There was probable cause to charge Lucy, because she was aware of what was going to happen and she didn’t stop it. But I’m the prosecutor. So my job was to present the evidence in the best possible way that I could to show the jury that she was guilty. And I did. I didn’t like it, but being a prosecutor, it’s not what you like and don’t like, it’s what you have to do. And you know, I would’ve loved to’ve just stood up there in front of that jury and point at Suzette Freeman sitting behind me and say, “That’s the bitch right there that you need to send to prison!” But I couldn’t.

  “But I got the bitch later on,” he said—with a vengeful twinkle in his eye—and he told me an interesting coda to the story of what had happened between him and Suzette Freeman.

  About four months after Lucy’s trial—it would have been in January or February 1979—Jerry got a call from a lawyer who was representing Suzette’s ex-husband, Robert Dardenne, in the still ongoing legal fight over custody of their daughter, Desha, who had been living with her father in Grosse Tête since the arrests in April.

  “I’d like to subpoena you to come to Louisiana and testify,” the lawyer said.

  “Yeah,” said Jerry. “I’d be happy to.”

  The lawyer bought him a plane ticket and booked him a hotel room, and the next week Jerry flew from Little Rock to Baton Rouge on a drizzly afternoon. Robert Dardenne’s lawyer picked him up from the airport and along with a few colleagues from his law firm took him out for drinks and the most quintessentially Cajun of dinners, a giant heap of boiled crawfish served on a sheet of newspaper, dripping with butter and mouth-numbing with capsaicin. “I’d never eaten crawfish before,” Jerry said. “It was him, a couple of friends, and me, and I thought, man, no way can we eat all that stuff.” (This is a thought that often occurs to someone about to eat crawfish for the first time; it looks like a lot more food than it really is because each crawfish, when snapped in half, has only about a teaspoonful of meat in the tail, though you can also slurp the guts out of the head, which is not for the squeamish. It’s a messy meal involving frequent minor injuries to the fingers and a lot of spatter—bib recommended.)

  The courthouse the following morning was a scene “I’ll never forget,” Jerry said. “Big-ass courtroom, big window overlooking the Mississippi River, and it’s raining. I’m standing there looking out the window, and I hear this commotion behind me. When I turned around, there was Suzette Freeman with a whole gaggle of people. Her new church. Well, course, they’re really happy and joyful, and everything just seems to be going along just great for them, until she sees me. When she does, she stops right there.”

  Suzette had shown up to the custody hearing with a cohort of enthusiastic supporters in colorful holiday dress—fellow worshippers at the church she had joined since returning to Grosse Tête, Sunnyside Apostolic (it, too, it turns out, is an institution embracing of doctrine considerably beyond the theological pale of mainstream Christianity). She had planned to have them all sitting in the public gallery cheering her on, but upon seeing Jerry Patterson standing there in his suit and tie, watching the rain sprinkle the Mississippi through the grand courtroom windows, she stepped aside and said something to her lawyer, who had come in alongside her. Suzette’s lawyer then knocked on the door of the judge’s chambers, and the clerk let him in. After a few minutes, the clerk came out and asked Robert Dardenne’s lawyer to join the conference. A little while later, both of them emerged from the judge’s chambers, and the lawyer who’d subpoenaed Jerry and flown him down to Baton Rouge came up to him and told him that Suzette’s lawyer had asked the judge to close the proceedings to the public, and he had complied. “You scared the shit out of her,” he said. That made Jerry smile.

  So the custody hearing proceeded, and the only people in the stately courtroom overlooking the Mississippi River on that rainy winter morning were the judge, the two lawyers, the clerk, the court reporter, Suzette Freeman, Robert Dardenne, their lawyers, and Jerry Patterson. The sizable Sunnyside Apostolic contingent was forced to wait in the hallway outside. Jerry was the first and only witness called that day. He swore the oath, took the stand, and told the lofty and nearly empty room the whole story about everything that had happened the previous year in Arkansas.

  During cross-examination, Suzette’s lawyer asked him exactly one question: “You don’t like my client, do you, Mr. Patterson?”

