This time Matthew used the pry bar. He had trouble getting the green aluminum door to pop open, so he smashed an upper pane of glass. The laminated glass shattered but hung from the frame. Matthew threw one of his lighted incendiaries inside. He smashed windows at two of the building’s three other entrances and chucked in more Molotov cocktails. He had one left. Running behind the building he threw it into a green garbage bin.
It was three twenty. A sanitation worker pulled a truck around the back of the building and saw the bin in flames. Startled by motion, he spotted two men in jumpsuits getting into a boxy car. Under the deceiving parking lot lights the car’s copper paint job was an indefinite muddy color. And anyway, it was gone before the garbage collector registered what was going on. The fire department came. The fire was out within twenty minutes. The Choice Medical Group offices hadn’t been touched.
Nothing was reported on the Redding murders for several days. Investigators thought it was a local case, ugly but not earth-shaking. No connection was made to Sacramento, of course. And no connection was made between the clinic firebombing and the synagogues. Not that every article didn’t mention both or ask the question, “Any connection?” At one point, investigators suspected the owner of the clinic building was responsible himself—insurance fraud. Also, three different jurisdictions were involved: ATF at the clinic arson, FBI at the synagogues, and the Shasta County Sheriff’s Department on Olive Street.
Something feels incomplete, exhausted, about the clinic attack. Even so, Matthew and Tyler were probably confident of their safety. With no reason to believe the Olive Street scene had been discovered, they may have thought their answering machine ploy had worked. They tried to rest. But they weren’t finished. This was still just the beginning.
The evening of that same day, July 2, in Chicago, “August” Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, until recently a member of the World Church of the Creator and a close associate of church leader Matt Hale, started shooting Orthodox Jewish men walking home from Sabbath services. It was the start of a three-day spree. After wounding six in Chicago, Smith drove to Skokie and murdered ex–basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong. If Matthew or Tyler napped that afternoon, they may have woken up to breaking news about these racist attacks and thought, If this isn’t the beginning of a racial holy war . . .
Smith threaded a path between Illinois and Indiana over the next two days, killed a Korean student, shot or shot at six others, then shot himself while being chased on I-57 near Salem, Illinois. He was captured in a messy struggle during which he shot himself again. He died in a hospital. It was the Fourth of July.
One small item didn’t make the news: California police discovered Gary Matson’s Tercel wagon at two p.m. on July 3. The car was abandoned in Oroville, California, a little up-country from Gridley. When officers opened the car, they noticed a strong odor of gasoline.
Many murder cases are easy to solve. Forensics is about proof not clues. The killing of Gary and Winfield, however, was genuinely mysterious. Even after the car was found in Oroville, investigators had a difficult time imagining a story line. The victims were paradigmatic innocents, beloved and without an enemy in the world. Just when the police were at a loss how to proceed, they were alerted that Gary’s credit card had been used. The reloading equipment had shipped. Dillon gave the authorities the delivery address.
Yuba City (where Sally Williams once taught elementary school) isn’t far from Oroville. So that seemed to fit. The Mailboxes Etc. store was in the Feather Down Shopping Center, a sprawling pink strip mall, its façade hinting at ’80s postmodernism. On a hot Wednesday afternoon, July 7, cops showed up to ask about “Gary Matson’s” box. The man at the counter looked up from his computer screen. With a shrug of surprise, he gestured through the plate glass: well, there they are! Two young men had just gotten out of a Corolla hatchback and were approaching the store.
Shouting, guns drawn, officers pushed open the door. Matthew and Tyler took a few steps back toward the car. Other policemen materialized. With a glance of assessment, they too drew their guns and aimed at the young men. All were close enough to hear Matthew quietly ask Tyler, “Well, partner, what are we gonna do?”
