When I answered it, Sean’s voice sounded more haggard and tired than I had ever heard it.
“I need you to pray for me,” he started, his voice cracking and wavering. “I’m at a crossroads and I don’t know what to do. I can’t tell you the details of the situation, but just pray and see if God says anything. I’m not hearing him very well lately.”
The request was reminiscent of a Bible story where the king of Egypt had suffered through a disturbing dream but had forgotten the details, so he had demanded from his court magicians that they tell him both the dream and its interpretation, throwing them into prison as frauds when they could not comply.
Sean’s request, while not quite as extreme, was a good window into a fundamental Pentecostal belief: God speaks to people today just as he did in the Bible, giving them direction and advice for their daily lives. It’s a natural outgrowth of the belief that God still works miracles. He is still personally active in believers’ lives, and if they’ll just listen for his “still, small voice,” he speaks to them every day about matters both weighty and mundane.
I was on my way to disbelieving such a notion and although I had made no secret of my doubts—especially to Sean—he sounded like he really needed the help, so I agreed to try.
My personal religious beliefs had been going through a significant upheaval—I no longer considered myself a fundamentalist and, although I didn’t put anything outside the realm of possibility, I was leaning toward the idea that most of what Pentecostals were viewing as miracles and signs of God’s active participation in their church services were more likely psychosomatic phenomena—and possibly even unintentional mass hypnosis. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in miracles or that God could visit people on earth if he wanted to, I just didn’t believe such things were as common and pedestrian as they were being portrayed.
I had trouble denying some of the things I had experienced on my Pentecostal journey. I had been overwhelmed by what I considered to be God’s presence at Sean’s grandmother’s church. I had personally seen a woman healed of a very obvious physical ailment. I had personally prayed for a deaf girl who left the service with her hearing restored. I had witnessed a friend dying of AIDS recover and live another twenty years without taking another pill or shot to mitigate his disease. All those things, I knew, could be explained by other phenomena, but I leaned toward believing at least some of them possibly could have been manifestations of God’s power. So I hadn’t transitioned into full heathen mode or anything but I was leaning toward the idea that if such things actually were physical evidence of God, they weren’t the norm, or even very common.
My belief in God talking to people was taking a similar path. Many of the great men recorded in the Bible had heard God once or twice their entire lives, yet many Christians claimed God spoke to them multiple times daily about things as unimportant as which way to turn at an intersection—like a holy GPS system. I wasn’t buying it. In one of my meetings with a televangelist, I had presented an idea for a ministry campaign. The idea had been approved, and weeks later, I had seen the televangelist on television saying God had told him to embark on the campaign, which God had revealed to him in prayer.
“God didn’t tell you that, I did!” I had barked at the television screen. Of course, when I confronted the televangelist about it, he said it had been God working through me, which I found too convenient. If I was synonymous with the voice of God, how could anyone discern what was God and what was not? I hadn’t felt particularly inspired when I came up with the idea; in fact it had struck me as kind of jaded. Yet here was a man who was listened to by millions of people saying my jaded idea was revealed to him divinely.
So I was no longer very keen on the idea of believers “hearing from God” daily and Sean knew that, which made his request all the more poignant.
For his part, Sean had both long believed and long preached that hearing from God was a function of having a relationship with him.
“Let me tell you the reason we’re in fear many times,” he had thundered from the MetroChurch pulpit in Norman, Oklahoma, eight years earlier during a revival he preached there. “We’re in fear because we have forgotten what God has already said. We’re going through this life and doing things we feel we’re supposed to do, and God has spoken prophetic words over our lives...and we become afraid because we don’t meditate and dwell on what God has said. We go crying to Jesus and we feel he is asleep and he is not hearing what we’re saying and we try to rouse him and say ‘master, don’t you care that we are going to die?’...[Christians] today are forgetting what Jesus has said. Are you meditating on what he has said about you? Or are you meditating on your situation and what the devil is saying to you?”
Whatever the situation that he didn’t want to tell me about, the preacher who had so intensely focused on hearing from God as a result of having a relationship with God was desperate for advice. I suspected it had to do with helping him deal with his grief about Joy leaving him, which shows that God clearly wasn’t revealing any secrets to me. But Sean seemed like he was reaching out for a life vest.
So I prayed. And waited.
Nothing.
I prayed again, this time saying, “It’s for Sean, not me.”
Nothing. It wasn’t that I believed God never talked to people. I just believed it wasn’t all that common. And whatever had made Sean desperate enough to ask for help struck me as a need worthy of an uncommon event—and thus maybe an exception from God.
So I prayed a third time.
Nothing.
Sighing, I called Sean back.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t hear anything.”
Sean sounded disappointed.
“Thank you anyway,” he said. “I just don’t know what to do.”
On the spur of the moment, I was hit by inspiration: “Just do the right thing, Sean. You can never go wrong with that.”
