The Cokeville Miracle

by Hartt

  While the hostages were being identified and treated, as swiftly and carefully as their situations permitted, everyone still had their minds on what the lawmen and investigators were finding in Room 4. The only question of any importance was who was still inside.

  As lawmen, firemen, and EMTs picked through the room rubble, their minds were on this question. The first impression was that of total shambles. While the walls were still upright, much of the ceiling tile had blown out. Debris was everywhere, and everything was black, except for one white patch on the east wall about the size of a human figure with its arms partially outstretched. In the smoke-stained wreckage, this area stood out sharply. It was speculated that the blast had spent its force on some person, most likely Doris Young, leaving the wall area behind that person unseared. But Doris had been in the center of the room. The mystery remained unsolved.

  As they worked, searchers continued to be amazed at the destruction in the room. The estimated property damage was later placed at $50,000. With so much destroyed, how had anyone escaped alive, let alone the number of people who did?

  Patrolman Anderson kept his mind focused on the task, moving slowly and methodically through everything on the floor. Yet every backpack or abandoned jacket made his heart jump. Was he coming now to the body of a child?

  Finally, the lawmen and their cosearchers turned over the last bit of flotsam, examined next to and under the last bit of broken furniture large enough to shield a body, and investigated the far reaches of the last closet. Only then did they dare believe the unbelievable—there were no bodies in the room. Every one of the hostages had gotten out alive.

  The good news raced through town, turning what had been dreadful hours of pressure and uncertainty into relief, gratitude, and tears, all to be shared with neighbors and friends, more than likely in the same position themselves. The official investigation was barely underway, but lawmen could now turn to the work ahead with confidence in their professionalism without the fury and pain they expected to feel as soon as they heard the bomb explode.

  Their first task was getting rid of the leftover ammunition. The cartridges had already spent themselves by exploding in the heat of the fire inside Room 4. Some of the blasting caps, however, had not detonated, and these were quickly taken care of in specially designed bomb-disposal canisters in a nearby field. David’s arsenal of rifles and other guns, no longer a threat to anyone, was taken into evidence.

  Whatever remained of the bomb was the next object of investigation. Explosives expert Richard Haskell from Rock Springs, Wyoming, was put in charge. A member of the Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office, he had become familiar with bomb design during military service and during his years as a lawman. The deadman’s bomb used by David Young was a familiar type.

  As he dismantled the remains of the device, however, Richard found something strange. The two wires that were to detonate two blasting caps and fill the air with exploding gunpowder, were severed, cut cleanly as if snipped with wire cutters. When the battery current could not reach these two caps, there was no power to spray their contents into the room, particularly the aluminum dust, which was supposed to increase the incendiary potential of the air when the bomb went off.

  Further, Haskell found that leakage in the plastic jug David used to contain the gasoline component of the bomb had created a partial paste of the granules that were supposed to become airborne at detonation. The bomb had been designed to kill everyone in the room, Haskell concluded, but in those two ways alone it had been prevented from working as David intended. Had the blast occurred as David originally designed it, Haskell said, it “would have caused an explosion caving in the walls and blowing up everything in the room.”

  In time, official investigations would reveal more unusual aspects to the entire incident, but at the moment, it was the children who began to make statements their parents found remarkable, to say the least.

  Seven-year-old Katie Walker told her fourteen-year-old brother, Shane, the first family member she saw after running from the explosion, “They saved us. I said a prayer, and they saved us!”

  “Who saved you?” Shane asked.

  “The angels,” she replied.

  Katie saw her mother, Glenna Walker, the recently certified EMT, a few minutes later. “Mommy,” Katie repeated, “the angels saved us!”

  Glenna patted her daughter on the head. “Yes, we all have much to be grateful for, dear,” she said, holding her close.

  Glenna did not realize that her daughter wanted to be taken literally. Even though Katie’s sister, Rachel, was being treated for burns at the hospital, Rachel and Katie and Travis had all come through their ordeal alive and Glenna hoped they would soon no longer need to talk about the takeover. The children, however, wanted to talk about it.

  Dr. Vern Cox was one of the psychologists brought in to help the town work through the fears and feelings generated by David Young’s attack. Along with other families in Cokeville, Kevin and Glenna joined the group and individual discussions intended to provide this help. At one of these meetings, Katie and Rachel told Dr. Cox that they had tried to talk with their parents about the angels who had saved them. Their brother Travis also had something serious on his mind. Dr. Cox told their parents what the children had been telling him.

  “Why haven’t they been telling us, their own parents?” Glenna asked.

  “Have you been listening to them?” he asked her. “Really listening?”

  Glenna realized that perhaps they hadn’t. She and Kevin arranged a time when the whole family could talk.

  “They were standing there above us,” Katie began. “There was a mother and a father and a lady holding a tiny baby, and a little girl with long hair. There was a family of people. The woman told us the bomb was going off soon and to listen to our brother. He was going to come over and tell us what to do.”

  “She said to be sure we did what he told us,” Rachel added.

  “They were all dressed in white, bright like a light bulb but brighter around the face,” Katie told her mother.