The capture was a matter of dumb luck for the police and startlingly abrupt. If any of the officers had doubts, they disappeared as soon as the suspects were searched. The police found that Matthew was wearing a bulletproof vest. He had his Glock on him. Tyler was carrying a 9mm handgun, as well. Inside the car were two assault rifles, two more handguns, a shotgun, a pry bar, a crowbar, a homemade silencer speckled with something, blood it turned out. On the floor by the driver’s seat, an extra set of car keys was found—Gary’s. And they found Gary’s Visa card. The card was the pretext for arrest: possession of stolen property.
The capture took place at four thirty in the afternoon. Then a grueling full day’s worth of legal procedures began. Matthew and Tyler weren’t booked in the Shasta County Jail until one fifteen a.m. Bail was set at two million each. Obviously, the authorities had more on their minds than possession of stolen property.
III. Escape
The Shasta County Jail was built in 1984. A boxy eleven-story building of stained concrete, it’s fittingly ugly for a prison, a heavy-browed, slit-eyed modernist mug of a structure. Inside, mottled concrete floors as dark as pumice have been rubbed smooth by jail-issue slippers and flip-flops. The cinder-block walls are painted the color of dirty pollen. The paint’s been scratched away from pipes and vent covers by anxious prisoners. Scablike patches of metal show through. Prison clothing comes in two colors, pale tangerine for T-shirts, socks, briefs, and slippers; black for the pajama-like pants and a V-necked pullover. In the visitor’s room and dayroom the seats are immovable discs of stainless steel projecting from under stainless steel tables. Visitors are allowed the usual telephone conversation through a glass window.
On Thursday evening, July 8, Sally Williams finally got to speak to Matthew.
“I still love you,” she told her son at once.
“I love you too.”
Sally sighed. “I don’t know. It looks real bad.”
Matthew diverted her. Or maybe he couldn’t help himself. What’s a mother for, if not complaint? He said they took some cash and tools from him. They had him on suicide watch. They also took away his socks. He was freezing. (The building had been refitted in ’97 to operate two chillers on hot days, part of an energy-efficient HVAC system.)
Matthew tried to reassure her. “Our forefathers have been in prison a lot—prophets, Christ.”
Sally told him she’d start looking for a lawyer.
“Don’t bother,” Matthew shot back. “I plan to represent myself from Scriptures.”
“I don’t think you did what they say you did,” Sally said earnestly.
“What do they say I did?”
“They say you took out two homos.” Sally said she couldn’t imagine him doing something like that.
Matthew responded callously, “Why wouldn’t you think I’d do that?” He continued, “I had to obey God’s law rather than man’s law. I didn’t want to do this. I felt I was supposed to, though . . . They’re not doing the death penalty a whole lot here anymore. I’m probably looking at twenty, forty years. I don’t think I’ll serve that, though.”
He seems to be equating assassination with a bar fight gone wrong, but he likely couldn’t grasp what even those numbers sounded like to a mother. Or what they could mean for a man.
Matthew said, “I think God put me here as a witness. A lot of people will hear. They call what I’ve done bad . . . I’ve followed a higher law . . . People will hear it. They might think I’m insane . . . I see a lot of parallels between this and a lot of other incidents in the Old Testament. They threw our Lord Savior in jail.”
* * *
Only after Matthew and Tyler were captured did the investigation finally come together. What was a Redding newspaper, the one lining the crate left at B’nai Israel, doing in Sacramento? Why the odor of
gasoline in Gary’s car? When Matthew’s Hartnell Avenue apartment was searched (after the street was blocked off for fear of explosives), investigators came across reams of hate literature, more weapons, the list of prominent Jews.
At Palo Cedro, a crate like the B’nai Israel one was discovered, plus Mobil Delvac 1300 jugs identical to those left behind by the arsonist. Dog hairs and chicken feathers were collected. A blue jumpsuit of Tyler’s was found, and fibers linked it to the upholstery of Gary’s car. Paint and glass powder on the pry bar and crowbar were examined.
As the forensic evidence fell into place, dread rippled outward. Just how big was this thing? Matthew and Tyler had successfully conjured at least the impression of a war.
