Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier

by Tom Kizzia

  They started their descent. The horizon disappeared, pinching off the grandeur. As the cabins beside McCarthy Creek came into view, they looked tiny and alone, hidden away. His mood changed. Payne remembered how he’d felt when he first read through the trooper interviews. As a churchgoing father of three young children, he’d found the stories sickening—the worst sort of domestic violence he could imagine. He was eager to get before a grand jury. But he still needed to know the scope of the case.

  Payne had called ahead, reaching the cabin over some sort of remote phone, and the mother would be down there waiting. He had flown all this way to interview her and find out how such things could have gone on. How to measure her guilt in all this? He was also unsure about the oldest sons, whose whereabouts were unknown. They were reportedly away at a hunting camp, but he’d been glad to have two armed trooper investigators in the helicopter when they stopped to fuel up in Glennallen.

  The helicopter landed in a clearing by the Marvelous Millsite camp. Cute little children scrambled over when the rotor stopped. The pilot invited them to look inside while Payne and the two investigators followed the mother to a cabin. She said she was glad it was finally over. They sat and talked for several hours. As Country Rose described how her husband ordered their daughter to do a dance and get him ready to bring forth his seed, Payne felt the hair prickle on the back of his neck.

  ONCE THE hunt for Papa Pilgrim commenced, sightings were called in from all over the state. None were helpful. Longhaired, gray-bearded men were more plentiful in Alaska than anyone expected. One old-timer from the ghost town of Hope, driving a van around Anchorage to gather supplies, was stopped by police three times in a single afternoon.

  The sound of a helicopter landing by the footbridge had evidently given the suspect time to slip away on a four-wheeler held at the ready. Despite his feeble health, he had somehow managed to sneak back after the troopers left and drive his dark blue Dodge Ram camper van out the McCarthy Road without being spotted. “We were expecting this to go nice and easy, and apparently Mr. Hale had other plans,” a trooper spokesman said. “Maybe we underestimated him.”

  Alaska, however, is not an easy place to make a getaway. The airports and ferries are easily watched. There’s one main highway out to Canada. A fugitive on wheels can only pinball among Anchorage, Fairbanks, and the border post at Tok, basically a highway triangle with a handful of road stubs leading to dead ends in the wilderness. And winter was closing in.

  After a week the troopers announced they were easing off the intensive manhunt. They were confident their quarry was still in Alaska and would turn up soon. “We don’t have the resources to be driving up and down the highway looking behind every tree,” the spokesman said.

  On October 5, 2005, twelve days after troopers had found the stove still warm in Pilgrim’s tent by the Kennicott River, an Alaska Railroad security agent came across the dusty blue van on a dead-end service road north of Anchorage. The agent was making a routine patrol near the tracks, through one of those weedy urban pockets where people sometimes go to disappear in more settled parts of America. The van’s driver tried to turn around but the agent used his pickup to block the way. Robert Hale’s long gray beard was tucked in a purple scarf around his neck. The fume-filled van carried a canister of extra gasoline, boxes of food, and eleven Bibles.

  The fugitive was cooperative as he was handcuffed. He waited on the pickup’s tailgate for troopers to arrive. In an Anchorage police video of the arrest, he seemed tired, his head sunk. He mumbled about a recent operation, his knee problems, and diabetes. He asked to see the wanted poster with his photo on it. One of the search warrants left at his tent in McCarthy was found in the van with “self defense” written across it, but Hale told authorities he had only just discovered he was wanted and had been on his way that very morning to turn himself in.

  The superior court in Palmer has jurisdiction over state criminal cases originating in the Wrangell Mountains. The suspect appeared there the next day to be arraigned and assigned a public defender. He peered out uncertainly through round wire-rim glasses, his long white hair thinning, his yellow jail suit looking a few sizes too large. In legal papers, and among the newspaper and television reporters who turned out in force, he was no longer known as Papa Pilgrim.

  The judge asked Robert Hale for his occupation.

  “I’m a father,” he said.

