Keith and Kate wanted—needed—to be shot to death by the police. They needed it to happen that way to fulfill the prophecy in Revelation 11:7: the beast must ascend out of the bottomless pit and make war against them, and overcome them, and kill them. Ray’s main concern then was getting the remaining passengers/hostages off the bus. The bus driver, Bill Carney, and his eight-year-old son, after delivering Keith’s letter to Deputy Russman, had not returned to the bus, remaining safely behind the police barricade on the south end of the bridge. Minus the woman who’d had a heart attack, Bill Carney and his son, besides Keith and Kate, fourteen people were left on the bus. Ray and Keith negotiated a deal: When Caldwell arrived with a cameraman, they would let seven of the hostages off the bus. Once KY3 News finished recording the interview, they would let the other seven off.

  The KY3 News helicopter carrying Caldwell and a camera operator landed in a field near Jasper around 2:30 in the afternoon, and a State Police patrol car picked them up and took them to the bridge. Ray walked them out to the bus, explaining that their first priority was freeing the hostages, which was the only reason the police had capitulated to Keith and Kate’s demand to bring the news crew to them—and anything they could do to help get those people off that bus would be greatly appreciated. Ray also warned him that according to the letter, Keith and Kate supposedly had dynamite on board, with which they said they would blow up the bus and everyone on it as a last resort. Caldwell assured him that they would do all they could do to help free the hostages.

  After a little palavering between Keith and Ray, who was standing in front of the bus’s open door with Caldwell and the cameraman beside him, Keith and Kate made good on their promise, letting seven people off the bus. When the seven people had walked across the bridge and were safe behind the police barricade, Ray gave them the go-ahead, and the news anchor and cameraman boarded the bus. They recorded an interview with Keith—with Kate occasionally shouting her input from the back of the bus, where she was guarding the remaining hostages—in which he asserted that he and Kate were the witnesses named in Revelation 11, and that they had been prophesying for one thousand two hundred and threescore days. Today they had finished their testimony, and they would be killed by the police, after which their bodies were to rest unmolested for three and a half days on the property of the messiah, Emory Mayo Lamb, aka Daddy Fou. All were welcome to come and watch their resurrection, which would happen on July 7. It was only the content of his speech that was crazy; he didn’t say it like a crazy person, with lots of dissociative logorrhea and jittery subject jumps. He said it in a fairly calm voice, and with a Mona-Lisa-faint smirk on his face, a cellophane-thin adumbration of irony, as if he himself didn’t quite believe what he was saying. It’s as though he was saying, “Look, I know this sounds crazy, but . . .”

  True to his word—and to credit Keith Haigler’s character, he was clearly not someone who took any sadistic pleasure in anything he did in the one day of his life he spent as a serious criminal—after Caldwell and the cameraman stepped off the bus, he and Kate released the remaining seven hostages, the last of whom was a young woman who hugged him and kissed him on the cheek on her way out.

  Keith and Kate sat in the bus for another hour after that. After KY3 recorded their interview, other reporters and photographers were permitted to walk up to the bus, talk with them through the door, and take pictures of them. Ray still stood nearby, relieved now that all the hostages were safe, but still trying to talk Keith and Kate into giving up their plans and turning themselves in.

  Ray remembered Keith at one point asking him, “What kind of charges would I be facing if I give up?”

  “Probably kidnapping and hijacking.”

  “How much time would I have to serve?”

  “I don’t know,” Ray told him, truthfully. “The FBI is going to have to talk to you because of your interference with travel on interstate commerce.”

  Keith paused, thought about this for a moment.

  “What about an insanity defense?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” Ray said.

  Keith laughed, shook his head.

  “What am I saying? Insanity defenses are for people who are not responsible for their actions. I’ve never been saner in my life. I know that there’s no way out of this. Either I die, or I go to prison. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  Ray repeatedly and insistently assured Keith and Kate that whatever was about to happen, the police were going to do their best not to kill them.

