The Devil in Pew Number Seven

by Rebecca Nichols Alonzo; Rebecca Nichols Alonzo

  Whether Daddy cared to admit it, the campaign of terror was taking a heavy emotional toll. Although Daddy refused to abandon the church, his nerves were shot. During the fall of 1975, the voices of discouragement reverberating in his head battled for dominion over his heart. Daddy found himself fighting a depression so severe that, rather than lingering after church services to greet and visit with worshipers, he’d slip out the side door and take refuge at home. Daddy even stopped visiting door to door, as had been his custom over the years. Instead, he remained in bed for hours day after day.

  What he needed were words of peace and comfort—not the voice of confusion. What he longed for was God’s assurance that all would be well with his soul, that his family would be safe, and that the persecution would come to a swift and just ending. With the determination of a drowning man clinging to a life preserver, Daddy clung to the words of Psalm 28:1-4, in which King David, no stranger to persecution, wrote,

  Unto thee will I cry, O LORD my rock; be not silent to me: lest, if thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down into the pit. Hear the voice of my supplications, when I cry unto thee, when I lift up my hands toward thy holy oracle. Draw me not away with the wicked, and with the workers of iniquity, which speak peace to their neighbours, but mischief is in their hearts. Give them according to their deeds, and according to the wickedness of their endeavours: give them after the work of their hands; render to them their desert. (emphasis added)

  Daddy had reason to hope that, indeed, everything would work out. He was encouraged to witness ATF Agent Charles Mercer digging deep into the case, like a hound dog on the hunt of truth. He was heartened on September 30, 1975, two weeks after the fourth bombing, when Agent Mercer served a federal warrant to search the home of Mr. Watts.

  Perhaps the end was in sight.

  Perhaps Mr. Watts would be brought to justice.

  However, Daddy’s disposition darkened when Agent Mercer, following the search of Mr. Watts’s property, told the press, “The search warrant is merely a tool38 that we work with, and by no means does it reflect an accusation on anyone.” Daddy was convinced Mr. Watts was behind the two years of oppression. How, then, could Agent Mercer downplay Mr. Watts as a suspect? Why was it taking so long to gather the evidence proving his guilt? How much longer would Daddy have to fight the good fight under a constant cloud of fear?

  Like a pendulum swinging back and forth on a grandfather clock, Daddy’s mood swings that fall were as regular as time itself. One minute he was trapped in the doldrums; the next minute hope abounded. At one moment, Mr. Watts appeared to have the upper hand. The next moment, progress would be made on the case, giving Daddy the strength to press on.

  For instance, because the drama in Sellerstown39 had been so widely reported and had so horrified most residents, North Carolina congressman Charlie Rose requested a summary of the acts of terror directed at our home and church from the FBI and ATF agents. This was good news. Perhaps there was enough pressure building on the case that it would be resolved sooner rather than later . . . if only Daddy could squelch the voices predicting defeat.

  Meanwhile, there was more good news to brighten Daddy’s outlook. An aide to then-governor Jim Holshouser gathered newspaper clippings from which he determined that action was needed. On October 16, 1975, the governor publicly offered40 a $2,500 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for these acts of terrorism in his state.

  But it wasn’t long before the internal voices forecasting Daddy’s doom renewed their strength. Their fiendish chant soared once again, this time just after 7 p.m. on November 6, 1975. That’s when Mr. Watts initiated a fifth explosion.41 While our house was unharmed, the foundations undergirding Daddy’s heart began to crumble. Maybe the voices were right. Maybe he or his family wouldn’t make it out of Sellerstown unharmed. Maybe he should quit.

  Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this attack was the fact that a hired armed guard, Leo Duncan, was on patrol when the detonation took place. Worse, Mr. Watts was speaking to Leo Duncan in his driveway at the precise moment of the blast. Evidently Mr. Watts had lured Leo away from his post, leaving our home unguarded long enough to strike again.

  * * *

  Momma was a strong woman.

  A steel magnolia before the phrase was coined.

