He’d had a hippie phase, hair to his shoulder blades. Back then he fathered a daughter, Clea, with his wife Marcia Howe. The couple started a food coop, People of Progress, and later helped found the Redding Certified Farmer’s Market. Gary was the force behind a children’s natural history museum in Caldwell Park in Redding where Marcia became director. Through People of Progress Gary started a community garden on the Sacramento River. He got a ten-acre arboretum going on city-owned property. He earned a little money on the side with a specialty nursery.
Winfield Mowder, who was ten years younger, lived with Gary in a ramshackle property on rural Olive Street in an area called Happy Valley, south of Redding. They’d been together fourteen years. Winfield worked at Orchard Hardware Supply in Redding while he studied for a higher degree at Chico State. He was bearded, chunky, an environmentalist nerd like Gary, a cheerful eternal student to Gary’s natural teacher.
Gary Matson and Matthew Williams probably met when Matthew joined the Redding Certified Farmer’s Market. By all accounts they never knew each other well. Still, they must have had a few conversations. Gary may have taken Matthew to Olive Street, shown off what he was growing there, or loaned Matthew a book. A market acquaintance was later quoted: “I believe Matthew talked about how intelligent Gary was.” Whether Matthew ever met Winfield isn’t known. He learned the two men were gay, though.
Olin Gordon, an elderly man from Olinda, right next to Happy Valley, considered hiring Matthew and Tyler. The fifteen dollars an hour Matthew asked for sounded steep. Just shooting the breeze, the eighty-six-year-old recalled wondering, “You know Gary Matson—does the same sort of work?”
“Yeah, I know him,” Matthew answered. “He’s a homosexual.”
Gordon tried to explain it to a reporter later. He was old enough to remember when saying something like that amounted to a serious charge. Even now, it felt odd hearing it in normal conversation. Whose business was it?
Redding is so conservative that Gary’s daughter never dared tell her religious classmates about her father and Winfield. Maybe there were no other obvious gay people in town. Maybe Gary was the only out gay man Matthew encountered there. Regardless, when Matthew felt he had to make a “judgment” on homosexuality, Gary was the one.
* * *
Matthew and Tyler’s “war” was to have more than one front: homosexuals, abortionists, Jews. Matthew had assembled a list of nationally prominent Jews on his computer.
The brothers must have practiced. The night of the first attack would involve split-second timing. They’d have to drive from address to address without making a false turn. Just choosing the first night’s targets had to involve research.
As the brothers waited for the day they’d chosen, the oddly elegiac alertness of soldiers probably came over them. Matthew would have seen three days of front-page articles in the Record Searchlight about the capture of Kathleen Ann Soliah in Minnesota. If nothing else, the story proved that it was possible to live underground for twenty-three years, marry, have a family. Heartening for someone about to become a fugitive.
Friday, June 18 had symbolic weight. On that date in 1984, “The Order” assassinated the radio host Alan Berg in Denver as part of their own legendary racial holy war. A little after midnight Matthew and Tyler left Palo Cedro and took I-5 south to Sacramento, a two-and-a-half-hour trip. The freeway runs through downtown Sacramento, hugging the eastern bank of the Sacramento River. Passing the vivid yellow-orange Tower Bridge, aglow in streetlight at that quiet hour, the brothers headed into south Sacramento and got off the highway at the Sutterville Road exit. They drove north on Riverside Boulevard, which doubles back along I-5 for a while before veering right to pass in front of William Land Park.
They pulled the car into the shadow of one of the great trees near the park entrance. They would have been on the right side of the street. On the left, on a triangle of land cut off in back by the I-5, was Congregation B’nai Israel’s synagogue complex—sanctuary, chapel, education wing, courtyard, and library. The famously progressive B’nai Israel was founded in 1852; it’s the oldest congregation in Sacramento and one of the oldest in the American West.
Matthew used the crate in which they’d stored the oil jugs. He packed several of the jugs inside, tossed the crowbar on top, and scuttled across the street. Park, synagogue, and neighborhood were utterly deserted. It was a quarter past three in the morning.
