Lucy and her daughter moved back in with her family for about a year, and they helped her care for the baby. She was psychologically damaged by the domestic abuse, heartbroken, dependent upon her family, and dirt broke. A couple of months after her divorce from Gary was finalized in 1976, she went to an employment agency in Baton Rouge, seeking temp work. That was where she met June Harris, Winston Van Harris’s wife, and Suzette Freeman, who were working there. An employment agency is a good place to meet desperate people. Abused, broken down and brokenhearted, taking care of her infant daughter, twenty years old and desperate for money, Lucy was in a dangerously vulnerable and emotionally fragile state—exactly the sort of person cults prey upon. “They sent me on a couple of interviews,” Lucy told me, “and I think I got a job. I can’t even remember where the hell it was at now. But then they would start wanting to know how I was doing, because they knew the situation I was in, and they knew that I had a baby—and they kind of drew me in, and I went to Suzette’s house, and they were talking about their church, and I . . . at the time I was so beaten down by my husband, and then you have this little light. That’s how they kind of put me in there. How I got involved with them. . . . I was young, stupid and had been in a beating relationship, and just so far down that I didn’t even hardly know my own damn name. And so it was, like, they just kind of sucked me in there.” Lucy became more and more closely involved with the church over the next year. She had moved out of her family’s home again and was living on her own with Bethany in an apartment in Camden. Throughout 1976 and the beginning of 1977, the Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, Inc., gradually isolated her from her friends and family. “It was days that I sat in the chair, and it was like that toward right before we left. ‘Your parents don’t love you and they’re bad for you and you can’t talk to them and you can’t go around them and you can’t see them.’ ” Lucy did not join the church until after Edith Harris died. By the time she did, Royal was still the church’s “Pastor,” but the position of “Prophet” had been passed down after his mother’s death to her son, the then-fifteen-year-old boy, Mark Harris. Suzette Freeman was called the “Interpreter.” I believe that by this point she had become the church’s real leader. And when Lucy had been with the church for over a year, in the winter to early spring of 1977, “all of a sudden we were supposed to be going to Arkansas,” she told me, “because of such-and-such tribulation and this kind of stuff. All the bad stuff didn’t happen until we got to Arkansas.” The Church of Christ in God through the Holy Spirit, Inc., moved from the Baton Rouge area to Northwest Arkansas; the wilderness of the Ozarks was their eventual destination. They towed up the trailer that Royal owned and parked it in the Midway Trailer Park in Springdale, rented another trailer next door to it, and rented an apartment not far away in Rogers. For a time, Royal and Mark were living in one trailer, Winston Van and June with their young son in the other, Lucy and her daughter, Bethany, in a small camper-trailer parked in the driveway, and everyone else—the Freemans and Johnny Stablier—in the apartment in Rogers. At some point, Suzette ordered Lucy and her daughter to move into the apartment with them.

  Jesus prophesizes the Great Tribulation in the Olivet Discourse, which appears in all three synoptic Gospels, and in Matthew (chapter 24) it is the final speech he makes to his disciples before the narrative of the Passion, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. “Tell us,” the disciples ask of Jesus, “when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?” . . . “Ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars,” he answers—many false prophets, nation rising against nation, kingdom against kingdom, famines, pestilences, and earthquakes, and then the end shall come. “Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains. . . . For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.”

  The Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, Inc., relocated from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Northwest Arkansas because its leaders intended it to serve as their way station and jumping-off point before moving into the sparsely populated Ozarks to wait out the imminent nuclear war they believed would kick off the Great Tribulation, and then to hide from the roving bandits and warlords and such in the three and a half years (Revelation: “a time, times, and half a time”) to follow before the second coming of Christ and the end of the world.

  During their year and several months in Arkansas, Lucy worked almost constantly. She had three different jobs. She worked for one of the area’s biggest employers, Tyson, at a poultry-processing plant, and at a Long John Silver’s, and waitressed at a diner, and she turned all of the money she earned over to the church. Winston Van Harris also worked at the Tyson plant, and also gave everything he earned to the church. None of the other members of the cult worked, and the toddler, Bethany, was often left in the care of the others. One of the other cult members—usually Royal, Winston Van, Larry, or Suzette—would drive Lucy to her various jobs, pick her up at the end of her shift, and take her to the next one, or back home.

