Lucy also had to endure the humiliating ordeal of the trial and the local press’s callous and often incorrect sensationalism of it. Suzette’s lawyer, David Matthews* (“hell of a gab”), put it most colorfully:

  I did not see anything except the first few opening minutes, but I’ll never forget those. It was like a scene out of To Kill a Mockingbird. They obviously did not have cable television in Jasper, Arkansas. That courthouse square was packed, I mean, packed with people. There were folks that had brought up the equivalent of what we’d call a food truck now, that were selling concessions on the square. The courthouse itself was packed full, full, full. And when Lucy was led in to start the trial, this murmur went through the crowd. “There she is. There she is. There she is.” It was creepy.

  “Everyone has his ‘own’ idea about my case which was sensationalized by the newspapers and TV media,” Lucy wrote in an email years later to Joyce. “They know nothing of the horror, nothing. I never knew who killed my daughter until the trial was almost over.”

  Tom Keith later came to believe that if all this had happened after the Jonestown massacre—which did more than any other event to change the public’s understanding of cult psychology—the jury and the press covering Lucy’s trial might have better understood the power of brainwashing and the impossibly weak position she had been in and had more sympathy for her. Of course, that’s possible—but as we’ve seen recently with a tabloid fixation from a few years ago, Casey Anthony, there is absolutely nothing that incites the rabble to misogynist wrath more than a mother who somehow causes or permits the death of her own child. It scratches at some instinctual horror lodged deep in our mammalian middle brain. Milk and motherhood are in the very name of our warm-blooded taxonomic stratum. It’s the nightmare on the other side of what Colleen Nick would tell Kelly twenty-three years later, advising her to emote like hell for the cameras: “There is nothing stronger and more understood by people than a bond between a mother and child.” There is something about these cases people find so horrible that perhaps they perversely crave for the charges to be true. No, Keith thought, Lucy Clark was not guilty of complicity in her daughter’s murder, but the shocked outsider’s salacious imagination is, and cries out for catharsis.

  All four remaining defendants maintained their pleas of not guilty until the morning the trial was set to begin at the Newton County Courthouse in Jasper: Tuesday, September 12, 1978. All three of the men had clashed with their initial court-appointed defense lawyers. All of them had requested to be appointed new lawyers before the trial, and their requests had been granted. The motion terminating the relationship between Royal Harris and his defense counsel, Donald Bishop, during a pretrial hearing on August 8 was hastily jotted down by hand, apparently the result of a decision Royal abruptly made that day. By the time of the trial a month later, Royal and Mark had switched defense counsel several times and were represented by attorneys they had met with only once or twice.

  Because Winston Van Harris appealed his sentence twice in the decade that followed, the court records in his case were preserved in the Arkansas Supreme Court archive, so I have the most documentation about him. He appealed his case the first time in 1981, alleging inadequacy of counsel, which was denied. He tried again in 1987 and ultimately won a half victory, getting part of his sentence reduced. Because the appeal centered around his claims of inadequacy of counsel, most of the court record is the testimony of his final court-appointed defense lawyer, Doug Wilson, talking about his attempt to represent him in the lead-up to the trial in 1978. Again Winston Van’s ego—and mouth—got in his way. At first Wilson figured the best strategy would be to try to present him as a victim, a brainwashed cult member in a weak position, but Winston Van kept undermining that strategy by insisting that he was one of the leaders of the group. “He was not, therefore,” Wilson said in court, “in the position of a subordinate adherent to his being brainwashed by the leaders, he was a leader.” Throughout his testimony in the appellate case, Wilson vented the frustration he remembered representing a client who wasn’t being cooperative and who he strongly suspected wasn’t being fully truthful with him. The story that Royal, Winston Van, and Mark had stuck to from nearly the beginning was that Mark had given the order that the child be put to death, Suzette had confirmed that through interpretation, and then Royal and Winston Van had taken her into the woods, away from the others. Royal had been the one to pull the trigger, and Winston Van had helped him bury her. Wilson knew there was almost no chance that his client would not be convicted of a crime and sentenced to significant time in prison; the best he could hope for was to lessen the sentence with the argument that he had been an accomplice who had not directly committed the murder. That strategy deflated after Wilson received the ballistics report on August 8, indicating that two guns, not one, had been used to shoot Bethany Clark; she had been shot eight times, four times with each weapon. The ballistics report prompted Doug Wilson to send Winston Van a (surprisingly funny, considering the circumstances) letter the following day (as a writer, I particularly applaud the sardonic flourish of capitalizing the pronouns referring to God):

  Dear Van:

  As you may know, the ballistics report is in and shows that two guns were used in the murder. Of course, this pretty well turns your story into a fairy tale. Unless Royal comes up with a new version, that he was aspiring to be a cowboy and packed a couple of sixguns or rifles or whatever for the fun of it. What I am trying to say, as before, is that the jury will in all likelihood include a few people of at least normal intelligence who will listen to your version and get some good laughs out of it before they send you to the penitentiary for the rest of your natural life.

