Matt and Tyler seemed too odd to be popular with other children. In any event, their parents disapproved of contact with most outsiders. (Sally’s sweet expression could flutter into one of surprising toughness.) People from church were safest. Tyler sometimes joined kids a few doors down for a game of basketball. But on the whole life revolved around home studies, work in the huge garden, and services at whatever evangelical church the family attended at the moment. Though Ben threw himself into church life with near-incoherent passion, he was liable to break with a given pastor at the drop of a hat. The family would switch to a new church, until the next irresolvable conflict came up.
When they got older, the boys started going into Gridley to attend high school. Ben didn’t want them involved in school activities, so they came home as soon as classes ended. The social incommunicado was harder on Tyler than it was on Matt. Unlike his older brother, Tyler may not have had the imagination to participate in the family’s shared inner life of virulent religiosity, thrilling symbolic intuitions, and nightmarish political insights. Matt, on the other hand, flourished on Higgins Avenue. He was growing up the image of his father.
Neither parent was happy when Matt graduated high school and announced he was ready to go out on his own. But they couldn’t isolate him from the world his whole life. Matt joined the Navy and, after “nuke school” (shipboard nuclear power plant training) in Florida, he was stationed in Bremerton, Washington, across Puget Sound from Seattle.
On base Matt was considered strange. His mom’s indulgence probably meant he’d never had to regulate his intense enthusiasms. He could seem prissy about some things. Then again, he always sat too close. He forever touched arms and shoulders and backs. Out of the blue he’d say something fond about you right to your face. How could you respond to that? He just didn’t have a regular guy’s taut self-repression.
To American sailors in 1990, Matt’s behavior didn’t call to mind “homeschooled, isolated, doted-on.” It called to mind “gay.” A friend later said he got fed up always having to mutter, “Dude, back off. Gimme some room here.” So one day this friend asked what he and the others had been thinking. Was Matt gay or what? Matt was stunned. How could anybody ever think he was gay? He couldn’t leave it alone. He came back to it for months. “Why would you think that about me?”
Matt had a couple of things going for him. His unedited enthusiasms made for real charisma. Plus, in a gun-toting culture his easy relationship with firearms, especially his pet Glock 9mm handgun, earned him respect. His gun savvy had come from his father who’d often dismayed the neighbors on Higgins Avenue by standing on the porch to take potshots at starlings or scrub jays attacking his plums.
During this time a friend, Todd Bethel, took lurching videos of the California boy: Matt misfiring and frowning at the Glock somewhere in Olympic National Park, Matt in a room mugging gangsta-style with a fan of hundred-dollar bills cashed from his sailor’s paycheck. It looks for all the world like he was trying to become a regular guy.
And yet, Matt may have been feeling a subterranean tension. For him, the messy, painful conflicts of adolescence had never happened. He believed as firmly as ever that his father was right: those who walked with the Lord, the truly virtuous, were a besieged and minuscule band. The Navy and Bremerton were providing his first true glimpse of the immensity of the corrupted world out there. Raised on prayers, epistles, psalms, and gospel, the rolling rhetoric of scripture was very likely the language of Matt’s thinking.
After Thanksgiving, Matt put in for early discharge. Perhaps he was feeling the pull of family and Gridley. But just as he was about to leave, he met Kimberly Rogers at church. She was evangelical too. She found him irresistible.
To look at, you’d have assumed Matt was cocky or unpleasantly suave, but his awkward energy could charm. He was TV handsome, almost too refined-looking for Bremerton, like an admiral’s son incognito in the swarm of oafish, jug-eared sailors. Fine dark eyebrows crossing a wide forehead, fine nose, fine red mouth on an elfin chin, fine ankles, fine wrists, fine spiritual fingers, his body had been whittled down to the elegant essential.
Matt talked, Kimberly listened, they dated. Just like that, she was pregnant. Of course, she was going to have the baby. She wasn’t a murderer. But Matt’s intensity had started to make her uneasy. Already he made all the decisions. Her first real decision was not to marry him.
Many things suggest Matt was shocked by her refusal. It wasn’t just the sin. His shock must have been personal, like the appalled disbelief an artist feels when the work of a lifetime is shrugged off by critics. Kimberly was rejecting the masterpiece of the Gridley workshop—himself. His friends report that he was shaken—but they probably couldn’t guess the extent of it.
