Larry and Suzette Freeman joined the group while Edith was still alive. And although Jerry Patterson suspected that there was some sort of sexual relationship going on between Suzette and Mark, at least near the end, two of Suzette’s siblings recalled that Suzette had actually dated Winston Van Harris; they had been a couple for a time. The time after the end of their relationship and before Winston Van’s marriage to June and Suzette’s marriage to Larry must have been fairly brief. Suzette married Larry Freeman in 1976, and I don’t have a record of when Van and June married. The detail of Winston Van and Suzette’s previous relationship adds an interesting layer of possible sexual jealousy to the dynamics between Suzette and June, perhaps coloring in that critical moment that led to the cult’s downfall, when Suzette declared June “anathema” and cast her out of the church sometime in mid-April 1978. Suzette’s brother Jerry Kleinpeter is pretty sure that all of these people met one another at the future televangelist Jimmy Swaggart’s flagship megachurch in Baton Rouge, the Family Worship Center. For some period of time in the mid-1970s, the Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, Inc., was apparently an intensely fanatical but almost “normal” evangelical Bible study group. Three couples—Royal and Edith, Van and June, Larry and Suzette—plus the teenage Mark would meet either at Royal and Edith’s home or at Larry and Suzette’s, to read aloud to one another from the Bible, sing hymns, discuss scriptural hermeneutics, and talk about the problems in their lives—all with Edith Harris leading the discussions.

  In 1976, at the age of fifty, Edith died of a heart attack, and that was when things started getting weirder and decidedly darker. It was, of course, Edith who had introduced the weirdness and darkness before her death—with her claims to the power of prophecy, her declaring Mark to have the power of prophecy, her declaring people “anathema,” her inventing creepy, arcane rituals like the time they had snuck into the cemetery after her mother’s funeral and she had everyone toss pebbles into her uncovered grave; but she apparently had control over the situation and control over all the others. Edith had been the domineering power that held the group together. Without her, the power dynamics within the group splintered in several different directions, and the members’ theology, what they understood they were supposed to believe, became scrambled and confused. Edith’s widower, Royal, the cofounder of the group and now the oldest among them, would naturally have been in the best position to assume its leadership, but I don’t think he was terribly smart or charismatic or even very confident in himself; he was not a natural leader as his wife had been. Furthermore, he and the others truly believed in his son’s power of divine prophecy, which left the fifteen-year-old boy occupying the center of their universe.

  Jerry Patterson believes that this was the moment when Suzette Freeman seized control of the group, using the teenage prophet as a puppet. And that was the situation that Johnny Stablier and Lucy Clark got sucked into. In Jerry’s view, the other people who were arrested that day—especially Royal, Winston Van, and Lucy—had been motivated to do what they did by the sincere belief that an apocalyptic nuclear war was about to commence at any moment, that Mark and Suzette had direct access to the mind of God, and that the Devil was trying to thwart them and had entered Lucy’s three-year-old daughter. One testament to the sincerity of their beliefs is that according to Dr. David Pritchard, a psychologist who testified as an expert witness at the appeal of Winston Van’s sentence, in the days immediately after their arrest, he was seriously panicked because now he was going to be stuck in jail and utterly defenseless when the nuclear weapons started raining down, obliterating human civilization in a daylong storm of radioactive fire. Jerry, of course, does not think that Suzette ever really believed any of it. Although the end of the world and the second coming of Christ “might have been in the back of her mind in a way,” as he put it, she didn’t seriously believe it—as evidenced by the fact that while the others were despairing about being stuck in jail during the apocalypse, she called her lawyer.

  What was Suzette’s motivation, then? What did she get out of it? Did she just get some sort of high off of manipulating people, sending them out on childish treasure hunts, ordering them to commit kidnapping and, ultimately, to murder a three-year-old girl? In Jerry’s opinion, yes; it was a game to her, a power trip that lasted several years until it collapsed and ended in murder, after which she slipped out the back door.

  The prosecution’s situation in 1978 was: They had a particularly horrific murder—could you possibly have a more innocent victim than a three-year-old girl?—and justice had to be done. And while the one person Jerry believed bore the most responsibility for the crime had been rendered legally untouchable, they had four other people about to stand trial for it: the two adult men who had actually shot Bethany and buried her, a teenage boy who had supposedly ordered them to do it—who was so disconnected from reality that the local legal shrink had sent him up to the next level for psychological evaluation (Jerry on Mark: “That kid didn’t even know where he was.”)—and a twenty-two-year-old woman, the mother who had apparently been complicit in her own daughter’s murder, the “flower girl” who had somehow gotten mixed up with these people.

