Fred and Ed led them from there into the dark springtime woods, five pairs of boots crunching on the leaf litter: Fred and Ed in their hunting camo cradle carrying their shotguns, Hurchal and Ray armed with handguns in their hip holsters (unusual for Hurchal, who didn’t ordinarily carry a weapon and would retire from his six-year stint as sheriff without having fired a single shot in the line of duty). They found the campsite perhaps a hundred feet from the road: the pile of pale gray ashes ringed with stones, the two tents, the bight of laundry line strung between two trees, the aluminum camper-trailer hitched to the brown Jeep Wagoneer with wood side paneling. The trunk of the Wagoneer was packed to the ceiling. No one was about, but the curtains in the windows of the camper-trailer were drawn, and they could see shadows of movement behind them. It was about nine in the morning now, and the sunshine had burnt away the frost. A beautiful midspring day. Shooting stars and pink azaleas were at their height. The sheriff and deputy unsnapped their holsters and put their palms on the gun handles. The five men on foot surrounded the car and the camper-trailer. Approaching the vehicle, they could hear voices inside; not talking, but several voices speaking in unison in the murmuring cadence of a chant, as if they were reciting something. Hurchal stood back a bit and with a nod gave Ray the go-ahead. Ray banged with his knuckles three times on the door of the camper-trailer. The voices inside went silent.

  “Police,” Ray said. “Open up.”

  A long time passed. Sounds of weight shifting inside the trailer. Nothing. He banged on the door again.

  “Police. Please step out of the vehicle.”

  After a very long while, he heard a latch lifting, and the trailer door squealed open. The older man stepped into the doorway and looked around. Thin, tall, a bald crown ringed with short, sandy iron gray hair, a lean, gaunt face, gold-rimmed glasses, one slightly droopy eyelid. The man wore the unmistakable look of someone who knows this is the moment everything changes. He looked sick, haggard, tired. Ray could see at once that he knew the general reason why there were armed men knocking on the door of his trailer. Ray drew his gun, but didn’t point it at him.

  “Turn around please, sir, and place your hands against the vehicle.”

  He did as he was told without a word. Hurchal’s son, Eddy, patted him down, and they had him stand back a ways from the camper-trailer with his hands up.

  Next, one of the women came out—youngish, very pale, long black hair, barely taller than five feet, and skinny, probably not much more than a hundred pounds. One of the two children they were supposed to have with them followed her out; that had to be the nine-year-old girl. Ray figured the woman was her mother. There was no fight in the woman, either; she came out with her hands up. Eddy patted her down, and they made her stand off to the side next to the older man. Eddy took the child by the hand—she let it be taken—and guided her away from the others. He told her to sit down on the ground, and she did.

  The door opened again, and the wiry young guy who looked like a hippie came out—long brown hair and beard, jeans and jean jacket, cowboy boots—already talking, saying something like, “Now, Officer, look—”

  He was the healthiest looking and most able-bodied person to emerge from the trailer yet. There was a jumpy energy in his body, and wildness in his eyes. He immediately made Ray nervous in a way the others hadn’t; if there was anyone here he might need to be rough with, it was probably going to be this guy. Ray shushed him and jerked his gun at him.

  “Turn around and place your hands against the vehicle.”

  He did as he was told, but he was still trying to talk.

  “Shut up.”

  Ray quickly patted him down. Clean.

  The Newton County Sheriff’s Office possessed only one pair of handcuffs, which Ray had clipped to his belt. This guy was the only fish that had tugged back against the line, and he decided to put the cuffs on him. He holstered his gun, grabbed the man’s arms, pinned them behind his back, and ratcheted the cuffs onto his wrists. Hurchal guided him by the elbow to stand beside the others.

  The camper-trailer door swung and banged shut and opened again. A fragile, frightened-looking, pretty young woman with big quivery eyes came out of the trailer next. No fight whatsoever in her. Ray handled her gently, and in a moment she was standing beside the other three with her hands up.

  Then: a long nothing. Silence.

  A tableau of ten people: Fred and Ed standing back cradling their shotguns, Hurchal and his son, Eddy, standing with hands on hips, Ray with his hand on his holstered gun, four others standing quietly in a row, one handcuffed, the others with their hands up, and one little girl sitting by herself off to the side. Spring sunlight dappling the shady green forest, the crisp midmorning mountain air still cold enough their breaths came out as faintly visible fog, the songbirds singing.

  Ray looked at Hurchal. Hurchal was looking at the camper-trailer. The bulletin from Benton County had said three men, two women, two children. That left one man and one child unaccounted for. Ray could sense that the camper-trailer wasn’t empty. He banged on the door again.

