That the film so clearly resonated with Royal Harris may have had something to do with his wife’s earlier obsession with British Israelism. I personally believe that there is an element in the Abrahamic religions that tickles a certain romantic itch for historical fantasy. I first had something like that thought as a child at Bethany Baptist’s Summer Bible Day Camp, when the counselors told those of us assembled in the pews that we were about to go back in time. The magic school bus drove us to some kid’s house, where his parents were waiting in the backyard, dressed in impressively professional-looking Bible-times costumes, with a pre–­Columbian Exchange Levantine lunch arranged on blankets on the ground, ready with a lesson in Ancient Aramaic table manners—the ritual significance of washing feet and breaking bread and so on. I suspect that this LARPing element of Christianity might even go back to the Middle Ages, when painters felt free to anachronistically depict Classical and Ancient Hebraic subjects such as Hercules and Samson in clothing or armor that was contemporary for them, but when depicting Jesus, Mary, or the apostles, they usually remembered those characters’ historical, cultural, and geographical contexts as distinct from those of the artists or the worshippers looking at their paintings: robes and sandals and so on. This historical fantasy reaches out from the holy texts and touches the fingers of the present via apocalyptic prophecy—absolutely essential to the theological structure of the religion—that has been foretold but not yet come to pass: the long-awaited return to the land promised to the descendants of Abraham, lost at a time when armies fought with bows and arrows and swords and regained in the time of tanks and machine guns, but continuous within the same story. This emotional narrative, built on a foundation of romantic fantasy and essential to the self-mythology of Israel, is connected with a mystical umbilical cord to the Christian Revelation, a scriptural mirror that reflects your own times’ nightmares, whatever they are, whenever you are: a flash, a ring of fire, a mushroom cloud rising over the plains of Gomorrah, a sea of blood reaching high as the horses’ bridles.

  Who actually murdered Bethany is a matter of some dispute. “Each one of ’em had shot her,” Ray Watkins said. “That’s what the prophet wanted to do, have each one of ’em shoot that little girl. That’s what the others told me.” With all respect due to Ray, I think his imagination invented that in the intervening years. In court, the narrative solidified into this: On Monday morning, Royal Harris and Winston Van Harris took Bethany out of sight about fifty feet away from the campsite, and about an hour later they returned without her. Throughout her trial Lucy maintained that she had never heard the gunshots. Though the three were not very far away, this isn’t implausible; sound does not travel very far in the Buffalo National River Wilderness in late April, with full foliage on the trees. Plus, a .22 is a very small-bore weapon that doesn’t make much noise. That may have even been precisely why they used it; as Ray Watkins duly noted, they had plenty more powerful firearms with them. It may have also been the reason it took eight shots to kill her.* In court, Royal insisted that he had been the one who had pulled the trigger—eight times—but that may have been a story they’d agreed on in the hope that the much older man, rather than his thirty-one-year-old stepson or his seventeen-year-old son, would get the longer prison sentence.

  Forty-six years later, Lucy’s memory of the sequence of events is a bit muddled, and she contradicted what she had said in court about not hearing the gunshots. She told me that she and Bethany had spent the first night in the woods in a tent with Suzette and Desha, and the next morning, “Suzette said Van and Royal were going to get some water and they wanted Bethany to go with them. . . . He [Royal or Van] took her by the hand and said, ‘We’ll be right back.’ And then I’m sittin’ on this log, and that’s when I heard the shots. . . . They came back, they didn’t have her. And I wanted to know where they were, and Suzette kept telling me, ‘You sit down and hush, just sit down and hush. It’s okay. It’s okay.’ ” She does not remember what happened the rest of that day or the following night, but the next morning was when Fred Bell and Ed Burton discovered their campsite, and the sheriff’s officers later arrived to arrest them; she does remember that all of them were holed up in the camper-trailer when the police got there, and that Van was sitting beside her with a .357 Magnum pointed at her. “They knocked on the door, and Van said, ‘Shut up, don’t say nothing.’ And we opened the door and went outside. And that’s when all they got us.” She told me that she was in retrospect grateful that the sheriff’s officers arrested them when they did, because if they hadn’t, she was sure “they would’ve killed me, too.”