  THE CRIMINAL case against Robert Hale raised several unusual challenges for the Palmer prosecutor. The defendant insisted he had done nothing wrong. Everything had been consensual. Richard Payne knew a jury was going to have some questions. If things were so bad, why didn’t Elishaba simply leave? Why didn’t the mother help? Indeed, how could such a big secret have been sustained in such a small cabin?

  Medical examiners found no lingering physical evidence of abuse. They confirmed that Elishaba had never been pregnant. There had apparently been a memory stick of digital photos, which Hale hid on his Bible shelf, but the boys had destroyed them as vile. Troopers had hoped at one point to trap Hale on the phone. But Jim Buckingham refused to allow a phone tap. Hale had often secretly taped conversations in the cabin, then turned his children’s own words against them. The Buckinghams were trying to teach the children to give up such deception.

  Without physical evidence, then, Elishaba’s testimony would be crucial. But it was going to be necessary to paint a fuller picture of life in the cult that Robert Hale had raised around himself. The oldest son, Joseph, had turned out to be particularly helpful in describing for investigators how his father used starvation and other techniques—Joseph called it “brainwashing”—to control the family. Payne filed a motion spelling out how his case would involve testimony from Kurina Rose, the older children, and the Buckinghams to explain the ways this unhappy family was like no other—how Robert Hale had made himself into a feared “quasi-deity” for the purpose of controlling his family, and then ensured his conduct would not be discovered by isolating them and adopting the guise of a man pursuing a dream in the Alaska wilderness.

  Some people seemed ready to explain Hale’s God as the grandiose fantasy of a pathological narcissist. But Payne was starting to believe the whole religious guise was phony. It was so riddled with contradictions. He also had doubts about Hale’s purported pacifism. With all those guns around, there was no telling how the story might have ended if the sons and daughters had not found the courage to escape when they did. Payne followed the trail back through Hale’s life. He found the death of Kathleen Connally particularly suspicious, given the absence of fingerprints and the gunshot wound to the back of the head. Hale’s family told Payne they believed the shooting was truly an accident. In his early Christian life, they said, their father would have confessed such a serious sin in hope of clearing his soul. Payne wasn’t so sure. That kind of soul-clearing confession can put a person away for life.

  So far, the general public knew little about what had gone on inside the Pilgrim Family. The state’s charges—separate counts for each year the family had lived in Alaska, plus multiple counts of rape, assault, and kidnapping for the January 10, 2005, incident at the wanigan—were laid out in brief, neutral, boilerplate language. Because the accusations involved sexual assault and the exposure of minor children, no detailed charging document had been filed. The grand jury testimony was locked away. The family members, all of whom had now moved into the Buckinghams’ home in Palmer, were being shielded from reporters. It was not even very clear that the charges involved a single adult victim, someone referred to misleadingly by her legal initials, B.S.

  My newspaper went along with the general blackout, following policies against naming rape victims. There was no worry this criminal case might slip through the cracks, as there would have been if the complaint were in the hands of the state’s office of child protective services (which continues to this day to cite the confidentiality in its statutes in refusing to discuss how at least six formal investigations of the Pilgrims had been
opened through the years in Alaska with no action ever taken).

  The date of the trial, when secrets would finally be revealed, was pushed later and later into 2006, as Hale’s public defenders won repeated delays. Gradually, in court filings, the defense’s legal strategy emerged: His lawyer would argue that sexual activity with the adult victim had not been forced; that Jim Buckingham, the real Svengali in the story, had stolen away the defendant’s family and planted stories in their minds; and that the state was unfairly and selectively singling out Robert Hale for prosecution, ignoring other allegations of thievery, incest, and child abuse perpetrated by the children themselves and offered up freely to investigators in the detailed stories they told of their lives.

  The first two arguments were to be expected. The last one infuriated Payne. He saw it as pure mudslinging—an effort to intimidate the children by threatening to drag the family’s ignorance and confusion into the courtroom. Payne needed the children to testify without fear. He was prepared to bring in clinical experts who would talk about sexual grooming and the way victims came to identify with their captors, and how these factors were heightened in this case by religious domination and social and geographic isolation. But such expert testimony would be useless without the children’s own stories.