  “Police. Come on out of there.”

  A long time passed—perhaps five, ten minutes. Every once in a while Ray would walk over, bang his fist on the door of the camper-trailer, and shout, “Police, open up.” Then: more silence. They could hear movement, weight shifting now and then, and the trailer would wobble slightly and creak. But the door was shut, and the curtains remained drawn over the windows. Hurchal and Ray came together for a sotto voce private palaver about whether or not they were going to have to go in there. While Ray kept periodically banging on the trailer door and shouting, civilian Ed Burton, who had just been out for turkey hunting, made himself useful and took care of the child; he walked her through the woods back to the road and put her in the back seat of one of the vehicles. Eddy stood watch over the detainees while Hurchal did a quick cursory sweep of the Wagoneer; he found a Remington .32 pistol in the glove box and a Ruger Mini .223 in a compartment in the driver’s-side door, both loaded. He unloaded the guns and placed them on the hood of the car. An ominous sign. Most of the law-enforcing these backcountry cops did in the day-to-day was writing tickets, and the most adventuresome police work Newton County typically required of them involved busting illegal marijuana farms—that is to say, dealing with ordinary human criminals motivated by the most ordinary of human motives: money. They knew they were dealing with something dark and strange and very out of the ordinary.

  Considering the arrest warrants and the guns Hurchal had just found in the car, they had no doubt they could claim probable cause to enter the camper-trailer. That wasn’t the issue. If they had loaded firearms in the car, there was a good chance there were more in the trailer. Ray wasn’t going to just open the door and stick his head inside.

  Again, Ray banged on the door. This time he said, “Listen. There’s a warrant out for you. If you don’t get out of there, I’m gonna shoot you and pull you out.”

  Silence. The trailer creaked and wobbled. At long last, the door opened. Ray Watkins drew his gun, stepped back, and kept it pointed at the trailer.

  “Come out of there with your hands up.”

  A lanky, gangly teenage boy in jeans and a tight red-and-white-striped T-shirt appeared in the doorway. He had a mop of curly brown hair and prickles of acne on his cheeks; he was still awkwardly growing into his body, the features of childhood and adulthood jumbled together: big hands but rail-thin wrists, broad shoulders but a skinny chest, girlishly pretty eyelashes, a man’s Adam’s apple bobbing in a long, slender neck. He had wild, wide-open eyes, and he looked, if anything, confused to be there.

  With all five adults accounted for, Ray felt safe enough to open the camper-trailer door and peek inside: a lot of boxes full of stuff heaped atop one another, a sleeping cot folded out on the floor, pillows, blankets, books—and most notably, a .44 Magnum lying on one of the benches, which Ray suspected that the last of them to come out—that gangly teenager—had been spending all those long minutes of silence contemplating using, and a thin chill scissored through him as he briefly imagined a more interesting way the morning could have gone just moments ago. But he could tell at a glance that the trailer was now empty of human occupants.

  Ray Watkins was certain that the arrest warrant from Benton County he’d seen had mentioned that the group consisted of five adults with two young children with them: two girls, one about nine or ten years old, the other not older than five. The older girl was accounted for; they were going to have to get Social Services to come get her after they had the adults locked up. But the younger one—she wasn’t there. There was no sign of her.

  They questioned the five detainees about the missing child, the little girl. None would talk. It was clear they would be getting nothing out of them. Hurchal and Ray conferred and decided it was time to take them to jail. It was about half a mile to get out of the woods and back up Kaypark Road to where the vehicles were parked, a good fifteen minutes or so of walking. They went single file: the older man and the two women in front, Fred and Eddy following them, then the jumpy young long-haired guy in cuffs, then Ray, then the teenage boy, and Hurchal bringing up the rear. Ray’s spider sense kept tingling with that teenager walking behind him. Several times he felt him get too close, and he turned around and barked at him to stay back.

  “He kept easing up behind me,” Ray told me. “I have a wide peripheral vision. And I could see him easing up, easing up. And I turned around and told him, ‘Stay back.’ And he said, ‘No.’ And I pushed him. I said, ‘Stay back. I want you this far back. I don’t want you up behind me like that.’ And so then we walked another, oh, probably from here to that tree out there, and he was up behind me again. He was about two and a half feet from me. If he had made a lunge, he might have been able to get ahold of the gun—which he hadn’t, but that was beside the point. I turned around, and I’m left-handed. I turned around, and I hit him right there.” Ray pointed to the spot on himself, where the neck meets the shoulder. “Took him to the ground. And I told him, ‘Now that is your last warning. You get up behind me again, I’m going to turn around, and you’re going to have this here pistol. It’s going to be pow.’ I said, ‘Always go right.’ And so he stayed back then, but I had to watch him every step of the way until we got him into the car.”

