Three shots to the head killed Dena Lynn Gore on July 17, 1986. She was nine, riding her bicycle five blocks to the convenience store for a Coke, pedaling with determination when she caught Terry Clark’s eye. He didn’t plan to kill her. He hadn’t killed the last girl. Donita Welch was six years old when Terry coaxed her into his sports car as she walked home from school. Donita hadn’t cried. She lived—and eventually long enough to witness Terry’s execution. But Dena Lynn cried as Terry raped her. She cried and cried and told Terry she would tell on him. She said, You’re going to pay for this. He panicked. Tied her up. Shot her three times in the back of the head. Dropped her little naked body in a ditch on the ranch where he worked and kicked at the embankment until she was covered with dirt.
I leave Brother Maxey’s office. The sun has set and a thunderstorm is rolling in. From the parking lot of our warehouse chapel I see smoke rising off the Sacramento Mountains. I walk to a nearby park where the view of them is unobstructed. There’s the Sleeping Lady. This evening the forest on her chest is burning. She’s been struck by lightning. The fire spreads down to her stomach, jumps up onto her shoulders, really rages in the valley of her clavicle. I guess any forest fire so close to town is frightening but this one turns my gut. I feel sick.
I go home. My niece always wants me to read to her when I’m home. She can’t wait to be in Girl Scouts. We’re halfway through the first chapter of an American Girl dolls book about Girl Scout camp when I stop.
What? She turns in to me and rests her face on her hand—squishing her whole cheek up into her eye. What, Josh? She’s laughing. Why did you stop?
The book closes in my hand and the room shrinks to the space between our faces. I say it before I know why I say it. How old are you?
I’m six, Josh. You know I’m six. I’ve been six since my birthday.
How do you warn a kid about evil? Don’t talk to strangers seems woefully inadequate when the things the world can throw at them are so gruesome. It’s not just that children can’t understand how evil arises anywhere, anytime. We grown-ups don’t have the capacity to explain it. So we say, Don’t talk to strangers. So we say, Don’t go anywhere alone. So we say, Always be brave, but that’s the thing Dena Lynn remembered and that’s why Terry killed her.
This night I don’t sleep. I sit up in the living room, watch out the window as the Sleeping Lady burns.
Microfilm
The microfilm machine at the library looks like an archaic notion of the future—a hulking box with dials and blinking lights. And it is as imprecise as it looks. Despite many buttons and flashing lights and knobs and levers for adjustments, each newspaper page I copy from the film is static ridden and unreadable for inches around the edges. There is auto skew correction and center/fit and masking and print mode and film type (text, fine, or photo). But for all my twisting and pushing, rubbing and cursing, nothing prints anywhere near accurate. Each page of every newspaper has, imposed at the top, the words BEST COPY AVAILABLE—the antique future-machine knows, at least, how to taunt. And it lies. I make sure to utilize the framing feature before I send the film to print but the print is never framed the way I want. And it tricks. When one feature is set to automatic, all the others default to automatic and some of my prints come out as negatives. And it attacks. Three drops of blood are on a mistakenly printed article from my zoom-lens-smashed pinkie. No, the librarian says as if she’s encountered this before, I do not have Band-Aids. All blood must be immediately cleaned from the machine. The information is lost or undecipherable or overshadowed by annoyance because of all the problems.
The forward/reverse knob on the viewer has four speed settings for scanning through the newspaper in each direction. On the slowest setting there is no immediately perceptible movement but I develop a headache as the subliminal crawl pushes left against my eyes. On the fastest setting I’m only able to decipher a few words of each headline. My eyes burn as I try to focus on the long blur of old news flashing by. I switch back and forth between the middle settings but I never get to a speed where I feel I’m both progressing efficiently and comprehending the information.
