For years the kids of Eagar-Springerville looked forward to riding their bikes on what used to be called R.V. Hill. It was the highest place around and, before the town’s modest sprawl, out on the edge of things. A boy could ride to the top and feast his young eyes upon the delightsome land the Heavenly Father had provided for his Saints in which to dwell. Then, having offered thanks to Creation, that same boy could ride down the hill as fast and wild as he wanted, front wheels rimming six-inch-deep rain ruts in the unpaved road, no helmet on, chancing fate with every unseen stone.
Scott Hamblin, who grew up in the Round Valley, was one of those boys back in the seventies and eighties. Now Dr. Scott Reynolds Hamblin, he felt a sweet continuity when he opened his own practice in Eagar. He’d fulfilled his outreach ministry, graduated medical school, done his residency. He opened his medical practice on North Main Street. He was a cherished and indispensable member of the community. He was home.
On July 11, 2001, Dr. Hamblin, wife, Deanna, and their young daughters went out for a run at Water Canyon near Big Lake in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. It was beautiful up there on the early summer evenings, a decade before the Wallow Fire burned everything to the ground. Driving back to Eagar in their van, the Hamblins stopped off at the Dairy Queen for ice cream cones. A thunderstorm was rolling in. They decided it’d be fun to drive over to the old R.V. Hill road to watch the lightning streak across the sky.
What happened next was a “most bizarre occurrence,” Dr. Hamblin wrote in the statement he filed with the Eagar Police Department the next morning.
After about ten minutes, “the kids were ready to go home, so we started back,” Hamblin’s report read. “As we turned down the hill, a vehicle pulled up very close behind us with brights on. He followed us VERY closely till the bottom of the hill. At the stop sign he was within inches of our van.”
The truck continued to tailgate the Hamblins’ vehicle to their home on East Second Street, about a mile away, pulling into their driveway right behind them. Hamblin remembered “a premonition” he had earlier about the hill where he played as a boy. He’d heard there was a man up there “who was in some way connected to Timothy McVeigh.” Now, looking at the pickup idling ominously in his driveway, he wondered if he should have taken the feeling more seriously.
Hamblin told Deanna to get the kids inside.
He took a few steps toward the truck when the driver got out and yelled, “Stay the f— off my hill!”
Hamblin told the man, whom he did not recognize, that he and his family hadn’t meant to go on his property. They just wanted to watch the lightning.
“I know what the hell you were doing up there!” the man shouted. “You were spying on me!”
“I don’t even know who you are,” Dr. Hamblin replied. The man then approached and stuck his index finger hard into the doctor’s chest. “Then you better find out who I am,” he said.
According to his statement, Hamblin grabbed the man’s finger and bent it back “forcefully.” After that, the driver “stepped back to his pickup, leaned over, and picked up a small, squarish handgun. He pointed it within one foot of my face and charged it.” Glaring at Dr. Hamblin, the man said, “Don’t you EVER come up my hill again.” Then he got in his truck and drove away.
Soon after filing their complaint, Dr. Hamblin and his wife were asked to look at a police photo array of potential suspects. They both immediately pointed to picture number 3. To the surprise of no one, it was Bill Cooper.
Cooper had been involved in several such incidents since declaring himself at war with the federal government. In December 1999, he’d run off the coach of the beloved Elks, the Round Valley High School football team.
Cooper was ordering people off property he did not own. The lot where his house sat was the extent of his holdings. He justified these actions by saying he was only performing his duties as the duly registered captain of the Neighborhood Watch program. “We’re the only ones up here, so we’re the neighborhood,” Cooper told listeners.
Cooper’s attempt to control his privacy perimeter was further complicated by the hill’s long-established status as the town’s lover’s lane. Round Valley residents had been groping one another in the back seats of cars in the vicinity of North Clearview Circle long before Bill Cooper declared the hill the last bastion of constitutional law in the country.
“They think this is the Blueberry Hill of Eagar, Arizona,” Cooper complained on The Hour of the Time, saying he was sick of cleaning up the used condoms and beer cans. Cooper’s intervention with time-honored Round Valley rites of passage sparked some resentment at the high school and in bars over in Springerville. Driving up to Cooper Hill and making a racket became a town dare. If you got “old man Cooper” to come raging out of his house on his fake leg with his gun and killer dog, you were a winner.
“I could barely see the driver the whole time he was following us. I only saw the grille of the truck. Even that looked angry,” Dr. Hamblin told me when I visited him at his pleasant Eagar home in 2016. In his early fifties, Hamblin and his family had thrived in the years since their run-in with Cooper. The doctor’s practice, where he specializes in hospice and palliative care, was doing well and he had helped many people.
Friendly and accommodating, the doctor drove over from his office to meet me at his house for lunch. He wife, Deanna, had prepared a lovely spread. In retrospect, it was “fascinating and scary” to revisit the fifteen-year-old incident, Hamblin said. It wasn’t every day that “someone points a gun in your face in front of your house.”
The memories came tumbling back. “One thing I recall,” Hamblin told me. “When I pulled back his finger, it was cold, there was no resistance at all. Like clay.” But the main thing Hamblin took away from the incident, he said with a sharp laugh, was that “I didn’t die. I didn’t die that night.”
Deanna was proud of how her husband handled himself. “I’m a person with a strong faith,” she said. “I probably should have been petrified but I wasn’t. I was with my children and family. That’s where I was supposed to be, so I felt things would work the way they were supposed to.