Matthew set the crate down by a metal door just off the street, a door he’d likely examined already. He used the crowbar to pop it open. The alarm sounded at three nineteen a.m. He described it to a reporter later. Though he was denying Tyler’s involvement at the time—claiming instead that he worked with those eight unnamed guys—his description of the moment was probably true: “I was real nervous. Getting caught was a real issue. Just the excitement of it, coming in and having the alarm go off, and I knew I was crossing the Rubicon. It was the cusp of my life where I was putting faith in my beliefs.” The immediate reality may have been darker, terrifying and exhilarating. He was on Satan’s ground.
He grabbed the jugs and hustled through the library. He smashed a window to get out of the locked vestibule and found the sanctuary. You can imagine him in there. When he unscrewed one jug, the cap jumped from his fingers. It was found later. With a sowing motion of the arm he poured the sputtering liquid from the jug. He splashed a piano, the benches, the walls. He ran to the front of the sanctuary and splashed the bimah. He ignited the fires with an electronic stick lighter. After an irritating crackling like loose wax in the ear came the wonderful thud and windy heat. He tossed the plastic jug aside, though he’d meant to take it with him.
On his way back out he doused the library. This time he did a more thorough job. The sanctuary fire was already beginning to burn out. Here he soaked the books and got a real fire going. This building would be gutted. Again, he dropped the jug. He ran out, leaping past the crate, though he’d meant to take that with him too. From the moment he left the car to the moment he jumped back in, only three or four minutes had passed. The burglar alarm registered automatically at three twenty-four a.m. The brothers were gone.
Congregation Beth Shalom, another Reform synagogue, is on El Camino Avenue in Carmichael, at the other end of Sacramento, an off-white stucco A-frame facing the street. A big flame-shaped sign carries the congregation’s name (House of Peace) in Hebrew. The best way to get there from B’nai Israel is to go north past the Riverside Water Treatment Plant and take the eastbound Capitol City/El Dorado Freeway. Exiting the freeway you have to cross the river and take one of the big streets north to El Camino. Or the brothers could have turned around and gotten back on the northbound I-5, then traveled one of the major arteries east as if they were heading to Cal Expo. Either route takes just over twenty minutes. There was no traffic, but they would have avoided speeding. The timing just works out. The Beth Shalom alarm registered at three forty-eight a.m.
The shul of the Kenesset Israel Torah Center is four miles from Beth Shalom on quiet Morse Avenue. The alarm at this Orthodox synagogue went off a bare ten minutes after the Beth Shalom alarm. That means Matthew must have broken in, set his fire (Beth Shalom suffered mostly sprinkler damage), and traveled the four miles on El Camino and Watt Avenue within that time. It’s possible. The shul suffered mostly smoke damage. Still, the building had to be replaced. Here, Matthew remembered to take in some of his anti-Semitic fliers and scatter them around. His palm print was later found on one. The brothers were back in Palo Cedro by six thirty a.m. Friday morning, unless they stopped at Matthew’s Redding apartment to recover.
This time people noticed. The synagogue arsons were national news. The city was appalled. Because the fires seemed nearly simultaneous, the early impression was that a squad of arsonists had fanned out through the city. Rewards were offered, a unity rally was held in the Sacramento Community Center, the FBI gathered evidence, and B’nai Israel started accepting replacement volumes for its ruined library and holding sum
mer services in a recently opened courtyard.
People studied the fliers left behind. “The ugly American and NATO aggressors are the ultimate hypocrites. The fake Albanian refugee crisis was manufactured by the international Jewsmedia to justify the terrorizing, the bestial bombing of our Yugoslavia back into the dark ages.” The author was referring to the bombing campaign against Serbia. The campaign had been prompted by the flight from Kosovo of almost half a million people in fear of ethnic cleansing. The author’s passions had been excited by a terrifying but remote and hard-to-fathom event. Like any underground extremist, his truth was simplified and inverted. What connection could he have found between the synagogues of Sacramento and the mosques of Tirana? This combination of intensity and obscurity is typical of Matthew.
The usual suspects were questioned by reporters. William Pierce in West Virginia knew nothing about it. Matthew Hale, then running the World Church of the Creator out of his father’s basement in East Peoria, Illinois, said his organization didn’t promote violence, though it was hard to object to someone torching the “dens of the serpent.”
