Then they stuffed Bethany’s body in the bag, which they stuffed in the bucket, dug a hole in the ground several feet deep, put the bucket in it, covered it, spread the dirt around, and dragged several rotten logs over the spot. The process took one to two hours.

  The group spent the rest of the day trying to get the U-Haul off the road and into the woods, and they spent most of their time cutting down a tree with a chain saw. They spent the next night camped in the same place, and then, early the next morning, they had a brief conversation with Fred Bell and Ed Burton as the two passed through while hunting turkeys. I think Mark was still asleep in the camper-trailer for that. Perhaps an hour or two later, around nine in the morning, all of them—Royal, Van, Mark, Suzette, Desha, and Lucy—were sitting in the camper-trailer, reciting Philippians 4: “I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”

  That was when Newton County Sheriff’s Deputy Ray Watkins knocked on the door of the camper-trailer.

  Ray remembers Mark Harris refusing to come out of the camper for a long time after the others had come out and submitted to arrest. The Newton County Sheriff’s Office had only one pair of handcuffs, which Hurchal Fowler’s son, Eddy, remembers they put on Winston Van Harris, as he was the healthiest and strongest of the five and the jumpiest, the most talkative, the one who most made them nervous.

  Ray remembers Mark Harris repeatedly seeming to reach for his gun and repeatedly yelling at him to stop it and smacking him on the chest. Mark Harris does not remember this.

  Neither Ray Watkins nor Eddy Fowler remembered Suzette’s nine-year-old daughter, Desha, but she had to have been there.*

  Mark Harris does remember that as they were marched out of the woods by Hurchal Fowler, Eddy Fowler, Ray Watkins, Fred Bell, and Ed Burton, Suzette looked up, and again and again, she wailed into the sky, “It’s over. It’s over. It’s over.”

  In the synoptic Gospels, the last words of Christ on the cross are quoted in Aramaic and then translated into Greek: “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani?,” which is translated as “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” But in the Gospel of John, Christ’s last words are “It is finished.”

  It is over. It is finished.

  But it wasn’t over. It wasn’t finished. Certainly not for Suzette Freeman, anyway. After they were taken to Newton County Jail and then to Benton County Jail, Suzette called David Matthews, the family law attorney who had represented her six months prior in the custody battle with her ex-husband over Desha. The following day, Matthews negotiated a plea deal with the Benton County prosecutor, giving Suzette immunity from prosecution in exchange for her agreeing to testify as a witness for the state in the others’ coming trial; once granted immunity, she told the prosecutor, her lawyer, and a State Police detective about Bethany’s murder—which they did not know about, because even though later on the previous day Hurchal Fowler had returned to the campsite, discovered Bethany’s body, and called the state coroner in Little Rock to come get it, no one in the Newton County Sheriff’s Office or the Arkansas State Coroner’s Office had thought to notify the police in Benton County who had the suspects in custody that they had found a murder victim. Suzette was released from Benton County Jail on May 1; her father and two of her brothers drove up from Louisiana to get her. She was free for the rest of her life.

  Mark Harris spent the days after the arrest “crying in a jail cell, chewing on cigarette butts, and things like that.” The Benton County police took him into an interrogation room to question him, but he refused to talk, as did Royal, Winston Van, and Lucy.

  Before the trial began in September, Suzette Freeman wrote an eighty-four-page witness statement in which, Mark said, “she got our names right, but most of the rest of it was lies. ‘It’s their fault, they did this, they did that, I was an innocent bystander.’ Blah blah blah. Yeah, she did really good on escaping the penalties of her true culpability.”

  Suzette’s witness statement, along with all of the court transcripts that weren’t archived with the Arkansas Supreme Court because of Winston Van’s appeals in 1983 and 1986, has vanished. The only documents having to do with the case archived at the Newton County Courthouse in Jasper are the one-page official briefs noting that the various court proceedings took place. I discovered this on my own, but Mark already knew it because a friend of his (Mark can’t leave the state of Georgia) did him the favor of driving to Jasper to look for them; she was surprised to find nothing in the archives, and was given no explanation. Mark believes that someone at the Newton County District Court deliberately destroyed the case records “because they were protecting themselves from lawsuits and other things, because they ramrodded this through with a disqualified jury.” Jerry Patterson, when I met with him, was incredulous that the case file isn’t there. “But there is a case file in that courthouse,” he said. “It has to be. I mean, that’s the deal, man.” I went back to the courthouse in Jasper and looked again once more, just to be sure. There is no case file: no records of the lengthy jury selection process, no court transcripts, no witness statements. There’s nothing there except for the documents noting that the proceedings happened.