  8

  The Child Is Not Alive

  NEWTON COUNTY SHERIFF HURCHAL FOWLER AND DEPUTY RAY Watkins arrested five people that day: Royal, Winston Van and Mark Harris, Suzette Freeman, and Lucy Clark. Within one day of the arrests, 19th Judicial District Judge W. H. Enfield in Benton County had granted Suzette Freeman immunity from prosecution in exchange for her agreement to testify as a witness for the state of Arkansas. The other four entered pleas of not guilty, but Royal and Mark would later switch their pleas to nolo contendere, or no contest, and Winston Van Harris would switch his plea to guilty. Only Lucy Clark maintained her plea of not guilty; thus hers was the only case that went to trial.

  Why Suzette was allowed to walk while Lucy was put on trial was totally unclear to me when I first began researching this story, but it was tempting to put it down to the very facts that make it seem the opposite outcome would have been more just. Suzette was much older and more experienced; had made herself powerful enough in the cult’s leadership that she apparently had more standing in it than Royal’s stepson’s wife, June Harris; and by most accounts was a terrifyingly forceful and manipulative person. Lucy, on the other hand, was a twenty-two-year-old single mother, a woman who had been badly abused and then abandoned by her husband before she had joined a cult, and who had been terrified of disobeying Mark and Suzette because she seriously believed if she did that omniscient God would tell them. That is to say, Suzette was probably a lot better than Lucy at talking people into things.

  When I first spoke with her, Lucy had no idea why Suzette had been granted immunity. “Suzette was a whiz at this stuff,” was all she could guess about it. “The very person who gave them the order to kill that baby and to kill me was the one who got immunity and got off scot-free.”

  I first met Ray Watkins in December 2022. I had gone to the Newton County Sheriff’s Office in Jasper, arrived near the end of the day, and caught Sheriff’s Deputy J. D. Harper just as he was trying to lock up and slip out a little early at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon. He was more friendly and accommodating than he needed to be to the stranger who pulled up half an hour before the beginning of his weekend, asking to see police records from 1978. He led me into a storage room full of cheap metal shelving units, fetched a cardboard box from on top of one that was hand labeled in Sharpie “1976–1980,” and sat chatting with me at a conference table while I flipped through manila folders, each of which contained one slip of yellow legal paper torn in half with ghostly minimal notes jotted on it by hand in pen and sometimes pencil about bad checks and stolen canoes: there was nothing in it about the murder in the woods near Kaypark Cemetery.

  Harper apologized. “They weren’t too good about writing stuff down back in those days,” he said. But he later recalled that Ray Watkins, who had served as deputy sheriff and later sheriff of Newton County back in the 1970s and ’80s, was now working at the hardware store, and suggested I ask him about it. “If you go down there now, you might still catch him.”

  So I thanked him, ran back to my rental car, and drove the two minutes from the Sheriff’s Office to Bob’s Do It Best Hardware and Lumber just outside town—which thankfully closes at 5:30—and found the eighty-five-year-old Ray Watkins sitting behind the counter in a plaid flannel shirt and green John Deere cap. I introduced myself and asked if he remembered what had happened on Cave Mountain on April 24, 1978. Indeed he did. Pausing a couple of times to ring up customers, he told me the story. This is the end of it:

  We brought ’em out and took ’em to jail and they went to court and they entered pleas. I believe they got life, and some a little less. And the mother, she—the prosecuting attorney gave her immunity because he was gonna have her testify. But we really didn’t need her. We had enough evidence to hang ’em all. But she got off, did the deal, and the other three went to penitentiary, and I don’t know what happened to ’em after they went down there. They were all charged except for that Clark lady, and the sheriff was pretty upset that the prosecutor gave her immunity, because she was just as guilty as they were—lettin’ ’em kill her daughter.