“Being with our family, I think that’s what saved Scott,” Deanna went on. “He was a man with a family and he was protecting his family. He wasn’t backing down, even with a gun cocked in his face. I think that he . . . Mr. Cooper . . . realized that.”
Deanna turned to her husband. “I think that’s why you’re still here,” she said.
What most bothered Hamblin in the immediate aftermath of the encounter was what he then took to be inaction on the part of the Eagar police. “After I filed the report, I thought they would arrest him. But they didn’t seem to be doing anything.”
Hamblin became more adamant that something be done about Cooper. He understood that Cooper was a federal fugitive and it was the FBI that was largely calling the shots. Yet it was intolerable that someone could put his family in danger in his hometown without any repercussions from the local officials, many of whom were his friends and patients.
“At the time, I thought they were afraid to go up the hill. To tell you the truth, I thought they were cowards,” Hamblin told me over lunch. The inaction was surprising. After all, it wasn’t as if the Hamblins were nobodies in the Round Valley.
Across southern Apache County, certain names come up over and over again. The Lees, the Browns, the Burkes, the Crosbys, the Udalls, and the Romneys are but a few. These are the descendants of the “pioneer families,” Mormon believers who settled the Little Colorado basin during the 1870s and 1880s. These were the people who built the Big Ditch, people whose descendants continue to make up much of the Round Valley establishment. However, few family names inspire the same kind of reverence as Hamblin. To get to Dr. Hamblin’s house from Highway 260, it is best to make a right on Hamblin Street. As of this writing, the mayor of Eagar is Bryce Hamblin.
The prestige of the name derives in no small part from the defining role played by Jacob Vernon Hamblin in the early days of the LDS Church’s singular place in the epic of the American West. Born into an Ohio farming family in 1819, Jacob Hamblin went west with Brigham Young after the death of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith at the hands of an angry mob in Carthage, Illinois, in 1844.
A member of the feared Mormon militias, Hamblin was widely rumored to have been involved in the infamous 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre in which 120 members of a California-bound wagon train were allegedly killed in a Mormon ambush. Hamblin’s main task, however, was to defend the Saints against the Lamanites, as the Native Americans were called.
It was a struggle predicated on scripture, part of the prehistory of the continent as described in the Golden Plates, one of the most significant of American secret documents. Found in the same upstate New York area that gave birth to the Millerites and translated from the “reformed Egyptian” language by the prophet Joseph Smith with help from the Angel Moroni, the Book of Mormon offered a history of the early American races, including the “delightsome” light-skinned Nephites and the Lamanites, whose rebelliousness against God caused them to bear the curse of dark skin. By 420 AD, the warlike Lamanites had wiped out the Nephites. But with Joseph Smith’s discovery of the plates, the descendants of Nephites, the resurrected Latter-day Saints of Jesus Christ, had returned to reclaim their ordained place in the New World holy land.
Then, as the story went, Jacob Hamblin found himself face-to-face with a formidable member of the Lamanites. The Lamanite shot his arrow as Hamblin fired his gun. Neither was hurt in any way. For Hamblin, it was a revelation. As he wrote in his diary, “The Holy Spirit forcibly impressed me that it was not my calling to shed the blood of the scattered remnant of Israel, but to be a messenger of peace to them.”
Appointed by Brigham Young as the “Special Apostle to the Lamanites,” Hamblin spent the rest of his life as the LDS ambassador to the native population, learning their languages, sitting by their council fires. In the sacred Hopi village of Oraibi, Hamblin broke bread with elders who told him his arrival had long been foretold by shamans.
Eventually weary from his travels, Hamblin was given a last task by Brigham Young. He led a group of pioneers to the edge of the White Mountains and became presiding elder of the Round Valley Branch of the Little Colorado Stake. He’s buried in the woods of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, where his gravestone reads PEACE MAKER IN THE CAMP OF THE LAMANITES.
“It is a tremendous history,” said Dr. Hamblin, who, like his namesake, had just been elected president of Round Valley Stake.
Bill Cooper had a different take on LDS history. As far as Cooper was concerned, the Mormons were a “power structure that controlled staggering resources and was organized for absolute authoritarianism.” They were just one more branch of Mystery Babylon.
In a 1993 broadcast entitled “The Godmakers,” Cooper told the audience that Mormons believed that “if a married couple produces many children and conforms to the teachings of the church, when they die, they will be gods and be given a planet of their own.”
What crap this was, Cooper said, bemoaning the sheeple’s capacity for self-delusion. “Where do these people get their egos? ‘I’ll be a god!’ Yeah, sure you will.”
Later, in a 1996 broadcast called “Truths about Mormonism,” Cooper said that he lived “in Mormon territory.” The vast majority of LDS members were “good, honest, wonderful people,” Cooper said. But that didn’t negate the fact that Joseph Smith was a 32nd-degree Freemason, who at the moment of his death was heard to shout “Oh Lord, my God, is there no help for the widow’s son?,” the traditional Masonic distress call. Beyond that, Cooper said, the LDS Church followed “apartheid” racial policies, to say nothing of the fact that an abnormally high number of LDS members joined the CIA and FBI, working in “covert operations, black projects, and intelligence-gathering organizations.”
During the siege, Cooper got into a dispute with Stephen Udall, a member of the Eagar City Council. Cooper said, “Where I live, you can’t walk one hundred yards without running into a member of the Udall family.” Most of them were “nice, wonderful people.” But Councilman Udall was snooping around, invading Cooper Hill space, having driven up the approach road that, typically enough, was called Udall Street.