  “You’re exactly right,” said Jerry. “I don’t like your client. I don’t like anybody who abuses the system in order to save their own ass and let everybody else go to hell.”

  The judge awarded permanent custody to Desha’s father, allowing Suzette Freeman, after she completed “three or four different programs,” supervised visitation once a month.

  When it was over, Robert Dardenne’s lawyer patted Jerry on the back and said, “You did a hell of a job for me.”

  “Thank you very much,” Jerry told him. “I can’t tell you how much pleasure that gave me.” And then, he said, “I took an airplane back to Arkansas.”

  Losing custody of her daughter certainly wasn’t the lifelong prison sentence Jerry thought Suzette Freeman deserved, but it was at least a small morsel of revenge.

  The midsummer sky was now rosy with the beginnings of the late sunset, the dog was asleep on the floor, and the coffee table between us was piled with memorabilia from Jerry’s career as a prosecutor, including a 1996 issue of Playboy with a paparazzi snap of Uma Thurman on the cover, which quoted Jerry in an article about the right-wing separatist militia the Freemen (he had received death threats for prosecuting one of its members for the rather quaint crime of refusing to register his car; Jerry’s job had led him into entanglements with several more cults and extremist organizations over the years). He had returned to thinking about the Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, Inc.

  “The boy, that poor boy,” said Jerry.

  “The teenager, you mean,” I said. “Mark Harris.”

  “Man, he didn’t know where he was. That’s about all I can tell you about him. That’s all I can remember. And I still hate that bitch.”

  “Do you think that Suzette was really the main one telling everybody else what to do?”

  “Yeah,” Jerry said. “She was running the show. She didn’t want to take credit for it. ‘I don’t want to take credit for it, but I suggested we do this. I suggested we do that. I wasn’t in charge, but I suggested . . .’ She was so full of herself. Whatever happened to her, whatever it was, if it wasn’t bad, it was too good for her.”

  A little later, our conversation turned to Larry Freeman and Johnny Stablier getting arrested in Missouri for tying up Larry’s ex-wife and kidnapping their two children while the others were camping in the woods on Cave Mountain.

  “Now,” Jerry said, “I think those were the same two guys that went to that place in Tennessee. I think those were the same two folks.”

  “Do you think that she might have been sending her husband off on these crazy missions because she was having this relationship with the prophet, with the teenage kid—just to get him out of the way for a while?”

  “Well, kidnapping will get him outta the way for a long time, won’t it? . . . Yeah, well, I think that’s plausible. I sure do. But she was running the show, man. She was the mentor for the prophet. Basically whatever she said, he said, and that was the golden rule. And she made sure, this is God’s word. God’s word through the prophet.”

  “Did it come up in the trial? Like what else they believed and how this church had started and so on?”

  “No, it did not. The only thing we did is, we presented our case about the murder, about the involvement of poor little old Lucy. She was just sold, man, she was just passing on their shit. You know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hope her life was better after that.”

  “And Royal, Winston, Mark—those guys got long sentences. Were you involved with that, or was that just between them and the judge?”

  “No, no, I was involved in that. I wanted more time on the boys. But the dad said, ‘I’ll take the big sentence for a lesser sentence on the boys.’ I thought it over and decided that’s probably a good thing, ’cause they’re gonna get fifty years at least, and Daddy’s gonna die in prison. I didn’t hate those guys, either, Daddy and the two boys . . . I guess if I ever hated anybody, I hated her.”

  “You didn’t hate Royal.”

  “I hated Suzette Freeman.”

  “And you didn’t feel the same way about Royal Harris?”

  “No. Oh, no. No. I mean, I can’t tell you how bad I disliked that woman.”

  “Do you think that Royal Harris had been manipulated by her, too?”

  “Yeah. I think she manipulated everybody. I honestly think that she got involved with this church and she was smarter than everyone else, and she just took charge. But she’s smart enough to push others out in front of her. She’d make the decisions, but the actions were done by somebody else, just like the two guys that killed that little girl. She didn’t go out there. She made sure that the prophet made the pronouncement and sent those other two guys out there to do it.”