  Watkins was right to say they were “armed to the hilt.” This is what the Blytheville Courier News reported in its coverage of the trial on September 5, 1978: “Newton County Sheriff E. H. [Hershel] Fowler said in April authorities confiscated 15 to 20 weapons and ‘something like 2,000 rounds of ammunition’ from a van belonging to the sect. The weapons included seven or eight rifles and pistols of assorted calibers, he said.* The van also contained food, clothing and several copies of a book entitled ‘The Third Step to Joyful Living, or How to Stop Worrying’ by Royal and Edith Harris.”

  There are a few things Ray misremembered that day—understandably, as it happened forty-six years ago, and although Ray is a rather astoundingly healthy and lucid eighty-five-year-old man, he’s still an eighty-five-year-old man. For one thing, it was Benton County, not Washington County, that put out the warrant for the arrests. And most notably, it was Suzette Freeman, not Lucy Clark, who was offered immunity. Ray said “four people” but then listed them as Clark, the Harrises (three people), and “this other lady.” He conflated Lucy Clark and Suzette Freeman, and Suzette faded into the background.

  Ray misremembered it being Lucy who had been offered immunity, rather than Suzette, but I do believe him that the sheriff was pissed off at the prosecuting attorney for offering any of them immunity, because he thought they were all equally guilty and furthermore they didn’t need the additional evidence of her testimony to convict them.

  One thing that Ray was absolutely certain of, however—and he remained so when I returned to Jasper to interview him several more times—is that Hurchal Fowler discovered the body of Bethany Alana Clark later on the same day that they made the arrests. He said he remembers very distinctly that Hurchal had found the body by the time he returned to the campsite after taking the detainees to jail. Days like that one did not happen very often.

  “Hurchal, he’s a woodsman like I am,” Ray told me in a later interview. “He was born and raised in the woods. So he noticed things as different. And so he went looking around, and he found a spot that had fresh dirt on it. It was over by a creek bank, and it shouldn’t have been there. So he dug down there, and that’s where he found the bucket. It had the little girl in it. Five-gallon bucket with a little girl stuffed in there. And then, when I got back up there after I got ’em in and got ’em locked up, he was still down there. And he came up from the creek, and told me he found the little girl. ‘She is dead.’”

  In 1978, Jerry Patterson was Arkansas’s 14th Judicial Circuit prosecutor. He is still alive, and it took some doing to track him down. While in Arkansas in the summer of 2023, I sent him an email and left him a voicemail, neither of which he responded to. Eventually, with uncharacteristic boldness and unforgiveable rudeness, I simply drove to his address listed in the white pages—a house perched on a hill high up in the Ozarks on a rural road outside the near-ghost town of Marshall in Searcy County—and knocked on the door. No one answered. I was sitting on the front steps of his porch writing him a note when the eighty-year-old man with a face belying understandable confusion and suspicion roared into the driveway in an enormous silver pickup truck with a dog in the back seat of the cab barking her head off at the stranger. Jerry Patterson was shirtless in shorts and flip-flops, with long, wild gray hair and a woolly white goatee. It was midafternoon on the first day of July, and the sunlight bathed the Ozarks in a buttery glow in the wake of a brief but torrential midsummer rainstorm—puddles flashing everywhere—and Jerry’s dog paced circles around me and growled. When I introduced myself and told him what I’d come to ask about, he nodded in recognition and invited me inside. The reason he hadn’t returned my call or answered my email was because he and his wife had been off the grid the past few days at their lakeside cabin, fishing. They had just come back earlier that day. I sat in his living room—gold-lettered stippled-leatherbound law books on the shelves, rifles mounted on the walls, his dog in the backyard still barking at me, chess set on the coffee table, backyard and beautiful view of the mountains through the sliding glass door to the back porch—and Jerry poured me a glass of water, half buttoned on a shirt, flopped into a tan leather recliner as cracked and worn as the palm of a baseball mitt with one leg over its arm, and began to speak.