Cooper went out to inform the councilman about the “situation,” and why access had to be restricted. “If an innocent person happens to be here when the federal government decides to come up here and kill us, they could be killed themselves,” Cooper told the audience, explaining how he went outside with Crusher and told Councilman Udall quite reasonably that if he wanted to come up “this mountain,” it would be best to call first.
Udall said he wasn’t going to do that. Udall Street was a public thoroughfare and he’d drive up it anytime he wanted. He said he had some property up on the hill he wanted to sell and had come by to check if the road-paving project had been finished to his satisfaction.
Cooper was enraged. As he told the audience, he’d been trying to get that road paved for five years with no response from the city council. During the monsoon season, the mud could be half a foot thick. In the winter the road froze solid. He paid his rightful local property taxes, went through the proper channels, without result. But when “a Udall” wanted to his sell property, suddenly the work was done.
This was out-and-out corruption, a criminal act, Cooper railed, opening the phones. He wanted to see what people in the Round Valley had to say about Udall, but he doubted anyone would have “the guts” to call. This was because, Cooper said, Councilman Udall “happens to belong to a prominent church in this valley which appears to control everything there is.
“If you live in a town that is mostly populated by Mormons and you are not a member of the church, you are going to be shunned in politics, business, and society,” Cooper declared.
“They should have learned their lesson in the 1800s that you should not do that; based on their own experience of being discriminated against,” Cooper bitingly declared. This was the way the forces of Mystery Babylon always acted, he said, playing Hank Williams Jr.’s defiant “A Country Boy Can Survive” to underscore how fed up he was with the Round Valley’s grandees.
The standoff with the feds took a turn in August of 2001 when Dr. Hamblin wrote a letter asking the Apache County Sheriff’s Office to look into the Cooper case. “I wanted someone to do something,” Hamblin told me when we talked.
The Apache County Sheriff’s Office has a long and colorful history dating back before Arizona statehood. Rawhide Jake Brighton was county deputy when he hunted down and killed the outlaw Ike Clanton outside of Springerville. Later came the red-haired gunfighter Commodore Perry Owens (1887–1888). Jacob Hamblin Jr. was sheriff in 1915–1916 and again in 1919. But no one held the top job as long as C. Arthur “Art” Lee, sheriff from 1973–1999.
When the Cooper siege began, Sheriff Lee was a main advocate of nonintervention. He was adamant about not allowing “a Ruby Ridge in my county.” As far as he was concerned, Lee told the FBI, Bill Cooper could live in the community “for the next fifty years and never receive a traffic ticket.” He agreed with Special Agent Fillerup that storming Cooper Hill just “wasn’t worth it.”
Fifteen years later, he hadn’t changed his mind, Lee told me when we spoke in November of 2016. Now into his eighties, Lee said “Things would have been different if I was still sheriff that night, that’s for sure.”
But Art Lee was not the sheriff in 2001. When he retired in 1999, he appointed thirty-seven-year-old Brian Hounshell, a former prison guard, to finish out his term. Many thought Hounshell was just a placeholder until Lee’s son Clint was ready to take over the job. As the elder Lee said, “Before I put Hounshell in, I made him promise that the department would be run the same way it had been. He gave me his word on that.
“Well, he went about as far south from that as you could,” Lee said. “In twenty-six years as sheriff, that was the biggest mistake I ever made, putting that guy in there.” Hounshell was nothing but “a hard-charger, a bull in the china shop. Can’t say I got much use for the man.”
It was true that Hounshell was a different sort of Apache County sheriff. He had nothing to do with the old-line Mormon pioneer families. He’d been brought up around the Navajo Nation, where his parents ran a trading post. He spoke Navajo, had deep roots on the Rez, and pretty much didn’t give a fuck what Art Lee wanted. In 2000, rather than step aside as had been assumed, Hounshell ran for sheriff on his own, and won. Once in power, he surrounded himself with several of his old correction facility buddies.
“He loved getting his name in the newspaper,” Art Lee said. It was this quest for publicity, Lee contended, that prompted Sheriff Hounshell to take up Dr. Hamblin’s case against Bill Cooper, celebrity madman of Eagar, Arizona.
On August 29, 2001, the State of Arizona on behalf of the Apache County Sheriff’s Office issued a warrant charging “William Milton Cooper” with two felony counts aggravated assault and another for reckless endangerment against Scott Hamblin and his family. A plan was being devised to bring Cooper to justice.
The first date scheduled for the Apache County Special Response Team (SRT) to take Cooper Hill was September 11, 2001. These plans were canceled due to what the Arizona Department of Public Safety (DPS) called “a possible security breach.”
“They were going to come get him on 9/11! Can you believe that?” Doyel Shamley said. “The ‘possible security breach’ was that Bill was on the air for like nine straight hours that day, all across the country. I guess they didn’t want to break into the middle of that.”
On the morning of September 11, Cooper was awakened by a phone call from Allan Weiner, owner of WBCQ. “I was recovering from cancer surgery and I see the Twin Towers crumbling. It felt like the world was coming apart,” Weiner told me when we spoke in 2015.
“It is in times like that you have to go with your gut. People want to know what happened and 99 percent of the media was going to tell them the same thing. I asked Bill if he would take the mic, be voice of WBCQ. I told him to stay on for as long as he could, call it the way he saw it. On this day more than any other, I felt that what Bill Cooper had to say was essential.”
Opening the show by saying, “This is probably the worst day in the history of the entire world,” Cooper’s first order of business was to set up The Hour of the Time as a media command post, a clearinghouse for American patriots who could not trust mainstream news reporting. He’d done something like that after the OKC bombing, but this was a bigger situation, almost beyond imagining.