Things got worse. A little girl was born. Matt wasn’t about to keep this from his parents. Disappointing them must have crushed and terrified him.
On a personal website Sally reported with leathery cheerfulness that at exactly this time, the fall of 1991, “a time of personal crises,” she took up watercolors. She describes herself as forever at the easel singing “praise songs to Jesus/Yahshua” while she painted. Until recently the website still displayed and offered for sale her many paintings. She did a vase of red tulips that later won a prize. She painted crystalline views of Sutter Buttes in the distance. Selling a few of these pictures must have been a consolation. The family had never had much money. But her chief aim in painting, according to the website, was to glorify Yahweh. She’s been described to me around this time wearing a broad-brimmed hat and linen skirt and looking almost like an old-fashioned hippie. But she was a contradictory, Pauline sort of “hippie,” whose website would later quote the epistle to the Philippians, “whatever things are lovely . . . think on these things.”
After a couple of years at home, Matt left California a second time in 1993. He was twenty-five. He was going to try to jump-start his life by finishing college. He enrolled at the University of Idaho in Moscow, declaring a major in biology.
Moscow and its twin college town, Pullman, Washington, six miles due west, are in the Palouse, a vast prairie and one of the world’s most important wheat-producing regions. The hills of the Palouse look like one of Grant Wood’s surreal farmscapes. People say the Palus Indians, cousins of the Nez Perce, gave their name to the prairie, but an apt confusion with the French word for “lawn,” pelouse, might have been involved too.
Besides being farm country, a better fit for Matt than Bremerton, the Palouse had something else he may or may not have been aware of. For historical and geographical reasons, eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and western Montana are probably the whitest, most Christian part of the United States. The area is sometimes imagined as part of “Cascadia,” a fantasy all-Caucasian nation, by racist dreamers. Barring occasional bloodshed—the shoot-out at Ruby Ridge, for example—residents roll their eyes at the area’s tax protesters, racists, and UN-phobes. But in a conservative, deeply private, deeply religious region, madness and tolerated eccentricity can be hard to tell apart.
Matt Williams had been in Moscow only a few days and knew no one when he was approached by a team of kids from the cultlike Living Faith Fellowship. They introduced themselves with, I imagine, the hard-smiling friendliness that looks so false to skeptics like me. Matt, however, responded with enthusiasm. He joined up. Like his father, he was both driven to and despaired of belonging. In the Living Faith Fellowship he thought he’d found the perfect home away from home.
As part of church indoctrination, Matt was interviewed in depth, encouraged to confess his sins and failings. He later said he told them about his ruined relationship with Kimberly and about his illegitimate daughter. This information would have been entered on a standardized form. His photograph would have been paper-clipped to his file. Like most church members Matt wasn’t told anything about the church files.
Mistrustful of the outside world, the church involved itself in the private lives of its members, especially in th
eir relationships and marriages. Associate pastors didn’t hesitate to suggest or discourage matches. Ex-members complain they were often berated and kept in a fog of self-doubt.
The church had a policy of protecting its flock from dangerous books. Members submitted to church leaders any books they intended to read. Though the process might take months, the book was vetted and either approved or rejected, perhaps with an inquisitorial, Why would you want to read this? Bizarrely, Matt felt right at home in an atmosphere others have described as a nightmare of manipulation.
In the fall of 1994, a group of disaffected Living Faith members began meeting, often at the home of Jeff and Ann Monroe in Pullman. To this day Jeff and Ann share an easy friendship unusual in couples. I interviewed them together, and their banter is charming. Back in the day both struggled to diet, yet forgave themselves for being overweight. They preferred focusing their energy on others. They agreed that something had to be done about the bewildered young people lured into Living Faith.
Jeff and Ann’s group started posting warnings about the church on bulletin boards at university campuses. By winter a full-fledged battle for student sympathies was underway and made it into the local papers.
Cult or not, Living Faith reacted to the negative publicity like a simple-minded tyranny. The church dispatched shock troops of student-believers to rip down fliers at all hours. A flier freshly stapled to corkboard at, say, two in the morning vanished within an hour.
