But prison began to wear him down. In November the Shasta County DA McGregor Scott decided to go for the death penalty for both brothers. When Stanton and Delsohn interviewed him again on January 6, Ben appeared nervous. His hand shook when he held the telephone, and when they asked about the death penalty decision, he admitted, “Tyler has been pretty upset about it.”
The arsons were first to come to trial in federal court. The murders wouldn’t be dealt with in state court for a year or two. The frenzy of media curiosity abated. Prison, even if it hadn’t seemed so awesome initially, must have started to look far more imposing with the dimension of time factored in.
The tedious courtroom routine quashed Ben’s theatrical attempt to defend himself from Scripture. His lawyer had the impossible job of representing someone who’d quite sanely admitted the crimes he was accused of. In fact, the Bible was the only defense in this case. Ben was right about that.
An effort to bring religion into the trial may have been behind a bizarre episode a few days after Father’s Day. On Sunday, June 18, 2000, Oscar Matson, seventy-seven now, turned a page of the Redding Record Searchlight and found the following ad illustrated with a dove holding an olive branch:
Congratulations! The family and friends of Benjamin Matthew Williams are proud to announce that he was ordained Reverend by Christ’s Covenant Church. This honor was bestowed as recognition of his decade of diligent studies in Ancient Wisdom and Truth and for his spiritual works benefiting our fellowship and community. Reverend Williams: May your knowledge and faith continue to grow during your current persecutions and trials.
The newspaper hastily apologized for running the small ad. Reporters tracked down the purchaser—Ben’s lawyer. If he meant to set up an argument that religious freedom or religious mania were somehow behind the crimes, it was wasted effort. The courts wouldn’t allow a defense based on the holy book of a five-thousand-year-old desert tribe.
Ben made at least one friend in jail. Twenty-four-year-old Paul Gordon Smith Jr., known as PJ, was in ad-seg too. A ward of the court since he was five, PJ had spent most of his life in institutions of one kind or another. Now he was charged with the gruesome murder of a young woman. In ad-seg, prisoners are usually allowed out of their cells for an hour a day unless they’re in lockdown. Ben and PJ got to talking in the common area and hit it off at once, according to PJ.
PJ says he never bought into Ben’s constant talk about religion, nor did he get Ben’s visceral revulsion for homosexuality. They became friends because they were starved for intelligent company. They talked science. Or Ben would describe episodes of his Edenic childhood, and PJ couldn’t help envying what sounded to him like an ideal family life. Time began to loom large. A year passed. The federal trial was drawing to a close.
Even though some of Ben’s letters and drawings reflect strict Christian Identity beliefs, PJ is adamant that Ben’s beliefs were free-form and more diverse and, most interesting, that they were changing. Ben talked and wrote about American Indian spirituality, Druidic religion, even Wicca. Similar references had appeared in the old pamphlet “Optimum Health and Longevity.” Ben’s hatred of homosexuality itself may have been wearing thin. One wonders whether his beliefs weren’t supremely incoherent all along. He may always have been too impatient to let his beliefs gel before inspiration became action. Or maybe his beliefs were fundamentally exterior to him: a book, a mentor, a father, a mother. Those of us hoping to figure it all out may be trying to attribute logic to notions of honor, self, and world as wild as love. But PJ claims that prison was changing Ben to the core. He says at the end Ben didn’t even consider himself Christian.
And while he acknowledges the irony that the worst homophobes do sometimes turn out to be gay, PJ says simply, “Ben wasn’t gay.” The idea that he was came up because it always comes up. It strikes some people as perversely fitting.
That old hiking friend from the Palouse, Dan Martin, also gave the idea a boost. In the early months after the crimes and before dropping out of sight, Martin gave an interview to the gay magazine the Advocate. The article reports that Matthew (as he was known in Idaho) went skinny-dipping and wrote poetry with his best friend, who later turned out to be gay. “You do the math,” the article suggested.
