Deadly Vows

by Leif M. Wright

  Was he seriously using his sentencing to thank the court for letting him get his flaws out in the open? It seemed that was exactly what he was doing. Even in expressing contrition, Sean could not let the opportunity to promote his Christianity slip away from him. But he went even farther, claiming to be a doting father, even after he had been convicted of killing the mother of his children:

  “I also express my sorrow...to my sons, who are without me,” he said. “I make public apology and record of my deep and abiding love and affection that far surpasses that for my own life.”

  It was complete bullshit, of course. If his fatherly love truly surpassed his love for his own life, Sean would have found a way to make it work with the boys’ mother instead of murdering her and depriving them of her. But he was on stage, and that meant he had one more opportunity to make himself into the hero of the story—one last attempt to pull martyrdom for himself out of the case of the woman he martyred.

  “I mourn the loss of Joy for myself and our children,” he continued, his speech falling on incredulous ears throughout the room. “I pray some day they understand my plight and my eternal love for them.”

  His plight? He wanted his children to understand his plight? The man who was about to find out how messy the pig sty he had landed himself in really was didn’t see the need to apologize to his sons for killing their mother but instead wanted them to understand how hard he had it. And then, he had to take the opportunity to profess that, even as the judge was about to pronounce sentence on him for his horrific crime, a higher court had already absolved him:

  “Sadly, I cannot apologize to Joy today,” he said, the corners of his mouth bordering on a smile. “But I know in my heart that one day I will.”

  When I heard Sean speaking in such grandiose terms I realized his religious view of himself was completely out of touch with reality. Even if he believed that God had already forgiven him for murdering Joy, a room full of Joy’s loved ones who were there to find some kind of closure, some kind of justice for a crime that made no sense was not the place to be grandstanding and proclaiming his innocence before God. A man, I thought, would suck it up and take his lumps from the people in the room who wanted nothing more than to express their hatred for him, their pain at his crime and their disbelief in his ability to calmly sit there while Joy was gone by his hand.

  But Sean wouldn’t even afford them that one small kindness, because he had too much to say about his own religion, the forgiveness of which he was sure—and unbelievably, how the entire experience had served to teach him a valuable lesson about his place in God’s kingdom:

  “I turned myself in because that’s what God required of me,” he said. Not, of course, because it felt like the authorities were getting too close. There was also no mention of the fact that his first wife had all but commanded him to turn himself in. No, it was because God, conveniently at the same time that the cops were about to start banging on Sean’s door, decided it was time for Sean to stop lying and tell the police he had killed Joy—and then start stonewalling so Joy’s remains wouldn’t be found and mess up his planned defense. “Though I did not win my trial, through my obedience, I won a much greater victory, one with eternal implications.”

  Here, where he should be expressing his sorrow and apology, Sean again had found a way to portray himself as a righteous man, a misunderstood Christian who was fighting the good fight for Christ. It was his obedience, he contended, that had won the day, his faithful Christianity that had given him an eternal victory, forgiveness by God, even as the judge prepared to lower the boom of mankind’s punishment. It was sickening to hear.

  “My sufferings will continue to make me a better Christian,” Sean continued, “and will continue to allow me to be an example to others of the saving grace of Jesus Christ and Jehovah our God. And I thank you for that opportunity.”

  It was a stunning and terrifying performance. Though he had said he was sorry, Sean expressed about as real a remorse as the tears he had cried on the stand. And he once again threw his religion, portrayed by him as holy and superior, into the faces of the people he had most wounded—those who loved and missed Joy. It was like a final stab wound, Sean refusing to relinquish control for one second of even Joy’s memory. He would go to prison, but it was Joy who had put him through these sufferings, had thrust him into this plight.

  Joy’s father, Charles Risker, was outraged.

  “Sean, you not only destroyed Joy’s life,” he said when he gave his statement. “You destroyed mine. You’re a man who said he has his own kind of religion. What kind of religion was that?”

  Risker, wearing a T-shirt with pictures of a smiling Joy plastered all over it, was working up to a fever pitch as he threw his vitriol at Sean, who was calmly sitting at a table, appearing to listen.

  “Joy was my only child,” he said. “She cannot be replaced. If you once loved her... why would you just desecrate her body in the way that you did? Barbaric! Monster!”

  But the barbaric monster just sat there, emotionless, as the father of the woman he had brutally murdered let his emotions overflow.

  “I hope you remember this,” he said. “You deserve the death penalty. You deserve to die. I want them to give you the same consideration you gave Joy Risker, my daughter. I want...you deserve less than consideration. At the minimum, you should have life without parole.”

  And then a final parting shot.

  “I hope you remember this for the rest of your life.”

  But Sean had long ago told me he had no respect for Charles Risker, who he felt had abandoned his daughter when she was just a baby. So he wasn’t about to listen to the rantings of a man who claimed to love Joy while abandoning her. He was, after all, a man of God, and Charles Risker was just another deadbeat dad.

  Then it was the judge’s turn to speak, and he sentenced Sean to serve a term that shocked just about everyone who knew about the case: twenty-six years to life in prison. Not the death penalty, not life in prison. If Sean serves the minimum twenty-six years, he will be sixty-four years old when he gets out.