Matt Williams in particular threw himself into the defense of Living Faith. He later said how much he’d loved the quasi-military midnight campus patrols. For him, the strongest and best beliefs involved action. But it seemed the strength of a belief meant more to Matt than its content, because in two weeks he switched sides, won over by a book (Churches That Abuse) and by a Christmastime meeting at Jeff and Ann’s house. He went from tearing fliers down as a good soldier of the Lord to putting them up with equal joy as a fiery partisan of the truth.
Once Matt left Living Faith he needed a new object for his wild devotion, and he focused on Jeff and Ann. They were charmed and taken aback. It was as if a hyperarticulate puppy had entered their lives. Matt started calling the Pullman couple his spiritual father and mother (as the leaders of Living Faith had been called). He asked advice on every aspect of his life: work, love, belief. Jeff became “Pastor Jeff.” Some days, Jeff told me, he was sure it was all just playful admiration, a flirty, childlike bid for affection. Then Matt would bow his head and soberly confess that he hoped Jeff would find him a wife, and Jeff realized that, incredibly, this wasn’t a game. Or was it that nothing separated play and earnestness in Matt’s mind?
Matt’s open-hearted sensitivity could be eerie, like the time he called Jeff following a party to ask after a person he thought had seemed unhappy. He gave friends poems, thoughtful presents like Christmas ornaments of little mice in calico, cookies. He placated the whole world the way a brilliant little boy will placate a doting mother when she’s sad or distracted. His generosity was all the more impressive because he was the poorest person Jeff knew. Matt was living on about a hundred dollars per month, including his seventy-five-dollar-a-month rental at a Moscow trailer park.
But Matt caused problems too—puppylike problems of too much enthusiasm, or so it seemed at first. Matt was now anti–Living Faith with a vengeance. Others in Jeff and Ann’s circle were unnerved by his intensity. His with-us-or-against-us absolutism made him a divisive figure. A crazy suggestion to assassinate church leaders was just—crazy.
More disturbing still, a girl Matt dated briefly confided in Jeff that her relationship with him had been miserable. It wasn’t only churches that abuse. Matt had been like a one-man, domestic Living Faith Fellowship. He’d immediately established complete control over the girl’s time, activities, and thoughts. Even as he railed against the church, he seemed oblivious to his own manipulative behavior. And he was erratic. Sweet, haranguing, apologetic, hysterically funny, cruel, in moody syncopation. It was scary.
After hearing from the girlfriend, Jeff was horrified. He’d introduced Matt to another girl he knew. Now he regretted it. Now he understood why the date hadn’t even lasted the whole evening. Yet Matt claimed to long for a simple, Christian married life. He sometimes talked about it in a way that made Jeff feel a sense of pity. Dream and likelihood were worlds apart.
As it had with the sailors in Bremerton, it did cross Jeff’s mind that maybe Matt was struggling with his sexuality. There was the time Matt—very hesitantly—said that he’d gone hiking naked with a friend. He asked whether Jeff thought that was gay. Matt got the awkward question out in his docile, what-should-I-do voice, and “Pastor Jeff” tried reassuring him. To Jeff, Matt’s physical ebullience—his frequent hugging, for example—ultimately seemed more infantile than closeted. The pressing issue for Matt was acting human, not acting heterosexual. And nakedness by itself wasn’t at all unusual for him. He was, in an exuberant, Edenic way, a naturist.
Physical perfection—purity—besotted Matt. He left pots of tap water sitting so the fluoride would settle out. After abruptly turning vegetarian, he became adept at “food combining,” a faddish, complicated nutritional system meant to ensure perfect health. He came to believe drinking so-called “colloidal silver” could boost his immunity, perfusing his body with naturally antibiotic silver particles. Jeff and Ann had some old silver-plated cutlery. Matt got battery, wires, silver spoon, and alligator clips arranged in a circuit and started brewing the omnipotent silver ion solution. From there, he went on to kombucha tea. Soon everyone in Jeff’s circle seemed to have a bucket of the stuff fermenting under their sink. The kombucha “mother” was a brownish mat of bacteria and yeast growing on the surface of the tea. With the unsqueamish tenderness of the true gardener, Matt would peel a layer from the living “mother” whenever he wanted to get a new batch going.
