The Court: All right, I will hear anything else you want to say at a later time. Does the State desire to make any statement at this time?

  Mr. Patterson: Not now, your Honor.

  Mr. Martin: Your Honor, we will waive any demand for immediate sentencing and let the Court sentence at the discretion of the Court.

  The Court: The defendants may be returned to jail.

  Several different and perhaps contradictory ideas jostle against one another in Mark Harris’s confusing remarks to the judge, which his lawyer, Richard Parker, tried to clarify: One is that he, Royal, and Winston Van are not guilty of murder because the events leading to the death of Bethany Clark had been “changed by God and in God’s eyes they did not happen.” Therefore, were they to plead guilty, that would be a lie, and “if we lied in Court we would be anathema.” But then right after that he said, “Bethany was an anathema.” I think, squinting through the fog of Mark’s delusory thinking muddled with ecclesiastical language, that he was trying to explain that his choice to plead no contest instead of guilty is due to this: Although here on man’s Earth they may be guilty of murdering a three-year-old girl, he and God know that what they really killed was an unsalvageable human body possessed by the Devil. I do not think Mark’s comparatively taciturn father still believed that four and a half months later, with their interpreter having turned witness for the state against them and the Tribulation still unbegun—but Mark does.

  The consequences of Royal and Mark Harris’s decisions to plead no contest rather than guilty would last for the rest of their lives.

  Court returned to session, and the trial began. Now it was only two defendants on trial, those who maintained their pleas of not guilty: Winston Van Harris and Lucy Clark. Two witnesses took the stand in the beginning; the records have unfortunately been destroyed, but I believe, based on newspaper coverage of the trial, that the two witnesses were Suzette Freeman and June Harris. The trial broke for recess late in the morning. Lucy’s trial kept going later that afternoon, but at that point, Doug Wilson, along with Winston Van’s biological father, Gobe Smith, with whom Winston Van was now in contact for the first time in twenty-two years, closeted with Winston Van and explained to him that considering their deplorably idiotic escape attempt the night before, he was going to have to reassess his options. Wilson recalled his conversation in private with Winston Van Harris and Gobe Smith while the court was in recess:

  To me it was clear that the escape was an additional circumstance, which, while I was going to object to any reference to it as not being relevant to the trial, we were running the risk that the judge was going to rule, as a matter of law of evidence, that testimony could be induced about that escape attempt. And that it would substantially undermine whatever presentation Van was going to put on. . . . This was a very unfortunate development, and we really needed to be thinking about how we were going to get out of this prosecution with less than the maximum. . . . I said words to the effect of, “You’ve had me barking up the wrong tree all along, and I have not been able to prepare the defense as effectively as I might have, and now for your own sake, it’s time for you to tell me the truth. Did you do this? Should I be talking about a guilty plea, or should we just sail into that courtroom full of denial and hope for the best?” Finally he said, in his father’s presence, “Yes, it’s all true. I was very actively involved. I went out there with the child, with Royal.” . . . He said that there was only one gun, but that he was right there and assisted Royal in putting the child to death. And that’s when I said, “Okay, now, we’ve got to start talking about how many years we’re going to accept.”

  When the trial resumed after the recess, Doug Wilson requested a private conference with Jerry Patterson. The two lawyers stepped aside, and Wilson told him that his client was prepared to change his plea to guilty. Jerry told him he would recommend a sentence of fifty years.

  “I’m going to save you a big prosecution,” Wilson recalled saying. “You ought to think about something less than fifty.”

  “Forget it, Doug,” Jerry said. “Fifty or nothing.”

  Wilson returned to the defendant’s table, where he remembers saying to Van, “This [fifty years] is what he’s offering. We don’t have much to bargain with. I can in good conscience recommend to you that this is better than life in prison, and I recommend that you take it.”

  Van agreed to plead guilty in exchange for the fifty-year sentence the prosecution offered. Wilson then returned to the private conference with Jerry Patterson and told him that his client would accept the fifty years. Then Jerry told him he wanted to add another fifteen years on top of that for a separate charge of illegal possession of a firearm.

  “Oh, come on, Jerry,” Wilson said, “you know you’re really warping me on this.”

  “That’s the way it is,” Jerry said. “Take it or leave it.”