  He had decided not to file charges against Kurina Rose. His helicopter visit to the Mother Lode convinced him she was a textbook abuse victim herself, making crazy desperate trade-offs as she struggled to protect herself and her younger children. Charging her would give the case too many confusing vectors. Going after both parents would also fulfill Robert Hale’s pseudo-prophetic warnings about state social workers, conceivably upsetting the family to the point of destroying the criminal case against the real perpetrator. But Payne knew a jury trial was going to put Mama Pilgrim in a difficult position.

  He worked to nurture his relations with the family. He brought his wife to dinner at the Buckingham home. His open Mormon religiosity was a helpful bridge: The Buckinghams and Hales said it felt like the Lord himself had brought Payne to their assistance. Payne also brought in assistant district attorney Rachel Gernat, a young soccer-playing mom whose sunny demeanor belied the darkness of her experience as a sex-crimes prosecutor in the rural meth belt of the Palmer-Wasilla valley. Gernat was not at all religious, but she came back early from maternity leave to work with the children of Papa Pilgrim, especially the females. She prepared them for the kinds of questions they might hear on cross-examination. She explained the difference between a witness statement and soulful testimonial. She listened to their stories. The children had visited no psychologists and received no conventional trauma counseling, and the lay reassurance of a state lawyer who had seen these things before was undoubtedly valuable beyond the practical purpose of putting their complicated experiences into words the court would understand.

  “Victims have to feel safe before they will tell you what happened,” Gernat told me privately. “What if no one believes you, and then you have to go back to the abuser? Because now you’ve told, and it’s going to be even worse for you. At the same time, they’ve been taught to fear the state. That’s very common among abused families: ‘Children’s Services and the cops are going to take you away.’ What was unique in this case is that he expanded it to all government, including the National Park Service.”

  The case was distinguished, too, by the victims’ efforts to reconcile their rescue with the religious faith in which they’d been raised. For many abuse victims, an important part of recovery is constructing a narrative to explain their trauma. In the case of the Hale children, this meant persuading themselves it had been God’s plan all along to guide them through their wilderness trials to safety, learning hard lessons along the way about grace and redemption. Gernat found the Bible lessons and sympathetic ear of Jim and Martha Buckingham had been remarkably helpful at leading the children out of the valley of the shadow of their father’s megalomania.

  “I don’t think he ever thought his own children would go against him,” Gernat said. “He was too narcissistic; he couldn’t see his own potential downfall. I know he still has a hold on them. Maybe in the courtroom he thinks he can exert his power. I don’t think it will work. At this point, they just want to hear him ask forgiveness. Most victims want to hear the words ‘I’m sorry.’ ”

  Gernat understood that the children would see the defense table bathed in a holy light. “They will look at him and wonder, how could he not repent?”

  THE IMPRISONMENT of their poster child had not been helpful to the property-rights campaigners fighting the Park Service.

  Activists struggled to distance themselves from the man who had conjured such happy images of living off the land. The American Land Rights Association issued a press release calling the criminal charges against Robert Hale “appalling and tragic.” Chuck Cushman, the association head who had helped set up the family’s Pacific Northwest concerts, noted that ownership of most of the McCarthy Creek inholding had always been in the names of the victimized children anyway (a ruse, he may not have known, to ensure that assets in a parent’s name did not interfere with the family’s eligibility for welfare).

  “In working with the family over the last two years ALRA never observed anything out of order and we had no reason to believe that any misconduct by Papa Pilgrim was taking place.… The American Land Rights Association will stand by these children and all other Alaskans that are facing unjust access restrictions to their lands affecting their daily lives.”

  Kurt Stenehjem, the airlift “angel” who once fell into Hillbilly Heaven, showed up at Hale’s arraignment in Palmer, appearing stunned at the ground loop his memoir’s story line had taken. Stenehjem was interviewed on the evening news as a former admirer.