“I don’t want to hear any rumors,” Cooper declared, “nothing that came in ‘mysteriously by fax,’” or repeated from the radio shows of his enemies, people like Bo Gritz, Art Bell Jr., or Alex Jones.
“The only people who should be calling this radio program today are those who have something to report that the country and world absolutely needs to know,” Cooper declared. Early reports would be crucial. It was only a matter of time before “the official story,” the one the authorities wanted you to believe, set in.
As the head of SCAR’s Intelligence Service, Cooper briefed the troops. Airports had been shut down, borders sealed, the president and Congress had been taken to well-protected bunkers. That could mean only one thing: The country was under martial law, whether the government admitted it or not. As for the patriots out there, it was the time to go underground. As proved after OKC, the reaction could be fierce.
Misinformation was everywhere. Even in the Round Valley, 2,500 miles from New York and Washington, people were spreading rumors that someone was planning to blow up the high school. There were reports that the Red Chinese were moving in.
“There is no threat in the Round Valley. I repeat, no threat in the Round Valley,” Cooper announced.
He had predicted the attack, of course he had. Everyone had heard him do it only two months before on the June 28, 2001, episode of The Hour of the Time. The terrible event that was going to happen and be blamed on Osama bin Laden had come to pass.
On C-SPAN they were interviewing Orrin Hatch, the Utah senator. With zero proof, Hatch was foaming at the mouth, demanding bin Laden’s bearded head on a plate.
Cooper stayed behind the microphone through the afternoon, pausing only when Doyel brought him an Italian sub sandwich from Arby’s. He chastised those who called for blind vengeance against Muslims, as if the immigrant behind the counter at the Circle K was somehow the mastermind of the plot.
The only proper course of action, Cooper said, was to send in a highly trained team of professionals “to hunt down and find the people responsible, bring them back to this country, try them in court, and if they’re guilty, sentence them to whatever punishment is required.” That’s how it was done in a constitutional republic, Cooper said, in case everyone had forgotten.
The show highlight came about fifty minutes in, when a Jersey man called in with an item that had been reported on the Channel 7 local news but then deleted from the news stream, unmentioned by Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and the rest. This fit the description of what Cooper was looking for, news suppressed by the keepers of the official story.
Someone on the eighty-sixth floor of one of the towers had apparently phoned a local reporter to tell him that he’d heard a massive explosion and that “the entire core of the building has been blown out.” The man said he was trapped. He was going to die.
The caller said he was passing this on because “I thought it might say something about the structural integrity of those buildings.”
“You said someone inside the building heard an explosion before the planes hit?” Cooper inquired, the notion beginning to crackle awake in his head. A moment later the scenario arrived, full-grown. Suddenly he knew that “it couldn’t have just been the planes flying into the buildings.” The planes “hit high up, in the top third or quarter of those towers; the impact could not have injured the integrity of the buildings’ bottom core.
“Something blew up at the major structural core of the buildings down at the bottom,” Cooper declared, 2,500 miles away from the scene. “I can assure you of that.”
The WTC was “exactly” the same thing as Oklahoma City, Cooper went on. Just as “a truck full of fertilizer parked in the street could not have brought down the Alfred P. Murrah Building,” jet planes did not topple the World Trade Center.
The Twin Towers were “steel-reinforced concrete” buildings, what they called “a hard target in military jargon,” Cooper said. When he was in the Navy he learned that the “only way to bring down a hard target is with shaped, specially placed charges.”
It was not possible that the impact of a 400,000-pound 767 jumbo jet traveling at 540 miles per hour could have caused such a catastrophic result, Cooper declared, harkening back to the story of a B-25 bomber that ran into the Empire State Building in 1945. It took out a couple of floors, but the building stayed up.
Cooper had found the lede. His next “recap” of the day’s breaking news events began with his assessment that the towers had “collapsed upon themselves, all the way down to the ground . . . as a result of detonation of a series of shaped charges.” It was, Cooper said, “a demolition.”
Supposed to be arrested that very day, Cooper made the most of his reprieve. He laid out the rudiments of what came to be called 9/11 Truth, the first great conspiracy meme of the broadband age, a theory of the crime that generated a fury of obsession not seen since the Kennedy assassination.
It was a necessary story. For many of the younger generation, 9/11 was the biggest public event they’d ever experienced. Like Ezekiel and his wheel, like a broad-daylight shooting of a president, it was an instantly mythic moment, a once-in-a-lifetime event. It begged for explanation, reassurance, something that made sense.
9/11 deserved Truth, or at least the semblance of an effort. Instead, it got Osama bin Laden and his nineteen men with box cutters, along with a president too engrossed in The Pet Goat to call in the SWAT teams. The story insulted your intelligence, left you cursing in the dark.
“These people are arrogant, they love to flaunt what they’re doing in our faces,” Cooper told the audience. “They think they can tell you anything and you’ll believe it. Not this time.”
The “controlled demolition” scenario became a major strand of the early 9/11 Truth groups that began appearing around the country. Commencing in 2004, members of the NYC 9/11 Truth movement attended weekly meetings in New York’s East Village at the 350-year-old St. Mark’s Church, where Alexander Hamilton once dispensed pro bono legal advice and Allen Ginsberg read “Howl.” It wasn’t just the usual gray-ponytailed guys with the protruding R. Crumb eyes; there was a new demographic present, younger, more diverse, crust punks, businessmen, schoolteachers.
