It was not until July 29, 1999, that the FBI file made mention of the departure of Annie, Pooh, and Allyson from Cooper Hill. According to the file, the Lakeside agent (Fillerup’s name is again redacted) had received word from an IRS representative saying “that (redacted) of Bill Cooper” had been located in California. The information came to the IRS from members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office (LACSO) who had discovered Annie and the kids while investigating a crime in the same house.
When Annie’s identity as a federal fugitive came to light, the FBI file said, the authorities suggested she would likely “receive favorable treatment from the prosecutor and the court if she assists investigators.” As the agent writing the report said, the absence of Annie and the kids “may allow for more and better options to apprehend Bill, while minimizing risks to federal agents, Cooper’s associates, and Cooper himself.”
On November 22, 1999, Cooper opened his broadcast with more bad news about his family. His beloved mother, whom he described in Behold a Pale Horse as “the kindest, gentlest woman that I have ever known,” had suffered a stroke. She was in a hospital in Harlingen, Texas, not far from his parents’ Gulf Coast retirement home in Port Isabel.
“She can’t do anything. She can’t brush her teeth, she can’t brush her hair, can’t talk, can’t walk. She’s trapped. It must be horrible for her.” He didn’t see “a good outcome,” Cooper despaired, adding that “this is the worst year of my entire life. I don’t know if the stars are turned upside down or someone put a curse on me, or what.”
The really maddening part, Cooper told the audience, was that his father, brother, and sister were giving him “a lot of flack because I’m not there.”
As usual, his family didn’t understand the situation. “There’s a federal warrant for my arrest,” Cooper wailed. He couldn’t even leave his house, much less come to Texas. To do so would be to walk right into a trap. It was one of the “favorite tricks” of the “Nazi jackbooted KGB thugs,” Cooper said. “They keep tabs on your relatives and when one of them gets sick or dies, they’re at the funeral, or the hospital, waiting for you to show up.”
His family couldn’t “get that through their heads,” Cooper said. All he got from them was an endless whine. “If you really loved your mother you’d be here,” they said. Asking the audience to keep his mother in their prayers, Cooper said that he would provide updates on her condition, “as depressing as it is.” Then he put on one of Dovie Cooper’s favorite songs, Willie Nelson’s version of “Stardust.” He hoped the song would give her “some comfort,” Cooper said.
That was “pretty much the end between Bill and his family,” Doyel said as we sat chowing down on plates of “chicken-fried chicken,” a specialty of the house at the Safire Restaurant in Springerville.
Asked why he’d stayed, Doyel said he wasn’t going to leave a friend like that any more than he’d leave a fellow soldier on the battlefield. In retrospect, given the grim circumstances, much of his life on Cooper Hill sounded funny.
“Here I was, a trained combat veteran, in Desert Storm. And I was marching up and down in full body armor guarding Bill Cooper’s backyard,” Doyel said, cackling at the absurdity of the memory.
“We had a bunch of Radio Shack motion sensors that we stuck in the ground around the house. It was a waste of money because jackrabbits kept setting them off,” Doyel reported. “A few days later, I heard Bill bragging to the HOTT audience that the compound was so secure that a jackrabbit can’t twitch its nose without us knowing about it.
“I had a routine. In the mornings and early afternoons, Bill and I prepared that night’s broadcast. Then I’d go pick up the mail, go shopping. I’d go into the supermarket and there would be someone on the government dime snapping a picture of me buying a head of lettuce. That sort of thing.”
There was still the show to put on, but for the most part, he and Cooper passed the days quietly, Doyel said with a touch of nostalgia. “We’d go run the dogs, hang around the back porch barbecuing. . . . I’d find these giant puffball mushrooms, big as a dinner plate; we’d cut them up and put them on the grill. We had secret knocks and code words. I’d whistle a certain way so he knew it was me. . . . We would sit there on the porch in the summertime listening to Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM show. Bill would refute everything he said, point for point.