The mistakenly printed and mistakenly bloody article is the obituary page for Thursday, July 17, 1986—the day that Dena Lynn was murdered. Her death is not listed—would not be announced until after her body was found five days later. On this day Colleen Gore is beside herself with guilt, calling the police to report her daughter missing, wishing she had gone to the store with Dena Lynn when she asked to get a Coke. Jean Ortiz is volunteering to join the search parties. Terry Clark is kicking at an embankment. I don’t know why I stopped and printed this page. The only article that is not an obituary is an AP story that seems dropped in to fill space: “Researchers Trace Human Genes Back to Common Ancestor.” The headline uses the biggest font on the page and the article sweeps across the entire breadth, overshadowing the obituaries on the bottom half. Discussed is a study suggesting that women carry a gene in their mitochondrial DNA that dates back one hundred thousand years, possibly to a common ancestor not unlike the biblical Eve or some other early member of the human race. The scientists postulate that this gene might be the key to curing hereditary disease. Maybe the article is a life-affirming attempt by the newspaper’s editor to balance the list of over twenty deaths announced on this day. I don’t know why I stopped and printed this page. But I’ve read this article many times. I’ve read it more than any of the articles about the crime or the execution. I keep reading it over and over.
Flatliners
My correspondence with Jean lasts nearly a year, much of it trying to parse the exact nature of her correspondence with Terry. But she remains fixated on Brother Maxey, sending me annotated articles about him, critiquing articles he’d written: This article is not even about the Lord, it’s about Al Maxey who wasn’t there for MANY years, between the Baptism & the execution. She writes that she knows why Brother Maxey advised Terry not to call his lawyer in the days before the execution, implying that the preacher wanted Terry to die, that the execution would be a good notch in his salvation belt.
She sends me a box full of material about her relationship with Terry, many of his letters, lots of newspaper clippings, a VHS full of her interviews with the local news about ChildFund International and segments about Terry’s resentencing and Dan Rather’s interview with Colleen Gore about fighting to change the bond laws. Jean sends me two full front pages of the Roswell Daily Record. They’re from November 6 and 7 in 2001, with the headlines “Dead Man Walking” and “Terry Clark Executed.” On the front page of each is a subscription sticker addressed to the prison: #34930, Terry Clark, Santa Fe. He never saw them.
I ask Jean why she didn’t fight Terry about his decision to die, and it trudges up a lot of guilt: I feel like I signed his death warrant. I did. I did it but I knew his heart better than any other. If I did this, picking up his appeals for him, he would have been so angry with me and would have faith in no one. I wanted him to know at least one person on this Earth loved him unconditionally when he was murdered by the state. He had to die with some sort of dignity in his mind.
After nine months, her e-mails become more sporadic. They are now mostly about financial trouble. She worries she will lose her house, have to sell her classic car. She mentions she has found a producer to make a film of her life if only I will write the book. She throws out lots of numbers such as $10,000 and $5 million and promising 50 percent to charity. We could make some $$$, she writes, and I am offering this chance to you 1st. He has produced Flatliners, Radio Flyer & more … My whole life, my home depends on this chance. Eventually I stop writing her back.
In the film Flatliners a group of medical students attempt, as an extracurricular activity, to discover what lies beyond death. They give each other lethal injections and, while medically dead, experience mostly ghosts, people and events from their lives about which they feel guilt. When they’re resuscitated, the ghosts follow them back into life. I haven’t seen the movie in years
but I watched it a lot when I was young. A guy in my youth group at the warehouse chapel had it on VHS and we passed the tape around like unholy contraband. The film was rated R and had some sex in it, but I don’t guess that’s why it felt so illicit. The scandalous thing about Flatliners, for a bunch of Christian teens, was the depiction of the afterlife: no hellfire or pearly gates, just regret.
There’s a Lot of Room for You People Up in Heaven
They call him Doorman, Greeter, Prophet, and Priest, but that’s overly romantic—not incorrect, just overly romantic. The crass way of putting it: he’s mentally ill and spends his days trying to sweep all the sand off a desert road. His name is Sonny and he walks up and down the streets around El Patio, waving at all the cars with a kind of peace sign/salute combo and holding doors for folks. The local businesses keep him busy with the occasional supply run or, more often, a broom. He sweeps at sand that will eventually be caught up in the wind, cause the sting and burn, and fall back onto the road. He always says this thing to me, says it to most everyone, says, There’s a lot of room for you people up in heaven.
