Edith is forceful, a big personality by all accounts, domineering, a dynamo. She is also two years older, has already known marriage and motherhood, and has seen much more of the world. Royal, by contrast, is shy and quiet, lets his family work him like a mule, the obedient and faithful older son who never leaves and never gets a fatted calf slain in his honor, who doesn’t need to be found because he’s never been lost, still living in the farmhouse he was born in and still toiling for his father seven years after graduating from college with the engineering degree he’s put to precisely zero use in the grocery store.

  Whatever happened between them, it happened fast, because Edith left her first husband and moved back to Texas in 1956, and she married Royal Harris at Bethany Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, a small town outside Tyler, on April 26, 1957. Edith took Royal’s surname and changed her son’s name, rechristening him with Royal’s middle name: Winston Van Harris.

  They lived in Tyler in the late 1950s and early 1960s. That was where Edith and Royal’s own son, Mark, was born in 1960. In the early 1960s, Royal landed a job as a systems analyst at Ethyl Corporation, a manufacturer of lead gasoline additives based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. So the family moved to Baton Rouge, and except for his years in college, Royal was living away from his parents for the first time in his life. Winston Van Harris, formerly Gobe Smith III, aka Buster, graduated from high school in Baton Rouge in 1964, enrolled as a student at Harding College, a small private Christian college in Searcy, Arkansas, for two years in 1964–1966, dropped out, joined the army, trained as a reconnaissance ranger, rose to the rank of first lieutenant, and served three years at the Demilitarized Zone in Korea, where he racked up an exemplary record of service, received an honorable discharge at the end of his tour, and returned home to Texas with his wife, Mia, a Korean national.

  Meanwhile, Edith Harris was becoming increasingly isolated from her family and increasingly obsessed with some fringe interpretations of Christianity that they found worrisome and bizarre. Royal’s parents had started a trucking company, which by the late 1960s had begun to do pretty well. Royal quit his job at Ethyl, and the small family sold their house in Baton Rouge and moved into a trailer on his parents’ property in Tyler, behind their house. Royal got his trucker’s license, and for the next few years he was often on the road, driving a truck for his father’s company. Edith stayed at home in the trailer parked behind her in-laws’ house and obsessed over Christian doctrine, poring over the Bible for clues, listening to gospel on the radio.

  Edith’s brother, Paul Aaron—the same brother who would call Gobe Smith, Jr., many years later to tell him that his son had been arrested—when asked if his sister and her second husband had had any “unusual religious beliefs,” would tell a courtroom:

  They became involved in unusual religious beliefs that, in my opinion, amounted to a cult. . . . I won’t go into the religious doctrine unless you want me to, but the results was that they should consider the whole family that did not go along with them in this belief as their enemy. At this point, which was after Van had returned from the military and married, they began to put themselves in seclusion from the family and practically from the rest of the world.

  When asked about their beliefs, Paul mentioned that they were adherents of British Israelism, a crackpot theory with racist and anti-Semitic overtures that has been kicked around on the pseudohistorical fringes of dubious Christian scholarship since the seventeenth century, positing that the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, said to have been exiled from the Promised Land after the conquest of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 722 BC, eventually resettled in the British Isles and northern Europe— i.e., Celtic, Nordic, and Germanic people; meaning that the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers of North America directly descended from Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham: the true-born chosen people, the bloodline of the Messiah. This notion essentially combines colonial apologia with Christian atavism—the quest to return to early Christianity as it was practiced in the first century AD, before the Devil in the disguise of what’s now called the Catholic Church took over and started twisting everything around—and its first major wave of popularity hit the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, where it influenced both Mormonism and Pentecostalism. Biblical genealogical nonsense and its intersection with global politics—wars and empires and the migrations of tribes—continued to influence Royal’s religious thinking up until the end. Royal and Edith may have believed they were the true descendants of the people God gifted with the power of prophecy, and it’s worth keeping in mind that those who wish to revive the earliest form of Christianity believe the Book of Acts to be their best record and model (KJV, Acts 4:30): “By stretching forth thine hand to heal; and that signs and wonders may be done by the name of thy holy child Jesus.” It’s not just narrative, and it’s certainly not metaphor: in the Book of Acts—the story of the formation of the Christian Church at Antioch in the days after Christ’s Ascension and the first apostolic missions of Peter and Paul—God appears as a blinding flash of light and speaks directly to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus; when Peter gets thrown in jail, angels come in the night to melt his chains and bust him out; Paul’s hands heal the sick just as Jesus’s had. The yearning for the uncorrupted early Church is also a sincere yearning for a human world in which God can and will directly and visibly intervene.