  “Well,” Keith said, “what if we start shooting randomly into the crowd?”

  “Well,” Ray said, “if you do that, then yeah, we probably are gonna have to shoot you. But I can promise you we’re still going to try not to kill you.”

  Keith and Kate tied the handles of their guns to their wrists with rope so that they could not drop their weapons.

  The police considered firing tear gas at them, but there were too many onlookers crowded too close to the bridge. During the long standoff, State Police Lieutenant Earl Rife had stationed two sharpshooters just north of the bridge. He now told them that Kate and Keith were trying to make the police kill them, and that they had tied their guns to their wrists. If the Haiglers started walking away from the bus, as soon as they had a clear shot, Rife instructed them, one of them was to shoot Keith in his right shoulder and the other was to shoot Kate in her right shoulder.

  The media people returned behind the police barricade.

  At 3:45, Ray was again standing near the bus door with a couple of State Police officers nearby, making a last-ditch effort to talk them into turning themselves in. Ray remembers the last exchange he had with them.

  “Ray,” Keith called out from the bus, where he was sitting in the driver’s seat. “You’re gonna make sure our bodies get back, right?”

  “Keith, there’s something else I want you two to think about.” (Ray remembers saying that but does not remember what he had planned to say next.)

  “There’s nothing left to say,” Keith said. “I think it’s time to do this.”

  He turned and exchanged a few words with Kate. Then he got up, stood in the doorway of the bus with his pistol—the handle tied to his wrist with a length of thin white rope—and motioned for Ray and the two other officers standing near him to move away.

  “Now y’all go on,” he said, “because we’re coming off the bus.”

  Ray and the two other officers backed away slowly and walked off the bridge.

  Keith and Kate Haigler, twenty-six and twenty-four years old, stepped off the bus and started walking across the scalding concrete surface of the bridge over the Little Buffalo River on a bright hot midsummer afternoon, the day before Independence Day, with their handguns tied to their right wrists, toward a line of police cars, with dozens of cops training their weapons on them and a crowd of onlookers behind.

  State Police Lieutenant Jim Stobaugh warned them through a PA system rigged through loudspeakers: “You don’t have a chance. You will not be killed. Please lay down your weapons and surrender.”

  When they had walked about twenty feet, they both dropped to their knees and continued crawling forward in that position, like penitents entering a cathedral. Ray thinks they probably did this to make it harder to shoot them in the legs.

  “This is our last warning,” Stobaugh said through the PA: the watching crowd silent, his amplified voice furred with speaker-crackle echoing across the empty stretch of concrete in the hot dead afternoon doldrums. “We advise you to stop. You don’t have a chance. We’re only going to shoot to hurt you.”

  Keith and Kate stopped, turned to each other, kissed goodbye, and resumed crawling forward across the bridge on their knees. Neither of them had yet raised their weapon.

  The two police sharpshooters fired, and Keith and Kate Haigler both fell instantly. Keith tried to raise his gun, but his right arm—he’d been shot in the shoulder—was paralyzed. He pulled the hammer of the pistol back with his left hand, but couldn’t pry the gun out of his own right hand. But the sharpshooter who had shot Kate had shot the wrong shoulder—her left—and Kate, writhing on the concrete with her right arm wildly flailing around, fired a few shots at random—two into the sky and another that ricocheted off the railing of the bridge—before she rolled over, facing Keith. She shot her husband once in the chest, and then she put the muzzle of her gun against her right eye and shot herself in the head.

  Keith Haigler, who had been shot in the heart, died on the bridge. Kate, despite having shot herself in the head, lived another ten minutes, dying in an ambulance on the way to the hospital in Harrison.

  While searching the bus for the dynamite Keith had claimed in the letter to Ray Watkins to have on board, police found a duffel bag full of bundles of one-inch-diameter wooden dowels that had been painted red and bound together with strips of black electrical tape.

