by Ania Ahlborn
This is bullshit. The word rolled around inside his head, loud and pulsating with slow-growing outrage, with disbelief. It had been the house in exchange for his cooperation. The house so Lucas could understand, could appreciate what had transpired in March of 1983. He was living there so he could write the story that no run-of-the-mill reporter ever would.
The media relayed the story, but what they fail to acknowledge is that this story, my story, is one that has yet to be told.
Lucas needed this story, goddammit. He needed this fucking book to work.
“Sorry, man,” Morales said, speaking if only to get Lucas moving again. “We have to go all the way back.”
Lucas would have moved to Washington regardless of whether or not Halcomb had asked him to do so—that was just the way he worked. He just wouldn’t have done it in a mad ten-day dash. The house was a dated relic, a dormant nightmare that he’d dragged his daughter into. He’d dumped money into a moving van, into endless tanks of gas. He’d signed a lease and made a security deposit. It was money he couldn’t afford to lose or even had in the first place.
“Son of a bitch,” he hissed.
“Hey, sorry, man, I thought . . .” Morales cut himself off, as if catching himself in a statement he shouldn’t have been making. Backpedaling, he posed a question instead. “It’s going to mess you up, huh?”
“Uh, yeah, just a little.” Lucas narrowed his eyes as they trekked back to the front of the facility.
“Hey, you wrote a book about the Black Dahlia,” Morales reminded him. “You didn’t interview anyone for that, and that book was good, man. It was really good.” So Morales had read something beyond Bloodthirsty Times; a repeat reader. His eagerness to make Lucas feel a little less defeated would have been endearing if he hadn’t been so pissed off.
“Thanks.” He nearly sneered the word, then sighed at his own aggravation. “I’m sorry. I appreciate you trying to lighten the mood, I’m just . . .” He shook his head. “I just can’t believe this blew up in my face.”
Morales nodded.
“You interact with the inmates, right? I mean, you said that you don’t make it a point to get friendly, but you do interact with them.”
“Yeah, sure, man. All part of the job.”
“So, if you wanted to go one-on-one . . .”
Morales made a face at the suggestion.
“What if it was for a project?” Lucas asked, sensing the guard’s disapproval.
“You mean, like . . . for your book?” Morales’s expression turned thoughtful before giving Lucas a rueful glance. “I’m not real good with that stuff. I mean, I don’t know how I could help . . .” He cracked a grin. “I’m just a guy from East L.A., man. I know the streets, but that’s pretty much where my smarts dead-end. Cool offer, though. My mom would flip if I got my name printed in a book somewhere.”
“What about that other guy?” He tipped his head to motion behind them.
“Eperson? Yeah, he knows a lot of those guys.”
“You think he’d be willing to sit down and talk with me?”
“Probably. Eperson’s pretty cool. He does a lot of visitation stuff. That’s one thing I do know. Halcomb, he’s always got a visitor, and it’s always this one woman.”
Lucas stared at the guard, thrown for a loop by the new information.
The second barred door buzzed. He nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Do you know who she is?”
“That’s more like something Eperson would know. He knows when inmates are in and out of their cells, for how long, and for what reason. I don’t know if he has access to, like, names or copies of ID’s or anything, but I can ask.”
“What does she look like?” Morales continued to walk. Lucas suddenly wanted to grab him to make him stop, wanted to shake him by the shoulders and yell Do you know what this means? It was the mother lode of possible leads.
“Dirty blond, I think, but it’s hard to tell. She wears these scarf things on her head, and the one time I saw her up close, I was on break. She was sitting in the waiting area when I was leaving for lunch. She was wearing these big glasses. You know, like the ones the chicks in Hollywood wear? Lenses so big they swallow half your face.”
The third door. The buzz. The security desk. Morales sidled up to the counter and gave Lumpy Annie a smile. “Hey, anything up here for Mr. Graham from inmate”—he glanced to Lucas’s visitor release form—“881978?”
She rose from the counter without a word and wandered into the back, presumably to check on Morales’s request.