Around this time Matt self-published a forty-eight-page booklet entitled Optimum Health and Longevity. In the breathless voice of crackpot religious pamphlets, he condemns caffeine and television. He explains that AIDS can be transmitted in saliva and aerosols. Not so puppylike suddenly, he inscribed a copy to Jeff and Ann, May you continue to shed those evil chains. The perverters of truth shall die.
Matt’s fads didn’t just involve health and nutrition. Those were the easiest to talk about. His greatest intellectual thrills were ideological. He flirted with the fundamentalist King James Only movement after reading about it online (the movement maintains the King James translation of the Bible was divinely inspired). In the spring of ’95, Matt got hold of a book that sparked a political craze for tax avoidance. The book, by Lynne Meredith (now in federal prison for conspiracy to defraud the IRS), claims the government has no constitutional right to collect taxes. It’s written in a style Matt favored, an expository crazy-quilt of typefaces and quotations.
Matt started trolling the Internet daily and debating a fellow student, Karney Hatch. Hatch told me Matt would argue with an ever-reappearing smile and constant eye contact. He backed up his points with lightning biblical citations. Of course, what the Bible said proved nothing to Karney, raised an atheist, and even Matt seemed to understand that his fundamental argument—which was an argument from faith, after all—had to emanate hypnotically from his eyes, his lips, the peace of his expression, from the unstoppable music of his words, as much as from their meaning.
Most of Matt’s friends describe his years in Moscow as a decline into extremism. In his spiky handwriting (he was forever writing letters, journals, pamphlets), Matt once wrote Jeff Monroe, “I engaged three Mormons (actively) in ‘combat’ the other day. They are jumping onto the Ecumenical (bowel) movement . . .” As a fundamentalist Christian, Matt considered Mormonism beyond the pale. Here he’s mocking the Mormon willingness to engage with other faiths. But he writes, and thinks, in conceptual curlicues. His sentences become a chopped salad of capitalizations, parentheses, and ironic quotation marks. The sentence quoted above breaks off with a long
dash, so he can address Jeff directly: “—shift gears: It is nice to have friendships (rare) in which the members of such can speak into each other’s life via exhortation.”
It’s hard not to frown at the revealing strangeness of Matt’s wording there. Isn’t “exhortation” how you speak to a crowd or a flock, not a friend? And isn’t speaking “into” another’s life a lot less intimate than just speaking “to” a friend? It sounds lonely.
The small trailer park where Matt was living was just off the University of Idaho campus, across South Main (State Highway 95) from the Business Tech building. As he spent more and more time at the trailer, junk accumulated on a porch addition he’d built. Matt had some heated exchanges with his landlord, who thought the place was starting to look trashy. (Like his father, Matt was touchy about his rights.) An avid recycler, Matt had gathered shards of a broken mirror. He fitted them into an esoteric design on the outer wall of the porch. The design was a crowned sword with an extrawide “N” for a hilt, a Wolfsangel turned on its side. When Jeff visited he recognized this as a symbol of the “Christian Identity” movement. It explained a troubling reference Matt had made to “mud people” when talking about African American football players.
Jeff was becoming increasingly worried about his friend. Printouts of bizarre Internet articles were stacked three feet high in the trailer. A weird steplike block of wood sat in front of the toilet. Matt had learned to draw the Hebrew tetragrammaton (“YHWH,” in English letters, it’s read as “Yahweh” or “Jehovah”). He hung versions of it all over the walls. Money was a bigger problem than ever. He’d sold his CDs. His friends had pulled back.
In 1995 Matt saw the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart. The macho kitsch of Braveheart has a quasi-pheromonal effect on many young men of Matt’s stripe. After seeing it, he felt compelled to bike all the way to Pullman to talk to Jeff and Ann about the movie—and his life. He came in, sat on the couch, and spoke to them in a semicoherent monologue that made Jeff and Ann feel they might as well have been house cats. Rehashing Gibson’s story of masochistic self-sacrifice, of masculine honor, Matt worked himself into such a state of yearning ambition that he broke into sobs several times. When he abruptly got up to leave, Jeff and Ann were so stunned they didn’t know what to say to stop him. Or if they wanted to. (Braveheart foreshadows in a glorified form some of the later events of Matt’s life. It’s hard not to imagine that Matt often thought he was living this silly dream of manliness and insurrection. The movie, which won five Academy Awards, has a crudely propagandistic antihomosexual story line.)
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