  I have changed my mind about one aspect of this story. Before I spoke with Lucy, I mostly shared Tom Keith’s opinion of things, mainly that she should not have been convicted, and should not have even served the two years of her five-year prison sentence that she did. Tom considered her conviction a cruel and shameful miscarriage of justice tainted with ignorance, hot-blooded vengeance, and misogyny. There was one juror—Sharon Pierce, the youngest person on the jury—who believed in her innocence; the jury twice went back to the courtroom hung before the other eleven jurors finally convinced her to convict, and she broke down into tears as she agreed to join their decision of guilty. And the judge was sympathetic enough to Lucy to sentence her to only five years in prison. But Tom was still pissed off about it. As he told Joyce and Kelly in his office in 2001, he considered losing Lucy’s trial the worst failure of his career, and felt that he had failed her personally. Tom’s caring mentorship of and stewardship over her, which continued for the rest of his life, may in some way have been a kind of atonement for what he saw as his great failure.

  But when I finally spoke with Lucy, I found her attitude about her conviction and prison sentence much more contemplative and penitent than I had expected. She is still angry about Suzette Freeman’s being given immunity, but she seems at peace with her own conviction and full of genuine and terrible remorse. She is not angry about it at all. Those two and a half years in the women’s prison in Pine Bluff afforded her safety and stability, and she spoke of them in a tone almost of serenity and gratitude. Her time in prison was the first time in more than five years—her husband, the cult, the jail—that she had been in a relatively safe place.

  “You would think it’s a college campus,” she said about arriving at the women’s prison. “There’s no bars, there’s all glass. Everybody wore their clothes. So it wasn’t like one of these dark places you see on TV with the bars and all that. It was none of that. And I got an education. I had graduated from high school, but I did another course there, it was a two-year course. I finished it in a year. So that place wasn’t all bad. You had bad people there, but basically it was okay. It looked basically like a college dorm. The only thing is that they lock you in at night.”

  Lucy’s prison sentence gave her time to recover and recalibrate after the bizarre nightmare that her life had been before. She even came out of it with an associate’s degree. Who knows what might have happened if she had been found innocent and immediately cast back into the wider world so freshly and severely traumatized? Is it possible she might have careened off into some other new insanity without any time to heal her badly damaged soul? On the whole, I think the rest of her life was in fact probably made much better by her prison sentence. I’ve now come to think it was probably a good thing the jury found her guilty. Although Tom Keith did not believe she was guilty at all, Lucy herself said something to me that is strikingly similar to what Ray Watkins said: “But I was just as guilty, because I was there, and I’ve had to live with that.” If she had been found not guilty, she might not have been able to begin to cope with the guilt she felt.

  After his first meeting with Joyce and Kelly in late August 2001, Tom Keith emailed Lucy, asking if she minded him giving Joyce her email address. He was one of the very few people whom Lucy had kept in touch with who knew about her past and whom she trusted. Keith told her she could trust Joyce. For various reasons—mainly, I understand, long gaps in the correspondence between her and Tom on Lucy’s end—it would be another three years before she gave Tom the green light. Joyce emailed Lucy. Lucy emailed her back. And thus began an extremely unlikely long-distance friendship between the two women.

  The heart of their friendship was built from the beginning upon the resonances between Haley’s disappearance and Bethany’s murder. Several astounding coincidences lined up, starting with the facts that the two incidents had both happened in late April and had happened within about two miles of each other. The world is old and a lot of things have happened in a lot of the same places, but that particular place happens to be an extraordinarily remote, very sparsely populated area. As Ray Watkins put it, “A wilderness area, really, there ain’t nothin’ in there.”* Then there was the fact that Haley said that her imaginary friend had dark hair she wore in pigtails, as Bethany had and often did, and that she was four years old (Bethany was three and a half years old when she was killed). As Joyce and Lucy emailed back and forth, other connections inevitably surfaced: Haley said that Alecia had a flashlight with her, which would have been useful in those dark woods if Haley had actually had one; one time, Lucy wrote, Suzette took away one of Bethany’s only cherished and comforting possessions, a cloth Raggedy Ann doll (possibly the same doll June Harris mentioned in her testimony), because it was demonic idolatry or something, and the best thing Lucy could replace it with was a flashlight, which the child thereafter always held on to and clutched under the covers in bed at night as she had done her doll. “[Suzette] would just turn the lights off,” Lucy said, “and I had to give Bethany a flashlight. So she wouldn’t be so scared.” There were other felicitous connections like that, but in my opinion everything that travels further afield from objective recorded facts—such as the time and place where these events happened—feels more and more to me like finding new breadcrumbs leading to an answer already decided upon.

  I, myself, am a skeptic—in this, and in most things. I do not believe— as Lucy believes and as I think Joyce sort-of-maybe-kind-of believes—that Haley’s imaginary friend was the ghost or spirit or something of Bethany Alana Clark come to comfort and guide her when she was lost. (For one thing, “guide”? Guide her where? Really far away from almost all of the hundreds of people who were out looking for her?) Haley does not believe this, either. As with admirable wisdom and maturity she said to me, “There are things that I will never know, and that’s okay.” But one of the emails Lucy wrote to Joyce contained something that gives even me the willies: “Bethany’s middle name is Alana. Sometimes she would say her name is Alasee (al a see). I would tell her no it’s Alana. She would laugh. I would think how funny she even came up with that name as it was a little different than her own.” Imagine a toddler with a southern accent saying the words “all I see,” giving the last word a slight extra half syllable, a diphthong it’s called in linguistics. Stretched out phonetically: all ah see-ah.