Morales gave Lucas a patient nod. “Like I said, I don’t know if that was the woman for sure. Marty would know better. I’ll ask him. Just have a seat.” He motioned toward the plastic chairs. “It may be a few minutes.”
“How can I reach you?” Lucas asked. “Do I just call the facility and leave a message?”
“Yeah, that’ll work. I’m the only Morales here. First name is Josh.”
Lucas extended a hand to shake in official greeting. “Thanks for your help, Josh.”
“Yeah, man. It was an honor. Sorry about the letdown with Halcomb. But it was nice meeting a real-life author, anyway. Your stuff really is top-notch, Mr. Graham.”
“Call me Lucas.”
“Okay, Lucas then. Give me a shout when you need me.”
“Will do,” Lucas said, and finally took a seat.
16
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IT TOOK LUMPY Annie fifteen minutes to locate whatever it was that Halcomb had sent to the front. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had taken her fifteen days, Lucas wouldn’t have moved from his seat. She finally called him up to the counter and slid a note-card-sized manila envelope across the cracked and peeling laminate. Lucas didn’t bother walking out of the waiting area before tearing into the package; Lumpy Annie looking on.
It was a cross about the size of his palm. Delicate hand-painted flowers coiled across each tarnished silver arm. A small metal loop at the top suggested that someone had once worn it around their neck despite its large size. He peered at it, turning it this way and that, as though flipping it over would answer the obvious question—why did Halcomb gift this thing to him? Why had he bothered giving Lucas anything after refusing to see him?
His gaze flicked up to the woman behind the counter. “What’s this?” he asked, as though Lumpy Annie was privy to some important nugget of information.
“Looks like a cross,” she said, not interested in Lucas pulling her into his confusion.
“Obviously,” he murmured to himself, peering at the artifact in his hand. “But why would he send it up here? What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Send it up here?” Lumpy Annie arched an eyebrow. “No, that wasn’t sent up here.” Lucas shook his head at her, not understanding. “An inmate can’t send something like that up,” she said. “You think we’d let any of our charges have something like that in their cells?” Lucas blinked down at the cross once more. Its edges seemed sharp, its innocuous design far more weapon-like now than it had seemed seconds before. “Someone left that, but it wasn’t the inmate,” she said matter-of-factly. “Don’t ask me by who because I don’t know . . . but I’ve seen it done before.”
“Is there a way to—”
“No.” She cut him off.
“But someone keeps a record, right?” Lucas stared at her, determined. “Someone knows who left this, yeah? What if it was a piece of evidence? What if it was a murder weapon?”
“Sir . . .” Lumpy Annie’s expression went sour. Cool it. Lucas took a breath as she gave him a measured look. “You have a nice day.”
He turned away from the front desk, readjusted his bag against his hip, then veered around to face her again. “I want to schedule another visitation,” he said. “I want to know why I was stood up.”
Lumpy Annie only stared at him.
“I have a right to schedule another visitation,” he told her, his words hard-edged. She wasn’t impressed by his stick-to-itiveness. Clearing her throat, she reached for the phone. Was she calling security on him?
“You know what, forget it. I’ll call later.” Lucas turned away. “I’m leaving.”
He stalked across the parking lot to Selma’s car. When he looked back toward the facility, he spotted an officer standing just outside the main doors. The cop was staring right at Lucas, waiting for him to roll out of the parking lot without incident. She had called security. He barked out a clipped laugh at the ridiculousness of it. Had he really come off as that loose of a cannon?
Sitting in the car with the sun beating down on him through the windshield, Lucas narrowed his eyes. He scowled at the silver Toyota emblem affixed to the center of the steering wheel. The overpowering fruity smell of Selma’s air freshener was sickening. It was the kind of scent that gives birth to eyesight-impairing migraines. Glaring at those twin cherries hanging from the rearview mirror, he rolled down the windows and eased the car onto the road, but he didn’t get far. Frustration had him pulling onto the soft shoulder of the highway a few miles out of Lambert. He put the Camry in park, shoved the driver-side door open, and ducked into the trees that lined the quiet wooded road.
