When his brother Tyler made an extended visit to Moscow, Matt went into a manipulative frenzy. Jeff and Ann describe a weary and shell-shocked younger brother, an ever-inadequate member of Matt’s personal Living Faith Fellowship. In a thickening mist of fatality, Tyler probably couldn’t grasp the tyranny he lived under at his brother’s trailer. He had to read the books Matt told him to read. After getting out of the shower one time Tyler shut the bathroom door. Hypervigilant, Matt demanded to know why. Tyler answered that he needed to take a dump, of course. Through the thin trailer wall Matt then told Tyler exactly how to do that. Naked astride the little toilet, Tyler obediently lifted his feet to that strange block of wood. Only when you raise your feet, Matt explained through the wall, is your spine curved enough to ensure a proper, natural bowel movement. You should always do it that way. Feet on the block, knees raised, Tyler’s gut tensed as ordered.
Tyler told Jeff and Ann this story. They repeated it to me. It sounds like madness. Who needs to be in charge of the way another person takes a shit? According to Jeff the story came out sounding flat and sad. Worse, unaccountable tears welled up in Tyler’s eyes. The way Jeff and Ann smiled and held themselves with house-of-cards breathlessness may only have made the moment worse.
* * *
Somehow Matt had gotten into Christian Identity ideology. That mirror mosaic sword is its symbol. Amid the tangle of beliefs we avoid thinking about when we lump together skinheads, neo-Nazis, antiabortion madmen, racialist theorizers, right-wing Christian cultists, and all their kind, Christian Identity has, at least, a better story than most. Adherents tend to use the “correct” names “Yahweh” for “Lord” and “Yahshua” for “Jesus.” They feel an affinity for Hebraisms partly because Identity’s central, dumbfounding belief is that the Israelites, the Ten Tribes, the people biblical prophecy is about, the “Chosen People,” are not the Jews but the “Germanic, Nordic, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and allied races”—in other words, Aryans. Everything is backward. Conventional biblical history is a case of mistaken identity.
Some prolix Identity types retail tedious magical scholarship to prove that modern Jews are descended from the “Khazars” of “Khazaria,” a kingdom thriving between the Volga and the Don (or in Gog and Magog) during a shadowy stretch of the first millennium. But for many the story begins at the beginning.
God created the “beasts of the field.” That accounts for “mud people”—all people of color. They’re not human beings and have no souls. The history of real people begins in the Garden of Eden. Just after Adam inseminated Eve, Satan came to her in angelic form and inseminated her again. The Adamic seed produced Abel; the satanic seed, Cain. Satan, through Cain, is the forefather of the Jews. The Jews escaped destruction during the flood and have been waging a bitter war on humanity ever since. They’ve almost won. The imminent apocalypse will begin with a racial holy war because the Messiah can’t return until the world is cleansed of abomination.
Identity’s “Church Fathers” in the United States are Wesley Swift (1913–1970), Nord Davis Jr. (1931–1997), Ted Weiland, and Pete Peters (who now abjures the term “Identity”). Randy Weaver of Ruby Ridge believed in or had some loose connection to Identity. (Loose connections are usually all you get in a subculture of messy-minded loners.) Identity’s star turn came as the “state religion” of Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations (their flag bore that crowned sword and Wolfsangel cross, and they were among the first to propose an all-white homeland in the Pacific Northwest, the so-called “Northwest Territorial Imperative”). Allies of Butler helped form “The Order,” the group that assassinated Alan Berg in Denver on June 18, 1984. Believers in Identity may be more prone to violence than other racist and religious nuts, because they see themselves as an “Eleventh Hour Remnant” of the Chosen People. Their holy war is always just beginning.
It’s tempting to laugh at that Garden of Eden story. Like most extremists, Identity types are often more clownish than scary. A large measure of their dignity is reflected back on them by the alarmists and self-important law-enforcement officials whose careers depend on an enemy. Still, it’s sobering to imagine Identity from the inside.