  Alecia?

  For a long time, Haley did not know much about what had happened in the Upper Buffalo Wilderness in 1978. She was ambivalently aware of the rabbit hole Joyce had gone down, but she had never asked her mother or her grandmother about it. I was the first person to tell her that part of the story in much detail, over a beer at Maxine’s Tap Room in Fayetteville sometime in the spring of 2023. Her hesitancy to ask about it for the past two decades had come not from incuriosity but from respect, a disinclination to tread into a story that wasn’t hers. Her wariness of trespassing on someone else’s story comes in part from her irritation at other people’s trespassing on hers, glomming their imaginations onto her experience, altering things with their invasive interpretations.

  “A lot of people have used my story to say, ‘This is proof of angels, this is proof of this or that’ or whatever fits their belief system,” Haley told me some months later. “I’m not going to say, ‘Don’t do that.’ Where I draw the line is when people try to say definitively, ‘This is what it is, you should believe this.’ The truth of the matter is nobody was out there. It was just me. I’m not saying it wasn’t some metaphysical—whatever—but I’m the one who experienced it. I don’t need anybody to tell me like ‘It was an angel, it was an alien, it was a ghost.’ I’ve had all these people on the internet co-opt my story and essentially tell whatever story they want to tell and then attach my name to it. Which really pisses me off. I can’t fucking stand that shit, because it causes people to come to me and be like, ‘You told it wrong.’ ”

  All this is why I also do not want to dwell too long on the ghost story. At worst this paranormal element is just stupid, and at best there is something interesting in it about the moment when the rational mind turns a corner and enters a realm where, although it’s possible that most of the human beings who have ever lived on this planet have been there, I just cannot allow myself to go. It’s a place where the most abstract ideas of God hover at its heights, and there’s a slumber party going on down on its floor, where the planchette slides around on the Ouija board.

  Confirmation bias happens when two shapes in the disorderly chaos of reality line up in an astounding coincidence, like a stopped clock that tells the right time the moment we happen to look at it.

  A ghost haunts not when it manifests visibly right before our eyes, rattling chains and moaning our names, but when it evades us, when it stays just out of sight, when we think we just saw it flit past a window. A ghost we can clearly see probably is “an undigested bit of beef,” as Scrooge calls Marley’s apparition, “a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato”—or a mental illness, or a tab of LSD—but to be believed, a ghost must not perfectly appear.

  There is something tantalizing about how Alecia’s crux of coincidences almost snaps into focus and then blurs again. The coincidences are uncannily close, but not exact. Bethany Alana Clark was killed on April 24, and Haley got lost on April 29. The two incidents happened not in exactly the same place, but about two miles apart. Haley’s Alecia was four years old; at the time of her death, Bethany was not quite three and a half. Alecia’s flashlight and Bethany’s flashlight—well, that one is pretty goose-pimply. As is “All I see-ah.”

  Ghosts are much less interesting to me than why we want to believe in them. I have not asked Joyce if or how concretely she believes in this ghost, because I don’t really want to know the answer. I have no desire to try to peek under the eyeholes in the bedsheet.

  In the early 1980s, a woman named Dina Williams, then a graduate student at the School of Social Work at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, visited Arkansas’s Cummins Unit prison about a dozen times as a volunteer assistant therapist. She helped lead group therapy sessions with the prisoners and met frequently one-on-one with one of the patients she knew from this group, Winston Van Harris. Dina was young and attractive, and Winston Van was in prison; he fell in love with her and mailed her a lot of long, rambling letters. Many years and several moves and lives later, Dina and her husband, Jeff, landed in Fayetteville, where they became friends with Jay and Joyce through the Sierra Club. When Joyce became obsessed with this case, Dina gave her the letters. When I began researching this book, Joyce, not wanting them or seeing any use for them, gave them to me. The original and only copies of these letters are now in my possession.

  Dina wrote in an email:

  I was teaching inmates how to be innovative about connecting with their children and previous partners, so as to both participate as parents and to encourage their visiting. Van was one of the inmates who had elected to work on himself in the Therapeutic Community. I heard his history and was sick about what had happened to the child in the cult. But as a newcomer to prison therapy, I was fascinated with how someone could look so normal in the prison, but have done such horrifying things on the outside, and Van was a case in point. Except for his appearing intense and very focused on things he planned to do with his life in the future, he seemed to be a fairly normal young man. He was nice-looking, black-haired, fit-bodied and a little cocky, well-groomed, and was interested in martial arts. We got along immediately: he was not shy.