TWO

When Dick Hickock and Perry Smith killed four members of the Clutter family in the western reaches of Kansas in 1959, the pair chose Olathe (pronounced oh-LAY-thuh) as their staging ground. The two career chiselers, who had met in the penitentiary, set out from Olathe the day of the murders and, afterward, late that night, melted right back into town, all but unnoticed. The murders unsettled Kansas and the farm states surrounding it like little before. For weeks the Clutters’ murderers could not be found. But frightful as it was, Hickock and Smith’s run of freedom was brief and unproductive, involving nothing more than six weeks of petty crime and fizzled murder plots. The larcenous buddies had become killers when they took the lives of the Clutters, but—and there was at least comfort to be had in this—they never killed again. Hickock and Perry were hanged in the early 1960s at the Kansas state prison in Lansing and, were it not for Truman Capote, who documented their crime in the pages of In Cold Blood, that would have been the end of that.

Since the 1850s, when the Kansas School for the Deaf opened in Olathe, the town had stood home to an unlikely mix of farmers and deaf-mutes. Families tilled the flat land that had been handed down through the generations. The people were churchgoing folk. The more affluent ones—which was not to say wealthy—were those who had dairy farms in addition to wheat fields. In the evenings, the farmers and their families went into town to walk, which meant around the courthouse square. Girls married the boys they had grown up with and, if their husbands happened to die, say, in a farming accident, they married other boys they had grown up with.

The Church of the Nazarene came to Olathe in 1930, when it was chartered with twenty members. Things were put together with string and wax at first; for years, revival services were held in various spaces, including a creamery, an abandoned church, and a munitions depot. The latter was famous locally for its swayback roof.

The Reverend C. J. Garrett, who migrated from Ottawa, was the church’s first pastor, and his sermon topics, reported in the local paper, were all variations on a single theme (subjects from “A Trip Through Hell” to “Is Olathe Hell?”). His flock grew exponentially.

The pivotal moment for the church came in the 1950s when the national Church of the Nazarene decided that God wanted them to open up their world headquarters just one-half hour from Olathe, across the border in Kansas City, Missouri, to “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19).

The arrival of the world headquarters ushered in a period of migration of Nazarene Christians to “little Olathe,” as Truman Capote called it. Olathe was becoming a hub for the church.

A coterie of mostly professional Evangelical Christians—including the Lamberts—was becoming a vital force in reshaping this part of Kansas, bringing with them not only the church, but all the businesses, politics, and concerns that accompanied the church. This was not the high-wheat plains of western Kansas, but east, closer to Kansas City, Missouri, where suburbs were replacing farmland.

The people of Olathe weren’t hankering for any big changes. The big cities—Kansas City and, farther afield, the industrial bastion of Wichita—were for the middlemen with pickup trucks piled high with corn, the occasional day tripper, or the unlucky farmers who were reduced to seeking city work.

So the demographic shift—some might say lurch—that was transforming Olathe, Kansas, did not sit easy with the old timers. These newcomers—who came to the frontier a century or two after the initial heavy lifting was finished—were religious to a standard that unsettled even the locals, who responded, in their old-line prairie twang, “Those ones have all come down with a bad case of religion.”

Located in the middle of Johnson County and close to the geographic center of the United States, Olathe (the Shawnee word for “beautiful”) began to be known as the buckle of the East Kansas Bible Belt.

Olathe’s four-thousand-seat church, called College Church of the Nazarene, was built in 1968 to “bring God’s love to a dying world” (as the church’s promotional materials noted with considerable pride). Its steeple stretches upward as the sharpest and most prominent feature between earth and heaven for miles around. It remains the local skyline’s most identifiable structure. When the sky is awash in Kansas reds during a particularly beguiling sunset, the steeple appears as a welcoming symbol of solace and comfort. When a storm or tornado approaches, it can appear imposing.

In 1968, the General Assembly of the Nazarene Church chose Olathe as the location for its college after Bob Osborne, the president of Patron’s State Bank & Trust, pledged the land on which it was built. The college, today known as MidAmerica Nazarene University, or MNU, was centered around Christ in general, but organized, from its creation, around the Church of the Nazarene in particular.