  She was graceful yet strong on the outside, soft and tender on the inside. And yet she found it difficult to watch her husband struggling to hold it together in the wake of the fifth bombing. She, too, was reaching the end of herself and needed an oasis to recharge from the front lines. Although she didn’t want to be apart from the love of her life, Momma knew the love they shared could stand the distance. After celebrating Daddy’s birthday on November 11, 1975, Momma packed the car and took Danny and me to Bogalusa to be with her family.

  At age five, I had no say in the matter.

  Granted, being with my grandparents was always a highlight. And yet, I was such a Daddy’s girl that being apart from him bothered me almost as much as if I’d lost my right arm. Driving away from home that afternoon, knowing that I wouldn’t hear Daddy’s voice in the morning or smell his aftershave when I wrapped my arms around his neck, a gray cloud of sadness settled on me. I’m sure the feelings were mutual.

  Momma thought this was for the best, so off we went.

  On November 13, 1975, two days after Daddy’s birthday, he received a real gift of encouragement. A federal grand jury was assembled42 in Raleigh, North Carolina, to explore the preliminary evidence gathered in the case. Subpoenas for eight people were issued, including orders for Horry Watts, Bud Sellers, Wayne Tedder, and Daddy to appear before the grand jury.

  Under normal circumstances, this should have muzzled the persistent voices inside of Daddy’s mind. However, his yo-yoing between hope—that the case would be resolved—and despair—that Mr. Watts was too slick, too skilled, too adept at evading justice—began to catch up with Daddy. And no doubt, after Momma, Danny, and I left Daddy at home, he probably stayed up all night, sitting in a chair near the window to monitor the street.

  I’m sure he must have thought that any restraint Mr. Watts exercised while the family was home—which wasn’t much—would evaporate the moment we were gone. With Daddy home alone, he probably figured there was nothing stopping Mr. Watts from unleashing his full fury. That, of course, would explain why Daddy didn’t sleep at night and, instead, slept so much during the daytime.

  On Sunday, November 16, 1975, a highway patrolman found Daddy incoherent and slumped over the steering wheel of his wrecked car. He had crashed in Newton Grove, North Carolina, some eighty miles away from home. After preaching at our church in the morning, Daddy had been scheduled to speak at another church’s Sunday night service. He never made it. No doubt Daddy had fallen asleep at the wheel. The accident required Daddy to be transported by ambulance to Columbus County Hospital, where he was treated in the emergency room. Daddy was to appear before the grand jury the following morning. Due to the personal crisis, he never had a chance to testify.

  Several days later, Momma sensed something was wrong with Daddy’s mental state. The unsettling experience happened during a phone call she placed to him from Bogalusa that week. Danny was sick, and Momma had asked Daddy to pray for their son. But when Daddy began his prayer, he started to pray for someone unrelated to the need at hand. He sounded incoherent, confused.

  After the call, convinced that Daddy was suffering a much deeper depression than she had imagined, Momma left Danny and me with her mother and traveled back to Sellerstown with Daddy’s sisters Aunt Dot and Aunt Martha. The three women packed up Daddy, planning to whisk him away to his parents’ home in Mobile, Alabama.

  As they loaded Daddy and his luggage in the car, Mr. Watts strolled into his front yard. Like a vulture anticipating the death of a wounded animal, Mr. Watts smiled and gloated and all but rejoiced at the broken man he saw across the street that afternoon.

  In a momen
t of brutal honesty, Aunt Dot confessed to me years later what she was feeling as Mr. Watts appeared to relish Daddy’s broken condition. She said, “I’ve never been a violent person,43 but at that moment I wished I had been able to put my hands on a gun and make Mr. Watts pay for what he had done to my brother.” Mustering their willpower, the women ignored Mr. Watts as they finished packing the car.

  On November 20, 1975, Daddy was admitted to the University of South Alabama Medical Center. After submitting Daddy to a heavy battery of physical and psychological tests, the doctors were convinced of two things. Medically speaking, Daddy’s heart had been damaged from stress. In their view, any other man would have had a heart attack from such extreme pressure. The second prognosis was that Daddy had had a complete nervous breakdown and was exhausted.