“Stupid lying son of a bitch.” He seethed, kicking at the trunk of the nearest pine. What the hell had he done? What kind of an idiot trusts a criminal, a murderer? What kind of a father moves his kid to the scene of a crime?
Halcomb had played him, one hundred percent. The success of his project—his career, his marriage—hung in the balance. And all Lucas had to show for his trouble was an ugly goddamn cross.
THE WOLF AND HIS SHEEP
By Dani Dervalis, The Seattle Times staff reporter
Published November 18, 1983
All eyes are on Olympia as the case of cult leader Jeffrey Halcomb begins proceedings in Washington State Supreme Court today. The story of the massacre that occurred in Pier Pointe, Washington, in March of this year has been nothing short of a media frenzy. Halcomb’s face, as well as those of Audra Snow and the group the media has referred to as “Halcomb’s Faithful,” seem to permanently shine from our television screens. But who is Jeffrey Halcomb? Where did he come from, and how was one man able to talk a group of intelligent, vibrant young adults into taking their own lives?
“Jeffrey led our congregation out in Veldt, Kansas,” says forty-five-year-old Mira Ellison. Ellison, who now resides in Topeka, recalls her youth in the tiny hamlet. “It was small. A few thousand people. Jeffrey’s father was a pastor.” The Gate of Heaven Church was founded by Protestant Gregory Halcomb in 1939. Three years later, Jeffrey Halcomb would be born to sixteen-year-old Helen Halcomb (née Stoneridge). Gregory Halcomb was forty-three at the time of his son’s birth.
The Gate of Heaven Church wasn’t the only house of worship in Veldt at the time. “My mother said there was a big confrontation,” Ellison recalls. “Pastor Halcomb was dead set on running the original church out of town. Something about the opposing pastor being a blasphemer. I was young, so I don’t remember the details too well.”
But Ellison does remember meeting Jeffrey Halcomb for the first time. “He’d run up and down the center aisle during his daddy’s sermons. Everyone loved Jeffrey. People said that God had blessed him, being born to the pastor and all. Helen [Halcomb] was also gifted, so they all just assumed Jeffrey would absorb all that enlightenment from his folks.”
Helen was raised Protestant in Veldt. The older Gregory Halcomb was smitten before she reached the age of thirteen. “In Veldt, everyone ran in the same circles. Helen was entranced by the idea of marriage as much as she was by the idea of going to heaven. When she broke into tongues during Pastor Halcomb’s sermons, you could see Gregory watching her, fascinated. They were just enamored with each other.”
Helen Halcomb had the habit of tumbling out of her church pew and convulsing at the foot of the pulpit. “Nobody would intervene,” says Ellison. “The adults saw it as God working through her, delivering a message, but to us kids it was downright scary.”
That message from God, the congregation agreed, came in the form of a baby. When Jeffrey Halcomb was born in November 1942, the Gate of Heaven rejoiced.
“He was leading sermons by the time he was eight or nine,” Ellison recalls. “When he hit his teens, Pastor [Gregory] Halcomb handed over the reins. They called him ‘the Child Prophet.’ After word got out, people came from all over Kansas. We had to start having church outside on the lawn. Pastor Halcomb told folks that his son was the Lamb of God, that he’d usher in the second coming of Christ. It wasn’t long before Jeffrey started preaching about his own divination. My momma used to say that he only did it to make his sermons more powerful, but it seemed to me like [Jeffrey] believed it himself.”
Why, then, did Halcomb not stay in Kansas, where he was so revered? “He started convincing the younger kids that he could bring them back from the dead,” Ellison says. “Rumor was that a local boy tried to kill himself after Jeffrey said he could pull him back from the other side, but we never did find out who that boy was. That didn’t matter. [Veldt] turned on Jeffrey. His own father ended up excommunicating him, calling out the devil and such. Pastor [Gregory] Halcomb made him get down on his knees in front of the entire congregation and whipped him with a rod. There had been stories about how Pastor Halcomb used to beat Jeffrey bloody whenever he thought the boy had sinned. When he did it in front of the church, he said each lash stood for a year of deception, said that Satan had tricked him into believing his son was the Lamb.”