  In the four months and two weeks Mark spent in the Benton and Boone County Jails awaiting the trial, his weight dropped from 180 to 140 pounds. “I was in a juvenile area, and they fed us like one or two biscuit things in the morning and one small hamburger at night.” The night before the trial was to begin, Royal, Winston Van, and Mark were transferred to a cell in the Newton County Jail—the first time the three of them had been in a room together since the day they were arrested—and a guard caught them trying to escape. Mark doesn’t remember how Winston Van got ahold of the hacksaw blade; he managed to saw through one of the bars on the window of their cell on the upper story of the jail before the person working in the jail that night heard the noise and came to check on them. The following morning, with the small courtroom packed to capacity, TV crews bivouacked on the courthouse lawn outside, the crowd murmuring about the outrageous news of the previous night’s escape attempt, and the court-appointed defense attorneys at their wits’ end, before the trial began, Royal and Mark decided to switch their pleas to nolo contendere. “There was no way that we could face a crowd like that,” Mark said. “And we had the idea of protecting the basic church doctrines from further ridicule and association with that crime.” Pleading no contest was Mark’s idea. “We decided together, but I think I influenced him.” The prosecution offered each of them a sentence of fifty-five years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea—which Winston Van, later that morning, after listening to advice from his attorney and his biological father, Gobe Smith, Jr., decided to take. In the long term, that would prove to be a good decision; he would ultimately serve only fifteen years in prison. Upon their pleading no contest, Judge Kenneth Smith sentenced both Royal and Mark to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

  “Why did you plead no contest instead of guilty?” I asked Mark in the Panera Bread in suburban Georgia.

  “Because if you plead guilty, in our minds—me and my dad—you’re saying that there’s no way God could have said anything, right? So pleading no contest is the only way to avoid that.” Mark sat back, sighed, rubbed the corners of his eyes. “Look. We were crazy. And stupid. But we were sincere in our motivations to protect the cult.”

  Mark and Royal Harris were sent to the Arkansas Department of Corrections’ Cummins Unit, a maximum-security prison where they were placed together in protective custody almost immediately. Soon afterward, the state transferred Mark to the Tucker Unit. “Which is very fortunate, that I was away from him,” Mark says. “It allowed me to try to recover from all that shit.”

  Forty years would pass in the social death of incarcerated life.

  After the first year, Suzette appeared to Mark in a dream. “She was telling me to keep going. She was encouraging me not to kill myself. Because I prayed to die for the first three years I was in prison.” (Jerry suspected that there had been a sexual relationship between Suzette and Mark; when I asked him about it, Mark strenuously denied it. However, he confirmed what Jerry Kleinpeter told me, that Suzette and Winston Van dated—and yes, had a sexual relationship—for a short time before Winston Van married June and Suzette married Larry.) He thought about suicide constantly during those first three years, but he never did attempt it. Eventually, after enough time separated from his father, for the first time in his life, Mark began to think with a new clarity and independence. His mind began to change.

  His parents had alienated their small family from their extended relations long before the crime happened, and the only people he had ever been close to, except for Suzette, were also in prison. He was alone, with no one on the outside to contact. Winston Van Harris, paroled out of state to Georgia in 1993, made no attempt to contact his still incarcerated younger half brother for the next decade. He changed his name to Daniel Gobe Smith and started another life. Daniel had met the woman who would become his third wife, and Mark thinks his brother did not disclose to her the full truth about his past for a long time, if he ever did. “He wanted to forget about me,” Mark said. “He left me completely alone after he got out of prison. I didn’t hear from him for ten years.”

  “He was probably afraid he would have to tell details he’d kept hidden,” Barbara added. “He didn’t want his wife or anybody to know anything.”

  Twenty years into Mark’s sentence, his father died. “Some religious volunteers felt bad for me,” Mark said. “They put together some money so I could go to the funeral. They got me a suit to wear.” The warden granted Mark a temporary furlough. The funeral for Royal Harris was a small graveside gathering of about a dozen people. “I spoke briefly,” Mark said, “about the tragedy of his life. And then he was buried. That was in Star City, I think.”

  Twenty-eight years into his sentence, at the age of forty-five, Mark, who had never so much as kissed a girl before he had entered the system at seventeen, got married while in prison. This, it turns out, is another sad story. In 2006, Mark, a longtime model prisoner, had been in the Wrightsville Unit minimum-security prison for six years; there the inmates were allowed access to pay phones, and Wrightsville is close enough to Little Rock that he was able to get onto a Little Rock dating chat line, where he met a woman. “And we fell in love,” Mark said. “And we got married soon after that.”

  “They could never consummate it,” Mark’s second and current wife, Barbara, chimed in. “It wasn’t allowed.”

  “The preacher that married us was the prison chaplain,” Mark said. “And it was very kind of him to do that, because they didn’t usually do it. But after that she moved in with this guy that she had been with previously. This was within a month. And I told my chaplain about it, and he said, ‘You can do better.’ She also did not tell me she had significant mental health issues. Dissociative personality disorder. She was molested as a child. A lot of different stuff.”

  His new wife’s letters, phone calls, and visits to the prison steeply dropped in frequency soon after they were married, and as time went on, they ceased altogether. “And I found out later that she had been using me as a tax write-off,” Mark said.

  “What?” I said. “How?”

  “She was claiming me as a dependent. The IRS figured it out, and they told her she couldn’t do that anymore. That’s when our relationship degraded. And finally she divorced me.”

