There is a documented but scientifically unexamined phenomenon called third-man syndrome or third-man factor, which sometimes occurs when some sort of unseen or incorporeal conscious presence seems to accompany someone who is going through a long, difficult, traumatic, and frightening experience she does not know she will survive. It is not well understood. It may be some sort of emergency psychological coping mechanism. It seems to happen to people trapped for a very long time in a state of simultaneous boredom and terror. Haley says she knew she was alone, but Alecia had made her feel as if she was not alone. This feeling of companionship may be what helps the lost person get through the experience alive. The feeling of aloneness might lead to despair, which might lead to death; but the human consciousness in the friendly company of another soul experiencing this trial alongside her will keep on moving forward. Third-man factor was most famously experienced by Sir Ernest Shackleton during one of his expeditions to the Antarctic; the mountain climber Reinhold Messner has also reported experiencing the phenomenon, as have explorers Peter Hillary and Ann Bancroft. Shackleton writes in his 1919 memoir South, “during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.” T. S. Eliot read that book, and with characteristic pedantry tells us in his own commentary published simultaneously with The Waste Land in the literary annus mirabilis 1922 that it inspired these lines, which I often reread just to feel the ominous vibration of the cosmos in my heart:

  Who is the third who walks always beside you?

  When I count, there are only you and I together

  But when I look ahead up the white road

  There is always another one walking beside you

  Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

  I do not know whether a man or a woman.

  —But who is that on the other side of you?

  When Kelly stepped out of the car in the parking lot of Cave Mountain Church late in the afternoon of the day Haley went missing, Joyce was there to meet her. The first thing Joyce said was, “Will you ever forgive me?” And Kelly said, “There’s nothing to forgive. I’m not angry at all.” She was afraid that Steve would be furious with her parents, but he was not angry, either. Everyone involved with this story told me the same thing: No one ever blamed Joyce or was ever angry at her. Despite all that, Joyce could not forgive herself. By many accounts, she remained rattled and uneasy for a long time after Haley was found. One friend used the phrase “emotionally brittle.” It is an understatement to say that she could not stop thinking about it. And soon there was a new element thrown in: In the aftermath of Haley’s rescue, her “imaginary friend” made the rounds among the grown-ups, making everyone’s hair stand on end. Every adult who had been closely connected to Haley, in the days and weeks following her rescue, would weather many sleepless nights, and would spend many hours staring at bedroom ceilings with a mind stuck in neutral and grinding its gears, thinking about what might have happened. Everyone was still in shellshock for a long time. None more than Joyce. There was no one else who spent more time thinking about what the world would be like now if Haley had died. Angels descend upon us in our darkest hours. When people’s minds are most in turmoil is the perfect moment for a ghost to enter a story—it’s when children and adults are on the same plane, inhabiting the same reality haunted and enchanted with magic.

  On August 24, 2001, four months after Haley was lost and found, Tim Ernst—now a firm friend of the family—sent Joyce an email:

  Just a tiny bit of bizarre lore that we thought about last night. Pam and I were sitting around talking about Haley’s Alecia, and Pam asked me if any little girls had ever been lost or died in the wilderness near here. A huge chill ran down my spine. You may recall this too. It was twenty years ago when a little girl from Springfield of all places, was tortured, murdered, and stuffed in a pickle bucket and buried by a small group of cult members. The cult members were told to “go to the wilderness and exercise the demons” from this little girl. That location was just off of the Kaypark road, which is about three or four miles from here as the crow flies. I have not decided yet if I am going to dig up the specifics of this case—wouldn’t it just be CRAZY if that little girl’s name was Alecia, or was anything like Haley’s Alecia!!! I have not told Kelly about this, and it probably is just meaningless anyway, but just the thought of the possibilities . . .

  Tim remembered that the murder had happened about twenty years earlier, but did not know the exact date. Jay and Joyce had been living in Northwest Arkansas at the time but did not know the story at all. A few days later, still thinking about the case, Tim wrote Joyce another email:

  It turns out that this cult had just moved to the woods from Rogers, and had charges pending in Benton County, and were first taken to the jail there (I’m sure there was plenty of news coverage, although we still can’t find out what year it happened).

  Joyce went to the Benton County Sheriff’s Office and asked whether they had any records having to do with the murder of a young girl in the Buffalo Wilderness area in the 1970s, or knew anything about it. There were no records. But someone in the office did vaguely recall the case, and remembered that Judge Tom Keith had somehow been involved with it. And it just so happened that Jay and Joyce knew Tom Keith pretty well. Tom was sixty years old, about the same age as Jay and Joyce, a fellow Democrat, and by this time was a respected pillar of the community in Northwest Arkansas. Jay and Tom had served together as Justices of the Peace on the Benton County Quorum Court. Joyce called up Tom Keith. And it turned out he had been involved with that case. Before he became a judge, Keith had worked as a public defender for Benton County, and he had been one of the two lawyers on the defense counsel of one of the people charged with the murder, the only defendant whose case had gone to trial: the murdered girl’s mother.