“Bill was so used to thinking he was the smartest person in the room, he just ran over people,” Doyel recalled. “‘Do your own research,’ that was his big advice, except he didn’t follow it. After a while he decided he knew everything worth knowing. Mention a topic and he already knew all about it.
“That wasn’t going to work with me. We had some incredible arguments, about history, religion. They’d go on for days. I kind of miss that, because I could usually trip him up one way or another. But I’d be lying to say I didn’t learn things from him, just on the age difference alone.
“One time we decided we were going to sneak down the mountain and go to Belize. We even got passport pictures taken. Another time we were going to travel to Europe and join the Knights of Malta. ‘They’ll be happy to see us,’ Bill said, ‘we already know their secrets.’
“We had a pact from the beginning that if they killed me first, Bill would get all my research and writings and if they got him, I would carry on with his work,” Doyel said.
Then one day, a young Cooper acolyte who’d helped with the start-up of Veritas drove in from LA with some friends. “This woman, someone’s girlfriend, came over to me,” Doyel recalled. “She smiled and said, ‘So you’re Bill’s new nigger.’
“I think it was supposed to be a joke, but it really stuck with me. It was more than just the word. At the time, I was working as a lineman for the cable company, doing all kinds of overtime. I was basically supporting the whole Hour of the Time operation.
“Meanwhile, Bill was sitting on his ass ordering this stuff online. Once he realized he could buy stuff without leaving the house, he went hard on that. He bought camera equipment, stamp collections, old ’78s, model airplanes. One time he bought a bunch of clocks from decommissioned Russian battleships. The UPS guy was coming all the time; we made him call from the road because we didn’t want just anyone dropping by.
“The stuff piled up. There were some packages Bill never bothered to open. I’d scream at him, like what are you going to do with this shit? How was this going to help restore the Constitution?
“Then there was this day when I noticed that Bill’s name wasn’t mentioned on the website with the federal fugitives. In the beginning, he’d been right up there, in the top ten. Now he wasn’t there at all. I thought he’d be happy they dropped him off the list. ‘Bill, you won,’ I said.
“He got mad. He said this was a trick, some way to get him to give up. One day he said he wasn’t sure if he could trust me anymore. Now I was an agent like everyone else. That was it. I’d been up, taking care of him, basically being his caretaker, fucking popping these gross pustules he got on his back, helping him with his leg, and he’s saying he can’t trust me.”
After that, even though he continued to help prepare the Hour of the Time broadcasts, Doyel left the hill, moving down into the flatlands below. “Even then, I’d get home from work and then like three minutes later the telephone rang. It was Bill. He could see my house from his window. He was up there with binoculars, watching, waiting for me to get back.
“Sometimes he’d call in the middle of the night, saying he saw headlights on the road. I’d get my clothes on and go up there. But there was nothing. He was just lonely. He’d go into that business about how we were brothers, that we should stick together. You know, what are you going to do? I had a lot of love for the guy, no matter how he acted. So I said, yeah. I’ll come up. Like old times.
“Then he’d say, ‘Hey, Doyel, mind picking up a bottle of Jack on the way?’”
As always, even as he felt his eyesight was going, Cooper continued to work in manic spurts, putting out new issues of Veritas, updating the website (which now had a chat room), and broadcasting on WBCQ. In July 2000, as members of the audience continued to pray for him and support his stand by sending him homemade cookies and Laser Mind energy pills to keep his brain sharp, Cooper predicted the return of the Bush family to power.
Cooper saw the Mystery Babylon machinations at work in the Ralph Nader candidacy. It was the Perot gambit in reverse, except this time to sway votes from Democrats. The election was going to be close, so Nader didn’t have to get a lot of votes, just enough “to make George Bush Jr. the führer-to-be.”
Then, in mid-June, Cooper opened his show by saying he’d received an e-mail that “had changed my entire life.” It was from Jessica Dovie Cooper, the daughter he had with Sally Phillips in 1980. He hadn’t seen her since she was a little kid.