There were Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Pilots for 9/11 Truth, Poets for 9/11 Truth. Scholarly papers were prepared on the collapse of WTC Building 7. For many, the fall of building number 7 became a focus. It was hit by no plane and was the home of numerous governmental offices, including the FBI, CIA, and Securities and Exchange Commission. Many of the SEC files kept in the building were paper records, not yet digitized. When the forty-seven-story building tumbled to the ground, so did a lot of cases against market profiteers.
At the beginning at least, 9/11 Truth was being run with a sobriety that reminded an old hand of those super-earnest faculty teach-ins at the dawn of the Vietnam War protests. Parliamentary procedure was invoked, persistent interruption and intemperate outbursts were discouraged. But a critical corner had been turned. Too much had happened for anyone to have much faith in the official story.
When it came to possible Bush administration involvement, many 9/11 Truthers narrowed the theory of the crime to two possibilities, LIHOP and MIHOP, as in “Let It Happen on Purpose” and “Made It Happen on Purpose.” Arguments could go into the night about that.
Not that Cooper cared. He’d done his work, he laid out the rudiments of the 9/11 Truth “controlled demo” narrative in about three minutes of real time, off the top of his head, even as the paperwork from the Cantor Fitzgerald office still swirled in the wind above the pile.
Cooper said his special prescience came from having his “finger on the pulse of everyone in this country who thinks and feels the way I do.” The fact that the first version of the documentary Loose Change, the visual totem of 9/11 Truth, didn’t appear until 2005—making some of the same claims Cooper did as events transpired—shows how far ahead of the curve he was, a conspiracy salesman without peer, a natural.
For Cooper, 9/11 completed one more fearful symmetry. On September 11, 1990, before a joint session of Congress, George H. W. Bush, who Cooper claimed, had been initiated as “a priest in the Temple of Isis while lying in a casket with a ribbon wrapped around his genitalia,” welcomed the dawning of the New World Order with the blood ritual of the Gulf War. Eleven years later, almost to the very second, on September 11, 2001, George Bush the younger, Skull and Bones class of 1968, completed the full circle.
“Today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom, came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts,” Bush the younger said. The reason America was “targeted for attack” was “because we are the brightest beacon for freedom . . . in the world and no one will keep that light from shining.” Soon the president would be sending in more troops to the former Babylon. Death would beget more death. Bush Jr. was the new Horus to Poppy’s Kennebunkport Osiris. Cooper saw it coming, all the way back to 2001: A Space Odyssey. He even got the year right.
For eleven years, patriots had held them off. Ruby Ridge, Waco, and even Oklahoma City were battles bravely fought, but lost, catastrophically lost. The 9/11 extravaganza was Mystery Babylon’s victory jamboree, their unholy bombs-bursting-in-air bacchanal, their Fourth of July. The great work of the New World Order was complete.
One thing that bugged Cooper was that the newsmen and politicians were calling the people in the planes “cowards.” These weren’t cowards, they were “brave men fighting for their cause,” Cooper said.
“They see our hypocrisy. They see our lies. They know what we’ve done . . . we killed thousands of civilians in Bosnia and Iraq. But because we did it, it is supposed to be okay? It is never okay. You can’t expect someone to obey the rules when we have never obeyed the rules in our history. Ask a Native American sometime. How many tribes did we wipe out down to the last man, woman, and child, that don’t exist on the face of Earth anymore? It wasn’t because they were scalping white people going west in covered wagons. We did it because we wanted their land.”
America was supposed to be about freedom, real freedom. Freedom could not be bought or sold. Freedom was the real magic of the nation, the sense that an individual could make up his mind for himself about what could be done and not done as long as he stayed within the boundaries of his Creator-endowed rights. Indefinable at its core, freedom was the one thing no meaningful life could be lived without.
All around, Cooper saw surrender. The C-SPAN feed picked up the sound of a woman crying. We need “something to keep us safe” from these terrorists, the woman said. “See what I mean?” Cooper railed at the audience, with I-told-you-so dismay.
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing from the so-called patriot community. Bodies crushed under the buildings were still warm and people were calling The Hour of the Time to say they heard Sonny Bono was murdered because he was doing research on the Waco Massacre, and maybe that had something to do with the attacks.
“Sonny Bono hit a tree while skiing on a mountain,” Cooper said, slowly, and hung up.
“There must be someone who is just sitting around cooking this stuff up,” Cooper said, adding that he couldn’t imagine “why people take this stuff seriously just because somebody says ‘Look at this, it’s really true, man.’ Nobody checks, they just go out of their mind about it and pass it on to somebody else.” Most nights he just turned off the news and went to sleep.
One brisk early morning about two weeks after the Twin Tower attacks, Cooper got up to make breakfast. He opened the stove door and sprung the hinge, yet again. He went outside to get his rubber mallet from the trunk of the ’58 Chevy to fix it.
Then, Cooper told the audience in HOTT #1917, “the strangest thing happened . . . there was a large, a very large puma, a mountain lion, walking right across the driveway.” The puma walked past the chickens, who scatter at the sight of a house cat, and they didn’t react. Crusher was right there but he didn’t bark.
“It was like they knew each other,” Cooper said, still amazed, telling listeners how the big cat kept walking “right straight toward me.” His .45 automatic on his right hip as always, he was thinking of shooting the lion, but something told him that was a “bad idea.” He stood stock-still as the puma walked closer, sat down right next to him, and started to purr.
“This really deep-throated purr like cats do. Real loud. It sat there for a few minutes and then it got up and just walked away toward the south.” Nothing like that ever happened before. “I’m not bothered by it, I’m not perturbed, just sort of weirded out,” Cooper told the listeners, asking if they had any ideas about the incident.