Was it God or just dumb luck? I don’t know. Either way, it turned out to be the best thing to say, though it had seemed kind of hollow to me at the time.
“Okay,” he said. “That actually helps.”
“Really?” I was surprised. The advice had struck me as borderline platitude. “Well then, I’m glad. You know I’m here for you.”
Sean had long preached that hearing from God was a direct byproduct of having a relationship with God, of having Jesus in your life to lead and guide you along life’s winding roads.
“If you are hearing the voice of God,” he preached in 1995, “and I am hearing the voice of God, then we will hear the same thing. If God tells me to do something and then tells you to do something else, then somebody did not hear God.”
God was the end-all of answers to every question, he preached many times, and if you’re worrying about something or if you find yourself unable to come up with an answer to one of life’s problems, it’s not because you’re confused, it’s because you’ve lost your connection with God. If he had lost his connection to God, whatever was bothering him had to be of magnitudes greater than anything I had ever witnessed him go through, because the one person you could always count on to have inroads with God was Sean Goff. He was the rock upon whom other people leaned. He was the one who always had advice and inspired wisdom because he was always the one everyone knew was praying and reading the Bible for a deeper relationship with God, a stronger and more bulletproof hotline directly to heaven.
He had been impressed once by an old black preacher who had died by the time we heard his sermon on tape. The sermon, however, contained a simple yet powerful message. There was a small boy riding a train by himself, the preacher had said. His parents had put him on the train to visit his grandparents in a different city, charging the conductor with making sure the little boy made it to his destination safely. The conductor, however, came looking for tickets, and it seemed the boy didn’t have one, so he kicked the boy off the train. A few feet later, the train refused to move forward any more. The conductor and engineer tried eve
rything they could but the train stubbornly refused to budge, though nothing appeared to be obviously wrong.
Finally, a little old lady stood up and said, “Conductor, you better back up and let that little boy back on this train!”
The conductor, out of ideas, backed the train up and helped the boy back onto the train, at which point it lurched forward and began moving down the tracks toward its destination.
The preacher likened the story to having a life without God: If you find yourself unable to move forward, you should “back up—and let Jesus back onto your train!”
Sean loved that sermon and often would quote it and imitate the preacher, who would yell “Baaaaack up!” at the top of his lungs.
He copped parts of the message for his own preaching and applied it to the Bible story of Mary and Joseph, Jesus’ parents, visiting the temple in Jerusalem. “When their child was twelve years old, they went to Jerusalem,” he preached. “Why? Because it was a religious journey they took every year. They went to a religious city and went to a religious place called the temple and hung out with a lot of religious people doing the same thing. And they talked about what? Religion. And when they had had all the religion they could stand, they’d go back home. But on this one trip, they began to walk, and after a day, they looked around and said, ‘where’s Jesus?’
“Now, Jesus is the son of God, right? Jesus is God, right? How is it that these people were all wrapped up in doing this religious stuff, and when they left town, they forgot God?”
At that point, the congregation laughed, and Sean continued.
“That’s what religion will do for you,” he preached. “When they got to the place where God wasn’t with them any longer, they said, ‘where did we see him last?’ If you think God is not with you any longer, if you can’t feel his spirit anymore, you better back up and go to the last place where you knew God was.”
But by 2003, he seemed to have forgotten his own admonition to “baaaaack up” and let Jesus back onto the train. Instead of looking for answers to why he felt he wasn’t hearing from God clearly as he had always thought he had, Sean reached out to me to see if maybe I could hear from God for him.
Sean long preached that if you were putting your trust in God, you would have no worries in your life, even when circumstances might otherwise dictate that maybe you should be worried. During one sermon in 1995, he said as much:
“There was one thing about Moses that not everybody in Israel had, and that was that one day, God put him in the cleft of the rock and walked by so Moses could look upon him. And God spoke to Moses face-to-face, and what that tells me is his ability to rest in the omnipotence of God was a direct result of the increased relationship he had with God. It is not enough to know that God can move on your behalf, it is not enough to know that he has the power to move on your behalf, but once you know him very well, you’ll find that he’s more than willing to move on your behalf, and that’s when you begin to rest in God. That’s when you begin to put aside your worries and your distractions and begin to walk in the Spirit instead of the flesh, because he will use his power for you.”
Whatever the situation, Sean had been fond of preaching that a true Christian finds that relaxing and trusting in God is the solution, even when it seems like all hope is otherwise gone. In that same sermon eight years earlier, he had reiterated the point:
“If he is your friend, you can be at rest. You won’t worry. You won’t be afraid of what the day will bring, will you? The world will look upon you and see a peace that passes all understanding because Jesus is in your heart. If we know the God we are serving, we will have rest. If we don’t know him, then we will have fear, doubt and unbelief.”
It seemed when Sean called me that he had anything but the “peace that passes all understanding.” He was uncharacteristically confused and just as uncharacteristically reaching out for help. It was completely unlike the Sean I knew. He never asked for help with anything. If Sean had problems, you never knew about them, because Sean preached that problems stemmed from lack of intimacy with God. And if there was one thing Sean prided himself on, it was that kind of close relationship with God.