“Hi,” Cooper read from Jessica’s e-mail on the air. “I’m not sure what to say, or how to start this. I guess just, I am your daughter. I’ve been looking for you for so many years that I’d almost given up. I got this website from Aunt Connie; Grandpa told me she contacted you on it when Grandma had her stroke.
“I feel there is one thing I should make clear from the start; I have no ill will toward you. I don’t hate or resent you. I’m not looking for some perfect father figure to enter my life as if he was always there. I don’t even want money. I just want you.
“I look in the mirror and see a stranger’s face. A bit of my mother, of course. But then there are those characteristics that are just, sort of there. I want to see the face of my father in my own but I can’t. I’ve never seen the face of my father at all. I have some old black-and-white photos that Grandma sent me, but they are small and from a long time ago. I met my brother, your son Anthony, and my sister Jennifer a few years back. I am slightly calmed by the fact that you were nice and receptive to Tony. Jenny said you were nice as well. I can only dream that you will show the same loving kindness to me as well.
“Please e-mail me as soon as you can. Respectfully yours, Jessica D. Cooper.”
When he first read the e-mail, Cooper told listeners, “I couldn’t believe it. I thought someone was messing around with my head. I started to get very emotional. I read it again, and again. I must have read it forty or fifty times.
“Believe me, I was scared, but at the same time I had this incredible hope. All this love for a little girl that had left when she was four years old,” Cooper said, clarifying that he didn’t really leave Jessica.
“She was taken away from me,” he said. According to Cooper, he had “done everything I could do to hold that family together.” But it wasn’t to be. His wife Sally “met another man and fell in love with him.”
He still loved Sally, Cooper said. She was brilliantly intelligent, witty and sharp and fun. When she walked into a room, every eye looked at her. “When we fought, we fought ‘tooth and nail.’” But when they loved, it was “one of the greatest loves in the history of the earth.”
This was the cauldron of passion from which Jessica emerged, Cooper said. When Sally decided to leave, he found himself faced with “two choices.” He could “resort to violence and snatch her. Or I could move on. I moved on.”
This didn’t jibe with Sally’s version of their marriage, the one that had Cooper kicking her and Jessica out of the car in Long Beach. Sally said she felt bad for leaving Bill while he was in the VA hospital after his breakdown, but that was the best chance for her and Jessica to get away.
None of that changed the urgency of Jessica’s e-mail. Not knowing what to do, leery of a cruel deception on the part of feds, Cooper called Doyel, asked him to stop by the Safeway and pick up a bottle of scotch. He needed a stiff drink.
“Please be my little Jessica,” Cooper wrote back, recalling the times “I changed your little diapers, sang to you, pushed you in your stroller.” He’d taken many pictures of her, Cooper wrote, “some of which were very good.” But he didn’t have them anymore, Maybe Sally did. A few hours later, Jessica replied.
“Daddy!” she wrote.
“Daddy, exclamation point,” Cooper told listeners. “That stopped me right in my tracks. Daddy, with an exclamation point . . . When I saw that, I knew I had struck gold, the kind of gold that is really hard to come by.”
He went back to reading Jessica’s second e-mail. “I heard from Tony that you had written a book. I wanted to get a copy but I didn’t know the name,” she wrote. “I have looked for you for so long, almost five years now. I went to lengths you wouldn’t believe. I never had money for an investigation. And now here you are, on the net. In print. I want to know everything about you, and selfishly, the part of you when there was me. Father’s Day is coming up soon—”
Cooper stopped. He couldn’t get the words out. “Father’s Day . . . Father’s Day . . . is coming soon . . .”
It was “a day that is always sad and very hard for me,” Cooper read, audibly weeping. “I am exhilarated that now I really have a father for the Day. Perfect timing, huh? I have so much to say. . . . This is the most important day of my twenty little years so far, thank you, your old daughter, Jessica.”
Cooper composed himself. “And now she wants to come to see me,” he told the audience. “Boy. Won’t that be something? That might cause a flood here in Eagar. So you better start building your dikes right now. But we need the water, real bad. So I don’t think anyone will complain.”