A woman called and said the puma was Cooper’s “guardian angel.” She was Catholic, the lady said, and “St. John Bosco had a gray wolf as his guardian angel who would materialize whenever he was in danger from assassins or robbers or anything else that might be traveling around.” That’s who the cat was, the lady said, “your guardian angel, Bill.”
According to Doyel Shamley, Cooper was in a relatively cheerful mood on the morning of November 5, 2001. He’d just put the finishing touches on his Vietnam novel, tentatively entitled Cua Viet: The War on the River. Based on his experiences as a river patrol boat captain, Cooper started writing the book back in the 1970s, working on it on and off through the eighties. He’d put the book aside when his flying saucer career took off but now felt the need to get it done. He thought he’d lost the manuscript until Doyel found it shoved between some boxes in one of the storage units Cooper had rented in town.
The story tells of a river patrol boat captain known only by his surname, March, a Navy Special Operations man in a black beret, the sort who, Cooper writes, “makes people nervous.” The year before, March’s boat was ambushed by NVA forces near Whiskey Nine, a rocky island off the main channel of the Cua Viet. The only survivor of the attack, the gravely wounded March spent much of the next year in the sick bay. The book opens on the day he returns to the jungle, a terse, hell-bent Conradian soul looking for revenge.
“I’m coming for you, Charlie,” March says to himself as he choppers in over the defoliated, bomb-pocked terrain surrounding Dong Ha. “I’m going to pay you back, you bastards.”
Months before, Cooper read some of The War on the River, a work in progress, on The Hour of the Time. “Well, I just don’t know . . . I don’t know about tonight’s broadcast,” he began, laying out “the parameters” listeners “must observe” while hearing the story.
“You’ve got to be in a dark room, because that’s the kind of place we are going to visit. Sort of moody, and gloomy. You should be in a comfortable chair, you should be leaning back. You should close your eyes . . .
“Because . . . I am going to try to evoke some pictures for you. I want you to see the place. . . . It is an incredible place. Maybe two or three of you will recognize it. I don’t think it could possibly be more than that . . . and if you do, then you and I are very close.”
Slowly, carefully, Cooper read of a “lonely, bleak, and sandy” world where “the wind courses from the north and east, cursing this place with cold, rain, and low, black, ominous clouds. The light filtering through casts its drab finger on the land striking shadows dead. It is a perpetual twilight that eats at the soul and spreads the specter of doom.”
For the Vietnamese, the river provided “food and travel from dawn to sundown, when curfew began,” Cooper read. “But for us the river is a mysterious, evil monster to be confronted each night, night after night, night upon night, endlessly, without any break, every single night.”
There was a strange thing about Cua Viet, Cooper said at the outset of episode #1926, the final entry in The Complete Cooper. It was a brutal borderland where many died. Yet you never heard much about the place.
It was like the river “fell down through the cracks of the war,” Cooper said. He’d spent a long time looking for people who served with him, “but I never found a single one of them.”
This changed after he read the excerpt on The Hour of the Time. When the e-mails began to pour in, Cooper said he knew, “instinctively, that this was going to be a catharsis for healing, for bringing people together. . . . It has touched my heart, way down deep inside.”
He’d been “hard at work” building a website for veterans of Cua Viet, Cooper told the audience. The site was only one page now, but it would grow.
“We need stories from people, pictures,” Cooper told listeners that night, spelling out the site name, CuaViet.org, letter by staccato letter, three times. The web page was going to turn out to be “important,” Cooper said. “More important than I ever dreamed.”
Right then the phone rang. “Bill?” the caller said. “Why are you calling?” spat Cooper, recognizing the voice on the line. “I didn’t open the phones. Stay off the damn phone!” A moment later, still fuming, Cooper said, “I can’t believe how gross and inconsiderate so many people really are. . . . Well, I’m not going to let it bother me. I’m going to go on with this.”
Resetting, Cooper said he would be devoting the evening’s program to reading the “pages and pages and pages of e-mail” he’d received. “You’re not going to believe what you’re going to hear.”
The first e-mail was from Jerry Lilly, a platoon commander with H-company, Second Battalion, First Marines. Lilly told how he and his men had barely escaped an NVA unit after a firefight. “We spent two months along the river and it was dangerous territory for us,” he wrote, saying what a relief it was to see a PBR “on the duck pond.” He remembered the river boat personnel as “tenacious and on a fluid medium . . . focused, always ready to unload. Men who have tasted the sting of the enemy are like that. Me and my men could actually relax a bit because we could see you at the ready.”
“This next one is so important to me,” Cooper said. “I gotta tell you, when I got this e-mail, I was blown away. I sat down and cried. Because all these years I always wondered what happened to my crew. My crew! You see, I was a boat captain. And I never could find any of them. Then all of a sudden in my e-mail box, here’s what I read:
“‘Hey, Coop! Don’t sweat it, man. I understand. I couldn’t kick the Nam thing either. Glad to hear from someone who actually knows the score.
“‘I remember you talking about your wife and how you used to go to the movies at the Air Force Club theater. I still enjoy matinees because of that. I remember when we had a mine go off just as we got through one morning. I remember the ramp at Dong Ha. Saw an old high school buddy of mine there one night; he was a jarhead guarding the fuel tanks. I remember that U-boat that sunk somewhere around Two Lima. A guy had a picture of it on Military.com. It was weird seeing a picture of that boat again.