Both the Bee reporter Sam Stanton and Jeff Monroe to this day wonder whether Matthew was confused about his sexuality. Both mentioned it to me. But Stanton and Monroe are straight. For them, there’s a vengeful neatness to the story if Matthew/Ben was gay. And Dan Martin, who is gay, probably always saw his friend through a lens of fondness. Also, he was remembering a time when his own sexuality wasn’t clear to him. Nothing but hope or innuendo says Ben was gay. He wasn’t. However upsetting the realization—and we’re right to be upset, because this is an authentic instance of hatred that can’t be psychologized away—an idea of what’s right, not simple emotion, caused him to kill.
According to PJ the subject was in the air from the start. Both were up for the death penalty, and soon they started talking about escape.
The jail was beginning to show its age. In addition to revamping the air-conditioning system, authorities were making other improvements. A catwalk had been added to the second tier of the ad-seg “pod,” 3C. A secure door was placed right in front of the upstairs shower. From there, the catwalk led to the “mod,” the control area for corrections officers. With the new catwalk built, officers had direct access to both levels of the pod and wouldn’t have to climb the stairs inside the housing unit to reach the upper tier.
In any ad hoc design, compromises are made. It was hard for observant prisoners not to notice that the new catwalk leading to the mod also led right to an exterior window over the jail’s garage. If you could get through the secure door, somehow get past security cameras, somehow break the window, somehow get safely down to the garage roof, then to the street . . . That was the plan.
PJ tells me Ben was impatient. He seemed to think all they needed to do was get into the mod. Then everything would work out. PJ was more cautious. They had to study the mod schedules and weather reports. There’s a hint of wistfulness in PJ’s description of their planned route. They meant to use side roads to drive up to the Oregon/Nevada/California border. They’d go in summer, because winter wouldn’t allow for easy movement. Still, they’d have to watch for good weather throughout Idaho and up into Canada. They decided the smart, counterintuitive destination would be someplace remote, not a densely populated area. Behind the plan one can almost hear Ben’s romantic descriptions of the wilds around Ruby Ridge, his dreams of freedom and solitude in nature. PJ says he kept having to rein in Ben’s impulsiveness.
The plan involved a classic element of prison breaks—the rope of sheets knotted together. Late one evening Ben was allowed out of his cell for a shower. He stuffed his clothes on top of the sheet rope in a paper bag and got into the shower wearing only briefs. He didn’t shower. He waited past the time he was due back in his cell. Another inmate, Harold Seems, was up for the next shower. PJ assures me Seems took a shower with Ben standing right there the whole time. But Seems later testified that he was in his cell when he heard the following whispered exchange as Ben and PJ walked past:
PJ: Have you got it?
Ben: Yeah.
PJ: We’re going to have to kill him.
Ben: As quick as we can.
(Seems had to overhear that neatly self-incriminating conversation through a heavy cell door and before the supposed murder weapon was even made, though “it” could refer to a drain cover. The court didn’t put too much stress on this part of his testimony.)
At that hour, the jail’s main-floor control room was manned, but only individual “prowlers” walked though the pods from time to time, making sure prisoners were where they were supposed to be, handing out medications, or escorting inmates from place to place. According to the deputy in the control room, PJ was let out of his cell between eleven fifty p.m. and one fifteen a.m. At that point he was given extra time to take
a shower. So after about quarter past one, Ben and PJ were hiding in the shower together.
There, in wild silence, using his outdoorsman’s skills, Ben fashioned a unique tool or weapon to break the window or assault a deputy. A six-inch perforated drain cover had been unscrewed from the floor of his cell but left in place until tonight. A haft was constructed out of rolled paper stiffened with old bars of soap and ballpoint pen refills. Ben folded this around the drain cover, making sure the ends were long enough to provide for a good handle. Using lengths of torn sheet, he sewed the haft to the grill of the drain cover and wrapped the handle tightly. He had to be careful to make the haft secure. Only the curved edge of the drain cover showed past his elaborate weave of knots and ragged stitches. PJ describes him in the shower sewing in feverish haste. The result was a kind of tomahawk. I’ve seen a photograph of it, bloodied.