There’d been another murder in Happy Valley a month earlier. A mistaken report got out that the victim had been shot, so the killing sounded like the Olive Street murders. And if Matthew and Tyler weren’t involved in that one, what about the young man who’d gone missing in the Pullman-Moscow area back when Matthew was living in the Palouse?
More alarming than the stray unsolved case was the illusion of conspiracy. A lot remained unclear about Columbine. The Southern Poverty Law Center and other activist groups had been warning that extremists might engage in year-2000 domestic terrorism. Benjamin Smith’s Midwestern racist spree had coincided precisely with the Williams brothers’ attacks. Matthew’s letter to William Pierce and World Church of the Creator literature were found along with everything else at Hartnell Avenue. Could this be part of a nationwide plot cooked up by the odious Matt Hale or someone like him?
Hate groups, by their nature, can thrive without conspiracies, without organization of any kind. The same sacred texts are available to everyone: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The Turner Diaries, Resistance Records’ music, old issues of Racial Loyalty, Nord Davis’s Star Wars, handbooks on incendiaries and silencers and explosives, Israel: Our Duty, Our Dilemma. Like the kit houses the Sears catalog once flogged all over America, kit ideology can be mailed or downloaded anywhere. Some of the things Matthew did—leafleting high schools, sharing important books, dropping the leading inquiry (“What do you think of black people?” he once asked Jeff Monroe)—come straight from the racist playbook for recruitment, instructions he might have read somewhere and followed with soldierly fervor. A much-discussed theory even describes how concerted action is generated without organization: the “propaganda of the deed” is supposed to galvanize sympathizers into acting on their own. Matthew was probably convinced it would work for him.
Matthew shaved his head before his first court appearance, a preliminary hearing on July 13. The hearing lasted five and three-quarters hours. Ben and Sally attended, sitting impassively. Prosecutors played a scratchy recording of the July 8 prison conversation (quoted above from newspaper accounts). Sally and Matthew had overlooked a posted warning that conversations could be recorded. Spectators gasped at Sally’s “They say you took out two homos.” Fleeting as it was, there was the proof of hatred. Afterward, someone shouted at Sally that Gary and Winfield had been better men than her monstrous sons . . . The calm of proceedings like these sometimes feels outrageous. The formal repression of the courtroom must have made grief almost unendurable for the friends and family of Winfield and Gary.
* * *
Strangely enough, this was only the start of the most important part of Matthew’s life. It wasn’t denouement. Though he was thirty-one, like many adolescents he’d lived a fantasy life so far. Now, just when his fantasies seemed to have come true, he was also facing the disillusionment of real life. Real life ends up out-arguing all of us. You can’t catch its eye and charm it. And this wasn’t the usual real life of jobs and disappointment, it was imprisonment, the relentless, hard-hearted, small-minded necessity of the law.
Matthew’s emotions apparently whipsawed between intoxication with his fame and the petty humiliations of life in the Shasta County Jail. Unlike in movies, real life doesn’t cue your doom with music. Early on, the familiar-from-TV routine of prison, the apparently humdrum personalities of the inmates and prison staff, the sheer banality of it all, may have led Matthew to believe this was going to be a breeze. He thought he was the smartest guy around, and maybe he was. He was prey to a cocky adolescent hilarity. One of the first things he sent from jail in July or August was a credit card application on which he described his “employment.” He wrote, “My brother and I were captured by occupation storm troopers while we were on a supply mission. We are now incarcerated for our work in cleansing a sick society.”
Matthew became the demonic darling of reporters. No matter how silly, contemptible, or emotionally disconnected, everything he said was treated with gravity. Since it’s unbearable for most of us to think that evil has silly, contemptible, and emotionally disconnected causes (though it almost always does), reporters, in spite of themselves, inflated Matthew’s importance. His immaturity was painted as satanic levity. Although in his own mind he was playing Braveheart and made an effort to get that image out there, he must have known he was swimming against a tide of disapproval. He wrote frequent letters to the Redding Record Searchlight and the Sacramento Bee. One included a plaintive-sounding, “I’m not a hate-filled man.”