  From Doug Wilson’s testimony in the appeal years later:

  So I went back to my client, and I said, “This is not fair, it is not the way he led us to believe he was going to deal with us, but he’s in the driver’s seat, and he wants the additional 15 years.” . . . He didn’t like it any better than I did, but at that point, I think he was pretty well aware that the options were diminishing, and that he was running a very serious risk of getting the maximum imposed, and so he reluctantly accepted the offer of the prosecutor.

  After those negotiations—wherein the prosecution, which had the decisive upper hand, got everything it wanted—Winston Van Harris switched his plea from not guilty to guilty and furthermore entered a plea of guilty to the additional charge of illegal possession of a firearm. He kept his answers to the judge’s questions to “Yes sir,” and “No sir.” The judge ordered him taken back to jail, and the trial resumed for the only defendant not to switch her plea of not guilty, Lucy Clark.

  The records of what was said during the rest of Lucy’s trial, which are of course the ones I am most interested in reading, do not appear to exist any longer. Donnie Davis, the Newton County Court clerk in Jasper, seemed a bit befuddled himself as to why there were no records of the trial. Jerry Patterson used to have a copy of them, but some years after the trial, Buford Gardner had told him he was writing a book about this case and asked if he could borrow his records. Jerry gave Buford all his documents pertaining to the case. Buford never wrote that book. He died twenty years ago, and his two adult children have no idea what became of those documents. All I have to go on are the memories of the people who were there who are still alive—Jerry Patterson; Lucy Clark; the forewoman of the jury, Katherine Nance—and what was reported in the newspapers. June Harris testified. Suzette Freeman testified. Fred Bell, Hurchal Fowler, and Ray Watkins testified.

  Katherine Nance is now eighty-nine years old. She was born on her family’s homestead on the bank of the Buffalo River, at a time when they were living in “an old tin camp house,” while her father was building the house she would grow up in (the homestead is long gone, and the ruins of her childhood home are now on federal land in the Buffalo National River Wilderness). Katherine and her husband, Joe, lived for many years in a big, beautiful stone house they built on a large plot of land that her husband’s great-grandfather had homesteaded after the Civil War on Mill Creek, a tributary of the Buffalo. Including Joe and Katherine’s great-grandchildren, the property saw seven generations of the same family through 160 years of continuous ownership, and when I met them, they had just sold it to Johnny Morris, the billionaire founder and majority owner of Bass Pro Shops, who had also recently purchased the adjoining property of Dogpatch, USA, the ruins of a Li’l Abner theme park that operated from 1968 to 1993.* Katherine told me this about serving on the jury in Lucy’s trial:

  It was a long, long jury. Lots of evidence and the horrible pictures and everything. All but one person on that jury knew that she was guilty. But we had one girl on the jury that was in doubt that the lady was guilty. Why? I don’t know. But anyway, we ended up, we came out of the jury room two times with a hung jury, and the judge would send us back in there. So we’d go back and go over our notes and everything. And then I would ask finally, the last time he sent us in there—I remember now, her name was Sharon Pierce—I said, “You convince us, the rest of us, that she is not guilty.” Well, she started crying, and we finally got a jury.

  Sharon Pierce was a public elementary school teacher; she taught for nearly thirty years at Mount Judea School in the tiny town of Mount Judea, about ten miles south of Jasper. She also founded the Mount Judea Volunteer Fire Department and worked at the town’s post office after she retired from teaching. She died of covid-19 in October 2020 at the age of sixty-eight. She would have been twenty-six when she served on the jury in 1978—the youngest person on it, not much older than Lucy. She was the reason the jury’s deliberations lasted so long, resulting in two hung juries before she finally broke down in tears and went along with the verdict finding Lucy Clark guilty of her daughter’s murder.

  Royal Harris and his son, Mark Harris, who had turned eighteen while in jail awaiting sentencing, were both sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Winston Van Harris, one of the two people who had directly committed the murder and buried the body, was given fifty years plus another fifteen for the illegal possession of a firearm. Although sixty-five years might seem effectively a life sentence for a thirty-one-year-old man, it was in fact a significant compromise with the prosecution, his recompense for pleading guilty; it was a sentence that could potentially be appealed, reduced, paroled—none of which was a possibility for Royal or Mark.