For many of us, Adam, Eve, and Satan carry no more emotional punch than Astarte or Baal. Most of us have only encountered anti-Semitism as a fading middle-class vice. To a believer in Christian Identity things look different. You’re out in farm country. Everything is slow. You’re full to bursting with language, but the world is mute except for that uncanny snakesong. The truth comes to you with a little jerk of certainty. You’ve never met any Jews, but they’re everywhere in the Bible, history, and the news. How have they managed to be uniquely persistent, as every other nation fell and every other race mongrelized? They even look—the pure-bred ones—like Satan: the nose, the dark eyes, the mercantile grin. 1 Why is so much always made of the Holocaust? Why is the United States such a toady for Israel? Why is the worst American cultural sin anti-Semitism? It all makes sense if the far-off metropolises of the world are controlled by a multimillennial secret society, a partially satanic race.
Those cities are in chaos. Children are regularly strangled, dismembered, and vacuumed from the wombs of ignorant girls. Race traitors interbreed with soulless mud people. Drugs, filth, and abomination are embraced by urban orgiasts. You’ve never met a self-proclaimed homosexual, but it’s obvious homosexuality has nothing to do with desire, certainly no desire a normal person could feel. Homosexuality is “Gay.” It’s a big-city cult of makeup, disgraceful clothing, lasciviousness, lisping sarcasm, and decadence. Its goal is an end to generations, an end to history. It’s the preeminent invention of the Jews, a cult of sterility and death. This universal city—Pandemonium—is the enemy of a tiny, rural, outgunned, outwitted, Braveheart-like band of yeomen Christians. It all makes sense: you’re at war.
II. The War
Early in 1997, the Williams family moved to a larger property an hour and a half from Gridley in Palo Cedro, east of Redding. Palo Cedro and Redding are at the far northern end of the Sacramento Valley, where the terrain begins rising toward the high country around Mount Shasta. But the property really wasn’t so different from Gridley. The new house was on Oriole Lane and backed up on Cow Creek. The family set about recreating Eden.
Over several years, neighbors watched the property slowly disappear as new planting came in. Ben tended golden delicious apple trees. Sally later wrote on her website that “her son” (my instinct says Matthew) planted a pineapple quince especially for her. She did a painting of it. A bed of black hollyhocks was put in where she could see and paint them from her window. As they had in Gridley, the family raised ducks and chickens. Banties were a favorite, because, again according to Sally’s website, she liked their colorful, flowerlike plumage and fierce motherly instincts.
During his first years in Redding, Matthew becomes hard to pin down. On the surface, there’s not much to tell. He worked at a nursery briefly. Then he and Tyler started a gardening and lawn care business. Tyler was living on Oriole Lane with Ben and Sally, but Matthew took an apartment in a motellike complex on the 1900 block of Hartnell Avenue in Redding, ten or fifteen minutes away. He joined the Redding Certified Farmer’s Market and set up a booth there on market days. It was a natural extension of work he’d done in Idaho at the Moscow Food Co-op. The people who met him found him unfailingly polite—“nice, educated, smart . . . quiet, mild-mannered,” one market acquaintance was later quoted in a newspaper story. He enjoyed sharing his considerable knowledge of botany and horticulture.
But something more was going on in Matthew’s life. In January or February of ’98, he was spotted selling literature in the lobby of a Redding hall where Militia of Montana founder John Trochmann was giving a speech. Trochmann, a bald man with the dandified white beard and glare of a Confederate cavalry officer, was then traveling the country giving lectures about Y2K (remember, the dreaded year-2000 computer apocalypse?). When the organizer of the event, Larry Wampler, was later phoned b
y a Los Angeles Times reporter and asked how well he knew Matthew Williams, he said, “I had no influence on him. John Trochmann had no influence on him.” (Wampler suddenly interrupted the interview, saying, “The FBI is at the door.”) Though they may not have known him any better than the farmer’s market crowd, Matthew obviously had connections with the political fringe.
In April of that year, a Redding Record Searchlight columnist got a letter from a reader bemoaning the “folly” of integration. It came from Matthew. He wrote that strength through diversity “is a great lie that should be obvious to anyone observing modern America.” He wrote another letter to the founder of the National Alliance, William Pierce, author of the notorious race-war saga The Turner Diaries. A draft of that letter was later found by the FBI.