  “Here’s the way it all began,” he said. “There was a bulletin that was put out by the law enforcement agencies up in Northwest Arkansas. The reason that there was a bulletin put out is because the father of the child who was killed was very concerned about the welfare of his daughter, and he had requested a welfare check. And when they attempted to make their welfare check, there was nobody there.” (It’s possible that this also happened, but I think Jerry’s memory made it up; everything else indicates that the cult’s undoing began when June Harris met with the lawyer James Mixon. Human fallibility and forty-six years tend to pepper fact with fiction, sometimes in fairly banal ways.) “In the meantime, unknown to the father, the religious group that the child was with thought that the world was coming to an end and that Christ was coming to take his ‘bride,’ they called it, to Paradise or—whatever. So this religious group decided through their prophet, who was a seventeen-year-old boy, that they needed to stockpile food, clothes, guns, whatever they could get ahold of, to carry them over until Christ got here. So they started writing hot checks and they started using credit cards and extending over the limits—they did everything except steal, I guess, and maybe that’s what they were doing, too—but whatever they were doing, it was justified because Christ was gonna come and take them to Paradise. So they had all this stuff stockpiled, and there was a very—the most instrumental person in that was a lady called Suzette Freeman. Suzette Freeman was kind of the mentor for the prophet. The prophet’s dad was the preacher, but the prophet talked to God and Suzette Freeman talked to the prophet. I think there’s a little more to that, but I’m not positive.”

  “What do you mean, ‘more to that’?” I asked.

  Jerry paused for a while, squinted and drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “I think she was screwin’ him.”

  “Really?” I said. That was new.

  “Yeah,” said Jerry. “I think so.”

  “The seventeen-year-old kid?”

  “Yeah. Because everything, anything she suggested, that’s what he prophesied, see? And so I think there was a really close bond between those two. I don’t even want to call it a ‘bond,’ because that gives some legitimacy to what their relationship was. So anyway. They’ve got all this stuff stockpiled, and now they’re moving out of there. They’re trying to find a place to go to. The prophet says that they need to go to the wilderness in Newton County. And that’s what they were going to do, go to the wilderness in Newton County over in the National Forest. So they take their truck, and a big U-Haul truck, and go to the wilderness. And this little girl, precious child . . . apparently Suzette Freeman didn’t like her. So anytime anything happened that, let’s say, didn’t facilitate what the prophet was saying, she blamed that little girl. And the prophet, then—he blamed the little girl, too.”

  According to Jerry, prior to their abrupt relocation to Newton County, back when they had still been in the Springdale/Rogers area, the prophet, through Suzette, had prophesied that there was some sort of treasure buried in a grave somewhere on Cherokee Mountain in Tennessee. So Suzette’s husband, Larry, and Johnny Stablier—those two guys seem to have been the group’s gofers for such out-of-state missions—drove out to Cherokee Mountain, went looking for the buried treasure, didn’t find it, and returned to Arkansas empty-handed.

  “So they run out there,” Jerry said, “and of course they don’t find this grave. And so they come back, and the little girl gets blamed for all this. It’s because of her they can’t find the grave. Suzette and the prophet blame the little girl. And so now they get past that problem, and now they’re headed into Newton County and they get into the National Forest, and they have a flat, or they get stuck. I can’t remember. Anyway, Suzette and the prophet announce that it’s because of the Devil in this little girl. It’s trying to keep them from greeting Jesus and going to the ever-ever good land.”

  “Like it’s her fault,” I said. “It’s her fault that the truck got stuck.”

  “Yeah. I can’t remember exactly, but it was a flat or they got stuck. So anyway, they blame this on the little girl. She’s got the Devil in her, and she and the Devil are preventing them from accomplishing their goal to go to the wonderful land with Jesus. So the prophet tells Suzette Freeman and she tells the men that they have to kill the Devil, and in order to kill the Devil they have to kill the little girl. So they take her out and they kill her. Then they stuff her in a five-gallon bucket. They bury her. They shot her with a .22 Ruger. So they come back and they’ve accomplished it. But now in the meantime, you’ve got the police up in Northwest Arkansas searching for these folks.”