  “I enjoy families, large families,” he told the cameras. “You hope for the best. You’re curious and try not to be cynical, but the accusations would perhaps answer a lot of questions.”

  In McCarthy, the greatest surprise was expressed by those who had claimed to know the family best. Investigative records later revealed that some of these friends told troopers they’d often wondered how such competent and strong children could be so bruised up all the time.

  The Wrangell St. Elias News, which two years earlier had run a cover story called THE DARK SIDE OF NPS, now ran a cover story called THE DARK SIDE OF ROBERT HALE. “His accusers are not the National Park Service, but rather his own family,” Rick Kenyon wrote. “WSEN strongly supported, and still strongly asserts, the validity of the family’s right to access their home—to Hillbilly Heaven, a term the family gave their mountain property. But, unknown to us, their heaven was becoming anything but.”

  The Hales sent a letter to their neighbors in the Wrangells, signed by Joseph, to be read aloud at the next meeting of the McCarthy Area Council:

  We well remember the day we drove into McCarthy. Our hearts were overwhelmed by your kindness, and we fell in love with your town. You were gracious to us and we wanted to reciprocate, but we truly did not understand what it meant to be a good neighbor. Our hearts weep for the pain and misunderstandings that we have caused in the town, and we want to ask your forgiveness individually and collectively. We need your help to be the people that we want to be, and though we don’t deserve it, we beg for your patience and understanding. It took years for us to become the people that we are, so we know that it will take some time for us to adopt a manner of living that is truly acceptable before God and man.

  Joseph wrote that the family hoped to return to McCarthy the following summer to run their horse-ride business but planned to remain for the time being in Palmer, “to round out a bit of our educational needs.” Reaction around the valley was generally sympathetic, though some wariness lingered among those who thought they detected in the prose style a trace of Papa Pilgrim’s florid promises.

  The Hale family had already taken a step away from McCarthy. While holding on to Hillbilly Heaven, they had sold the copper catacombs on the mounta
in above to Ray Kreig.

  From their home in Anchorage, Ray and Lee Ann Kreig were aware, months before the arrest, that something big was going on. They knew the older children had moved out. Plans for a tourist lodge were forgotten. Elishaba, Joseph, and Joshua came by in May 2005 to sign the Mother Lode sales agreement and got Papa on the speaker-phone from McCarthy. “That’s the first time I’ve heard his voice since I left,” Elishaba said. She gave Lee Ann a hug as they departed and whispered, “We left because of me.”

  The Kreigs nevertheless stayed on friendly terms with Papa, visiting him in the Anchorage hospital a month before the indictment. Shaken when news of the manhunt came out, Ray Kreig asked Joseph what to do if his father tried to get in touch. “Do what I would do. Call 911,” Joseph told him.

  Sure enough, one morning the fugitive called from a phone booth. He asked Kreig to save newspaper clippings about his run from the law. He didn’t say where he was, and the call time expired. Kreig called the police and told them what he could.

  Robert Hale’s arrest did not diminish Kreig’s outrage over the government effort to close the Green Butte Road. When the federal appeals court finally endorsed “reasonable” regulation of inholders and environmental review of certain access plans, Kreig protested on his War in the Wrangells website. The appeals court judges had decided on their own, he complained, that winter access up McCarthy Creek was the best solution—details the trial lawyers had never gotten around to arguing. The Pacific Legal Foundation appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but eventually their petition was turned down. Thus ended the legal test of the limits of Alaska exceptionalism in the first generation to come along after the epic 1980 conservation act.

  There appeared to be little public energy left for defending the pioneer lifestyle of Papa Pilgrim.

  FOR THE first time in her adult life, Kurina Rose Hale was out in the world. She had a little cabin of her own, not far from the Buckinghams’. She attended Bible study classes and a class on victims of violence, where she heard stories of abused women and their embarrassments, fears, and foolish hopes. She also learned about something called bipolar personality disorder: Grandiose. Intolerant. Euphoric. Volatile. Jekyll and Hyde.