  As I have said repeatedly, I’ll advocate strongly whatever story you tell me to be true. It doesn’t matter that your present version has got more holes in it than a country club golf course. But it does occur to me that one possibility is that you may be doing what you honestly believe God Almighty wants you to do. If that is the case, my advice is to get in touch with God as soon as possible and ask Him if it is all right if you follow your lawyer’s advice. Of course, it is also possible that He wants you to work among the prisoners for the rest of your life, in which case He definitely has you on the right track. . . .

  I wish I could be more encouraging and less sarcastic, but I really have no reason for either at this point. I’ll just say what I’ve said before—I’ll do the very best I can, and that as matters stand, it won’t be near enough.

  Sincerely,

  Douglas L. Wilson

  Trial preliminaries began on Tuesday, September 2, 1978, and the trial date was set for September 12. The court-appointed lawyers for the three male defendants—Doug Wilson, Richard Parker (who represented Mark Harris), and Tommy Martin (who represented Royal Harris)—went into it knowing there was virtually no hope of winning the case, but they would try as hard as they could with what they had. They knew that their main job was going to be to try to mitigate the sentences their clients would receive. The jury selection was a long and arduous process that took up most of the week before the trial. Newton County is a thinly populated place where everybody knows everybody, and obviously everybody had been talking for months about the cult that had murdered the little girl and buried her in a bucket in the woods. Here’s Jerry Patterson dramatizing a dialogue with a potential juror:

  “Mr. Brown?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you live in Newton County?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “All my life.”

  “Have you heard about this case that we’re about to try, State of Arkansas versus Lucy da da da?”

  “No. Haven’t heard a word about it.”

  “Really? Not a word? You read the newspapers?”

  “I, uh, sometimes watch the news on TV. Well, not hardly ever.”

  “A lot of people wanted to be on that jury,” Jerry said. “Out of curiosity, for one thing, but also because they saw this as a shocking situation they wanted to help cure. Let’s just say that most of the people that we called as jurors had the propensity to find them guilty.” Which was a situation that was fine with him, as the prosecutor. But the defense counsel had their work cut out for them. They knew that winnowing the jury pool down to twelve people who either hadn’t heard much about the case—fat chance of that—or who might have the slightest chance of sympathizing with their clients was probably going to be the biggest and most difficult job they would have to do.

  The three male defendants were transferred from the Boone County Jail to the Newton County Jail in Jasper on Monday, September 11. Jury selection had taken up the previous week, and the trial was set to begin on Tuesday morning. The three were housed in the same cell, and it was the first time since their arrests that Royal and his stepson and son had been together. The old Newton County Jail, built of local stone in 1902, has four cells in it and looks like a place to lock up Jesse James. It was in continual use until 2009, when construction was completed on a new, less picturesque, and more functional jail next door. The old one, sitting empty and semiderelict, is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. During one of my recent visits to Jasper, in October 2023, it had been tricked out into a haunted house for Halloween, with spooky cotton cobwebs stretched across the doorways and mannequins in striped jumpsuits lying on the cots.

  In the early-morning hours before their trial was to begin, Royal, Mark, and Winston Van Harris were caught attempting to escape from this jail. Winston Van—and exactly how this happened no one remembers—had somehow managed to get ahold of a hacksaw blade, and he used it to saw through one of the bars on one of the upper windows of the jail. They were caught when the warden on the graveyard shift at the jail heard the sawing, stepped outside, and saw Winston Van with his hand out the window, trying to cut through the bars. From the Blytheville Courier News of September 13, 1978:

  Three Defendants Attempt Escape

  Jasper, Ark. (AP)—Prosecutor Jerry Patterson confirmed Tuesday night that three defendants in the first-degree murder trial of Bethany Clark, 3, tried to escape Monday evening.

  Royal Harris, 51, Winston Van Harris, 31, and Mark Harris, 18, tried to pry open a window in a communal cell where they were held in the Newton County jail here, authorities said. . . .

  The second story window of the jail had a bar removed and wire mesh covering the window had been rolled up in one corner, authorities said.

  Newton County deputies said the three were caught before they managed to break out of the cell. There were several remarks made in Newton County Circuit Court Tuesday that referred to the “incident” at the jail Monday evening.

  Attorneys for the defense Douglas Wilson, Tommy Martin, and Richard Parker arrived at the Newton County Courthouse for the trial on Tuesday morning to learn first thing that their clients, after all their fastidious work selecting the jury the week before, had pretty much torpedoed their case overnight by getting caught trying to break out of the jail. Suffice it to say, an escape attempt does not reflect well on defendants who have entered not guilty pleas. The three lawyers met separately with their clients to regroup. “There was a great deal of turmoil among all the defendants,” Doug Wilson recalled. “Everybody was agitated about the overnight developments.”