I’ve spent the day at El Patio Cantina, wallowing and shooting the shit with Old Man Sam. Jean’s schemes to profit from her relationship with Terry unsettle me. I keep thinking there’s something about faith I can’t quite grasp and that’s why this story needs telling, that this crime and the conversion and the execution is a chance to understand more concretely, beyond all abstract theology, what it means or doesn’t mean to believe in a benevolent god and grace and any afterlife at all. But then I think of Dena Lynn Gore and Donita Welch and how unfair it is to them to spend even one moment trying to understand anything at all about the man who raped them before they had even one full decade on this wobbling rock. Maybe I’m not so different from Jean. If you’re reading this story, that means someone published it, that they paid me and I put a line on my résumé. Writing is betrayal, said a lot of us navel-gazing writers a lot of the time. The money will vanish. One line on a résumé might get scanned by a suit somewhere. The sense of betrayal will linger. I feel powerless and complicit in something. I feel my feelings make it worse.
Last week I met up with my old girlfriend Elle. We went for a run, a kind of neutral but vigorous rendezvous in hopes of tiring us out to prevent falling into all our old bad habits. She’s a lawyer, works for a district attorney in another state now, works mostly sex crimes. They’ve been on a case, she tells me as we run, trying to solve a rape. One suspect seems like their guy, but when the cops bring him in for questioning, he pulls down his pants and shows them his dick is gone, just a mess of scar tissue—his alibi. More questions. He cut it off a while back. More questions. He sliced it up and stored it in the freezer. More questions. He slipped it in his mother’s meals over a few months. We run a long way without saying anything. We were still living together when I started this story, started putting it aside. Back then she asked me why I wanted to write about something so awful when it was already all over with. I didn’t have an answer. I asked her why law school. She said she thought most crimes were just a result of people being lowlowlow, that they needed help getting back up. Now we’ve run farther than we planned and it’s going to be a long trudge back to the car. Now she says the hardest part is seeing evil everywhere she looks, trying not to become completely numb to the feeling of it.
I leave El Patio, into the sun to walk off the beer, do a few laps around the plaza with Sonny. He always wears a bandanna and has two big waves of hair slithering out from under the bandanna like a couple of water snakes. When he smiles, he tends to face down and look up at you from that low angle so his eyes roll heavenward. “Lift up thine eyes to the high places.” He’s got a bit of gray stubble scattered around his brown face and three deep canyons with a half dozen tributaries of smile lines on either side of his leathery lips. He’s skinny as hell from all the walking and sweeping. I ask him again which prophet he is. There are the prophets Elijah and Ezekiel, he says. And there is me, Jeremiah.
Before I formed thee in the underbelly I knew thee, God said to Jeremiah when calling him to a life of prophecy. Jeremiah is known as the weeping prophet because he got beat up a lot. People didn’t like the doom he was forecasting. The thing about prophets in our world is they don’t get much chance to say anything optimistic. That’s why Jonah takes to the belly of a whale, why Jesus disappears for all those years. But Jeremiah never minded bringing the bad news. Sonny will sometimes quote Jeremiah or channel him or, if you believe he is Jeremiah, repeat himself. He says, But his word was in my heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones.
But the thing Sonny says most—There’s a lot of room for you people up in heaven—doesn’t jibe with the doom Jeremiah preached. When I first heard Sonny say it to some rich tourists loading up on lattes and cinnamon buns in the coffee shop, I thought it was a joke, like leave us poor locals alone, get on up to that fancy heaven you keep talking about. But I’ve come to believe it’s all part of Sonny’s revision of the weeping prophet. Sonny never talks doom. If he ever talks about fire, it is only from those parts of Jeremiah where the prophet receives the divine word. That kind of burning is not exactly hellfire because it’s the word of God, but I’m not sure if it’s much better. Jeremiah’s God was angry. He threatened to send lions to slay his people, wolves to spoil them, and leopards to tear them apart, serpents to bite them, dragons to roost in their homes, threatened famine and captivity and pestilence, destruction upon destruction. He talked of a mountain his people had brought to life with idolatry, said, Behold I am against thee, O destroying mountain, which destroyest all the earth: and I will stretch out mine hand upon thee, and roll thee down from the rocks, and will make thee a burnt mountain.