  Since 2000, tobacco has been prohibited from Arkansas prisons, but for some years afterward, that difficult-to-enforce policy was not followed very strictly. That changed suddenly for some reason in the mid-2000s, when corrections officers were told to start cracking down on inmates with tobacco. While Mark was still married to the woman in Little Rock, a CO at Wrightsville caught him rolling cigarettes, and as punishment he was sent back to the maximum-security Tucker Unit. He had a bunch of possessions he’d been allowed to keep at Wrightsville—“a photo album, a guitar, a lot of hobby craft stuff, painting supplies, things like that”—that he was forced to give up. He had them sent to his wife. After divorcing him, “she threw all my stuff away.”

  Mark worked many different jobs in his four decades in the Arkansas Department of Corrections. He worked in the prison library for three years before he was transferred to mental health services, where he worked for twelve years. He started as a clerk, typing up psychiatrists’ medication orders. Later he learned to read the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and administered the tests to fellow inmates and scored them. He underwent hundreds of hours of therapy with his boss at mental health services, studied psychology, and took college courses at night (he took many courses over the years but has no formal record of how many credit hours he would have earned, because inmates serving life sentences were not allowed to take classes for credit). Eventually he became a peer counselor and led a variety of therapy groups. Later, he taught reading and painting classes. After his long employment in mental health services, he was transferred to another prison, where he began working for the chaplaincy services. “Which was interesting,” he said. “I was able to interact with a lot of different religious faiths and be a part of the Kairos program and things like that.”

  Kairos is a word I’m well familiar with from studying classics; it’s an important word in Ancient Greek, and it essentially means a critical moment of opportunity. The word occurs frequently in the New Testament, as in Mark 1:15: “The time [kairos] is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.” Founded in 1976, the Kairos Prison Ministry is an interdenominational Christian organization. According to its website, “The mission of the Kairos Prison Ministry is to share the transforming love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ to impact the hearts and lives of incarcerated men, women and youth, as well as their families, to become loving and productive citizens of their communities.”

  “It’s a ministry dedicated to inmates where they’re shown Christian love and basically indoctrinated to become a Christian,” Mark said.

  “Even in prison?” Barbara said, turning to her husband. “All those Bible thumpers?”

  “Especially in prison,” said Mark.

  “It’s a captive audience,” I said.

  Mark nodded in agreement.

  “That’s a big deal within the prison system,” Mark said. “The Christians want to proselytize people. And inmates are the perfect target. They need love, they need acceptance. So you can use that population to more or less bolster your membership in the Christian faith. You can pretty much sense my skepticism about that whole situation.”

  Throughout his four decades in prison, Mark read—constantly and widely. He was particularly interested in comparative religions, philosophy, science, and especially psychology. The works of William James and Carl Jung affected him deeply. He acquired a small library over the years, ten boxes full of books that now line shelves in his apartment. On one of our Zoom calls, I could see his bookshelves on the wall behind him, and I asked him what was on them. “I have a huge number of books about science,” he said. “And mathematics. I have some religious stuff. A couple of Bibles, an interlinear Bible. The Oxford English Dictionary. Let me see. I’ve got several books on languages—Greek, Latin, Sanskrit. Some books on mythology, photography . . . a lot of books on art. Art history, history of architecture. The New York Times Guide to Knowledge, The Treasury of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Underground Education. Books on all kinds of different subjects that made me a whole lot more aware of how bad people can be, and what to watch out for.”

  Through all of his many, many years of reading and thinking, Mark gradually became, if not an atheist exactly, perhaps an agnostic—but whatever he is, he is deeply mistrustful of formal religion. “I can’t say that suddenly I woke up one morning and had this attitude. It’s a long process of development, of study, of reading hundreds of books from different sources. There were so many questions I faced during those forty years. The conclusions I came to weren’t very supportive of my connection with faith.”

  “You wrote in your email to me the other week that you are no longer religious,” I asked Mark in another conversation. “Can you remember the evolution of your thinking about religion over the course of all this time?”

  “I studied occultism for a long time. Kabbalah, and things like that, and was able to get insight into the various risks and errors that Christian doctrinal acceptance is prone to. And because of that exposure to Kabbalah and things like that, Jewish mysticism, models of reality that they came up with during the Babylonian exile, I became more firm in my belief that while there may be a God the absolute, he’s certainly not the God that any of the religions that human beings have. All those are attempted approaches to something that we cannot really comprehend. God the absolute is universal, the unity of all things. Even worshipping that—whatever you call it, consciousness—seems kind of odd in a way. Instead of being the best people we can be, and doing our best to help others and to experience compassion for other people.”

  “Did you,” I asked, “eventually come to the idea that human religions are—how to put it—misdirection?”

  “They are attempts to interact with—all that is—that relate to human beings. They are attempts to curry favor and dissuade misfortune through the belief in various deities, or a monotheistic God, or whatever. And to somehow be able to get assistance in controlling one’s life, to have pleasant things happen, rather than bad things.”

  “Am I right in saying that you don’t believe in any of it?”

  “Religious doctrines and dogmatic assertions tend to interfere with human cognition and what we see around us. They’re inherently dangerous in that way.”