  Early on in the afternoon’s dramatic spectacle, several friends and acquaintances who had known Keith and Kate, and Emory Lamb and his wife and daughter, and later, police officers, had gone to Lamb’s place, found him at home, and pleaded with him to intervene, to come down to the bridge over the Little Buffalo and try to stop what was happening. Lamb had refused to leave his home, saying that he had nothing to do with whatever Keith and Kate were doing; it was a police matter. Afterward, he maintained they hadn’t told him anything about their plans for that day.

  Keith and Kate Haigler’s bodies were not moved to Emory Lamb’s property, and they did not at any point resurrect from the dead. Lamb’s wife, Shirley, left her husband not long after the incident, taking their daughter, Angela, with her. Emory Lamb continued to live on diminishing resources, he and his property growing increasingly derelict for another thirteen years, until he died of lung cancer in 1995 at the age of sixty-six.

  12

  You Have Almost Persuaded Me

  LUCY SHELTON (SHE HAS TAKEN HER SECOND HUSBAND’S SURNAME) was dismayed to know that I myself do not believe that there was any immaterial—in the philosophical sense of the word—connection between Haley’s imaginary friend and Bethany Alana Clark. I wince to imagine her disappointment in this regard after our long conversations over the phone when she generously opened up to me about unimaginably painful events in her past, during which she broke down in tears more than once. It is true that this belief is vitally important to her, that it closed a wound in her soul that had been open most of her life, but I certainly cannot lie and say that I believe it. She wrote me an email (this isn’t all of it, just the last three paragraphs):

  One thing you need to understand Ben is that I was raised to know and believe there was God and Jesus. Through abuse with my husband and through the others, I lost a lot of what I was taught to be good, and they turned it into something totally evil. They used God against me and toward the end, I had been told that I was never going to Heaven along with my daughter and June. That I was cast out. It took me years to get to where I am at now. There have been many books written, but none as great as the Holy Bible.

  I had to ask God to help me get back to Him. I asked for forgiveness, and I know that God has forgave me. I, in turn had to forgive them also. For if you don’t forgive, God certainly won’t forgive you. That was not easy and I have been on my knees countless times and cried many tears. I understand that you are sceptic and do not believe as well as others do not that there was a “spirit” or “angel” that helped Haley. As you said why would she lead Haley away from the people? As I stated to Joyce, maybe she was led to safety and those two men were led to find her.

  No Ben, I don’t think it is strange her being in Heaven, that is where she is. My question to you is, why write a story, you don’t believe? Surely, you must have some sort of faith. The next time you are outside, take a good look around you. You see God everywhere for this is His creation. Sadly, the one place that you won’t find Him is in the hearts of skeptical people which are so many today.

  I told her it does not matter whether or not I personally believe that Haley was visited by Bethany’s spirit. It doesn’t even matter whether or not Haley believes this (Haley told me, “There are some things I will never know, and I’m okay with that”). What matters is what Joyce and Lucy believe.

  Why write the story if I don’t believe? It’s a good question. Why study religion if one is not religious? The most beautiful and fascinating works of art about religious faith are not about having it, but about doubt and struggle with it—and that even includes the Christian gospels; one can read in his last words—why have you forsaken me?—that not even Jesus nailed to the cross in his final mortal moments is perfectly resolute in his belief. As in all things, Christianity’s power lies in narrative, and the Christian who believes and has always believed has no story arc. It is the prodigal son, not the faithful one, who needs redemption. Doubt is the essence of faith.

  In the summer of 2023, I contacted one of Suzette Freeman’s younger brothers, Paul Kleinpeter. Paul and his wife, Kelly, invited me over to their house in Grosse Tête, the same village he and Suzette had grown up in, in the house on the road named after their grandfather, where I spent an afternoon talking with them in their living room. Paul was understandably cagey about talking with me at first, as I was there to dredge up a dark and shameful episode in his family’s history that they very much do not like talking about and would rather leave buried under the many years of time and silence and relatively normal life that followed. So would the other two of Suzette’s brothers with whom I spoke, Jerry and Greg.*

  All of Suzette’s brothers I spoke with are also deeply religious. Only one of the three, Greg, has stuck with the Cajun Catholicism they were raised in; Jerry and Paul now belong to evangelical Protestant churches. And the centrality of Christianity to their lives is hard to overstate. One of the first things Paul asked me when we sat down was, “Ben, what is your conviction of God?”