  Meanwhile, up in Missouri, Larry Freeman and Johnny Stablier had been charged with kidnapping and the lesser charge of child enticement— i.e., convincing Larry’s two young sons to get into the car with them. Johnny Stablier, who was apparently considered more of an accessory to the crime, was released from jail on $500 bond shortly after his arrest. Larry Freeman’s bail was set at $40,000. In a deal with the judge that August, upon paying 10 percent of his bail, he was released and given permission to live with Suzette in Louisiana before returning to Missouri for his trial in October. The court seems to have gone easy on both of them; they had otherwise clean records, Larry Freeman was a Vietnam War vet, and it seems the deluded but good-hearted intentionality of the crime’s bizarre motive (they believed they were saving the children from dying in a nuclear war) also factored in winning them leniency. The more serious kidnapping charges were dropped for both defendants in exchange for their pleading guilty to the lesser enticement charge. They were both given probationary sentences and served no prison time.

  Lucy Clark was sentenced to five years in prison.

  In February 1983, at the age of fifty-six, Royal Harris—who was suffering from prostate cancer that would go in and out of remission for the rest of his life and would eventually kill him—was transferred from the Cummins Unit prison to the Diagnostic Unit Hospital in Pine Bluff—that is, the hospital within the Arkansas Department of Corrections where inmates too ill to be held in the general prison population are taken—and remained there until he died at the age of seventy in 1998.

  Winston Van Harris appealed his case twice, the second time with some success, and managed to get the additional fifteen years taken off his sentence. He was released on parole in 1993 and discharged from the system in 2003. He changed his name to Daniel Gobe Smith and moved to Alpharetta, Georgia. He died of cancer and septic shock in 2022 at the age of seventy-five. This is from his obituary from Covenant Funeral & Crematory in Alpharetta (which doesn’t mention his prison sentence):

  After his discharge [from the military], Daniel worked in a wide range of areas in the civilian business sector, and was a dedicated employee. Daniels [sic] Christian faith was very deep and strong, and his determination to adhere to the doctrines of his faith was absolute.

  Daniel married Robin Lynn Holt, and they enjoyed a strongly loving marriage for 25 years. During the final 7 years of their marriage, Robin developed senile dementia, and Daniel took care of her until her death with love, compassion and unswerving loyalty. When Robin passed away on November 8, 2020, Daniel was devasted [sic], and tried to go on, but he was never quite the same. He looked forward daily to rejoining his beloved wife in heaven.

  In 2017, the state of Arkansas passed a statute eliminating life without parole for juvenile offenders, which provides that juveniles convicted of capital murder are subject to a sentence of life with eligibility for parole after thirty years. Mark Harris, who had been a juvenile at the time of the crime for which he was serving a life sentence, appealed under the new statute in 2018 and was paroled out of state to Georgia after serving forty years.

  After testifying in Lucy’s trial, Suzette Freeman returned to her hometown, Grosse Tête, Louisiana, with her husband, Larry, who was serving five years of probation for the child enticement charge. The couple later moved to Baton Rouge, where they owned and operated Advantage Personnel—a temp agency—for over three decades. Larry died in 2013 at the age of sixty-seven. Suzette died in 2019 at the age of seventy-two. This is from her obituary:

  Suzette had a strong Christian faith and a positive outlook—always quick with a bright smile and words of encouragement to everyone she encountered. Throughout her life, she shared God’s blessings and love in her service to others, both in her business, Advantage Personnel, and in the community, teaching Sunday School and volunteering to help those in need. She was happiest in her beautiful flower garden and with her beloved dogs. She was a beautiful soul and will be greatly missed.

  The day after Lucy Clark’s conviction for second-degree murder, Katherine Nance visited her in Boone County Jail, where she was being held. The jury had found her guilty knowing she would probably receive a fairly lenient sentence, and the five-year sentence was determined by the judge. Nance’s decision to visit Lucy in jail was unusual, unnecessary, and legally a little unorthodox. When I asked Nance why she had visited her, she simply said, “Because I am a Christian.”

  “She wasn’t mean,” Lucy said, “she was nice. She was compassionate. But she said, ‘We didn’t find you guilty of murder. We found you guilty because you couldn’t tell the future.’ I should have known what they were doing. I should have foretold, should have seen better than what I did. . . . And she brought me some books. I kept those books for a long time. And then one day I just threw them all away.”