  He needed immediate bed rest.

  He needed prayer. He needed a break from the voices.

  The doctors wanted to offer hope yet remain realistic about the extent of his condition. They told Momma, “It will take at least three weeks to come around,44 and then he will not be out of the woods.” Momma told the doctors she was shocked that this had happened to a man who had been a tower of strength for his family and for the church. In their professional opinion, Momma said, “They told me this is what happens when the base of the tower crumbles.”

  Daddy, heavily sedated, was admitted to Charter Hospital, the psychiatric wing of the University of South Alabama Medical Center, where he stayed for six weeks until his insurance ran out. Because of Mr. Watts, three holidays were stolen from us due to Daddy’s breakdown. Hospitalized, sedated, and alone, Daddy missed Danny’s first Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s celebrations. Rather than experience the joy and happiness that I had enjoyed, my brother’s childhood, although he was just nine months at the time, was shortchanged.

  For their part, the church showered us with thoughtful expressions of love and faithful prayers. Upwards of sixty get-well and Christmas cards poured in as the church family prayed for our quick return. One child sent Daddy a Humpty Dumpty card in which she wrote, “My prayers will always be with you. And you mean everything to me.”

  Ironically, even Mr. Watts signed and mailed a get-well card in which he’d expressed hope that Daddy would experience “more happiness than you have ever known!” Whether he wrote that out of guilt or a twisted attempt to deflect criticism, I don’t know. Somehow, receiving a card from Mr. Watts felt about as appropriate as someone bringing a beer keg to one of our church picnics.

  When Daddy was strong enough to return to Sellerstown, he still wasn’t operating at full capacity. His bullet-riddled car, the one he had wrecked several months prior, needed far too many repairs. Since we didn’t have the money, the generous church family voted to purchase Daddy a new 1976 Buick45—which drove Mr. Watts mad. They also approved, and paid for, a single-wide trailer. This home away from home was placed on the farm of James Sellers out in the Beaver Dam community, just a few miles away.

  The church leadership wanted to give us a refuge at night, well away from Mr. Watts’s immediate scrutiny, while the lawmen did their job. Even better, this new location was adjacent to a neighbor who had excellent guard dogs. Any attempt by Mr. Watts or his men to approach the trailer with ill intent would arouse a round of barking loud enough to raise the dead.

  Admittedly, our getaway was not a secret. Nor did it stop Mr. Watts from harassing us. I remember watching him drive past the trailer, slowing his car to glare through the windshield, just to let us know he knew where we were living. He was livid that the church spent money on this shelter for us. Aside from the cost, he had to be miffed that he could no longer keep tabs on us during his nightly prowling.

  I remember as evening approached, we’d pack up as if we were going on vacation and return to that little haven, make dinner, and then settle in for the night. The next day we’d return to the parsonage to conduct our lives and the church business. For me, the novelty of living in our new “home” wore off pretty fast. In my view, it wasn’t fair that Mr. Watts got to stay in his house with his personal things while we lived like gypsies out of suitcases.

  There was such an injustice to it.

  Didn’t we have a right to live in peace like other families? Shouldn’t we, too, be able to lay our heads down on our own beds and feel safe through the night? I admit I was sleeping better. For that, I was thankful.

  * * *

  The phone rang. As Daddy had done numerous times before, he reached for the receiver not knowing whether a friend or foe would be on the other end of the line. It was just as likely to be a call for help from one of the parishioners as it might be another crank call.

  “Hello?”

  When the caller spoke, his words were muffled as if smothered in fabric. Once again Daddy strained to understand what was being said. As before, without identifying himself, the anonymous man groused, “You’re a thorn in a friend of mine’s side46 . . . and the best thing you can do is leave the community.”

  Daddy waited. Would there be more to the threat this time? When the caller fell silent, Daddy said, “God bless you, son.”

  The phone went dead.

  * * *

  Mr. Watts, Roger Williams, and Charles “Wayne” Tedder were huddled in the house directly across the street from the parsonage. The phone from which the call had been made sat on the table between them. Mr. Watts, the owner of the residence, had asked Roger to make the call and insisted that Roger cover the mouthpiece with a handkerchief as he spoke. Wayne watched as Roger did as he was told.