  “I was so scared of these people,” Lucy told me. “You couldn’t go nowhere. You couldn’t call your family. My family did not know where I was at. And I had wrote letters. Even after all this happened, I know I told my sister, ‘I wrote you letters.’ And she said, ‘I never got them.’ So I wrote the letters, but they wouldn’t send them. They would destroy them. They took all my stuff. I come home from work one day, and Suzette had sold my wedding ring and my graduation ring and all my clothes.”

  Some horrific anecdotes about that time surfaced in Lucy’s trial and are mentioned in the newspaper coverage of it—for example, that one of Suzette’s adages to justify the beating and torturing of children was, “It’s better to be black and blue on the outside than black on the inside.” From the September 13, 1978, Blytheville Courier News, concerning June Harris’s testimony in court:

  Mrs. Harris said sometime in late March, a meeting was called concerning Bethany.

  At that meeting, Mark Harris placed a pot on the coffee table in one of the members’ homes in Rogers and started a fire in it. He ordered Mrs. Clark to get some pictures and Bethany’s doll and throw them into the fire, she said.

  Mrs. Clark tore the clothes off the doll and threw them and pieces of the pictures into the fire, Mrs. Harris testified. When flames shot up out of the pot, Mrs. Harris recalled that Mrs. Freeman said, “That’s what it’s going to be like, Bethany, in hell.”

  She then screamed to Bethany, “Put your hand in the fire,” Mrs. Harris testified.

  She said Winston Van Harris took the child’s hand and placed it into the flames. Mrs. Clark did not try to stop them; she only called out, “Van,” Mrs. Harris testified.

  Mrs. Freeman then held Bethany over the fire, Mrs. Harris recalled. She said that afterward Bethany’s hand was black and blistered.

  The hand was placed in ice water, then wrapped in gauze, but no other medical attention was given, she testified.

  Everyone seemed to live in terror of Mark Harris and Suzette Freeman—the “Prophet” and the “Interpreter.” The founding member of the church, Royal Harris, appears to have taken on a secondary role: His job was not to make decisions but to enforce Mark and Suzette’s rule over the others. At one point in one of the court transcripts, Richard Parker, the public defender appointed to defend Mark Harris, arguing for a lighter sentence for his client, said, “We would ask you to consider that if a seventeen-year-old boy orders or tells his father and his brother who is almost twice his age to go out and shoot a child, and they actually go do it, who should owe the greater responsibility or draw the greater penalty, the boy for telling them to do so, or the father and the brother for actually going out and doing it?” It is disturbing how Mark Harris acquired this seemingly absolute—divine—power over the others. His mother, Edith, declared her son to be a prophet in 1972, when he was twelve years old, and she died not long afterward. The boy seems to have been in control of everyone else, including his father, since then. The lion shall lie down with the lamb, and a little child will lead them. “Since Suzette supposedly was an ‘interpreter,’ ” Lucy wrote in an email, “and Mark the ‘prophet,’ I was always afraid of God. Many, many times I would have sat in a straight-backed chair in the middle of the floor, after coming home at night from work and listening to them tell me what God was going to do to me. Over and over and over.” Later in the same email: “At that time my fear of those people and God was so great it was like I was nobody. I honestly believed that they were getting messages and if I did anything, they would know about it because God would tell them. I was doomed any way I went.”

  The series of events that led to their arrest in the woods began sometime in mid-April 1978, when Mark Harris and Suzette Freeman declared June Harris—Winston Van Harris’s wife—to be “anathema,” accused her of having an affair with a woman who lived nearby, accused her of worshipping the Devil, and cast her out of the church—keeping her son, Matthew David, who was two years old and who may have been suffering from the same routine physical abuse on Mark and Suzette’s orders as Bethany was. Her husband gave her some money and let her take their car. Distraught and panicked, June drove all night back to Baton Rouge, but when she got there, she had second thoughts, turned around, and drove all the way back to Rogers to try to get her son back. (That’s about a ten-hour drive both ways.) She met with James Mixon, a family law attorney in Bentonville, and explained at least some part of the situation to him.