The college, originally called MidAmerica Nazarene College, opened its doors as a Christian liberal arts college with 263 students. The wild hairdos, frock coats, and casual morality popular elsewhere were not found here. Students were not allowed to drink alcohol, play cards, dance, or watch movies, among many other prohibitions up to—and obviously including—premarital sex. While professors did double duty as movie “sentries,” standing watch at the local movie houses over the weekends to make sure no MNC students entered, those looking for drink or cinema could drive an hour in either direction outside of Olathe. Those craving intimacy merely needed to drive to the first remote Olathe street they could find (the police still joke about parked cars with steamed windows from the heat of Bible college students).

Students at MNC were required to attend church twice a week—though most went even more frequently—to bear testament to Jesus, and to encourage others to save their own souls. The church technically sat just outside the school’s boundaries but, for practical purposes, it was the center of campus.

Guiding principles at MNC were the ideas of being faithful to Jesus, spreading God’s word, and striving for “heart purity,” or holiness. The result was, quite literally, an attempt at perfection—an attempt to live up to the same standards that Jesus did. This is a lofty goal but one the Nazarenes believed to be attainable. Therefore, fighting imperfection or evil was crucial at MNC.

The search for perfection had its casualties, however regrettable. But good evangelical Christians did not come ready-made. As time progressed, MNC produced good Christians in increasingly large numbers, and today the university’s student body is two thousand members strong. In the church parking lot on Sundays you can spot bumper stickers announcing, “Jesus Loves All, But He Likes Me Most.”

“Me” could very easily refer to Mark Mangelsdorf. Mangelsdorf was one of the newcomers thronging to this part of Kansas. In fact, Mark stood out among the new arrivals at MNC. Big-bodied, at 6'4", and hard-working, Mark was smart and ambitious, with a fervent belief that he would be rewarded for his toil.

Mark was born in 1960 in St. Louis, the middle child sandwiched between his older brother, Ray Jr., and his younger sister, Patricia. His father, Ray, had grown up Catholic but allowed his wife, Mickie, to raise their children as evangelicals in the Christian & Missionary Alliance (C&MA), a denomination closely aligned with the Nazarenes.

The C&MA Church is less literal about the Bible than the Nazarenes. Founded by Albert Benjamin Simpson around the turn of the twentieth century, its two major tenets are that: 1) members should donate their worldly riches to support foreign missionary work, and 2) for the highly observant, their exercise of faith would bring physical healing. (The latter belief was influenced by Exodus 15:26: “He said, ‘If you listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, who heals you.’”)

Mickie did not stay with the C&MA for long. The family lived in St. Louis’s Hazelwood section, a lower-middle-class area with few professionals, and she was drawn to the more ascetic and literal Nazarene Church, whose doctrine required more supplication and forbade the usual drinking, smoking, dancing, card playing, and most of the other favorite pastimes in her neighborhood. For Mickie, the Bible was more than metaphor; it was a blueprint for living. She was attracted to the Nazarene traditionalism and social teaching, combined with that chance at salvation through self improvement and perfecting one’s soul.

Ray Sr.’s job at Reynolds Metal (where Reynolds Wrap is made) didn’t pay enough to send three children to parochial school, so the brothers worked as night custodians for the church in exchange for tuition. Reverend Wayne Moss, their teacher and youth pastor, said that in all his years of Christian education he never saw students work harder for their education than did the Mangelsdorfs.

The two boys shared a work ethic but little else. Ray had been a fat little kid—75 pounds at the age of three, 120 pounds by the first grade. Mark had been luckier weight-wise, tall but never fat. Mark—studious and well-behaved—was the family’s golden boy. He would often bake with his mother, specializing in cookies for church bake sales. In contrast, Ray was rebellious, a boy who might be headed in the wrong direction. Mark and Ray could not interact without fighting.