  Joyce wrote in an email:

  When I called him, I remember a long pause before he spoke. I was afraid that client privilege was still an issue and that he wouldn’t feel he could help. After a while, all he said was that I needed to research the newspapers for April, 1978. After that I should make an appointment with his secretary.

  Joyce hit the microfiches at the local library and filled herself in on the broad outline of the story. Then, late that summer, taking Kelly along, she met with Judge Keith in his office. Keith told them that defending the mother of the murdered child had not been just any job for him; he believed in her innocence, and he still believed that her conviction had been a shameful and tragic miscarriage of justice. He considered losing that case the worst failure of his career, and it had haunted him ever since.

  6

  The Third Step to Joyful Living

  FRED BELL, AT FIFTY-FOUR YEARS OLD IN 1978, HAD HELD THE office of Newton County Game Warden with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission for nearly three decades. A lifelong outdoorsman, he was also a much loved and respected figure in his tight-knit community in that sparsely populated part of the Ozarks, a Scoutmaster with the Boy Scouts and a deacon at First Baptist Church in Jasper. On Monday, April 24, of that year, Fred Bell and his good friend Ed Burton went turkey hunting in the Upper Buffalo Wilderness area. Around six in the morning, they drove east to west up the mountain in Fred’s truck—his own vehicle but outfitted with a police radio and a stick-on beacon light—turned left on Kaypark Road, aka County Road 1410, and parked about a mile down the road in a flat, grassy clearing with a firepit in it, an area big enough to turn the truck around in, a favorite spot of theirs from which to set off hunting.

  It was the middle of spring, around last frost, a time of year when the nights still get quite cold, especially at high elevations. It was below freezing when they set out before sunrise, and by midmorning the temperatures were still in the thirties. The morning had met with success; they’d shot a nice fat bearded tom, and Ed had the big blue-headed bird, tagged and field dressed with guts scooped out, slung over his shoulder with legs trussed, dangling from a rope, the radial fan of shimmery rich russet brown plumage bouncing at his back. As the two men crunched through the springtime wilderness headed uphill back toward Kaypark Road, they were somewhat astonished to stumble across a campsite: two pitched pop-up tents, a clothesline strung between two trees, the remains of a firepit—a ring of stones around a heap of charred wood and warm ashes—and a small two-wheel aluminum camper-trailer hitched to the tow of a tan Jeep Wagoneer with wood paneling, which Fred was a little amazed anyone had managed to get all the way down into those woods. It was a very remote and odd place to be camping: pretty far from the road, not within sight of a trail, and not very close to any water source. The choice of campsite was odd, and so was the group of campers. There were six of them, all white. One was a man about Fred’s own age, early to midfifties perhaps, balding, lean, clean shaven, narrow eyes with one slightly droopy lid, gold-rimmed aviator glasses, jeans, tucked-in flannel shirt, and denim jacket; he looked like a high school football coach, and he was by far the oldest person there. There was a much younger man in his early thirties, maybe, who looked like a hippie: bushy beard and long, straggly brown hair; a woman of about the same age with long black hair, pale, thin; another very young and very pretty woman who couldn’t have been older than her early twenties, trembly and fragile looking, with long, dark hair and big black eyes; and a kid: a timid, skinny blond girl who looked perhaps nine or ten years old.

  Fred immediately sensed something off about the group. The young long-haired hippie-looking guy in jeans and jean jacket stepped forward to speak for everyone, and shook hands with Fred and Ed. This guy was doing all the talking; there was a nervous, jittery energy about him that Fred mistrusted; he was acting too chummy and gregarious, like he was covering for something, and the others were cagey, hanging back at a distance, unnervingly silent. The older man, taciturn and stone faced, glowered at them from a distance, standing like a scarecrow, didn’t say a word. The younger of the two women in particular, the very young one, had a dazed, empty look in her face. It would have looked less weird if these campers had been a family—say, a mother and father with little children—or a group of teenagers. The adults didn’t look related to one another, and none of them looked very healthy; they looked sickly, skinny, and ashen, and there were strange social tensions going on between them; Fred didn’t know what they were, but he could feel them. These people clearly were not expecting to meet two strangers out here in these woods, and they were visibly anxious for them to go away. Fred, after all, was a kind of cop, and although his purview was violations of hunting and fishing regulations, he had a cop’s well-trained nose for fear. The two men talked with the motley crew of campers for a while, and Fred showed them his game warden’s badge. They did not appear to be doing anything illegal, but Fred silently flash froze the license plate number of the Jeep Wagoneer in his memory, told them to have a nice day, and as soon as he and Ed were out of their sight wrote it down on a scrap of paper with the pencil stub he kept in his pocket for marking game tags. Fred and Ed climbed with their turkey up the steep hill, emerged from the woods onto Kaypark Road, glanced back down the steep slope behind them, and saw something even more bizarre: Somebody had managed to drive a twenty-four-foot U-Haul moving truck all the way up the mountain and down onto this tiny Forest Service road that you really wouldn’t be wisely driving on in anything but an ATV. Fred and Ed walked down to the U-Haul to look at it more closely. One of its back wheels was lodged deep in a rut, and the mud spray on the back of the truck and deep cuts in the road indicated that someone had gotten the truck stuck, mightily but unsuccessfully tried to get it unstuck, and given up. The alarm bells in Fred’s mind were sounding louder and louder. Something strange and most likely not good was up. He jotted down the plate number of the stuck U-Haul, too, and he and Ed headed up Kaypark Road to the grassy clearing where they’d parked the truck earlier that morning. As Ed loaded the dead turkey into the truck bed and tied it down, Fred sat behind the wheel in the cab, switched on the radio, and called the Newton County Sheriff’s Office in Jasper. The radio squealed and crunched, and Sheriff’s Deputy Ray Watkins answered. Ray, who would later serve as sheriff himself, has long since retired from law enforcement, and now works at Bob’s Do It Best Hardware and Lumber in Jasper, said that Fred thought the folks he had encountered were “acting kinda funny.”