Three weeks later, instead of the usual sirens and snarling dogs, Cooper began his show with the 1930s standard “I Miss You So,” the original 1937 version by slick Chicago crooners the Cats and the Fiddle. “I Miss You So” had been “in the back of my head without me even knowing it” ever since he lost Jessica, Cooper said. Now he could finally play it.
Cooper provided a little exposition, saying how he’d asked Doyel to drive the four hours to Phoenix to meet Jessica at the airport. Cooper spent the time fixing up Jessica’s room and scrubbing out the bathroom so it was “spotless.”
When the truck finally arrived on Cooper Hill, Doyel parked in “a different place than he ever parked before.” The doors didn’t open for a long time but when they did, “out stepped this very tall, very beautiful young woman and she just rushed into my arms.”
Now, a few days later, Jessica was sitting right beside him, sharing the Hour of the Time microphone. “Let me paint a picture of her for you,” Cooper said. “She’s five foot nine. She’s got beautiful long brown hair, and the most beautiful smile I think I have ever seen in my life. No, that’s not true because it’s her mother’s smile. But also much her own, too.” He went on, singing his daughter’s praises, talking about her great intelligence, her grace, her sense of humor, but Jessica soon interrupted.
“He’s lying,” she said, with a perfectly deadpan delivery. That made them both laugh, a special laugh that fathers and daughters have with each other. Five minutes into the show, they were already a team.
Cooper opened the phones. There was Joe from North Carolina, Danny from Texas, Bob from Long Island, regulars like “Captain Audio.” Everyone wanted to welcome Jessica. Many had been praying for Cooper in his standoff against Mystery Babylon and its federal hired guns. Those prayers were answered. If God had seen fit to take Annie, Pooh, and Allyson away, He’d seen fit to bring Jessica home.
After a while the phones went still. Cooper was about to sign off when he said, “Do you like to dance, Jess?”
“Ohhh,” she replied noncommittally.
“Would you dance with me?”
Then, because he already had it cued up, Cooper played Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love.” Perhaps it was the title that caught his attention, or that he liked the tune’s muted gypsy swing, but it was an unsettling selection on Cooper’s part. Cohen himself said the song was inspired by the string quartets who played at Nazi death camps, “beside the crematoria, pressed into performance while this horror was going on.”
Still, an author’s intention and the listener’s reaction need not be the same. So, in the tiny radio station on the besieged hill, Cooper and Jessica danced together, into the night.
If you wanted to write a book about Bill Cooper, she was as good a person to talk to as any, said Jessica, now Jessica Caulboy, when we spoke fifteen years after her visit to Eagar in the summer of 2000.
This was because, she said, “I’m exactly like my dad. I’m a violent alcoholic.”
The statement was borne out by the thirty-four-year-old Jessica’s current residence, which was the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon, ninety-five miles up I-5 from her home in Eugene.
Her incarceration stemmed from an August 2011 incident in which the Lane County Sheriff’s Office responded to a domestic-violence call to find three people—Jessica, her live-in boyfriend, and a neighbor—all bleeding from stab wounds. According to the cops, Jessica and her boyfriend had gotten into an argument and when a friend, attempted to intervene, he wound up being stabbed in the chest with a kitchen knife.
Well into her second year (of three) at Coffee Creek, Jessica wasn’t denying the charges. “We’d been drinking. This really big guy, six foot two, 340 pounds, pushed me against a wall. I got knocked out cold. When I came to, I lost it, went spider monkey all over him, completely destroyed the house, trashed a computer. I don’t like to fight but when I do, I want to fuck you up. Every aspect of my life has been full of this sort of craziness.”
Like many of his ideas, Bill Cooper’s genetics have staying power. Jessica bears a facial resemblance to him, as does his older daughter, Jennifer. According to Janice Pell, her son Tony not only sounded like Cooper but also used similar expressions, stuff she’d never heard anyone else say.