Jeffrey Halcomb disappeared from the tightly knit Veldt community after his excommunication. He had just turned seventeen. “Most everyone in Veldt was glad, too,” Ellison says. “By then, everyone was right scared of their kids dying because Jeffrey said he could bring them back. When, at a spring picnic, someone asked Helen where Jeffrey had gone to, she went pale and said that he’d gone back to hell.”
There were, however, those who didn’t take so well to Jeffrey Halcomb’s excommunication. “Lots of people had come down from all over to listen to Jeffrey preach, and lots of people really did believe he was doing God’s work. So when Veldt told [Jeffrey] he had to go, some of those who came from far away weren’t happy at all about it. Jeffrey was real charismatic,” says Ellison. “Lots of the young girls fell for him. I remember, after Pastor Halcomb announced that Jeff was gone and not coming back, some of them started wailing like they’d just seen someone die. A few of them demanded the pastor reveal where Jeff had gone to. Those girls were determined to find him, to follow him out to wherever he had gone.”
Jeffrey Halcomb left Veldt for San Francisco, arriving sometime in the summer of 1959. There, he held a few odd jobs bagging groceries and helping to organize protests in the Haight-Ashbury district. “He seemed like a good guy,” says Trevor Donovan, the head organizer of a peace group called California Change. “He didn’t participate in our group for long, but all the girls dug him. I think he went down to L.A. He was nomadic. You can’t pin a guy like that down.”
In Los Angeles, Susanna Clausen-King—a drifter—states that she spent a few nights with Halcomb on a beach outside of San Diego in the mid-sixties. “I was hitching, got picked up by a dude in a VW bus, and Jeff was in the back. I remember him because he had a face you don’t forget. Real pretty. But he had some weird ideals. I split after he started yammering about how everyone deserves a clean slate, how you should forget your past, something like that. He said his pop exiled him, said he was something like the new age Jesus.”
Janessa Morgan, mother of Laura Morgan, tries to keep her composure as she speaks about her daughter over the phone. “When I saw Laura’s photo on TV, I thought I was losing my mind.” This past March, at the time of Laura’s suicide, she had been nineteen years old. “She was a free spirit. She wasn’t a run
away like any of those other kids. She left Boulder in search of adventure, said she wanted to see California. She’d been saving up her money to get out of town, and when she graduated from high school, I told her to be careful and sent her on her way. She was a straight-A student, a really good girl. She wrote me a few letters, but not once did she mention [Halcomb]. A few weeks after her letters stopped, I contacted the police, but they told me she was an adult. They weren’t going to go searching for a girl who was ‘on vacation.’ ” That vacation began in the summer of 1980, only weeks after fiery-haired Laura had graduated as valedictorian of her class. At the time of her death, Janessa Morgan hadn’t heard from her daughter in nearly two years.
Other than Laura Morgan’s mother, none of the families of Halcomb’s brood would come forward to comment.
One parent, however, did not need to speak with The Seattle Times to shed light on just how cunning Jeffrey Halcomb was. Washington congressman Terrance Snow (R) lost his only daughter, Audra, on that fateful March afternoon. While Halcomb refuses to reveal any information about why he or his followers had been staying at Congressman Snow’s beachside home, police are confident that they had been residing there for at least a few months. While Halcomb may have lost his congregation in Veldt, it’s clear that he was actively seeking members to share in his own faith-based views, and Audra Snow—a pretty and affluent young socialite—gave up everything under Halcomb’s sway.
The Jeffrey Halcomb trial will be lengthy, with the prosecution seeking a charge of ten counts of first-degree murder. “It’s one thing to convince some people to follow you,” Ellison says. “It’s another to kill a baby the way he did. I hope he gets what he deserves.”
17
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