  Mixon’s reaction to June’s story was: This is not a hire-a-lawyer problem you have here, this is a call-the-cops problem. He called the police and told them that he was almost certain that something dark and crazy and deeply fucked-up and involving young children was happening in that trailer park and they had better look into it—and he had a woman right there in his office who needed to get her son out of there right now. Because they believed that it might be an urgent matter of the child’s safety, before they had the arrest warrant, some Benton County sheriff’s officers escorted June Harris to the two trailers in Springdale, from which they took Matthew David and returned him to June.

  Lucy and Bethany were inside the trailer when the police knocked on the door. “And they would not let me go outside, because I would’ve left them,” Lucy told me. “I said, ‘Just let me go home, just let me go home.’ ‘Okay,’ [Suzette said.] ‘We’ll let you go home.’ But when the cops came to get Matthew, they refused to let me go out of the room. And the cops never came in the trailer. So it was like, ‘Oh my God, that was my chance.’ ”

  When the police retrieved Matthew David Harris from Royal’s trailer in the Midway Trailer Park, they also wrote down the license plate numbers of the cars parked outside. Benton County issued a warrant for the arrests of Royal, Winston Van and Mark Harris, Larry and Suzette Freeman, Johnny Stablier, and Lucy Clark for suspected child abuse. But by the time the police returned to the trailer park later that day with the warrant, they had all fled, and one of the two trailers was on fire.

  After the visit from the police, Suzette Freeman told everyone that Mark Harris had received a message from God, which she believed she had successfully interpreted; it was that the time of the Great Tribulation had been “moved up.” The apocalypse had been rescheduled, and they had no time to waste. The catastrophic nuclear war that was going to inaugurate the end times would begin at any moment, and the time to flee into the mountains was now.

  That night, the church checked Lucy and her daughter into a motel somewhere outside Fayetteville under a fictitious name, while, according to Lucy, “they got all their stuff together, I guess with the guns and the trailer, the U-Haul and all that stuff.” Lucy knows now that the night alone with her daughter in the motel was another lost opportunity to escape. “I’ve had many people ask me, ‘Why didn’t you leave? Why didn’t you leave?’ I don’t know why. I didn’t leave ’cause I was scared. ’Cause they watched me all the time.” And the next morning, “they come got me.” Then Royal, Van, Mark, Suzette, Suzette’s daughter, Desha, Lucy, and Bethany, in Royal’s Jeep Wagoneer towing the aluminum camper-trailer that Lucy and Bethany had been living in before they moved in with Suzette, Larry, Johnny, and Desha, and a rented twenty-four-foot U-Haul moving truck, drove from Northwest Arkansas to Cave Mountain in the Upper Buffalo Wilderness; they climbed a few miles up Cave Mountain Road, turned down Kaypark Road, and rumbled down the tiny Forest Service road until the U-Haul got stuck. They did manage to drive the Jeep towing the camper-trailer a good way into the woods, though, and found a spot near Kaypark Cemetery to camp for the night.

  The place where they were camped is about two miles, as the crow flies, from the place where Haley would get lost in the woods twenty-three years and five days later.

  Meanwhile, Suzette’s husband, Larry Freeman, and Johnny Stablier— ­also on Mark and Suzette’s orders—drove up to Columbia, Missouri, where Larry’s ex-wife, Dinah Turnbull, lived with their two sons—four and seven years old—to kidnap the children and take them to the place where the others were bivouacked in order to await the Tribulation.

  Larry Freeman and Johnny Stablier broke into Larry’s ex-wife’s home in Columbia, tied her to a chair, and successfully kidnapped their two kids. But Dinah Turnbull managed to untie herself and called the police, and the two men were arrested on the highway an hour later. This is from an article in the Columbia Missourian covering Larry Freeman’s trial that summer:

  Freeman was arrested in April less than an hour after he and a fellow religious cult member, John Stablier, allegedly tied up Freeman’s ex-wife, Mrs. Turnbull, and took Freeman’s two sons from their mother’s Columbia home.