  “The girl had a long dress,” Rachel nodded, “which covered her feet, and she had light brown hair.” The two girls spoke quietly but firmly about people who had certainly not been among the hostage group in Room 4. There was no apology or self-consciousness. The people they described seemed as real to them as their own parents, who were listening attentively now. Rachel remembered something else—that the figures dressed in white standing above them had moved around to another part of the room just before the bomb went off.

  Some time later, my wife and I met with the Walkers to ask them about their roles as EMTs during the hostage crisis. At that visit, their children’s unique comments were mentioned. We asked permission to discuss their experiences with them. Glenna and Kevin were understandably reluctant to subject their children to the scrutiny of others about something personal and sacred, even if those people knew and cared about them. But Katie had a different idea. “The woman made me feel good. I knew she loved me. I want to talk about it.” Rachel and Travis agreed.

  Accordingly, on December 28, 1986, we went to the Walkers, taking our son Kamron and daughter Cindy with us. After the children played together for a while, we asked Travis what he had seen and whether he could describe it to us. “I didn’t see anything—nothing,” he emphasized. “I just heard a voice. It told me to find my little sisters and take them over by the window and keep them there. I did what I was told. I looked around and found them and told them to follow me over by the window.”

  He seemed absorbed. I had known Travis for five years and had never seen him look that serious before. “I told them to stay there and not move,” he said.

  “Did they respond?” I asked.

  “They were playing with their friends, and I didn’t think they would want to leave them. I knew they had to come with me. They got their coloring pages and I took them over by the windows.”

  “Did they stay right there?” my wife asked.
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br />   Both girls quickly said “Yes.”

  “But,” Travis continued, “I didn’t stay there with them. I was also told to help them through the window when the bomb went off. And I went back over with the other boys where I had been, by the door—”

  Glenna interrupted and explained that Travis had told Dr. Cox earlier “how terribly guilty he felt—that he had not been by the windows with his sisters when the bomb exploded.” There was a long silence.

  “I should have gone over by the window with my sisters. That’s what I was told to do. I didn’t do it.”

  Glenna told us there was no consolation for Travis in the weeks following the hostage crisis. He did not sleep well for a while, she said. “I have never seen him so upset.”

  The girls seemed content to discuss their experience at length. They remembered details vividly. Referring to the people they had seen, they were asked, “How did they come into the room? Was it through the main door or the door by the bathroom?”

  “Through the ceiling,” both girls said at once.

  “Where were they standing?”

  Katie held her hand about two feet off the ground, just below her waist. “They were about this high off the ground.”

  “Could you see all of them, their entire bodies?”

  Rachel nodded, then said, as though deep in thought, “Except for the little girl. She had a long white dress. I couldn’t see her feet.”

  “Was there any color at all in the clothing they wore?”

  Rachel shook her head. “They were all dressed in white.”

  Kevin suggested looking at some old photos of family members, both living and deceased. Katie did not require a lengthy look as she picked up an old picture in a locket. She didn’t talk for a moment, but studied it as if enjoying a happy memory. Then, “She looked like this, only she didn’t wear glasses.”

  Rachel, who had been out of the room briefly, came back in and looked at the photo herself. “That’s the angel! But without the glasses,” she said emphatically.

  Shirley Ruth Thornock, the woman in the picture, was Glenna’s mother, who had died when Glenna was only sixteen. “My mother never lived to know my family,” Glenna said.

  Another photo, this one of Kevin’s brother who died in 1961, “looked like” the man who was with the “family of angels,” the girls said. But they hadn’t looked at him that day as closely as the woman who was doing the talking. They couldn’t be sure. There was no explanation for the others mentioned in the group. The girls had never seen nor known any of the others they described, including the little girl with the long brown hair.

  I had to ask the traditional question: “Did they have wings?”

  “No!” the two girls said without hesitation. “They looked like we do, but all dressed in white,” Rachel said.

  “Did she smile at you?” I asked, referring to the “angel mother.”

  Katie pondered the question. “She sort of smiled at me with her voice.”

  “Did she make you feel you were going to be safe?”

  “She said we would be,” Rachel replied, “if we did what our brother told us.”

  We turned to Travis. “Travis, did you feel that you would be protected when the bomb went off?”

  “I knew, somehow, we would be if I followed directions. When I heard the explosion, I just forgot about part of what I was supposed to do. I was so close to the hallway, it was easy to get out there. . . . It was a minute later when I thought about my sisters.”

  “Were all the angels there when the bomb went off?” Kevin asked his daughters.

  “I don’t know,” Rachel replied. “The smoke from the bomb covered them up.”

  It was getting close to the little girls’ bedtime. We had talked together for more than an hour on a subject both sensitive and unusual.

  The Walkers expressed their own feelings about what their children had reported. Glenna said, “The children know it happened, and they want to share it. They feel they have a responsibility to share it so others can benefit from it. What others do with their experiences or feelings is up to them.”

  Kevin pointed out, “It was the children’s decision. They stand behind it. We stand behind them. Where would we be—where would any of us be—without the courage to testify of such a spiritual happening?”