  In Tyler, Texas, in the late 1960s and very early 1970s, this “cult” described by Paul Aaron was just a family: Royal and Edith and their young son, Mark; Edith’s first son, Winston Van, who was then living in Dallas and whose marriage to Mia was already failing after less than a year since they had returned from Korea, could maybe be counted as a peripheral member. Most of Edith’s family also lived in the Dallas area, but by the late 1960s, Edith had cut off all contact with her mother and siblings. Paul Aaron would testify that when Edith and Paul’s mother died in 1971, Edith, Royal, Mark, and Winston Van did not attend her funeral, but waited outside the gates of the cemetery until all the mourners had dispersed from the graveside ceremony; when everyone had gone, they approached the yet-uncovered grave, and each of them tossed a pebble onto the casket—and, Paul said, “they pronounced an anathema on my mother and her mother and Van’s grandmother.” This testimony comes from an appeal to Winston Van’s sentence four years after his conviction, in 1984; the lawyer for the defense asked Paul Aaron about the word anathema. “It’s a curse,” he said. “The entire meaning is not clear to me except that I suppose one who has received this curse is supposed to lose his soul. I think that would be the bible definition of it.”

  That same year that Edith made her husband and sons pronounce anathema upon her recently dead mother, Royal had some sort of ugly falling-out with his father over something related to the trucking business. Royal liquidated all the family’s assets and took out a bank loan, and the family, with resources considerably reduced, moved back to Baton Rouge. He managed to scrape together enough money to buy a trailer, and they moved it into a trailer park on the outskirts of the city. For whatever reason, the Ethyl Corporation wouldn’t rehire him. After that, Royal struggled to find work, and the family’s finances dwindled. The following year, 1972, they “founded” their church and simultaneously registered it as a corporation, presumably for tax purposes: the Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, Inc. It was the same year that Royal and Edith self-published a book titled The Third Step to Joyful Living, or How to Stop Worrying and registered the copyright with the Library of Congress. I have tried to track down a copy of it, with no success yet. (The Library of Congress keeps all publishing rec­ords but throws away some books after a certain number of years, this title unsurprisingly being one of them.) 1972 was also the year when Edith Harris, who had declared herself a prophet, prophesized that her younger son, Mark, then twelve years old, was also destined to be a prophet.

  At some point in the mid-1970s—all I know is that it happened after 1972 and before 1976—the claustrophobically close-knit group began to expand, and here the story begins to emerge more clearly out of the dark. Edith’s first son, Winston Van, had recently moved to Houston and found work at an insurance firm and a part-time job teaching karate; he wasn’t there long before his wife, Mia, divorced him and he lost his primary job. He joined his family in Baton Rouge, where he briefly worked for another insurance company before landing a job as an assistant bookkeeper at Lynch Freight, a trucking company, which he held for a couple of years. There he met and married his second wife, June, who joined his parents’ church. Also in Baton Rouge around this time, the mid-1970s, two outsiders, Larry and Suzette Freeman, joined the Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, Inc.

  Barbara Suzette Kleinpeter was born on February 27, 1947 in Grosse Tête, Louisiana, the first of nine children. The Kleinpeters are a prominent and sprawling family in southern Louisiana, with roots that go back to German émigrés who settled in New France in the late seventeenth century. Another branch of the family owns a large, successful, more than century-old dairy farm on the other side of the Mississippi, and the red-and-white Valentine-heart logo of Kleinpeter Farms Dairy is a ubiquitous sight in the refrigerators of Louisiana’s groceries and convenience stores. Suzette’s grandfather, William Sidney Kleinpeter, made a fortune in logging, acquired a great acreage of land and twelve hundred head of cattle, and today the main artery that runs through Grosse Tête—Sidney Road—is named after him. Grosse Tête, a village of about seven hundred residents, straddles a bayou seventeen miles west of Baton Rouge. It is a picturesque place that looks like a romantic exaggeration of southern Louisiana: verdant showers of Spanish moss hanging from the witchy claws of live oaks; fields of sugarcane; alligators can sometimes be seen sliding through the film of fungal muck on the glassy surface of the bayou; and the night air in the summer, when I saw it, is enchanted with the phosphorescent twinkling of lightning bugs. That Kleinpeter patriarch with all the land and cattle and logging money left three farms situated all in a row to his three sons, each of whom married and was fruitful, multiplied: three sets of cousins, altogether twenty-two kids growing up in the middle of the century on the country road named after their grandfather.

  There was something dark and rotten between Suzette and her mother, Barbara Landry Kleinpeter (the Landrys are another big old Louisiana family). Barbara was an alcoholic whose drinking worsened throughout her life until she died of complications of diabetes brought on by her alcoholism in 1975. Suzette would often tell her brother Jerry and her sister Freida—the second and third oldest siblings, with whom she was closest—that her mother was jealous of her. “I don’t know if she was talking about looks or what,” Jerry Kleinpeter told me. “I don’t know. It was kind of strange. They kinda had a strange relationship.” (Several people have mentioned Suzette’s physical beauty to me; it seems to have been an important part of the story. In a high school yearbook photo she looks a lot like Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass.) The friction between Suzette and her mother was so bad that Suzette moved out, and she spent most of her childhood living with her mother’s parents down the road. She moved back in with her parents and siblings only after both her maternal grandparents had died, when she was in high school.