“I led my entire family to Jesus,” he told me once. “I got saved when I was six years old, and I was the first one. All of them followed me later.”
In that spiritual strength, he had finally found a situation in which his brothers—and even his seemingly always-in-control mother—were at last less adept than he was. He reveled in the biblical story of Joseph, whose older brothers had sold him into slavery, only later being forced to bow down to him once he had been promoted by the king of Egypt to the position of prime minister. That filial subservience always attracted Sean, who was physically weaker than his brothers, and if he was smarter than them it was just barely so. Only in spiritual matters was he truly their superior, and he never allowed an opportunity for that situation to reverse itself.
So to see him admitting spiritual weakness was a watershed in the religious evolution of Sean. It was then that I knew something serious was weighing on him, but I still thought Sean was struggling with the departure of his favorite wife—for another man, no less. That was the ultimate insult for a guy who had written a draft of a book proclaiming that most men didn’t deserve even one wife because they didn’t know how to take care of them. Those whom God had “anointed” to marry multiple wives were chosen to do so because God saw them as worthy spiritual leaders who could be trusted to lead the women faithfully in God’s plan. Being left for another man flew in the face of that belief, and I knew it had to be killing him.
“A true man will attract a woman who loves manhood,” he wrote in the draft of his book. “If I can be successful living with two women at one time, surely I can help other men live successfully with one.”
But with Joy leaving, the foundation for such moral high ground had all but eroded away, and that meant the entire premise for his last several years of preaching was undermined.
It had to have affected him more deeply than I had first understood, I suspected, for him to be having trouble hearing from God—and admitting that openly to another person. I felt sad for him, because I knew he loved Joy possibly even more than he loved his first wife: I obviously didn’t have a clue about the extent of his attachment to her, especially in light of the fact that he was thinking of divorcing her anyway—at least I thought.
I told him I was there for him and if he needed me to do anything, just let me know. We said our pleasantries and hung up.
I had no idea that Sean’s sudden spiritual crisis was caused by anything like a murder, nor that San Diego Police investigative aide Linda Koozin, who was assigned to the case, was turning up the heat on Sean, asking questions that made him nervous, such as requesting cell phone records, bank statements and rehashes of conversations Koozin and Sean had already had.
Koozin was the police department’s advance guard; the case wasn’t even serious enough in their minds yet to warrant putting a detective on it. But she was like a pit bull and Sean started sweating, believing, according to prosecutor Matthew Greco, that the police were a lot closer than they actually were to catching him. In fact, it was Koozin’s surprise visit to Sean’s first wife at her job that was the final reason Sean turned himself in. Sean’s first wife had no idea the police were involved or that Joy’s disappearance was anything other than how Sean had described it.
But when Koozin started asking questions, Sean’s first wife freaked. As soon as Koozin left, Sean’s first wife called him and asked why the police were interested in Joy’s whereabouts. She immediately went home, and Sean told her something that had her in tears. She told Sean he needed to call his mother, and then he needed to turn himself in.
The next day, Sean drove himself to the San Diego Police Department, only to find it closed. He got back into his car and drove to the San Diego County Jail, where he calmly told the officer at the front desk, “I killed Joy Risker.”
Chapter 17
The San Diego Police Department proudly traces its past to the wild west of California’s frontier days in the early 1800s. After an outbreak of fights, duels, murders and battles between soldiers and drifters, a twenty-six-year-old lawman rounded up eight vigilantes and formed a small police force to keep the tiny desert town under order.
About a decade later, the town was formally incorporated and an official police force created, setting the stage for the decorated and professional force the city now enjoys. And the force is doing its job. The city, now the nation’s eighth largest with 1.3 million people, sits just a short drive south of the nation’s second largest, Los Angeles. But if the crime rate is to be believed, they might as well be on different planets.
Los Angeles has almost three times the murders per capita as San Diego, almost three times the robberies per capita and more crime overall per capita, despite a police force ten times larger than San Diego’s. The police in Tijuana’s northern neighbor are proud of their success in keeping crime to a minimum and they play it by the book.
So when San Diego detectives took Sean Goff to an interrogation room on October 21, 2003, they started off directly as they’re taught to do.
“We’ve never met you before, and I just don’t know much about you,” Detective John Tefft said as he sat down adjacent to Sean in one of the police department’s interview rooms. And Tefft certainly didn’t know much about Sean if he thought for a second that the police would be in charge of the interview they were about to have with him. “It’s my understanding, Sean, that you came down to the Sheriff’s Department...”
Sean, managing to sound remorseful and contrite, interrupted nonetheless, wanting to make sure the record was exactly straight.
“Well, I came here first,” he said. “But I couldn’t get in the door, so I went down there.”
Deadly Vows Page 17