  Other children, apart from the Walker three, spoke of “messengers” who appeared to them as well. Some families decided it was too personal a matter to put on record. One mother said some people would not comprehend what the children were saying or know what to do with the information. Several other parents said their children gave specific details of someone they didn’t know appearing to them in the hostage room. These families specifically requested that their names not be used.

  One child who was willing to share his spiritual experience in surviving the takeover was six-year-old Nathan Hartley. Nathan was sitting near the taped line before the bomb detonated. He told his father, veteran sheriff’s investigator Ron Hartley, what he saw.

  “The lady helped me get out alive,” he reported.

  “I’ve been through it all with hours of interrogating suspects and prisoners,” Hartley said. “I’m especially trained to detect lying or manipulative answers for personal gain. I asked some more questions.”

  The first grader continued, “A lady told me the bomb was going to go off very soon. She told me how to save myself. She said to go over by the window, then hurry out when I heard the bomb explode. She told me that I would make it if I did exactly what she said.” Nathan said he had never seen the woman before.

  As the Walkers had, Ron Hartley leafed through the family album with his son. At one page, Nathan stopped his father. “That’s her,” he explained abruptly. It was a picture of Flossie Elliott, Nathan’s great-grandmother. She had been dead for three years.

  In January 1987, Nathan drew a picture of the way it had been. It shows a bright angel over the head of Doris. The stick figures in front represent the students—he didn’t see an angel over David’s head (see Appendix IX for the drawing). Did the Hartleys feel any concern about relating their son’s unique experience? “It happened,” Mrs. Hartley said. “I’d rather face people now than explain, either here or in the next life, why we didn’t say something about it,” she emphasized. “We can’t back down from personal convictions.”

  Three weeks after the takeover, Nathan wrote down specifics of his experience. “Just before the bombs went off,” he wrote, “angels came down through the ceiling. They were bright like light bulbs. There were about ten of them holding hands around the children to protect them.” One of the angels “told me the bomb was going to go off. . . . All the angels told us to run to the windows when the bomb went off. I was just getting ready to run to the window when it went off.”

  Later, he wrote, “What I saw was that there were robe-clad people by almost everyone. I looked around and saw that some were floating in the air. I suddenly realized that these people were angels. I looked toward the taped square and saw an angel high above Doris Young. It seemed as if the angel were about to leave.”

  Years later, when asked about the unique vision, he described it as a “special and sacred experience. . . . For those who want to be benefited by it, that is what happened.”

  Eva Clark was intrigued with the sensations she had felt while a prisoner of David Young. “I was scared,” she said with no reservations. “I was really scared. He had made sure we adults understood that he would not hesitate to shoot us. I was sure we were going to die. For about an hour and a half, time seemed to drag by, if not stand still altogether. But the last hour or so, after praying over and over, [I felt] entirely different. I felt peace. I knew we would make it.”

  Eva also spoke feelingly of the statements made by the children. “Everyone involved in the investigation of David Young’s bomb knows something strange and unexplainable happened. No one has any plausible idea at all how the children safely escaped. I think it is time to listen to them,
the hostage children themselves, and let them tell us the reason they all survived. We can label it ‘divine intervention’ or whatever we want. Whatever we call it, many of these explanations from the children help everything fit together better.”

  Two other adults found themselves greatly affected by their hostage experience: Rocky Moore and Jack Mitchell. Moore had long joked that he would believe in a God only when he saw his personal “burning bush.” He had used the expression every time he needed to avoid a discussion of spiritual things. Now, he wanted to talk about spiritual things. At a high school football game that took place several months after the crisis, someone asked Rocky, “What was it that saved you from the bomb?”

  “I’ll tell you what happened,” he told his questioner. “God was looking out for His kids.”

  “And you were saved because you were with them?” a bystander asked.

  “Exactly,” Rocky replied.

  “Did you see your burning bush, Rocky?” a child who had been one of the hostages asked.

  “You bet I did!” the teacher nearly shouted. “That’s enough for me or anybody. And don’t you forget it!”

  After falling from the classroom escape window, Rocky carried his sprained arm around in a sling. Once mended, he seemed as feisty as ever but almost contentedly ecstatic with memories of the experience. “I don’t see,” he said at one point, “how there could be any more atheists left in this country.”

  His former fellow agnostic Jack Mitchell made his change of heart unmistakably clear. In a statement repeated in three different interviews made over several weeks’ time, he stated, “I know this; there is no other explanation for what happened. It was divine intervention. A higher power stepped in. We could do nothing for ourselves. There were prayers answered in there. I’ll never doubt the power of prayer again.”

  It would perhaps be easy to discount the hostage children’s accounts because of their age, their willingness to please, or their need to make sense of a terrible ordeal by investing it with some eternal significance. It would be equally easy to discount their parents’ support because parents are not sufficiently objective to properly judge, or because it’s not always possible to determine whether your children are a bit confused, innocently playacting, or actually telling noncollusive lies. And it might be easy to discount sheriff’s investigator Hartley’s professional approach to his son’s reported experience because, just by being the boy’s father, his detachment might be questioned.