“Tony doesn’t remember ever seeing Bill in the flesh,” Janice Pell said. “But sometimes, I’d look at him and just see Bill. It was a strange way to feel. It was like Bill was still there, haunting me after all these years.”
Jessica and I had an arrangement. I put money into her phone account and she called me at 1:00 P.M. every day she felt like it. We’d chat for the State-allotted thirty minutes until the computer voice said to stop and the call went dead.
Sometimes she couldn’t get on the line. There were 140 inmates in her “dorm” and phone time was tight. There would often be a racket in the background that made conversation difficult. “There are so many lunatic bitches in here, watching these idiot TV shows, fighting to get over to ‘beauty bar’ so they can put this shit on their faces like they’re going anywhere,” Jessica said. She had some friends in the joint, but in jail you couldn’t really trust anyone. Everyone was a potential enemy.
That much and a lot more was going to be in the book she was writing about her incarceration, tentatively called Everything I Know I Learned in Prison. It was a “part diary, part Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, AA-type thing; a do-and-don’t about how not to get killed in a hellhole like this,” she said. “People who say the world would be better if it were run by loving, caring women have never spent any time in a women’s prison, that is for sure.”
When asked if by writing a book in jail she was carrying on the Cooper literary tradition of Behold a Pale Horse, the classic prison book, Jessica laughed. The reputation of her father’s book lived on at Coffee Creek, she said. “The older inmates know it. Some of the younger ones, too, because their dad or boyfriends had it.”
On the outside, people sometimes asked about her father. She recalled one time she was working as a waitress around Eugene when “this young guy asked me if I was Bill Cooper’s daughter. I said I was and he looks me right in the eye and says, ‘I’d take a bullet for you.’”
In jail, though, she tried to avoid such interactions. It was a recommendation she was going to include in her prison book. “If anyone comes up to you that you don’t know or don’t want to talk to, just start crying. Big tears. A lot of muffled shrieks. That usually stops them in their tracks.”
Getting thrown into the hole was a relief. For one thing, Jessica said, “they give you better treatment in solitary because they’re nervous you’ll commit suicide, which is a drag for them, paperwork-wise. At least it’s quiet, so you can actually think. I like to read these long romantic poems in the hole. Emily Dickinson. Lord Byron. Edgar Allan Poe. I just got his complete works . . . anything as long as it’s downbeat and heartbroken.”
The problem with the hole was no phone privileges, which prevented her from talking to her then two-year-old son, who was living with his father. Every night that she could, she got on the phone to read her son a bedtime story, sing him a song. He loved it, but that was no way to grow up, with a mom who was “a woman in a cage, a voice singing on the phone.”
While not denying responsibility for her bad actions, she pointed out the DNA of the situation. It was one of the complaints she had against her mother.
“I love my mother but she has problems. She’s a hoarder. When I was about five, after we left my dad, she decided that the best thing for us to do was ride around in a Greyhound bus for months, sleeping in these crazy places like hippies. There were all these stepfathers I never connected with. She wasn’t a bad mother, just a little careless. There’s a lot of rainbows and unicorns in my mother’s world. But she married my father, who was mentally ill. That’s how they came up with me.”
Recalling her visit to Eagar, Jessica said, “My dad sent me the ticket. I was supposed to stay fifteen days. But I only stayed a week. One week. That’s how long I got to spend with my father.
“I was twenty. I’d never been anywhere like Arizona. I knew he was in trouble with feds, but no one told me about what the scene was. All I heard was my mother telling my father, ‘Don’t let her drink.’
“Doyel came to meet me at the airport in Phoenix. It took us a while to find each other because I didn’t know what he was supposed to look like. It was like 115 degrees and his truck had no air-conditioning. From the beginning I could tell he didn’t like me but at least he was polite about it.
“Then I saw my father and he just looked so incredibly happy to see me, I jumped into his arms. I was really anxious but then I saw his room. His bed, his fake leg. It seemed like a normal person’s bed. This messy, cluttered, normal person’s bed. He used Old Spice. That seemed so perfect. Old Spice. Like that was what a father was supposed to smell like. It was an amazing feeling.