“‘Remember that leper colony at Da Nang and that old half-sunken Jap ship? I think it was our boat, PB-44, in Da Nang, when we had that picnic on Spanish Beach and a couple of kids blew themselves up. Was that our crew? . . . I don’t remember talking to you but once or twice up north. You got the silver star, didn’t you?
“‘Well, I’ll stop the rambling. Got to get up and go to work tomorrow. Remember that old saying, “It don’t mean nothing.” Your engine man, Mike.’”
It went on like that, Cooper reading the e-mails, stopping to compose himself, reading some more. One e-mail writer even recalled Cooper’s radio call name, Stinger.
That night, in addition to his now standard sign-off, “Good night, Annie, Pooh, and Allyson, I love you,” Cooper added, “and welcome home, my long-lost brothers. You have no idea how much this means to me, and everyone else who has just been lost, since then.”
There is no record of how Cooper passed the hours following the broadcast of episode #1926. Chances are he poured himself a few bourbons, sat in one of the few chairs not piled high with boxes. He could have practiced his trumpet or put on an album. It might have been the great Satchmo, his forever go-to guy, or perhaps another horn player, Harry James, Sweets Edison, Chet Baker, Miles Davis; the list was long. The trumpet was “the holy sound,” Cooper used to tell his old friend Jerry Etchey as they sat on garden chairs, scanning the skies over Area 51. “No xylophone ever brought down the walls of Jericho.”
Meanwhile, the enemy moved into place. Eight weeks had passed since the sheriff’s office aborted the 9/11 date to take Cooper Hill. But the strategy remained the same. It was essential to lure Cooper out of his house. No way did the department want to engage in a headline-grabbing shoot-out.
By this time the estimation of Cooper’s firepower had grown in the minds of law enforcement. It was widely believed he had an AK-47 just inside his home’s front door. Handguns were said to be positioned at windows throughout the house. Another worry was the so-called long rifle, a product Cooper often pushed on The Hour of the Time. He loved his long rifle, Cooper said on the show, bragging that he could hit a target with it from “up to a mile away.”
The sheriff’s office likely could have arrested Cooper up away from the hill. He was known to sneak out to eat enchiladas at Los Dos Malinos in Springerville. There were early-morning forays to the Safeway on North Main Street to stock up on glazed doughnuts. But just as the authorities chose not to pick up David Koresh on those solitary jogs outside Mount Carmel, the authorities never made a move to apprehend Bill Cooper. It was not the way these things are done.
The 311-page account later prepared by the Arizona DPS describes the authorities’ version of what happened the evening of November 5, 2001. The report is arranged, Roshomon-style, as a series of interviews, with testimony from all the police personnel present, but a consistent story line presents itself.
At 6:00 P.M., members of the county’s Special Response Team arrived at the sheriff’s department’s Eagar facility, adjacent to the Round Valley Rodeo Grounds, to go over the strategy devised for the takedown of the fugitive, Milton William Cooper.
Since it was essential to lure Cooper out of his house, the idea was to go with what had worked in the past. Officers were to proceed to Cooper Hill shortly before midnight, pretend to be partiers, and wait for Cooper to charge out of his house, screaming, as he had done so many times before. Once Cooper approached, he would be surrounded and arrested.
Devised by Apache County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO) commander Andrew Tafoya, the ornate plan called for the participation of seventeen officers. Seven of these were assigned to the undercover (UC) vehicle, a tan 1989 Chevy pickup, which would park down the road from Cooper’s house. Commander James Womack, up front with Deputy Matrese Avila, were to play the roles of lovesick teens out for a good time. Four other officers hid under a blanket in the truck while another cop, charged with the duty of “dispatching” Crusher should this become necessary, was crouched under the dash of the cab.
The second stage of the operation involved an Apache County Tactical Operations van, a recent addition to the department’s expanding motor pool. Parked out of sight on a dirt road adjacent to North Clearview Circle, the tac van carried four additional officers, including driver Sergeant Charles Brown, and Sheriff Hounshell riding shotgun. Hounshell had been on vacation but returned home early to take part in the operation, bumping his chief deputy from the spot. As many in the Round Valley said, Hounshell “wasn’t about to miss this.”
At approximately 11:40 P.M., Commander Womack drove the UC vehicle up North Hillcrest Road above where it forks away from Udall Street. Once in place, a high-capacity boombox was turned up all the way. Womack and Avila got out of the truck and waited in the middle of the road. When Cooper arrived all hot and bothered, Womack was to say, “What can I do for you?” This was the signal for the officers in the back of the truck to go into action.
Around 11:45 P.M., the music started up, that headbanger shit Cooper wouldn’t let Doyel play on HOTT because it was “inappropriate for a family show.” Almost immediately, the officers reported, the exterior light at 96 North Clearview Circle snapped on.
Cooper appeared at his front door and got into his GMC pickup. This was a surprise to the sheriff’s office. Their plan was predicated on Cooper arriving on foot, as he had in previous incidents.
“It was the monsoon, for fuck’s sake,” Doyel later said, commenting on the sheriff’s department’s strategy. “The worst one in years. Everything was muddy, slippery. There was no way Bill was going to walk, not with his leg. That’s pretty much a no-brainer, I’d say.”
Still, there was something odd about Cooper’s behavior. Ordinarily, if Cooper chose to confront an intruder, especially one that arrived in the middle of the night, he would have taken Crusher with him. As Cooper often told the audience, the dog had “one purpose on this earth and one only, to protect me and my family.” But on this night he left the Rottweiler chained to the bumper of the ’76 Buick.
“Here he comes,” said Commander Womack, who, according to testimony he gave to the DPS investigator, stood on North Hillcrest Road shielding his eyes from the glare of Cooper’s approaching high beams.