  Freeman said the leader of the cult told him to go to Columbia to bring his sons to the hills of Arkansas in preparation for the end of the world.

  Unbeknownst to the other members of the church, Larry Freeman and Johnny Stablier were arrested on April 21, two days before the murder of Bethany Clark.

  Bethany Alana Clark was killed because Mark Harris said that the voice of God had told him—and Suzette had agreed via “interpretation”—that Bethany was “anathema” and had to die. That is the reason Mark Harris still gave later in court during his sentencing. One particularly disturbing thing about the court transcripts is that Royal and Winston Van Harris seem to be aware that the jig is up—they understand that they’re about to be sentenced for murder, and are no longer in make-believe land—but Mark Harris does not. He still believes. He also still believes he is a prophet. He sometimes floats off on irrelevant flights of insane, quasi-Christian mystical gobbledygook that the judge frequently interrupts with comments such as “Mr. Harris, at this time I do not want to get into the philosophy of the church.” Mark is still, so to speak, drinking the Kool-Aid—his own. (That wasn’t an idiom yet, because the Jonestown massacre would happen a little less than two months after the trial ended.)

  In court Royal Harris would offer another explanation, which was that they all seriously believed that a three-and-a-half-year period of the apocalyptic collapse of human civilization loomed on the horizon and that three-year-old Bethany Alana would not survive it, anyway; it had been a mercy killing. An excerpt of Royal’s remarks to the judge prior to sentencing:

  I was acting in the belief that tribulation was starting in, and that we would in a matter of hours be in nuclear war, and that I was going in as a military commander of the group and responsible for the protection of the whole group, and I am an Air Force veteran and am very familiar with nuclear bombs and effects or results, and have studied extensively what happened in Germany during World War II and I know what happens when there is a war and law and order breaks down, and I watched the movie Exodus just a few nights before this happened and we went in the wilderness. . . . My actions were for the protection of the overall group and having a small child with us was a liability which endangered the whole group and we thought that she could not survive anyway and it would be more merciful to her to be out of it.

  My first thought reading this was that it was a piece of self-palliative bullshit that had entered Royal’s head when he was in jail long after the fact, before a weird detail he had thought relevant to bring up in court—“and I watched the movie Exodus just a few nights before this happened”—prompted me to watch the movie myself to try to glean some guess as to what the flying fuck Royal Harris thought he had gotten out of it. Otto Preminger’s film came out in 1960, so Royal must have seen it on TV or something. It’s an interesting movie for several reasons, one of them being that it was the first script Dalton Trumbo wrote under his own name after his decade of exile on the Hollywood blacklist. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, of which it won five, it’s a three-hour-long historical epic based on the novel by Leon Uris about the founding of the state of Israel. Paul Newman stars as Ari Ben Canaan, a decorated former officer of the Jewish Brigade in the British Army during World War II who tricks the British military into letting 611 Jewish refugees, most of them Holocaust survivors, being held in the Karaolos internment camp on Cyprus board a decrepit cargo ship to be sent back to Germany, which he intends to redirect instead to the British Mandate of Palestine; the British realize they’ve been duped after the refugees board the ship but before it leaves, so they block it from the harbor; then there’s a long standoff as the people on the ship dump their provisions over the sides and declare a hunger strike; on the ship there’s a lot of back-and-forth about the ethics of including the children with them in the hunger strike: at one point a doctor on board says to Ben Canaan, “We’ve made a mistake—a bad mistake in letting the children be part of this. A child’s body grows every hour. They need food more than adults. Their bladders require more sugar.” The doctor convinces Ben Canaan to let the children off the ship, but their mothers band together and patriotically refuse. “I will not take him back to Karaolos,” one says while holding her infant. “He will go to Palestine with me, or right here on the ship we will die together. I will not take him back.” So: Huh—thoughts about the extraprecarious health of children in times of crisis—and the harsh but supposedly noble necessity of sacrificing them, for their own good or for a higher cause—may actually have been bouncing around in Royal’s deeply deluded mind in the days before Bethany’s murder.