  When Suzette was twenty years old, she married a fellow Grosse Tête native, Robert Dardenne, a Vietnam veteran recently returned from the war; their daughter, Desha, was born in 1970, and the couple divorced not long after that. A few years later, Suzette met and soon married Thomas Larry Freeman—also a native Louisianan, also a Vietnam vet, and also a divorcé, with two young sons from his previous marriage.

  Like many Cajun families, the Kleinpeters and the Landrys were Catholics, and Suzette and her many siblings grew up attending Mass at St. Joseph Church in Grosse Tête, where all her brothers were altar boys. But when she got together with Larry Freeman, who had grown up Southern Baptist in a more northerly part of the state,* she drifted away from Catholicism and toward nondenominational evangelical Christianity. She and Larry began attending church at the Family Worship Center Church in Baton Rouge, headed by the helmet-haired pioneering radio minister (and first cousin of rock and roll great Jerry Lee Lewis) Jimmy Swaggart, who would later go on to become famous as a televangelist, and then infamous as a hypocrite and charlatan when he was defrocked after several prostitution scandals in the late 1980s. Jerry Kleinpeter thinks his sister and her second husband may have met the Harrises through Jimmy Swaggart’s church in what had to have been 1975 or the first months of 1976.

  Suzette Kleinpeter and Larry Freeman married in 1976. Suzette’s semiestranged and long-suffering mother, with whom she’d had a deeply troubled relationship, had drunk herself to death at the age of fifty-one less than a year before, and later that year, Edith Harris—the founder, matriarch, and first prophet of the Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, Inc.—died of a heart attack at the age of fifty.

  Larry and Suzette joined the church shortly before Edith’s death. After Edith died, the small group probably would have been reeling in uncertainty, destabilized by the abrupt passing of the woman who had been their main driving force. I have encountered many different sources describing Edith Harris as a figure of almost terrifying dominance and control, and I believe her death created a sudden, sucking power vacuum, which Suzette Freeman adroitly stepped into; she quickly and radically changed the social dynamics of what by now could surely be termed a cult.

  Now they were a group of eight: Royal; his son, Mark; his stepson, Winston Van, and Winston Van’s second wife, June, who had just given birth to a son, Matthew David; Larry and Suzette Freeman and her young daughter, Desha. Soon afterward, two more would join them: a lost and confused young man named Johnny Stablier, and a psychologically broken, penniless and desperate twenty-year-old woman with an infant daughter who had just been abandoned by her abusive husband. Her name was Lucy Clark, and her daughter was named Bethany Alana.*

  7

  The Tribulation

  LUCY CLARK WAS BORN IN BATON ROUGE IN 1956 AND GREW UP near there on her family’s farm in Camden, Louisiana, the youngest of five children. They grew up “on the old home place,” Lucy said, and a lot of native blood ran in her family. “I am French and Indian,” she wrote. “My great-grandfather on Mama’s side was full-blooded Choctaw whose tribe came down the Trail of Tears in North Carolina. My great-grandpa on Daddy’s side was full-blooded Cherokee. My mother’s dad was French. My oldest sister Emma and I are the only ones with light blonde/brown hair. All the rest have black hair. I was born black-headed, but didn’t stay that way though.” Lucy grew up in a musical family. “My grandpas on both sides played the fiddle. All of my mother’s brothers played also. My uncle Billy had a bluegrass band and had a show on the radio when I was younger. The same person who played for Hank Williams, Lum York, also played the bass fiddle for Uncle Billy. I learned how to play the guitar when I was eight years old. I would play with my uncle. I couldn’t read a note of music if my life depended on it, though. My uncle always used to tell me that if you hear it in your mind and heart, then you could play it with your hands.”*

  Camden is a small town spread out along I-12 in a wide stretch of verdant and pancake-flat land between Baton Rouge and the swamplands at the edges of Lake Pontchartrain, and it’s another quaint, rural place where everyone knows everyone. When she was a freshman at Camden High School, Lucy fell in love with her schoolmate Gary Clark, a year older than her. She married him shortly after graduating from high school at the age of eighteen. Soon after, Gary began beating and otherwise abusing her. “I was not allowed to see my family even though they only lived 3 miles from me,” Lucy wrote. “Many times my Dad would come by my house and I would pretend I was not at home because I did not want him to see my face black and blue and eyes swollen shut. I was not raised in a family that was abusive like that. At that time, I was pregnant with Bethany.” She gave birth to their daughter, Bethany, on November 2, 1974. Her husband left her for another woman when Bethany was a few months old. “So here I was a child with a child devastated and just didn’t know where to go.”