I tell Sonny how I watched the Sleeping Lady burn. I tell him the confusing part of Jeremiah is that, in his book, fire represents both total destruction on account of the sins of a few and the voice of God. I tell him Jeremiah was the first prophet to give us a glimpse of hell. There’s a lot of room for you people up in heaven, Sonny says. Then he salutes me away, like he always does, and keeps on sweeping at the infinite sand.
A Brief History of Hellfire
Technically the place Jeremiah talks about, in chapters 7 and 19 of his book, is not yet hell. But it will become hell:
Behold, I will bring evil upon this place, that which whosoever heareth, his ears shall tingle. Because they have forsaken me, and have estranged this place, and have burned incense in it unto other gods … and have filled this place with the blood of innocents and have built also the high places of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offering unto Baal, which I commanded not, nor spake it, neither come it into my mind: Therefore, behold, saith the Lord, that this place shall no more be called Tophet, nor the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter.
As early as the seventh century B.C.E. the Jews had a notion of afterlife. The prophet Ezekiel is told by God to have a chat with a valley of bones, a mass grave of Israelites: “So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a wobbling, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came upon them.” This afterlife was corporeal, and since criminals would need no afterlife, or perhaps to prevent afterlife, their bodies should be burned to keep their bones from reanimating.
The Valley of Hinnom that Jeremiah talks about, at the east gate of Jerusalem, became the place to do that burning. It was already tainted by all the child sacrifices the heathens had supposedly done there, and in the centuries after Jeremiah, people began to dump all their garbage there. By the time of Jesus, it was called Gehenna, a Latin word that would eventually be translated as “hell,” a place where people used sulfur to burn trash and criminals.
“A human limb burns a little like a tree branch,” says one forensics investigator. “The thin outer layers of skin fry and begin to peel off as the flames dance across their surface … The thicker dermal layer of skin shrinks and b
egins to split, allowing the underlying fat to leak out … The body can sustain its own fire for around 7 hours … The heat causes muscles to dry out and contract, making the limbs move … Bone takes longer to burn … By the end the skeleton is usually laid bare like a charred anatomical model, coated in the greasy residue of burned flesh.”
Hellfire grew eternal as Christianity began to take hold, though the fire remained literal. The New Testament includes eight references to literal hellfire, sometimes meaning the flames of the dump at Gehenna but also beginning to mean fires in some otherworldly afterlife. But those fires were still about consuming or destroying the bodies of the unrepentant, the forever flame just insurance that the bones always became ash.
The Apocalypse of Peter, composed maybe a generation after the gospels of the New Testament, is an apocryphal text but one so popular even in the fourth century C.E. that it was among the last to be excluded from the Bible, though it remained part of several Christian traditions through the thirteenth century. In the Apocalypse of Peter, hell evolves into a zoo of torment, no longer just a place where bodies are destroyed but where all kinds of sin-specific torture are performed eternally by angels for a crowd of spectators. Stroll through this hell and see blasphemers hang by the tongue, perverters of righteousness drown in a lake of fire, adulterous women hang by their hair, the men who mingled with them in the defilement of adultery hang by their feet, murderers cast into a pit of snakes and worms and the souls of their victims watching as the damned squirm among the squirming. See a gulley down below where all the gore from all the torture above washes down, washes over women and the children they aborted. See persecutors of the righteous with their guts burning and being eaten by worms, slanderers forced to gnaw their own lips while poked in the eye with a hot iron, liars gnawing their own tongues, wealthy assholes rolled atop swordlike and red-hot pebbles, homosexuals thrown from a cliff, forced to climb the cliff, then thrown down again, forced to climb again, etc. See idolaters and atheists turning their own spits, burning and turning themselves and roasting on the rivers of hellfire that course throughout the zoo of hell.
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