  “So she just orchestrated the whole thing. She manipulated everybody.”

  “That’s exactly right.”

  “That’s really incredible.”

  “It’s hard to imagine how somebody could do that. I mean, how? But then you gotta think about how friggin’ bizarre their religion was—to think that they got a prophet? That’s like Moses? He’s talking to God? You mean the big guy up there?”

  “Do you think that Suzette actually believed these things? That she believed that the Devil being in the little girl was somehow responsible for the truck getting stuck, or for their not finding the grave in Tennessee?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t think she believed it at all?”

  “Right.”

  “But you think everybody else believed it.”

  “Yeah, they did. I think she just didn’t like that kid. That’s the reason it happened.”

  “Do you think that she believed that the second coming was about to happen, and the end of the world was coming?”

  Jerry paused, stroked his beard, thought about for a while. “Do I think she thought that? I think that might have been in the back of her mind in a way.”

  We laughed about that. Then Jerry asked me, “Do you read the Bible?”

  “I’ve read it,” I said.

  “I have, too. And I’ll go to Sunday school, and I enjoy Sunday school—but I don’t believe that stuff. I don’t believe there was a Moses. I don’t believe that the Israelites crossed the Red Sea. I’m not real sure that Jesus Christ was the son of God. I have a lot of questions. And when anybody answers them, they say, ‘Well, it’s in the Bible.’ ”

  “There are a lot of things in the Bible.”

  “Yeah. No shit, man,” Jerry said. “So what I mean is—if you really believe in all that, well, you can get into some bizarre situations. They believed in all that. I don’t think Suzette Freeman really did, not hook, line, and sinker like they did. I think that Suzette Freeman had picked up on some stuff, and I think she saw that she was smarter than the rest of them. She was the person that was really making decisions, pulling the strings on the puppets. There you go.”

  9

  Anathema

  ROYAL HARRIS, MARK HARRIS, WINSTON VAN HARRIS, AND LUCY Clark spent a little over four months in jail awaiting their trial, first in Benton County Jail, where they were charged with second-degree battery, which was what they had been arrested for, and then, after Jerry Patterson filed the murder charges against them in Newton County, in Boone County Jail in Harrison, which was within the 14th Judicial Circuit but bigger and better staffed and equipped than the tiny jail in Newton County.

  Royal, Mark, Winston Van, and Lucy were all appointed public defenders. Tom Keith was appointed to defend Lucy on the day they were arrested. I don’t know the reason for the delay with the others, but they weren’t appointed counsel until May 26. All four entered pleas of not guilty on June 13 and again at their omnibus hearing on July 6. The court ordered psychiatric evaluations for Royal, Mark, and Lucy. For some reason it never ordered one for Winston Van. Everyone I’ve talked to who knew Winston Van described him as an extremely garrulous, headstrong, assertive guy; it’s possible that his personality did him no favors in the justice system; there were moments when it would have been wiser of him to keep his mouth shut. Dr. Travis Jenkins, the clinical director of the Ozark Guidance Center, evaluated Lucy and Mark. Dr. Jenkins reported to the court that Lucy was competent to stand trial: “In my opinion there is no evidence to suggest that she is psychotic at the time of my interview with her nor was there any evidence to suggest that she was psychotic at the time of the alleged offense.” But Jenkins wrote of the seventeen-year-old Mark Harris:

  I have seen Mark Harris today in psychiatric consultation. The background situation, as well as his current mental status, is very complicated. It is difficult for me to make the usual determination regarding competency and the presence of psychosis based on this one visit.

  Therefore, I would like to recommend further observation and evaluation at the Arkansas State Hospital.

  The judge in Benton County, W. H. Enfield, had already decided to bypass the Ozark Guidance Center and send Royal straight to the Arkansas State Hospital in Little Rock for his evaluation. Royal and Mark were both examined that summer at the Arkansas State Hospital, whose doctors ultimately declared them both competent to stand trial.