  Chapter 21

  THE AFTERMATH

  The tragedy and glory of life is that it has this incessant way of moving on, of continuing, regardless of the pain and horror it left behind yesterday.

  Joy’s remains are long in the ground, mourned only by the friends she left behind. Her father, Charles Risker, died in 2011, still haunted by the loss of the daughter he had only just reconnected with after a long absence, following his nasty divorce from Joy’s mother when she was little.

  Joy’s mother, thankfully, never lived to see her daughter murdered and sliced apart like a slab of meat. Joy had no siblings.

  Sean’s first wife divorced him before the trial and moved to the middle of America, where she has since remarried and continued to raise her son, who is almost an adult now, and keeps in contact with his father through letters to his prison cell in Chowchilla, California.

  Joy’s two children are being raised in the same area by one of Sean’s brothers, who, thankfully, is Sean’s polar opposite. Through many discussions with friends and relatives, it became clear that Joy’s older son is aware of many of the details of the case, but the younger son is not.

  The shock of my best friend murdering someone I knew and loved still simmers beneath the surface for me and, at the most inopportune times, it will pop back up in my consciousness. Invariably, the questions arise: How could you not have known about him? What kind of cult were you in? Are you stupid? Are you crazy? They’re all questions I have asked myself.

  Recalling those times for this book has been difficult and embarrassing. It’s ugly to remember myself as the closed-minded hypocrite I was during those times. It hurts me to remember being prejudiced against so many people: those of other religions, those of other lifestyles, those who wished to believe in no God at all—and that’s exactly what Sean and his murder remind me of. I was wholeheartedly part of a worldview that was insular to the poin
t of blindness. That period of my life reminds me of a child, plugging his ears, eyes slammed shut, running and screaming “La la la la la, I don’t hear you” to everyone who disagreed with the things I believed at that time.

  In 2003, partially because of Joy’s murder and partially because it had been coming anyway, I started truly and thoroughly questioning everything that I believed. I had been pastoring a small church in my hometown since 2000—a job I had rejected several times until the congregation had finally prevailed upon me to take on the burden.

  “Christianity’s main problem is the same problem that infested its root: that most Christians are every bit as blind as the Pharisees of Jesus’ day,” I preached. “We suffer from the same smugness they did. We wrap ourselves in the same filthy cloak of false piety they did. We believe we’re superior to everyone else in the area of religion simply because we believe in the right religion. Somehow—in our minds, anyway—we had the good grace to be born with the right stuff to believe the right way, bless God. But in our vanity, we ignore the fact that our corruption goes deeper than that of the Pharisees.”

  During that time, my congregation grew accustomed to hearing such sermons from me as I trudged one step at a time down the seldom-trodden road from fundamentalism to liberalism. While I was writing this book, I contacted dozens of people I used to know and my discussions with them were like cold splashes of water. Had I ever really been like that? Had I spoken that way? Had I used “Christianese” words and phrases peppered throughout every sentence?

  Embarrassingly, I had. More damning, I had taken my natural smartass personality and applied it to religion and politics, leaving a wide path of destruction in my wake as I had moved blindly forward, not caring who I offended or hurt along the way.

  Learning that my best friend—my spiritual mentor, the guy I had always respected as a good, giving, loving person, the man who had reached out to me and helped me along so many times—was a calculating, cold-blooded murderer was a shocking awakening to me.

  As I had testified, all I really knew was that Sean had admitted killing Joy, and that later her body had been found in Arizona with the jaw removed. I was as shocked as everyone else when I learned the extent of the horrific things Sean had done. But I was more shocked than everyone else, because Sean had been more to me than he had to most other people.

  In a life full of flippant comments and fights, I had made precious few true friends, and those I had made fell away from my circle as I had converted to the most judgmental and self-righteous religious person I knew. Only Sean stuck around. Even my family had become distant because of my offensive brand of religion.

  As I began my journey out of that particular religious experience, it had seemed like Sean was coming along for the ride, relaxing his Midwestern morals on things such as drinking and listening to non-Christian music. But now, in jail, he was gone too, and I never expected him to be back. In that sense, Sean killed my best friend when he killed Joy. It wasn’t that Joy was my best friend—she wasn’t. I loved Joy, but it was a cursory kind of relationship. When she was gone, there wasn’t a huge hole in my life, because we hadn’t interacted that often.

  But Sean left a big hole and that hole—like the proverbial black hole—has gravity. To this day, people act like they’re joking when they look at me sideways and say things like, “Just what kind of guy must you be to have had a friend like that?”

  I don’t have an answer for them, even though I’m never sure if they’re joking or really do want an answer. Surely, I think, it must be some kind of reflection on me as they suggest. Sean and I didn’t just hang out. We were close. We laughed at the same things. We enjoyed the same things. For a long time, we were inseparable; when people saw one of us, they saw the other. What kind of person must I be to have been close to someone like Sean?