“He’d tried to clean up but the place was a wreck. But Pooh and Allyson’s room, that was just how they left it. All their toys were still there, their teddy bears. That got to me. When I first found out about my father on the Internet, he was always talking about Pooh and Allyson. He never mentioned me or Tony or Jennifer. I thought, ‘I’m his kid, too.’ I was bitter about it.
“But now my heart went out to him. When Annie and the kids left, they didn’t take anything, just the clothes on their back. It was so sad. Me, him, them. All of us together. One of Allyson’s little tiny shoes was on the coffee table in the living room, like my dad had been looking at it. That’s still vivid to me. Allyson’s shoe. That’s what I remember most.”
As for how things turned out during her Eagar trip, Jessica said, it was “upsetting to think about.” Since Cooper couldn’t go out for fear of capture, father and daughter spent hours in front of the TV, watching movies.
“My father really liked these old movies. Black-and-white, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne. I wanted to see something newer.” They were watching the Spike Lee film School Daze and he said, “How can you keep watching this propaganda?” “I said he didn’t understand modern society. He started making this big speech. I don’t really remember the details, but I wasn’t in the mood. I said, ‘Can’t we just watch the movie?’”
This seemed to set Cooper off, Jessica said. The argument over the movie quickly escalated to long-suppressed resentments. Jessica got up in the middle, went into her room, and locked the door. Then Cooper was outside, banging on the door, telling her to open up.
“I started to get scared,” Jessica told me. “There was so much pent-up feelings and we were trying to pretend like everything was so magical. It kills me just to think about it. He yelled, ‘You’re just like your mother!’” I screamed back, ‘Of course I am! She raised me, not you!’ . . . That’s when I freaked out and called 9-1-1. I just had to get out of there.”
According to an Eagar police report, at 10:24 P.M. on July 19, 2000, local officers Crowe and Czarnyszka responded to what was called “a domestic disturbance” on Cooper Hill. What officers found is summed up in a fax from Eagar police chief Scott Garms to FBI Special Agent Steve Fillerup under the subject line “Another Cooper Report.”
Garms’s account said “everything had been going okay, but they were drinking that night and watching movies. Cooper flipped out for no reason and scared Jessica to death. She refused to go back into the house. She abandoned all her property there and we took her to a motel with nothing but her pajamas.”
The next day, Garms wrote, “My secretary got Jessica some new clothes and drove her to Show Low so she could take a bus back to Phoenix.” Garms’s note added that “Jessica’s mother Sally Phillips called the next day to check on her status. She described Bill as someone with some very good qualities; however, he has gone off the deep end with the UFO stuff and she thinks he has a mental illness.”
“I felt pretty numb after the whole thing,” Jessica told me from Coffee Creek. “My father kept calling to try to talk to me. Finally my mother put me on the phone with him. He told me he loved me. He was so, so sorry. He wanted me to come back. Nothing like that would happen again.”
Shortly thereafter, Jessica said, some men from the US Marshals office came to see her. “They’d been watching me. They knew everything about me. They wanted me to help them make a map of my dad’s house and tell them where all the guns he had were. They told me that my father was going to get arrested sooner or later and they didn’t want anyone, including him, to get hurt. So I told them there were a lot of guns. There was hardly any place where the guns weren’t. I was a twenty-year-old girl; I didn’t want my father to get shot.”
The feds told Jessica they had a plan. She was to go back to Eagar accompanied by “a really handsome” US Marshal pretending to be her boyfriend. The two of them would convince Cooper to leave his house to go eat in Los Dos Molinos, a Springerville Mexican restaurant he liked.
“It was supposed to a normal night but in reality everyone in the place would be agents pretending to be normal customers,” Jessica recounted. “At some signal I was supposed to go to the bathroom and then they’d arrest him. No one would get hurt. The agent playing my boyfriend wouldn’t break his cover, so Dad would never know I was in on it. This was like the dumbest plan ever. Really stupid.