  The four months in jail awaiting sentencing were grueling. For one thing, they were all underfed; Mark Harris—a tall, skinny teenager—lost forty pounds in the months before the trial. But Lucy’s experience was particularly harrowing. After being terrorized, beaten, and abandoned by her husband, Lucy—still only twenty-two years old—had endured three years of more terror, brainwashing, and physical abuse in the cult, at the end of which they murdered her daughter, and then she spent several months after Suzette’s release as the only woman being held in the two Arkansas county jails.

  Cops often make under-the-table quid pro quo deals with inmates, offering favors for information having to do with other cases. Lucy told me that one of the deputies in the Benton County Jail unlocked her cell and let in one of the male inmates, who raped her: “The deputy let him in there in my cell one morning. I know the deputy got fired, but hey, you didn’t hear about that in the paper, did you? Nope.” She said the same thing happened again after she had been transferred to Boone County Jail—that time without anyone being reprimanded for it, apparently.

  During the same time, late in the summer of 1978, another inmate started a fire in the Boone County Jail in an attempt at escape, and while the fire was being extinguished and the damage repaired, the sheriff’s officers rounded up all the inmates and crammed them all into the same cell. Lucy, again, was the only woman. “They put me in the cell with all these guys around me,” she said. “And these guys pissed on me and they spit at me, and there was piss all over the floor, and they just left me there all day.”

  Lucy believes that the Boone County sheriff’s officers felt justified in their degrading and contemptuous treatment of her because of their indignant moral disgust at the woman who allowed her three-year-old daughter to be murdered. (I hear a note of this in Ray Watkins’s voice even now: “She was just as guilty as they were, lettin’ ’em kill her daughter—helpless.”) Allowing male inmates to rape her, shutting her in a cell with them—whatever she got she had coming to her, including starvation and sexual humiliation at the hands of the officers themselves. Lucy told me:

  The way the cell was fixed was that they had a door to come into the hallway, and at the end of the hallway was the shower, which had no curtain on it. And I would ask [the sheriff’s officer] for a shower, and he would stand at that door and watch me while I took a shower with just a washcloth. . . . And then in the morning they would give me breakfast. I had a spoonful of eggs and a piece of toast, and they would pour half of the coffee out, and I wouldn’t get any lunch, I wouldn’t get any supper. Because it was like, “Oh my God, this is the worst person in the world.”

  Tom Keith had been assigned to Lucy’s defense when she and the others had been taken to Benton County; early on, she established a rapport with him, and toward the end of the summer she’d had to write a letter to the judge presiding over her trial for murder in Newton County to allow Keith to continue representing her. “He was my rock,” she said of Keith. Newton County also appointed its own public defender, Buford Gardner, to represent her, and from then on, she had a legal defense team of two; Tom Keith was doing it pro bono. Lucy didn’t trust Gardner, and she said he screwed her over, too:

  From those jobs that I did—he wanted to know what jobs I had done, and it was like, income tax time. So he had got the papers and figured out where I had worked, and whenever I got my income tax, when it came in, it’d come to him. And he says, “Well, I’m going to keep this.” I think it was like six hundred dollars or something. He says, “Well, I’m gonna keep this, but you owe me a lot more.”

  Tom Keith was young and idealistic. Defending Lucy was a moral crusade for him; he strongly believed that she was innocent. For Buford Gardner, it was a job, and he squeezed every cent he could out of it (which wasn’t much). Gardner was a lot older and more experienced than Keith, and another source of tension between the two men arose from the fact that country mouse Gardner was on his home turf, Newton County—the absolute sticks—whereas town mouse Keith was visiting with the judge’s special permission from Benton County in the northwest corner of the state where the university is, a much more populous place abustle with all the economic activity that Walmart, Tyson, J. B. Hunt, Daisy, and so on bring in. The two lawyers didn’t know each other well, but they had been friendly before Lucy’s trial. During the trial, something happened between them that tore a permanent rift in their friendship, and afterward they never spoke again. Unfortunately I can’t ask either of them about it; Keith died five years ago in June 2020, and Gardner died more than twenty years ago in January 2004.