Matthew and Tyler laid low through the weekend and the next week. For the first time Matthew could view his actions projected on the screen of genuine notoriety (not just an article about Living Faith in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, not just a self-published health guide). This was national. Q-scored faces spoke with expressions of compassionate woe, local TV reporters interviewed congregants. The inevitable inaccuracy and the artificial emotionalism of American news must only have reinforced Matthew’s delusion that the world was a Matrix-like lie. He couldn’t be touched. What he didn’t believe in wasn’t real. Far from having the slightest twinge of remorse, he started compiling an additional list of prominent local Jews. The list was afterward found on his computer by the FBI. Following the name of a man who’d offered a reward for the arsonists’ capture, he noted, “Yidbizman, $10,000 on us.” He later said the first attack emboldened him.
The brothers waited through a second weekend. All this time, eleven days, they only had themselves to talk to about what had happened. Did they debrief in a military fashion? Discuss upcoming plans? Did Ben or Sally ever mention the Sacramento attacks? Did the parents notice their sons seemed . . . silent? Energized?
* * *
On the last day of June, a Wednesday, Winfield Mowder and Gary Matson had dinner with Gary’s father, Oscar, a widower for seven years now. Oscar once taught German, French, Spanish, and English at Shasta College but he was best-known as a vintner. The family business, Matson Vineyards, founded in 1984, was the oldest in Shasta County. It was east of Redding, a stone’s throw from the Williams place in Palo Cedro.
Gary and Winfield left at about eleven and headed home to Olive Street in Happy Valley. Sometime during the first hours of July 1, Matthew and Tyler drove their father’s Toyota Corolla hatchback over to Olive Street, probably taking the exact same route Gary and Winfield had driven earlier.
The couple’s house, an unselfconsciously rundown trailer with a big one-room living space added on, was about halfway along Olive Street. Coming from the south, there were indeed neatly spaced olive trees growing on either side of the road. Farther along, the withered-looking trunks of eucalyptus raised their feathery crowns much higher against the starry sky. A waning gibbous moon had been full two nights before. The earthen roadsides were dry and yellow. The air smelled of eucalyptus and the vaguely horsey dust of a long, intensely hot day.
Matthew and Tyler probably pulled off onto a dirt road or alongside an olive grove; they wouldn’t have driven right up to the house. They let their eyes adjust to the darkness. Olive Street is rural, unlit, with a number of widely separated houses (none as ramshackle as Gary and Winfield’s).
As it was described to me, you entered the house and found yourself in the main living space. Kitchen and bathroom were in the trailer section. Matthew may have known the layout already. Directly opposite the door was a big, roughly built loft bed running sideways along the far wall. There were flimsy bookshelves with more books and botanical journals scattered across the floor. The place was a mess, either waiting for a big cleanup or, more likely, treated with indifference by the intellectual couple.
They were asleep in the loft bed, naked, Winfield on the near side, Gary by the wall. Maybe they stirred at the sound of the door opening. Maybe not. Tyler has said he didn’t remember either of them sitting up or saying anything. Whatever the plan had been, Matthew acted precipitately. He got a foot or two inside the door. This was it. He raised the .22 and started firing. The silencer made a prim farting sound, but the brass shell casings pinged and danced on the floor. Matthew pumped about fifteen shots into the two men. All Tyler remembered was a soft groan or sigh when the bodies deflated slightly and relaxed into death.
Matthew may have used an entire clip, normally ten to fifteen shells. If so, he had to put another clip in. He moved a chair to the foot of the loft bed. He stood on the seat, steadied himself, and fired several more times into the motionless bodies—kill shots. Just to be sure. Atomized blood spit back from the close-range wounds and flecked the silencer. Matthew jumped down. (There has been speculation that Tyler fired some or all of the shots, because his prints were found on the gun later. I’ve tried to contact him several times with no success. My hunch is that Matthew would have taken the lead throughout.)
The brothers went through the pockets of the pants Gary had slung aside before going to bed. They took his car keys and a Visa card. As part of the plan—unless they were improvising on the fly—they were going to take Gary’s bronze Toyota Tercel wagon. But what if someone noticed it was missing? They did something that probably felt clever—even brilliant—given the panicky state they were in.