“I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘You want me to rat out my own father? You got to be kidding.’” Then, Jessica said, the feds started bargaining. “They wanted to give me five hundred dollars and an apartment so I could move out from my mother. They wanted me to sell out my dad for five hundred dollars and an apartment.”
Jessica called Cooper to tell him about the meeting. That night Cooper responded with a broadcast called “Something to Die For.” The show, somewhat mysteriously, does not appear in the roster of The Complete Cooper but rather can be found on the web in an intermittently audible bootleg version. Cooper collector Graceful Watchman posted it on YouTube. Cosmic089 also put it up, adding that “Something to Die For” was the most prophetic show William Cooper ever made. “He KNEW how his life would end,” cosmic089 wrote.
“I am very upset tonight. I’m very angry, on the verge of . . . I’m not even going to mention what I am on the verge of,” Cooper began his program, sounding drunk and impossibly weary. “I talked to my daughter Jessica earlier this evening. . . . She said the United States Marshals are after her in an attempt to make her betray me. They want her to tell them all about my house. All about the rooms and what’s in the rooms and how many weapons are here . . . and how I am going to defend myself should they come after me.”
The Marshals Service had “intimidated” Jessica, Cooper said. “In fact, they terrorized her. They told her if she did not cooperate, she might go to prison. She’s twenty years old! She’s never known me or seen me in her whole life until recently, when she came and spent some time with me.”
Cooper then went off on Eagar Police Chief Garms. He was nothing but a “stinking little shit,” a “federal rat.” Didn’t he know that he had been elected to protect and serve the people of Eagar, not to spy on residents and report back to the feds? Garms, the Eagar Police, on up to county and state officials, the US Marshals, the FBI, and BATF were one and the same, Cooper said. They weren’t working for the United States government. They were working “for Satan, for deception, for lies.” They were “puke-faced, lying, threatening, despicable, dishonest, unethical, blackmailing, suck-ass, immoral bastards” who would rather pick on a twenty-year-old girl than come up Cooper Hill and face him.
It went on like this for nearly fifty minutes without stop. He didn’t care what the FAA or FCC had to say. He was “an American patriot, an American fighting man” and if need be, he was “going to come off this mountain and personally start the restoration of the constitutional republic” all by himself. If Garms or anyone else threatened his daughter, his family, or his friends ever again, he would “lay a path across this nation that no one will ever forget.”
“Come on, come on,” he kept shouting. “Find your balls! Come on up here. Chickenshit bastards!”
More than a decade before, in the introduction to Behold a Pale Horse, Cooper wrote, “I believe with all my heart that God put me in places and in positions throughout my life so that I would be able to deliver this warning to His people. I pray that I have been worthy and that I have done my job.”
That was when he set down what he called MY CREED, where he lists the four things that he stood inviolately behind. First, Cooper wrote, “I believe in God, the same God in which my ancestors believed.” Second, “I believe in the Constitution of the Republic of the United States of America, without interpretation, as it was written and meant to work.” Third, “I believe in the family unit and, in particular, my family unit.” Fourth, and last, Cooper said, “I believe that any man without principles that he is ready and willing to die for at any given moment is already dead and is of no use or consequence whatsoever.”
So much had been lost over the years. God remained silent in Cooper’s struggle with the Devil. The Constitution had been victimized out of sheer neglect, proving once and for all time that Ben Franklin had been right when he doubted humanity’s ability to live up to the document’s intentions. Cooper’s family was gone. There was nothing left but the fourth tenet of his Creed, the resolve not to give in.
Some weeks after Jessica’s departure from Cooper Hill, Doyel came up to visit. “I came up to work on a couple of broadcasts. Bill was in a funny sort of mood. We were standing in front of the house, by the cars. Then he turned to me and said he figured it out, decided what he was going to do now.”
“Well,” Cooper told Doyel, “I can always be a martyr.”