The prowler that night was a new guy, the unlucky Timothy Renault, who, incredibly, had had another inmate escape on him two weeks before. Renault was tall, slender, jug-eared. He was only twenty-three and probably still fretting about the coming investigation into the escape. Ben and PJ pressed themselves against the steel walls of the shower. The shower curtain was transparent but so thick and scratched and filmy it was opaque in the shadow. They couldn’t see Renault, but they could hear the catwalk door buzz open a mere three feet away. They recognized him by his voice when he keyed the mic at his shoulder to tell control that he’d left the mod. They let him pass. He wasn’t the usual guy—too slender, and the plan was to have PJ put on the uniform in case cameras could see them after they bluffed their way into the mod. (As it turned out, the light was so low that cameras wouldn’t have made anything out.)
As Renault walked past the cells, he glanced through the tall, narrow windows in each purple-painted door. A letter-sized envelope was wedged in the window frame of Williams’s cell, and it looked like the light inside was draped. Renault peered in. It appeared somebody was in the bed. Two envelopes blocked the window of PJ’s cell, but someone appeared to be under the blanket in that bed too. The envelopes were a common trick to block light from outside so inmates could sleep.
Ben and PJ let Renault pass a second time. By the third round, it was clear there was no one else to choose. They could hear a tapping from nearby. That would be the cell right next to the shower. It belonged to Harold Seems. Renault’s footsteps stopped. He went back past the shower and approached Seems’s cell in answer to the tapping. They heard the young deputy ask a question.
Seems later testified that he was at his cell’s window, frantic. He gestured toward the mod door. “Get out of here! Get out of here!”
When the situation registered, Renault spun around and made for the mod door. The shower curtain flew open. PJ ran to block the door. He saw Renault key the mic at his shoulder just as the first blow came from behind. PJ and Ben wrestled the deputy down.
Already PJ realized it was too late. He figured Ben hadn’t heard the crackle of the mic. He watched his friend chopping in a fury. The radio popped to life asking for a repeat. Still, Ben went on chopping, as if completely possessed by the need to make this work. He and Renault wrestled. The drain-cover blade thudded on bone and clanged against the concrete floor. Lubricated by blood, Renault’s hands and boots skated along the floor. According to PJ, Ben’s briefs and body were covered with blood. He was a cannibal nightmare, pre-Colombian, pre-Christian, pre-everything.
PJ could hear the elevator now. He knew escape was a lost cause and hurried away from the scene along the upper tier. When the first deputies burst in and spotted him, he raised his hands. A deputy testified that he immediately said, “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t have anything to do with this. I didn’t do anything.”
Ben had nearly killed Renault. The young man’s skull was fractured in several places, his eye socket and jaw and a tooth were broken. Intracranial bleeding could have injured his brain or caused death. Nine pieces of titanium had to be fitted into his skull to repair the damage. PJ tells me Ben probably thought the deputy would go down with a single blow like on TV. The expectation fits with Ben’s dreamy way of seeing the world. Maybe they both thought it would work, but their experiences with murder had been different. PJ knew murder could be hard. When he’d killed, it had been a grueling and horrific act. Ben’s murders had been unwontedly easy. He may well have believed—envisioned how—this would be as simple as a scene in Braveheart. When reality disappointed him this time, he never recovered.
After the failed escape, PJ was sent to High Desert State Prison. Ben remained in ad-seg and became despondent. It’s unlikely that he regretted the attack on Renault. He was as blind as ever to the lives of people around him. But failure itself may have eaten away at him. He wrote in a letter that he felt God had abandoned him because the escape hadn’t succeeded.
Ben’s amoral religiosity, as well as his image of a disappointed God, inevitably recall his father. Three years earlier, during that first pretrial hearing, the reporter Sam Stanton had peered over the elder Ben Williams’s shoulder as the courtroom listened to the scratchy recording of his wife’s initial prison conversation with their son. Stanton told me how he’d seen the old man taking notes on three-by-five cards. “No critical thinking!” he wrote energetically, marking the exclamation point with a punch. Exactly like his son, he was an unforgiving judge.