According to Deputy Avila’s statement in the DPS report, Cooper stuck his head out the window. “You need to get out of here. You can’t be here.” Desperate to get Cooper out of his vehicle, Womack and Avila attempted to engage Cooper in conversation. Womack said he and Avila “just wanted to build a fire and talk.” Perhaps Cooper would like to join them.
“I’m calling the cops,” Cooper told the undercover officers. “I’m going to give you ten minutes to be off this property, or the cops are going to be here.” Then he backed up his truck to turn around and started back toward his home.
“He’s moving!” Commander Womack shouted.
Commander Tafoya jumped out of the truck bed and began chasing Cooper’s vehicle on foot. The rest stayed in the UC pickup, which was now in pursuit. It was just then the tac van lurched out onto the road, blocking Cooper’s path.
“Sheriff’s Office! Put your hands in the air!” Sergeant Brown shouted from the van’s driver’s seat, as he aimed his M4 submachine gun at Cooper’s pickup. On the passenger side, Sheriff Hounshell was out of the van with his Wilson Combat AR-15, using the vehicle door for cover.
This seemed to be the end of the line for Bill Cooper, who, according to Sergeant Brown, stuck his arm out the window of the pickup “as if he were surrendering.”
This was a ruse. First checking the position of Sheriff Hounshell, Cooper turned his gaze back to Brown. “He stared at me for a few seconds,” Brown is recorded as saying in the DPS report. “Then he turned the pickup wheels right and accelerated directly at me.”
Brown managed to jump on the running board of Cooper’s “stepside” pickup. Reaching in the window, Brown attempted to “knock Cooper’s hands off the steering wheel with the butt of the M4 rifle.” Then he tried to grab the gearshift, to throw Cooper’s vehicle into reverse. Both maneuvers were unsuccessful. Cooper stiff-armed the officer, which sent him sprawling, as Doyel said, “right on his butt.”
Cooper’s maneuver cleared the tac van but caused the pickup to swerve over a rocky outcrop, stripping the truck’s exhaust system from the bottom of the chassis. A moment later, as Brown and Sheriff Hounshell pursued him on foot, Cooper’s pickup came to rest in his circular driveway about thirty-five feet from his front door.
Apache County deputy Joseph Allen Goldsmith picks up the narration from there. A twenty-nine-year-old father of two, Goldsmith came to the ACSO in 1999 after working in the state prison system. Goldsmith’s assignment that night was to be one of the four officers lying under a blanket in the undercover vehicle, waiting for Commander Womack’s “go” signal. Now, having chased Cooper’s truck toward the house, Goldsmith and his fellow deputy, Robert Marinez, were hiding amid the decaying motor pool parked in front of Cooper’s house, with their pistols drawn.
Taking cover behind the limousine Cooper had bought for Jessica in hopes she would go into the car-service business, Goldsmith saw the suspect moving across the driveway. Cooper appeared to be running, Goldsmith said, “but he was not moving very fast due to the noticeable limp.”
As Deputy Goldsmith moved in from the east, Deputy Marinez closed ground from the other side. Both officers were shouting, “Sheriff’s Office! Stop!”
“No!” Cooper shouted back and kept moving toward his front door. With the shouts and Crusher snarling as he strained against his chain-link leash, it must have sounded like a thousand openings to The Hour of the Time.
“Cooper almost made it to the door located on the east side of his residence when Deputy Goldsmith saw Cooper reach near his waist,” the DPS report says. Goldsmith said he then saw “an arm come up and then a muzzle blast and I heard a gunshot.” The shots, in the direction of Deputy Marinez “exposed his (Cooper’s) right side and upper right torso region,” Goldsmith said.
At that moment, Goldsmith told the DPS officers, he didn’t know that Marinez had been shot in the head, or that his skull had been fractured, fragments of bone pushed into his brain. He couldn’t know that in 2003 the Marinez family would sue Sheriff Brian Hounshell and Commander Andrew Tafoya for “willfully and maliciously” sending him into “a dangerous situation for which he was not properly trained or equipped.” Likewise, Deputy Goldsmith didn’t know that Rob Marinez would still be paralyzed more than fifteen years later. Nor could he have guessed that in the many invocations of Cooper’s Truther martyrdom, rare is it that an online poster mentions the name Robert Marinez, except as yet another piece of collateral damage in the vast saga that Bill Cooper crafted for himself.
Then again, from all accounts, Deputy Joe Goldsmith was not part of the audience. He might have listened to Cooper’s low-power FM station to hear some oldies, but he did not follow The Hour of the Time. He was not aware of Cooper’s uncanny ability to understand the tricks and deception of the past or his knack to foresee the future. He didn’t know Cooper’s despair; his sadness; the depth of his disappointment in the human species, the American people, and himself.
What Deputy Joe Goldsmith did know, according to the report, was that “fearing for the life of Deputy Marinez and for his own safety,” he “utilized a two-handed grip on his service weapon, aimed at the center of Cooper’s torso and continued to fire.” As he advanced, Goldsmith said, “he saw two or three more muzzle blasts from Cooper’s gun toward Deputy Marinez.”
Goldsmith got off nine rounds with his Glock .45. Asked by investigators “what he was trying to do when he continually shot at Cooper,” Deputy Goldsmith said all he wanted to do “was stop Cooper from shooting.” That was what he was taught to do: When someone shoots at you, keep shooting back until the enemy falls to the ground, which is what happened when Bill Cooper fell through space and landed, as predicted, on his doorstep.