dog!”
Richard managed to get his note into the hands of one of Wright’s band members but doesn’t know if she ever received it. The summer encampment at the Bohemian Grove was a week away. Richard was lovesick and felt defeat across the board. His parents were gone, his creative endeavors hadn’t come to fruition, and his fairytale fantasy of a Chely McCaslin hadn’t happily ever happened.
“Heartbroken, I drove the RV to Monte Rio, California,” he wrote.
IN JULY 2001, RICHARD spied on club members entering the Bohemian Grove from a distance. He saw that security was tight.
“As stupid as this sounds, I was worried that if I were killed and the story got national media coverage, Chely might see it on TV and wonder if I had committed ‘suicide by cop.’ I didn’t want her to live with the guilt and I wasn’t ready to die just yet.”
Richard scrapped the mission and headed back to Austin.
IN AUSTIN, RICHARD SAYS he tried writing Chely “a couple times” through her fan club, but his Secret Service file reports it was more obsessive than that:
“[Redacted] stated that McCaslin sent two (2) letters to Ms. Wright via the Fan Club that were forwarded on to Ms. Wright. McCaslin then sent additional letters; however, they were becoming too personal and were not forwarded to Ms. Wright. The Fan Club then put McCaslin on an informal list of people considered to be a threat to Ms. Wright. According to [redacted], the Fan Club sent McCaslin letters explaining the type of letters he was sending were not appropriate and would not be forwarded to Ms. Wright. [Redacted] advised McCaslin was angry with the Fan Club for not forwarding his mail.”
But he kept trying. The Secret Service report continues by saying that in October 2001 Richard sent Wright a birthday present of “some old cassette tapes he had.”
Desperate, Richard remembered talking about Wright’s brother, stationed with the Marine Corps in Yuma, Arizona. He sent him “a letter and videotape of some of his previous stunt work,” asking him to forward it to Wright. The Secret Service reports that “Ms. Wright’s brother informed the Yuma Police Department, who contacted McCaslin regarding the package. McCaslin stated that the Yuma Police Officer that contacted him accused him of stalking Ms. Wright and advised him to discontinue his actions.”
A Secret Service agent followed up in Yuma, looking for a criminal record, but found nothing, suggesting that Richard was let off with a warning.
It looks like that’s the point Richard finally gave up on trying to contact Wright (at least for the time being).
The Secret Service report notes that “McCaslin said he is ‘angry about the situation,’ but there is not much he can do about it. McCaslin stated he would like a second chance. McCaslin stated that if Ms. Wright isn’t interested in him, then he would like to be told in person. McCaslin stated he will do the ‘honorable thing’ and keep his distance from Ms. Wright.”
Richard’s obsession with Wright remains a difficult angle of his life for his few friends to come to terms with. Lon told me he found the situation “creepy” and added “that must have been terrifying for her.” To me, the situation had hints of the current “involuntary celibate” or “incel” online subculture of men who espouse hate and violence over their inability to establish romantic or sexual relationships. I don’t think Richard would have resorted to violence in this situation, but there is a sense that he felt entitled to have a relationship with Wright because he had bought a charity dinner with her.
AFTER 9/11, RICHARD STAGED his Phantom Patriot protests and began rethinking his mission.
“I had to return to the Bohemian Grove and finish what I started… whether it killed me or not,” Richard decided.
On January 19, packed and ready to go, Richard spread his materials on the Bohemian Grove across his table for police to find.
“I got out the autographed photo of Chely and placed it on the other end of the table,” Richard wrote. He placed a note on it that warned Wright not to “be corrupted by fame and fortune.”
“I loaded my gear in the truck and headed for California,” Richard wrote.
“He felt she would receive the letter in the event he was killed,” the Secret Service report notes.
AFTER ENTERING THE GROVE, Richard got lost in the dark and broke into an empty cabin, where he sat awake, waiting for daybreak. Sitting there, shivering in the dark, Richard was devastated by emotional pain and close to ending his life.
“There is another factor in all this that I haven’t discussed—guilt. I wasn’t there when either one of my parents died, because I was pursuing my stupid show business career,” Richard wrote to Lon from prison. “A part of me felt I should end up in an institution just like they did—a fitting punishment. So I made it happen.”
And Richard wrote to me about that lonely, dark night in the Grove:
“The weight of the past few years bore down on me; the death of my parents, the loss of my childhood home and my lost opportunity with Chely. Now it looked like I might not accomplish anything in the Grove. I seriously considered suicide, but then I realized how cowardly it would look. I could at least find the owl idol in the morning and destroy it. I’d probably have the opportunity to die with some dignity in a gun battle with the cops later.”
Richard had no luck destroying the Great Owl of Bohemia but quickly found himself set up for the gun battle that could have rapidly closed the book on his story.
He stood there in the middle of the forest road, ready to shoot. But here, the thought of Chely Wright saved his life.
“It would have been so easy to just ‘go out in a blaze of glory.’ However, a totally ridiculous notion popped into my head. Was I going to throw away any chance, no matter how remote, of ever seeing Chely again? No!”
He let out a visible sigh and lowered his head, he then lowered his rifle to the ground and removed his black satchel from his shoulder and placed it on the ground. He began to remove a sidearm from a holster. I ordered him not to draw the weapon. He complied with my directions, ultimately lying prone on the roadway.
“I think it’s pretty lucky no one got hurt,” says Jeff Mitchell, who works at the Sonoma County Public Defender’s office. He would shortly be handling one of the strangest cases of his career. “There was a period of time he wasn’t following their commands. He finally did. I think it really showed restraint on the police not shooting him.”
The police rushed forward to arrest Richard. He was handcuffed and stuffed into the back of one of the patrol cars, then brought to the Sonoma County Jail in Santa Rosa.
“I was processed, fingerprinted, and my mugshot taken with a biometrics camera,” Richard wrote. “I now belonged to Big Brother.”