Now more than ever, Ben experienced loneliness, disregard, and hopelessness. His world was his cell. The painted cinder-block walls, the ledge of a bed spanning the whole cell’s width, another ledge for a table, a fluorescent light fixture with no on/off switch, a stainless steel console with a tiny sink on top and a seatless toilet angled from the corner. That was it. The prowler started bringing him Klonopin (clonazepam), a sometimes habit-forming antianxiety medication.
The attack on Renault was an open-and-shut case. The state got the entire arrest/trial/conviction out of the way before the Matson and Mowder capital murder case even began. On Halloween, October 31, 2002, Ben was convicted of the attempted murder of Timothy Renault. He was due to be sentenced December 2 and was facing life in prison. He’d already gotten thirty years for arson in federal court. The Matson and Mowder trial was scheduled to begin December 10. In that one, Ben was facing death.
Now Ben becomes invisible for a moment as if a crucial scene’s been snipped out. Who knows what he was thinking? It’s tempting to imagine a sense of responsibility was beginning to leak through the massive dikes of his mind. But it’s easier to believe his agony was as uncomprehending as ever. A kind of ecstatic self-pity. For the purposes of a story he needs to come to, wake up at least for a moment. But sometimes a splendid pointlessness floods imagined constructs like stories. Nothing ends the right way. We just back off. The protagonist comes to appear as small and mute as a guppy struggling on the floor beside its tank. History or Story are overwhelmed by the eternal drone of Nature.
Ben was about to undergo some tests—a brain scan, among others—in connection with his defense in the upcoming Matson and Mowder trial, though he can’t have felt there was much point in any defense now. For the brain scan he was abruptly ordered off Klonopin on November 7. Withdrawal from Klonopin can be hard for some people, but Ben had nine days to adjust.
Happiness almost always feels contingent or tentative, but despair carries a kind of certitude, even if you try to tell yourself it’s only a chemical thing (not the kind of reassurance that would have occurred to Ben Williams anyway). November 16 was a Saturday. Ben spent the evening reading the Bible in bed. He was last observed at one thirty a.m. When he set his Bible on the ledge table, he left it open to the 22nd Psalm, the most abject of all the Psalms of David:
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? . . .
But I am a worm, and no man;
a reproach of men, and despised of the people.
All they that see me laugh me to scorn:
they shoot out the lip, they shake the head saying,
He trusted on the LORD t
hat he would deliver him:
let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him . . .
Ben had crafted his last tool. He’d broken the flexible blade from a plastic razor. He remounted it with string between a pair of ballpoint pen refills. Because it was hard to handle, he tied the blade to his wrist to give it traction for cutting.
He was naked except for the jail-issue tangerine briefs. I imagine he was so inclined to nakedness because our natural state reminded him of Eden. He wore an amulet on dental floss around his neck, a silver dollar–sized package of tin foil containing two Bible verses, a seed, a tiny piece of soap, and a crumb of chocolate.
He stuffed cardboard under the cell door. He spread his blanket behind the stainless steel sink/toilet console. He sat on the floor with his back against it—the only place in the cell where you were a little hidden from the window. He cut himself, beginning with his arm, leg, or neck—who knows?
The blade was hard to manipulate. It was narrow. It wasn’t easy to cut deeply. He seems to have made several attempts to get at the carotid artery in his neck, but muscle and tendon probably writhed under the pressure of the blade. He drew long slices up his arm. The surface veins bled for a while, but the flow kept trailing off. He may have cut himself twenty or thirty times by now. He’d lost a lot of blood. He would be cold, trembling with chills, queasy, dizzy. He would be starting to go into shock. But he was still awake.
It’s impossible to know if any thoughts or images broke through. Does a suicide grieve for himself or the world? Here he was, naked and covered in sticky blood again, his own this time, not Renault’s. Was that a kind of atonement? Was this punishment or self-sacrifice?
Soon he’d cut himself forty or fifty times. Because he was in shock and the nerves of his skin were starved for blood, the cutting likely hurt much less. He pressed an inch deep where he could, but he was trembling badly. He kept at it.
American Honor Killings Page 7