Gary and Winfield had an old answering machine, the kind with a miniature cassette tape for the outgoing message. The brothers erased the message and recorded a new one. Matthew coughs a few times to mimic illness then mumbles, “Uh, hi, this is Gary . . .” Cough, cough. “Gary” says he isn’t feeling well. “We’re going to, uh, visit a specialist friend in San Francisco for a week.”
The brothers were too wired to replay the message to make it sure it sounded right. Otherwise, they would have noticed that lagging spools or sticky buttons had caused a problem. When the tape is played, you first hear, “Be-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-ep!” Then Tyler’s voice, “—make it any longer than you have to.” And only then, Cough, cough. “Uh, hi, this is Gary . . .”
A couple of things about this message . . . First, it’s ludicrous. The childish pretense of illness and the equally childish “specialist friend” and gay men/San Francisco association make for a ridiculous ploy. Only someone with a contemptuous or unrealistic streak a mile wide could think it passable. Did Matthew believe his victims were rarely telephoned, marginal, friendless? Did he think callers would shrug when they heard a message like that? Did he think the unprepossessing shanty they lived in meant Gary and Winfield would be considered socially disposable?
Far stranger (even if recording that message was part of the plan from the beginning), Matthew chose to impersonate Gary moments after killing him, a man with whom he shared more than a few points in common. (Both were gifted horticulturists. Both had a BA in biology and the instincts of a teacher. Both were overqualified for the labor they loved as nurserymen/gardeners. Both had one daughter.) No matter how rushed, how nervous, how frazzled, how drunk on glory, how numbed by exhilaration, some kind of existential weirdness must have flickered through Matthew for an instant when he said, “This is Gary.”
That’s not him, Oscar Matson thought as soon as he heard the message. He’d phoned the next morning. Worried, he asked his son Roger, an enologist at the vineyard, to check on Gary and Winfield. By one o’clock, Roger was at the Olive Street house, probably calling out and hearing the nervousness in his own voice. He noticed the car was missing. He pushed open the door, saw several shell casings and, looking up, the bodies in the loft bed.
Tyl
er had taken their father’s car back to Palo Cedro. Matthew had driven Gary’s either to Palo Cedro or to his Hartnell Avenue apartment in Redding. Over the next day the car must have been a source of worry. The fact that they had it, and might as well use it, may have hastened the next attack.
If Matthew was able to sleep at all that morning, he was up by three p.m. at the latest. He had no reason to believe the bodies had been discovered two hours earlier. But he seems to have been in a hurry now, expanding his plans. At three he called Dillon Precision Products Inc. in Scottsdale, Arizona. Dillon is the country’s premier maker of reloading equipment. The Dillon 550 and the Dillon 650 may be the best machines available for making cartridges, a thriving hobby among people who are cost-conscious, finicky, or private when it comes to their ammo. Besides the press, you need a proper set of dyes for the caliber cartridges you want to make. You can take used shell casings, recharge the case with gunpowder, and seat and crimp a new bullet. Matthew ordered one of the machines along with some expensive accessories. He also ordered two classic black-leather gun belts, waist size 32" for himself, 34" for Tyler. The total came to $2,276.09. He used Gary Matson’s Visa card and gave a Mailboxes Etc. box number as the delivery address. The initial weirdness of impersonating Gary may have passed by now.
Sometime after midnight, Matthew and Tyler headed back downstate to Sacramento. They started out in two cars, parked one somewhere, and continued on in Gary’s Tercel wagon. They’d already chosen a target, but they wanted to act at once and get rid of the car. Or else, after killing two people the night before, continued warfare felt paradoxically more bearable than time to reflect.
They got to Sacramento at their usual action hour, three a.m. They drove to a shopping center called Country Club Plaza on the corner of El Camino and Watt Avenue. This is exactly halfway between Beth Shalom and the Kenesset Israel Torah Center. They’d passed the shopping center at around three fifty-six a.m. twelve nights before. Now they were back, a military-style runaround tactic. Behind the shopping center on Butano Drive is the Country Club Medical Center, on the second floor of which was the Choice Medical Group, an abortion clinic, tonight’s target.
American Honor Killings Page 5