Matthew hadn’t fallen completely out of touch with his old friends from the Palouse. They got letters too, disturbing ones. “Dearly beloved, I have just finished the most exciting and relevant Bible Study of my life! A special person shared IT with me and I want to share IT with the special people of my life . . . I reckon that thee shall be blessed by this greatly.” He mentions Pete Peters, Ted Weiland, and Nord Davis Jr. by name. He even praises the infamous, zombielike Okhrana forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. He suggests his friends arm themselves in preparation for imminent unrest. You can almost sense his excitement about this fantasy. The widely reported nervousness over Y2K can only have made his millennial emotional knowledge feel more certain.
In December, Matt tried to reach that college friend, Dan Martin, who’d gone with him on the naked hike back in Idaho. A mutual friend told Matthew that Dan had finally left the Living Faith Fellowship and begun a new life. “He came out.” Dan Martin was now working with the Stonewall Health Project in Moscow. He’d found a circle of gay friends. Matthew responded as if Dan had been in a car accident. He reportedly cried.
Just before his family moved to Redding, Matt would also have learned that Kimberly Rogers, the girl he’d asked to marry him, the mother of his daughter, had finally married another man. Maybe that, or his thirtieth birthday in 1998 or the news about Dan Martin, helped precipitate what happened next. But all three events could just as easily have been irrelevant to someone like Matt who was immersed in faith and a growing sense of mission. Jeff Monroe told me he sensed that Matt had given up on normal life, perhaps on life altogether, even before he left the Palouse. Yet he was still dreaming. Three months before the crimes, he wrote Jeff a letter mentioning a new girlfriend in Colorado. Matt called her “my Rocky Mountain lass.”
* * *
It was 1999. For most people the millennium was an enjoyable curiosity. Maybe it meant something, maybe it didn’t. Certainly, it gave a boost to the “Preparedness Movement,” those who awaited some kind of social or natural calamity. Preparedness was the term of choice, because by now everyone knew “survivalists” were bunker-happy kooks. Preparedness was a natural for Matthew, though it could have been more than just a timely fad. (The buyer of the old Williams house in Gridley reported that for years he received all kinds of survivalist literature addressed to the former occupant.)
In Matthew’s case, at any rate, the calamity was going to be RaHoWa, in-the-know shorthand for “Racial Holy War” (and the name of a popular Canadian white supremacist band with two discs issued by Resistance Records). 2
On February 19, Matthew drove down to Sacramento to attend a “Preparedness Expo” at the Cal Expo state fairgrounds. In later interviews he would point to this visit as the start of everything. Hoping to meet like-minded people he clipped a small sign to his backpack: The White Race, the Earth’s Most Endangered Species. The “endangered species” tag line is something of a trademark for the National Alliance, the flagship white separatist organization at the time (the one founded by William Pierce, who wrote The Turner Diaries and to whom Matthew had addressed a letter). It’s a best seller for them on all kinds of merchandise.
Matthew had a good chance of finding a brother in belief at Cal Expo. Years later, online, I discovered a short memoir of that year’s expo by a man who’d moderated a panel. The man describes ex-sheriff and right-wing activist Richard Mack responding “to the critics of ‘right-wing conservative wackos’ who accuse us of racism and bigotry. He called to the stage . . . an Hispanic woman, a black woman, a native American man, a pacific islander man, and a Jewish woman.” On the same panel Joseph Farrah “addressed the morass of the mainstream media”; Terry Reed, author of the underground CIA exposé Compromised, talked about Clinton corruption; Bo Gritz burned a small UN flag, his usual stunt; and Dr. Len Horowitz spoke about the dangers of AIDS, Ebola, and “emerging viruses.” The panel moderator waxed enthusiastic on his blog, “The people I met and saw covered a wide spectrum of society. From the guy who makes his own Colloidal Silver to the guy who bought a nineteen-thousand-dollar item at a charity auction . . . from the mother of a pilot concerned about anthrax vaccines, to the man moving his family to avoid the worst case scenario of Y2K. They were all different, yet all the same.” There’s no knowing whether Matthew attended this panel, but it’s tempting to imagine he’s the one described as making his own colloidal silver.