  Sheriff Fowler entrusted Fred, Ray, and Eddy to take the detainees to jail in Jasper. Hurchal said he wanted to stay there and look around the campsite. They put the two women in the back of Eddy’s car and the older man and the teenager in the back seat of Ray’s, with Fred Bell sitting in the back to keep an eye on them; and the young man in handcuffs they put up front in the passenger seat. Ed Burton drove the little girl in Fred’s truck, with the gutted turkey trussed up in the bed. The three vehicles pulled into Jasper about forty minutes later. Ray locked the three men in one jail cell and the two women in another. There were logistics to figure out after that. The child must have been placed in some kind of emergency state custody, and somebody had to have notified the police in Benton County. Someone else—Ray doesn’t remember who—must have driven the five detainees to Benton County later that day, because there are records of them being booked and processed there that afternoon.

  The five people who were arrested in Newton County that day and taken to Benton County, where there was an active warrant for their arrest on suspicion of child abuse, were Royal Harris, fifty-one years old; his stepson, Winston Van Harris, thirty-one; his son, Mark Harris, seventeen; Suzette Freeman, thirty-one; and Lucy Clark, twenty-two. Once the five were locked up in Newton County Jail awaiting transfer to Benton County, Ray got back in his car and headed back out to Kaypark Road on Cave Mountain to rejoin Hurchal. When he made it back to that scraggly Forest Service road in that remote wilderness area, the sheriff had bad news.

  After the others left, Sheriff Fowler stood alone on Kaypark Road with a heavy feeling in his gut. He hiked the half mile or so down the road and through the woods back to the campsite: the camper-trailer hitched to the Wagoneer, the tents, the clothesline, the firepit. He noticed a shovel leaning against a tree near the camper-trailer with dirt on its blade; that told him to look for a place where it looked like someone had dug a hole, buried something, and filled it in. Hurchal had grown up on Cave Mountain—his mother’s father had been the first person buried in Cave Mountain Cemetery—and he knew these woods in his bones; like Fred Bell and Ray Watkins, he was a hunter and an experienced woodsman who knew how to read signs. He paced around the campsite and swept in widening circles out into the woods surrounding it, looking for some kind of sign. After perhaps an hour of crunching through the woods scanning the ground, about fifty feet away from the firepit, the tents, and the Jeep and the trailer, just out of sight of them, at the bottom of a swale in the ground in the mulchy leaf litter on the forest floor, he found a mound of dark, freshly overturned dirt with a few dead logs that appeared to have been deliberately dragged over the spot. He rolled the logs aside and with the same shovel that had probably been used to dig the hole and fill it back up, he started digging. The soil was loose, and it didn’t take long to get down about thirty inches, when the blade of the shovel hit something that wasn’t dirt. He squatted over the hole in the ground and started digging with his hands. His fingers found the thin wire handle of a bucket. He scooped handfuls of mud away from the bucket and found a black plastic garbage bag inside it. He ripped it open and saw two small feet sticking up, wearing little white sneakers.

  Forensics would later determine that Bethany Alana Clark, three and a half years old, had been shot eight times with a .22, stuffed in a plastic garbage bag that had then been stuffed in a five-gallon plastic paint bucket, and buried (very recently) a foot and a half deep and fifty feet away from where the other six people had been found. Among other things, Newton County sheriff’s officers would confiscate from the Jeep Wagoneer, the camper-trailer, and the rented U-Haul truck: twenty-two firearms, more than two thousand rounds of ammunition, an enormous quantity of dry goods and canned food, and three copies of a book titled The Third Step to Joyful Living, or How to Stop Worrying, by Royal and Edith Harris.