The Nazarene Church initially galvanized Ray, but any change for the better didn’t last long. As a teenager, Ray smoked, drank, and fought with other boys, and sometimes his father tried to set him straight, but the corporal punishment he meted out did not seem to take.

As for Mark, he was a master of detail, unstinting in his ambition to please his teachers. Mark was a pragmatist. He went about things, even as a boy, systematically. His speech was clipped and precise. He was efficient and diplomatic. You might surmise he would become the ultimate corporate operator. That he was capable of fury seemed inconceivable.

After Mark graduated from high school, he joined the others migrating to Olathe to enroll in MNC in 1978. His brother enrolled the same year, having taken a year off after high school.

David Penrose, a friend from childhood, planned to get a seminary degree, which is why he, like many in the Hazelwood section who attended the Nazarene Church school and summer camp, also went to MNC. Penrose shifted gears on his way to studying for the pulpit, becoming a behavioral psychologist for the criminally insane.

“In church and school,” said Penrose, “we were always taught to avoid any appearance of evil.”

“Mark,” said David, “knew everything about avoiding the appearance of evil. He knew how to be the model citizen.” Unlike his brother Ray, who cavorted with girls, Mark dutifully withheld. Girls—and all the sin and temptation they involved—would simply have to wait.

“He learned to overcome teenage libido,” Penrose said.

“But,” Penrose added, “try to modulate every impurity at any one point in your life, and you might run the risk of temporarily distorting your soul.”

Mark’s soul was consumed with the quest for perfectionism. By the time he attended MNC, he had gravitated toward business, and he seemed to thrive in the constrained environment of the college. His freshman year he was the epitome of pious. At the dorm’s nightly bed check he was always in bed on time and alone. He was skillful and public in his spirituality: He would talk of his love for Jesus, proselytize, and maintain strict conformity with the rules of the college and of the church. Such behavior was expected at a Bible college, but Mark’s version came without sanctimony. He was just plain friendly, even in passing conversation, with the observant and nonobservant alike.

Mark’s brother Ray, however, remained unconvinced of the sanctity of the Nazarene approach and ultimately succumbed to the old temptations. Part of his doubt stemmed from a comparative religion class he was taking. In this class he heard for the first time the voices of other religions and found in them some validity. The “holiness” movement did not always seem so holy to Ray.

Soon he had a pet tarantula named Fuzz Butt in his dorm room. After installing the spider, he began to party, smoke marijuana, play football, bed women, and get into the occasional squabble or fistfight. During one night of carousing, he beat up a classmate in his car and left him by the roadside. Eventually, Ray dropped out of the college. He clearly didn’t fit in on a campus where freshmen still wore beanies and Nazarene college boys associated with girls through a practice called “parloring.” As immortalized in their 1982 yearbook: “Freshman girls eagerly await the ring of the hall phone and the sound of a nervous male voice asking to see them in the parlor. With fluttering heart and clammy hands, she meets her suitor and they proceed to play Uno, order a pizza, study together, or just talk.”

The Mangelsdorf brothers, despite the same upbringing, seemed almost unrelated. In Mark’s junior year, he was elected Sergeant-at-Arms, or attorney general, of the student body. Then, in 1981, as Mark was entering his senior year, he was elected student body president, or “Head Fred,” as the position was called in jest.

Even in the restrained atmosphere of MNC, Mark thought you could be spiritual without being brooding or repressed. By his senior year, Mark had staged six Christian rock concerts on campus.

A review of one of his concerts ran under the school newspaper headline CHRIST GLORIFIED. The review began, “What do you think makes a successful Christian singing group? Is it good instruments and equipment, talent, a great back-up or making a lot of money? I believe that it is none of these things. Unlike a secular group, whose success is marked by how much money they make per concert or how many gold albums they have, I believe a Christian group’s success can be measured in one thing: how much they glorify Christ. If Farrell and Farrell [the band’s name] were to be compared to how close to that goal they came, they would hit the center of the target.”

Mark also helped put together the most successful revival week—the campus week of prayer and togetherness—that MNC had seen in its limited history.