  After meeting with their lawyers, Royal and Mark Harris decided, against the advice of their respective counsel, to switch their pleas from not guilty to nolo contendere, or no contest. A plea of no contest means that the defendant does not admit guilt but does not contest the charges; it is effectively a guilty plea, with the slight difference that there is technically no admission of guilt. For instance, a defendant might plead no contest on principle if he maintains his innocence but has given up hope of not being convicted. However, a prosecutor is more likely to offer a plea deal to a defendant who pleads guilty, and the judge is more likely to be lenient in sentencing. There is virtually no advantage for the defendant in a criminal case to pleading no contest as opposed to guilty. The only perk of a no contest plea is between the defendant and God.

  In court, Royal and Mark’s lawyers, Thomas Martin and Richard Parker, respectively, made it very clear to the judge that their clients had made this decision—which left their sentencing totally to the judge’s discretion—against their advice. I think I can also hear in the lawyers’ comments a note of their exasperation with their clients, almost a relief to wash their hands of these people. When Judge Kenneth Smith asked Royal if he understands that by pleading nolo condendere he is waiving his right to a trial by jury, he answered, “Yes sir. There is no reason to drag it out. I do not wish to smear the church.” The judge repeatedly asked him if he understood what he was doing—that he was waiving his right to testify, waiving his right to confront his accusers in court, waiving his right to appeal to a higher court in the event the jury should find him guilty—and Royal continued to answer that he did not believe the jury could give him a fair trial (to which Jerry Patterson objected each time), that “it would do [him] no good.” The exchange ended:

  The Court: And you state that you have discussed this fully with your attorney?

  Mr. Harris: Yes sir, he has discussed it with me.

  The Court: Are you satisfied with his services and his advice in this case?

  Mr. Harris: Yes sir, it has nothing to do with his advice. It is contrary to his advice, but that is my decision.

  The Court: Mr. Harris, the Court accepts your plea.

  With that, the judge dismissed the jury, and Richard Parker, Mark Harris’s attorney, told the judge that his client would also like to change his plea. Mark Harris went forward, was put to the exact same barrage of questions that his father had been just before him, to which he answered only “Yes sir” or “No sir,” without commentary or elaboration, and the court accepted his plea. Then Deputy Prosecutor Gary Isbell requested that some record be made of the factual basis of the pleas, and Judge Smith dismissed the public from the courtroom and reconvened in chambers. There Tommy Martin presented four factual bases of Royal Harris’s no contest plea: (1) that he did “with leaded bullets end the life of Miss Bethany Clark”; (2) that he recognizes that it was “an unlawful act and a sinful act”; (3) that “the jury would upon hearing the evidence inevitably give him a life sentence”; and (4) that “he has no wish to spend the State’s time and money or undergo the ordeal of reliving these moments” and “he has no wish to participate in any way in the slandering and tearing down of his church and his religion.” The court accepted these factual bases. At the end of all that, when Royal was asked if there was anything else he wished to say, he left them with only, “I believe that covers it.”

  Mark Harris, in chambers, had somewhat more to say. Mark’s lawyer, Richard Parker, presented two factual bases for his client’s no contest plea. The first was that “as the recognized Prophet of the Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, he did in fact make a prophecy that Bethany Clark was to be shot and that in fact is what occurred as a result of this prophecy.” The second was that Mark Harris believed the jury would in all likelihood return a verdict of life imprisonment and that by making this plea and arguments for mitigation at the time of sentencing, he might hope for a lesser sentence.

  The Court: Mr. Mark Harris, do you concur in the statement that your attorney has made to the court?

  Mark Harris: Yes sir, all but one.

  The Court: Tell me at which point you do not concur.

  Mark Harris: I do not concur—yes, I guess that is right, because that was changed.

  The Court: Would you explain, I don’t understand.

  Mark Harris: I don’t really understand myself. I would like to give a brief statement about the people and the prophecy to add more emphasis to the fact that it does still exist and the fact that it is here today and also the fact that tribulations will occur very, very soon. When Edith received the gift of prophecy she was a Methodist Minister and also the daughter of a Methodist Minister and she was baptized when she was three years old.

  The Court: Mr. Harris, at this time I do not want to get into the philosophy of the church. If there is any part of your attorney’s statement that you disagree with, as you indicated you might, I would like to know what it is. I will give you an opportunity at another time to make all the statements that you want to along this line.

  Mark Harris: What I am saying . . .

  Mr. Parker: Do you agree or disagree with any of the words I said?

  Mark Harris: What I am saying is what is written down in the message some months back that what is written down in the record books of life, you know what happened here on earth is what we have been telling everyone. And also that if we lied in Court we would be anathema, so that is why we have maintained what we have told. Also it is a fact that if it was not changed I would have just went ahead and pleaded guilty and gotten it over with. I have really no wish to continue this or have not wished in the past to continue this any longer, but since this is the Lord’s will, so be it.

  Mr. Parker: It is my client’s religious belief that the events that occurred in the Kay-Park area that involved the death of Bethany Clark have been changed by God and in God’s eyes they did not happen.

  The Court: Very well. I think the Court is clear on it at this time.

  Mark Harris: May I state something. Bethany was an anathema. This church is based on free choice. That is why it is such small numbers, because in the past we have observed the Commandments and we have not diverted from them without express orders from God Himself, through prophecy and interpretation, over which Suzette is the interpreter for the church.