  The answer is beyond my abilities of introspection. Could I ever be duped by a friend like that again? I’d love to think not. But who really knows? Who really knows what is going on in someone else’s mind? In some ways, that fear affects me to this day in profound ways. Because of my business and the fact that I still play music and sing (mostly secular music these days), I have a lot of acquaintances. But I have very few actual friends. Could that be because I’m afraid of being duped again? I’m sure a psychologist would have a field day (and a fat bank account) trying to figure that out.

  But for the most part, I have moved on. In the midst of the worst economy that America has seen since the Great Depression, I left the newspaper where I had worked for so many years and started an online competitor. My online newspaper quickly flourished and its readership overshadowed that of the local newspaper, which had been the only game in town since 1888.

  In prison, Sean has thrown himself into a new kind of ministry—preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the lost souls who have found themselves locked up with him.

  I had written to Sean, letting him know I was writing this book—and even offering to let him read it before I submitted it for publication. Sean hadn’t responded to me, but he had told his relatives, who told his in-laws, some of whom contacted me and expressed that I should just let the story die. But I had expected that he wouldn’t respond.

  Sean has reportedly disavowed polygamy, saying he made a mistake. But he has never admitted to murdering Joy Risker. He will readily admit he killed her, but when pressed, Sean still contends that it was all Joy’s fault. Did Jesus teach him that lesson? It’s anyone’s guess.

  Sean’s confidence of God’s direction in his life is foreign to me now, and it refreshes my wonder that I was ever involved in beliefs like that. I still believe in God. I still believe in a supernatural creator, but, like so many of the characters in the Bible, my understanding of faith is that it is defined by doubt, by skepticism.

  Sean would certainly balk if he ever heard me preach, as I did in 2009, “Not one of us in this building is sure there is a God. Not one of us here is sure there is life after death. None of us knows any of those things, despite the preaching you hear in so many churches that you have to ‘know that you know that you know,’ for a simple reason: We don’t know because none of us has ever been dead. We believe, but belief is the manifestation of hope, not assurance. I’m hopeful that there is a God. I’m hopeful that there is a life after this death and that in that life we are rewarded with paradise. But do I know that to be true? Absolutely not. And neither do you.”

  For Sean’s beliefs, faith is the absence of doubt. For mine, faith is framed by the questions raised by doubt. When I’m wondering how it was that I could have been so close to someone who could do the things Sean did, I remind myself of that: those who claim to have such assurance are lying—to themselves, to others and to God. Anyone who doesn’t admit the possibility of being wrong is a person who is capable of horrors unimaginable to those of us who are profoundly aware that some of what we believe is probably wrong.

  Sean Goff’s main failing wasn’t rooted in the acts themselves; it was rooted far deeper, in his concept of faith that had been unshakeable since he had been six years old and allegedly had seen Jesus when he was eight. That faith told him that God spoke to people about the minutiae of their days, that he led them in the most intimate ways and that the ultimate example for our lives was to be found in the pages of a book that told the story of men who considered women their property, to be bought and sold.

  The idea that the book itself was as infallible as the God who inspired it meant that the book, as the “Word of God,” attained a sort of demigod status in the minds of those who were operating in the “blessed assurance” that its words were literally breathed out of the mouth of God. And Sean worshiped that book, though he would have denied that. That book led him to the logical conclusion that a man of God should have multiple wives. And that book led him to the logical conclusion that the ultimate solution for a woman who had turned her back on his version of the truth was to kill her to keep her from influencing his sons to follow the same infidel pat
h as their mother.

  I believe that book was indeed inspired by God, but that doesn’t mean God dictated it to people. I believe it was inspired by God the same way the Mona Lisa was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s model. And just as that iconic painting is not a photographic reproduction of its subject, the Bible is a good, if imperfect, representation of the God it aspires to describe. If Sean had believed that too, maybe Joy would still be alive, dancing her way across Europe, putting blush on celebrities, interpreting speeches for the deaf and raising her sons to be the life of the party, the magnets in every room they entered.

  Sean, blind to that idea, is happily ministering to his fellow prisoners in prison at Chowchilla, blissfully oblivious to the irony of a man claiming to preach the truth while still lying about planning and executing the brutal murder of the mother of two of his sons. No doubt, his preaching is still electric, morally convicted, incisive and powerful. No doubt, his inmate congregants are convinced of and awed by his “anointing,” just as so many were before he started accumulating wives. And no doubt, they flock to him for advice, spiritual and practical.

  Sean hasn’t changed. His surroundings have, his paper-thin mea culpa has and his audience has. Sean is still holding court from the pulpit, still fighting the good fight for Jesus, still being “led by the Holy Spirit.” But today, there has been a significant change: he no longer has any women to lead or woo. The polygamist is now less than a monogamist. The patriarch of his biblical family now leads none of his family. He is simply a guy in jail who can really preach.

  Trevor Whitken, now a music minister for a prominent Baptist church in San Diego, said this when I asked whether he thought Sean would be upset if Trevor gave me some quotes for this book:

  “Well, he shouldn’t have killed our friend.”

  Indeed.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A book like this is impossible to create without also creating a lot of indebtedness to those who support the author.