  Fred read off the license plate numbers he’d written down and asked Ray to run them. His instincts had been right. Ray ran the plate numbers and got back to him a few minutes later: These were vehicles linked to several people who had an active warrant out for their arrest in Benton County on suspicion of child abuse. They also supposedly had two young children with them, a little girl probably not older than five, and another girl a little older, maybe about ten.

  It had looked to Fred that they only had one kid with them, the older one.

  He agreed that he and Bill would stay where they were to make sure the people in the woods didn’t leave. Ray and the sheriff would be there as soon as they could to make the arrests.

  The sheriff of Newton County, Earl Hurchal Fowler, who hadn’t come in to work yet, lived on Cave Mountain Road, just a few miles away from Fred’s approximate location on Kaypark Road. At the sheriff’s office in Jasper, Ray finished his coffee, strapped on his Colt Python, pinned his badge to his shirt—that was the extent of his sheriff’s deputy’s uniform—got in his car (he didn’t have an official vehicle; like Fred, Ray drove his own car, a tan Ford LTD outfitted with a police radio and a beacon light to stick on the roof), and drove at law enforcement prerogative speeds the half hour west on AR-74. When he pulled into Hurchal’s driveway, the sheriff was standing there talking with his twenty-year-old son, Eddy, who had a volunteer sheriff’s deputy card. They decided he would come along that day to help make the arrests. Hurchal wore a mesh-sided baseball cap and had his six-pointed metal star pinned to the breast of his flannel shirt. The Fowlers have lived in that part of the Arkansas Ozarks for many generations going back to the early 1800s, and jowly, heavyset Hurchal Fowler in his bottle green aviator sunglasses was about as local a boy as you could get. Fifty-eight years old, Hurchal had served as Newton County sheriff for six years. Not counting the volunteer deputies who would assist as needed, Newton County employed exactly three police officers in 1978: Fred Bell, Hurchal Fowler, and Ray Watkins, who with his two-year associate’s degree in administration of justice was the only one of them who had any formal training in law enforcement. Ray had served as a reserve deputy part-time for the county’s previous sheriff, Toot Wagner, but his primary source of income had been a gas station and repair garage he ran in Jasper. Hurchal, a road grader operator and chairman of the Democratic Party in Newton County, had beaten Toot Wagner for sheriff in the 1972 election and offered Ray a full-time job as deputy. The Sheriff’s Office also assessed and collected taxes, and that was the part of the job that interested Hurchal; he and Ray had a gentleman’s agreement that Hurchal would deal with the taxes and Ray would do most of the actual work of enforcing the law. So Ray sold the garage and gas station and for the past six years had been the county’s only full-time cop. Hurchal would step down from his position later that year, Ray would run uncontested to replace him, and following the election that November, he would go on to serve as sheriff for twelve years. Hurchal Fowler died in May 2001, and he’s buried in his family’s large plot in Cave Mountain Cemetery, next to the church—a couple of miles, as the crow flies, from the spot where the three men—Hurchal, Ray, and Hurchal’s son, Eddy—met Fred Bell and Ed Burton in the clearing off Kaypark Road. Fred and Ed led the caravan of three vehicles a little way down Kaypark Road—a very primitive Forest Service road so seldom traveled that a strip of tall grass runs through the middle of it—to the place where the twenty-four-foot U-Haul moving truck was parked in absurd incongruity with its surroundings in the rugged and empty wilderness. They could see the tracks that the campers had made eking that Jeep Wagoneer into the woods. They parked their vehicles in a row behind the U-Haul.