At the same time, Matthew had always been eager to please. His instinct was to reward anyone smitten with him. It’s hard not to think he unconsciously played to the “monster” expectations of the reporters who were suddenly so interested in him. Jeff Monroe recalls seeing courtroom footage of Matthew smirking into the camera, eyes going narrow like a comic book villain’s. I don’t know this man, Jeff tells me he thought in shock. It didn’t occur to him that “Evil Matthew” and the old “Endearing Matthew” of the Palouse were equally unreal, the operatic sham behavior of someone who hasn’t grown up, who doesn’t know himself at all.
Matthew was prepared to say anything to entertain his audience and did. He confessed. His lawyer was exasperated. Despite a passing whim (a joke?) to appear in court in a Nazi uniform and wearing a toothbrush mustache, Matthew was determined to stick to his plan of representing himself from Scripture. It felt like a bold and idealistic stand, and it demanded confession. But confessing was probably also a way of reassuring himself that his own foolishness—his crime—had been a coherent intention all along. Because if he started gleaning that it wasn’t . . . Bizarrely, confessing likely postponed any horrible “real life” understanding of what he’d done.
Gary Delsohn and Sam Stanton were reporters for the Sacramento Bee. On November 4 they came to the jail to interview Matthew and found him smug and relaxed. Delsohn held the phone in the visiting room. They were talking in circles. Fed up with the verbal sparring, Stanton tells me he grabbed the phone and demanded, “Did you do it?”
Matthew wasn’t going to pause or appear the least bit unsure of himself. He answered at once, “Absolutely.” He told the two reporters, “I’m not guilty of murder. I’m guilty of obeying the laws of the Creator.”
Stanton and Delsohn had gotten the headline they wanted and continued to follow the case doggedly. They weren’t the only ones fascinated by the case. Dateline NBC and 60 Minutes did segments on the Williams brothers. Matthew was interviewed a great deal. Famously, he and Tom Brokaw had a heated exchange during an interview. There was no breaking through Matthew’s glibness. It must have given the young man a sense of triumph to get under the skin of the star newsman from Babylon on the Hudson. Brokaw was faced with the brick wall pseudosophistication of an overgrown, self-convinced adolescent.
Matthew was famous. He was contacted by the cultural lurkers drawn to grisly notoriety. In December he sent a drawing to a collector of memorabilia of famous killers. In some ways he was having fun. He decorated the envelope with a glowing key and the racist catchphrase “fourteen words” transliterated into runes. (“Fourteen words” refers to a credo dreamed up by The Order’s David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”) Matthew delighted in getting sec
ret messages past the jail censors. He became furious when he learned that Ann and Jeff Monroe had spoken to the FBI and viciously sent them an article on obesity, adding a series of biblical citations that amounted to a death threat. It was the last they ever heard from him.
He was famous, but he was also powerless. He was kept in “administrative segregation.” Ad-seg is highly controlled imprisonment away from the general inmate population. A fellow inmate told me deputies gave Matthew a hard time. Perhaps they spread rumors about him and tried to create conflict. Perhaps they laughed at his beliefs or passed along the by-now-widespread speculation that Matthew was gay himself. The fellow inmate told me deputies continually wrote Matthew up for petty violations of jail rules—having too many pairs of socks, too many letters, being disrespectful. He says Matthew was kept in more or less permanent lockdown with these violations.
Matthew’s name changed in prison. After the crimes he became known in police papers and court filings by the name on his birth certificate, Benjamin Matthew Williams. Tyler was James Tyler Williams. Newspaper articles had to explain repetitively that the brothers went by their middle names. But in prison Matthew accepted that he was Ben now, exactly like his father. Deputies and inmates called him Ben, and he started signing drawings and letters “Benjamin XIV Williams” or “Benjamin Matthew XIV Williams,” sometimes specifying, “Rev XIV.12.” (“Here is the patience of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.” Revelations XIV is a vision of the angels of the Apocalypse with whom Ben apparently identified himself.)
American Honor Killings Page 6