  Wayne, like Roger, was another one of Mr. Watts’s brute squad who took frequent trips on the wrong side of the law. Much of Wayne’s life had been a cocktail of bad judgments and even worse behavior, mixed with a history of pill popping and heavy alcohol consumption. Wayne was willing to do whatever Mr. Watts required, primarily due to his own indebtedness to the man.

  Like a wayward fly, Wayne was stuck in Mr. Watts’s web with little chance of escape, and he knew it. At one point Wayne privately confessed to Roger, his cohort in crime, a desire to stop taking orders from Mr. Watts, saying, “I’ve just got to get out47 of it. My nerves won’t take any more.”

  After the call was finished, Mr. Watts retrieved the handkerchief, tucked it into his pocket, and then withdrew a twenty-dollar bill. Even though it was payment for services rendered, when Mr. Watts “asked” for something to be done, Roger knew Mr. Watts was not the sort of man to be crossed. The last thing Roger needed was to be in his crosshairs. Handing the cash to Roger, Mr. Watts said, “You’re a good ole boy,48 and we’re going to get along just fine.”

  Mr. Watts, like a seasoned military commander in the heat of the battle, was directing a private war against the young Navy veteran turned pastor. This call was just the latest maneuver to provoke and unsettle us. All that was left for Mr. Watts to do was to watch. And wait.

  And, if necessary, strike again.

  * * *

  By God’s grace, from November of 1975 until August of 1976, the better part of a year, we savored what amounted to a cease-fire. Though our family continued to receive occasional threats over the phone, there were no more bombings. No shootings. No cut phone lines. To be candid, I’m not sure how Daddy or Momma would have coped had there been a string of attacks during that year. God knew what we could handle. The Good Shepherd knew we needed that season of refreshment to restore our souls in green pastures.

  Daddy had been welcomed back by a church eager to be reunited with their beloved pastor, and he returned to the business at hand as best he could. For her part, Momma resumed her work with the Spiritualaires, an eleven-piece music and singing group she founded in 1970, not long after she and Daddy began to serve in Sellerstown. Although Momma stopped traveling with the band after Danny was born, she was actively involved in rehearsing and arranging their music.

  Virtually every weekend the group was booked to conduct “sings” at churches throughout North Carolina and the neighboring states
. With the men dressed in red jackets, white shirts, and blue ties, and the women sporting handmade navy blue and white dresses, the Spiritualaires was, in many ways, one of the pioneer music groups to debut on the contemporary Christian music scene.

  To facilitate their heavy travel schedule, James Tyree made arrangements to purchase a 1948 Greyhound Silverside bus. The oil-burning tan and white bus was nicknamed “Old Lizzy” because it was older than anybody on the bus. He had the exterior of the aging bus painted with the band’s name accented with a series of musical notes.

  Week after week, the singers, often with their children in tow, would load the electric organ, piano, drums, and lead and bass guitars and then pray they’d make it to the next location. The Spiritualaires relied upon love offerings rather than tickets, and the group recorded two albums that were sold at their events. After each concert, they took the opportunity to offer an altar call for those who needed prayer or wanted to invite Jesus into their hearts.

  Early in their music ministry, Daddy would travel with the band on occasion—a practice he had to quit due to stress and the need to prepare for his sermons on Saturday. Even though Daddy no longer accompanied the band, he remained supportive of their musical outreach—as long as the team was back at their posts on Wednesday night and both services on Sunday.

  The unifying nature of the Spiritualaires was yet another reason the church family remained united in the face of Mr. Watts’s persecution. They lived together, sang together, and experienced a precious bond of friendship. Ironically, the Spiritualaires had rerecorded Dottie Rambo’s song, “One More Valley,” which promised that after enduring “one more valley, one more hill49 . . . you can lay down your heavy load.” Little did they know that in the summer of 1976, Daddy and Momma would be entering the valley of the shadow of death with a series of attacks that would further test their resolve and faith.