  Have you ever experienced a tingling in your gut when a near stranger— ­a person you have just met but you like so far, or at least have no reason to dislike—tries to convert you to Christianity?* When it happens to me, a feeling emerges within me like a taut wire running from my brain through the center of my body, vibrating like the string of a guitar. I feel my muscles relaxing, my superego retreating to the back of my mind and my emotional attention coming sharply into focus. The person who is trying to convert you to Christianity looks you in the eye and begins to talk with you about things of cosmic importance, about your own death, about the meaning of your life, about eternity. There is none of the nervous, embarrassed deflection to irony, the cushion of jocular small talk that happens when two fellow citizens meet in secular-urban-liberal-land. (Wallace Stevens: “He has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.”) All that bullshit bypassed, we have gone straight to the terror at the center of human existence that we wrap all our days and language and work and art around like papier-mâché wrapped around the void in the shape of the thing that is no longer there. Granted, it might help you get there quicker when you have shown up to ask someone about that one time forty-five years ago when his sister was in a cult that murdered a child. But the startling rawness of the connection comes from knowing that this person believes that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. He believes that he will live forever, and he is trying to give you the gift of salvation, the gift of everlasting life, and you keep saying “No, thank you” and pushing it back to him. At least I do.

  Throughout our conversation that afternoon, I kept trying to steer Paul and Kelly from proselytizing me and back to what they remember happening with Larry and Suzette Freeman in the 1970s. It turns out that Paul doesn’t remember it very well, because he was wandering in a dark wood himself at the time and distracted, to say the least. I didn’t ask him to get into it in detail, but something happened to him on the Fourth of July 1979: his road-to-Damascus moment when he saw the light. For a period of several years before that day, his life had been at its nadir: He was divorced from his former and future wife—who sat beside him on the couch as he told me this—with whom he had two young children, and he said he had been

  living for the Devil—drinkin’, slippin’, dippin’, screwin’, and brewin’. I was heavin’ up this and heavin’ up that. I will tell you, Ben, that my life was a total wreck. I was living in a dark time. All I remember is my dad said, “Hey, we goin’ to Arkansas, and I need you to help me drive this truck.” So I went there and got my sister with my dad and the U-Haul and got her stuff. They had it all in a barn. We went up a dirt road to the top of the hill and came back down the hill with her belongings, drove back home in the U-Haul. That’s the extent of me remembering.

  Paul thought that it had been just him and his father who had driven the U-Haul up to Arkansas to pick up Suzette, but about a week later I spoke with Jerry, the oldest brother of the nine siblings—the second born after Suzette—and he told me that he had gone with them, too. Although still nebulous, Jerry’s memory of it was a little more detailed than his younger brother’s, perhaps because, as Paul said, his brain around that time in his life was pretty fogged with drugs and alcohol. Jerry remembered that Paul had definitely been the one driving the truck. Both of them remembered that Suzette’s belongings were being kept in a barn on a farm off a dirt road way up on a mountain, a barn that was still in use as a barn, with hay all over the floor. I think that Hurchal Fowler and Ray Watkins must have moved all the stuff they confiscated from the scene of the crime—everything that had been in the Jeep Wagoneer and the rented moving truck—and stored it in a barn on Hurchal’s property right off Cave Mountain Road. Or maybe some neighbor with an empty barn available had lent it to them for storing evidence. Neither Paul nor Jerry remembered where exactly Suzette had been staying since she had been let out of Benton County Jail, but they both remembered their older sister looking sickly and malnourished. “Suzette was really skinny,” Jerry said. “She was really in poor health when we found her.”