  Lucy’s father, with whom she was very close, died not long after Lucy began serving her sentence. When it became clear that her father was gravely ill, she was given a temporary furlough from prison, which she spent at Tom Keith’s home, but was ultimately denied permission to leave the state of Arkansas to visit him. She wrote:

  My dad passed away September 27, 1979. He was a very soft spoken and caring man. He never raised his voice and his relationship with Bethany was a close one. It is true they would not let me come home when he passed. They considered me a flight risk and because I had been convicted of murder, they would not allow it and neither did they care. Before he was taken to the hospital, he told [my sister] Billie Jean that he did not want to die with me in that place (meaning prison). I was on furlough at Tom’s house. When we got to his office, Tom called the hospital for me. My dad had not spoken to anyone. When Billie Jean told him that I was on the phone, he grabbed the phone from her and talked to me and my sister told me he never spoke again. That was on Monday afternoon. My dad died early Thursday morning. After I came home, my mother was telling me a few weeks before my dad died, that she would hear him talking in his bedroom. She said that once she stood in the doorway and saw him looking up past where Bethany’s picture was on the dresser and talking. She said he was talking with Bethany. He kept saying, “PaPaw loves you and PaPaw is coming to be with you in just a little while.” So, to my daddy’s prayer, I was not in prison on the day he died.

  When Lucy was released from prison in April 1980, after serving two years of her sentence, it was Tom Keith who picked her up and drove her home to her hometown of Camden, Louisiana, and he stayed in regular touch with her afterward. Lucy married again and gave birth to another daughter, whom she and her husband raised on the same family farm Lucy had grown up on, and who now has her own children. Lucy worked as a court reporter for many years. She and her husband still live on her family’s land in Camden. A few of the people closest to her, including her husband, know about her past, but most of those in her general social orbit do not.

  Tom Keith died a few years before I began writing this, but everyone who knew him said that as a public defender and later as a judge, he was a markedly compassionate person of deep convictions about justice. And Tom was an ardent and loyal friend to Lucy from the day he met her—the day she and the others were arrested and returned to Benton County—until the day he died. The bond between Tom and Lucy was adamantine; Tom was “her rock,” Lucy said of him. For decades after her release, Tom stayed in touch with her by phone and mail and then by email. In the decades that followed her trial, he remained outraged and unwavering in his belief that Lucy had been innocent and should never have been convicted or served any prison time.

  And then, late in the summer of 2001, twenty-three years after the trial, Tom Keith got a phone call from his friend Joyce Hale, asking him if he knew anything about a certain murder case from 1978 involving a cult and a little girl found buried in a bucket on Cave Mountain.

  10

  Nothing to Forgive

  EDITH HARRIS FOUNDED THIS CULT—WHICH OF COURSE DIDN’T think of itself as a “cult” but a “church”—and led it from the beginning. She was its prime mover going all the way back to the ’50s, when she left her first husband and met a more sympathetic spiritual journeyer—and probably a more pliant soul—in Royal Harris. Edith was the one making decisions, the one laying out the doctrine of their church, and its first “prophet.” Her husband Royal was really the first member of the cult—her first acolyte, the first weak mind she found susceptible to brainwashing, the first person who believed her when she told him she could communicate directly with God. And she declared their teenage son, Mark, to be a prophet, too, perhaps grooming him for leadership. It was her son, not her husband, she was preparing to take her place; Royal was more of an acquiescent, slow-witted Joseph figure in the Bible story she was telling about their family. (That sad-sack dupe leaning on his crook in the manger, cuckolded by God, gazing down at that miracle glowing in the hay he knows had nothing to do with him. Why is he even in the story at all?) Sometime in the process of Royal and Edith’s family expanding into a small cult—the foundational moment would have been 1972, the year they self-published their book and registered their church as a corporation—Royal and her first son, Winston Van, acquired official titles, “Pastor” and “Assistant Pastor,” both of them decidedly below Edith and Mark in the hierarchy she had established. While Mark was touched with the same spiritual power she declared that she herself had, Winston Van was assigned an administrative job, to use the labor of his body to raise silver shekels for them after the move to Arkansas (he also worked at the Tyson poultry plant with Lucy) and to use his more earthly mind for the humdrum logistical tasks of paying bills and filling out legal paperwork and whatnot—positioned thus because, as Doug Wilson would later say, “he was less fortunate than Royal and Mark because, as I understood it, in his mother’s eyes, he was tainted with the blood of his natural father, who was not one of the faithful.”