Matthew says he met someone at the Preparedness Expo. The person noticed the sign on his backpack and invited him to join an unidentified organization. His new friend explained that initiates had to take part in a group activity. Matthew says that four months later he and eight other guys from south Sacramento (no one exchanged names) met at a strip mall in the capital city at around two a.m. Homemade firebombs were passed out.
There’s reason to believe Matthew made this story up. Whether he really had underground connections is a good question, though. He knew Larry Wampler, at least in passing, and his background makes it look like he could have been either a joiner or a loner at this stage. But even if he did meet someone at Cal Expo in February, no shadowy organization invited him on a secret mission. That isn’t to say he hadn’t started thinking about a mission himself, about action, about resurrecting the thrill of his midnight campus sorties for the Living Faith Fellowship.
The movie The Matrix opened on the last day of March 1999. A drawing Matthew made in prison and entitled “The Destruction of the Magog MATRIX” contains imagery suggesting he saw the movie. The nothing-is-as-it-appears-to-be paranoia, the Christlike central character, and the gorgeous violence all would have been intensely appealing to Matthew watching from his own looking-glass world.
A month later, it begins. April 20 was Adolph Hitler’s birthday. Anti-Semitic fliers were found at four high schools around Redding, California. Unknown at the time—Matthew and Tyler Williams did the leafleting. No one could remember anything like it happening before. The episode got shocked local news coverage.
Meanwhile, Hitler’s other birthday remembrance that year eclipsed this provincial case of nasty leafleting. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot up Columbine High School on the same day. The Hitler’s-birthday connection kept being talked about after the Colorado school massacre. As was the killers’ decision to wear trench coats, which some thought was inspired by costumes in The Matrix. It’s worth imagining what went through Matthew’s mind as he watched, heard, or read about this: there were others like him out there. He was part of something larger. This really could be the beginning of the Apocalypse in America. 3
While he was following news coverage of Columbine in May and June, Matthew was making war plans. He started on the Internet. It’s easy to find recipes for homemade incendiaries online, from a sugar/potassium chlorate mixture to rough-and-ready napalm made from gasoline and Styrofoam or gasoline and dishwashing liquid. Matthew opted for a straightforward accelerant, a two-to-one mixture of gasoline and oil. He and Tyler filled one-gallon black plastic jugs of Mobil Delvac 1300 Super with the mixture. They used up most of a case of the motor oil. They did the work at their parents’ Palo Cedro property in a shed or chicken coop. Dog hairs and bantie feathers were later found stuck to the oily mouths
of the jugs. The brothers stored the filled jugs in a wooden crate lined with an old copy of the Redding Record Searchlight.
Except for the most primitive examples (a two-liter plastic soda bottle slipped over a gun muzzle), most Internet designs for homemade silencers follow a perforated tube-within-a-tube pattern. You can use PVC pipe or radiator hose or motorcycle brake tubes. The damping material can be steel wool or cotton or Chore Boy sponges or rags. You can get fancy with a lathe and washers, but Matthew didn’t bother. His silencer was fitted to a .22-caliber automatic, not his Glock.
Around June 16, the brothers bought a new black crowbar and a black pry bar. They would wear blue mechanic’s jumpsuits on their mission. In an interview later, Tyler said Gary Matson and Winfield Mowder came up now as possible targets.
Gary Matson was fifty. He had a mustache, wire-rimmed aviator glasses, a tonsured-looking baldness with a flyaway fringe of blond hair, and the untidy wardrobe of a gardener. He seemed in serious need of gay style advice. He would have shrugged. The son of a college professor and a knowledge geek himself, he was too busy reading botanical journals, teaching, gathering material for a book on local flora. He was a resolutely local and neighborly sort of public figure.
American Honor Killings Page 4