  Edith Otellia Aaron—later Edith Smith, later Edith Harris—was born in 1926 in the tiny East Texas town of Navarro. She was the daughter of a Methodist minister, and she would later claim to have been ordained as a Methodist minister herself. Edith married her first husband, a US Army captain from Augusta, Georgia, named Gobe Smith, Jr., in Dallas on June 11, 1944, in a ceremony officiated by her father, the Reverend James Aaron. The couple’s son, Gobe Smith III, was born in November 1946. They were an army family, moving every few years whenever the father was assigned to a new base. By all accounts, Edith was a woman who held “tremendous domination” over her son—called by the nickname “Buster” from an early age—and was, to put it mildly, “an excessively religious person.” Many years later, Douglas Wilson, a public defender, would recall in court that Gobe Smith, Jr., had told him that during the twelve years of their marriage, “they would join one church, and then another, and after a short period of time she would find herself in disagreement with whatever doctrine prevailed in that church, and would attempt to tell them what the true path was, and they didn’t agree with it, so she would cut herself off from it. And eventually, it led to the founding of her own church where she could have total dominion over the doctrine.” In 1956, when their son was nine years old, “it had become clear” to Edith that her husband “was just not in agreement with every pronouncement in terms of religion that she made.” She left him, cut off all communication with him, and took their son with her back to Texas. Gobe Smith, Jr., would have no more contact with Buster until twenty-two years later, when his deceased ex-wife’s brother called him in April 1978 to tell him that his son had been arrested for murder in Arkansas.

  Soon after Edith Smith returned to Texas with her nine-year-old son, she met a fellow Texan, Royal Winston Harris.

  I know only the sparest details of how these two met each other. I know that Royal Harris was born on January 27, 1928, and grew up on a farm near Tyler, Texas, a city of about 50,000 at the time, halfway between Dallas and Shreveport, Louisiana. I know he must have grown up deep in the sticks because the home address listed on his draft card and on his father’s draft card is a Rural Free Delivery number. I know he graduated from John Tyler High School in 1945; next to a picture of a lean-faced teenager with center-parted hair in his senior high school yearbook: “How could he possibly be so shy/And also retain the twinkle in his eye?” I know he enlisted in the US Air Force’s Air Mobility Command Reserve while a student at Texas A&M. Years later, in court, he would claim to be a veteran of World War II, though I don’t see how that could possibly fit with the timeline. He graduated with an engineering degree in 1949. After that, I know from census data that he was living with his parents and much younger brother on the farm he had grown up on and working as a clerk in the country grocery store his family owned—eighty-four hours a week, which must mean that he was working grueling twelve-to-fourteen-hour shifts nearly every day, a schedule with barely enough time left over for eating and sleeping.

  I am looking at his face now as it must have looked around this time, his senior picture in his college yearbook. His mouth is flat and serious, and he’s wearing his AMC dress uniform: a not unhandsome twenty-one-year-old man with a neck beefed out a bit since high school. He frankly looks a little dumb: big ears and narrow eyes set close together, something asymmetrical about them—one lid droops lower than the other. He looks exactly like an East Texas farm boy in 1949.

  Where Edith and Royal met, the countryside beyond Tyler, is a flat, brown place dotted with trees, a quiet place with big open skies where oil derricks creak and bob their mechanical beaks up and down in the distance and a building taller than one story is an unusual sight. You may picture it in black and white, and you may hear Hank Williams playing from the radio of a Studebaker pickup with stake siding. How they met is a mystery. Royal Harris is twenty-eight years old, still living on his family’s farm and working long hours in their little country grocery store. The meat and milk and eggs and a lot of the produce for sale probably come from the family’s own farm. A thirty-year-old woman shows up in the area in 1956. She has family nearby, but not that near—closer to Dallas, about an hour and a half away. She has a nine-year-old son with her. She’s been a young army wife for ten years, bouncing around the South from base to base every few years, most recently in South Carolina, but she divorced her husband and has come back to Texas. Perhaps they met at the grocery store. It was a small store at the intersection of two country roads, probably still the old-fashioned kind where all the goods are stored in inventory and you have to tell the guy behind the counter what you want, and he goes and gets it for you and rings you up. The guy behind the counter is Royal Harris, working eighty-four hours a week (or at least that’s what he reported to the government). Everyone describes him as shy and taciturn—though he would have to interact with people to sell them food. Was a thirty-year-old recently divorced single woman with a nine-year-old kid in rural Texas in the 1950s unusual enough that the neighbors whispered about her? Probably. The young man fetching groceries down from the shelves for the stranger new to town, the single mother with her little boy with her who answers to the fairly odd name of “Gobe.” They get to talking; one thing leads to another. Or perhaps they met in church. Religion must have been a key component of their becoming a couple. It couldn’t not have been; Edith was obsessed with religion. Her first husband’s insufficient piety had been the reason she’d divorced him. So now I imagine they meet in church on a Sunday morning, mingling after the services, the Sabbath being Royal’s only day off, he in his Sunday best with hair combed, there with his family, young still but getting old enough to be a little embarrassed about still roosting in the nest.