Within These Walls (13 page)

THE WOLF AND HIS SHEEP

By Dani Dervalis,
The Seattle Times
staff reporter

Published November 18, 1983

All eyes are on Olympia as the case of cult leader Jeffrey Halcomb begins proceedings in Washington State Supreme Court today. The story of the massacre that occurred in Pier Pointe, Washington, in March of this year has been nothing short of a media frenzy. Halcomb’s face, as well as those of Audra Snow and the group the media has referred to as “Halcomb’s Faithful,” seem to permanently shine from our television screens. But who is Jeffrey Halcomb? Where did he come from, and how was one man able to talk a group of intelligent, vibrant young adults into taking their own lives?

“Jeffrey led our congregation out in Veldt, Kansas,” says forty-five-year-old Mira Ellison. Ellison, who now resides in Topeka, recalls her youth in the tiny hamlet. “It was small. A few thousand people. Jeffrey’s father was a pastor.” The Gate of Heaven Church was founded by Protestant Gregory Halcomb in 1939. Three years later, Jeffrey Halcomb would be born to sixteen-year-old Helen Halcomb (née Stoneridge). Gregory Halcomb was forty-three at the time of his son’s birth.

The Gate of Heaven Church wasn’t the only house of worship in Veldt at the time. “My mother said there was a big confrontation,” Ellison recalls. “Pastor Halcomb was dead set on running the original church out of town. Something
about the opposing pastor being a blasphemer. I was young, so I don’t remember the details too well.”

But Ellison does remember meeting Jeffrey Halcomb for the first time. “He’d run up and down the center aisle during his daddy’s sermons. Everyone loved Jeffrey. People said that God had blessed him, being born to the pastor and all. Helen [Halcomb] was also gifted, so they all just assumed Jeffrey would absorb all that enlightenment from his folks.”

Helen was raised Protestant in Veldt. The older Gregory Halcomb was smitten before she reached the age of thirteen. “In Veldt, everyone ran in the same circles. Helen was entranced by the idea of marriage as much as she was by the idea of going to heaven. When she broke into tongues during Pastor Halcomb’s sermons, you could see Gregory watching her, fascinated. They were just enamored with each other.”

Helen Halcomb had the habit of tumbling out of her church pew and convulsing at the foot of the pulpit. “Nobody would intervene,” says Ellison. “The adults saw it as God working through her, delivering a message, but to us kids it was downright scary.”

That message from God, the congregation agreed, came in the form of a baby. When Jeffrey Halcomb was born in November 1942, the Gate of Heaven rejoiced.

“He was leading sermons by the time he was eight or nine,” Ellison recalls. “When he hit his teens, Pastor [Gregory] Halcomb handed over the reins. They called him ‘the Child Prophet.’ After word got out, people came from all over Kansas. We had to start having church outside on the lawn. Pastor Halcomb told folks that his son was the Lamb of God, that he’d usher in the second coming of Christ. It wasn’t long before Jeffrey started preaching about his own
divination. My momma used to say that he only did it to make his sermons more powerful, but it seemed to me like [Jeffrey] believed it himself.”

Why, then, did Halcomb not stay in Kansas, where he was so revered? “He started convincing the younger kids that he could bring them back from the dead,” Ellison says. “Rumor was that a local boy tried to kill himself after Jeffrey said he could pull him back from the other side, but we never did find out who that boy was. That didn’t matter. [Veldt] turned on Jeffrey. His own father ended up excommunicating him, calling out the devil and such. Pastor [Gregory] Halcomb made him get down on his knees in front of the entire congregation and whipped him with a rod. There had been stories about how Pastor Halcomb used to beat Jeffrey bloody whenever he thought the boy had sinned. When he did it in front of the church, he said each lash stood for a year of deception, said that Satan had tricked him into believing his son was the Lamb.”

Jeffrey Halcomb disappeared from the tightly knit Veldt community after his excommunication. He had just turned seventeen. “Most everyone in Veldt was glad, too,” Ellison says. “By then, everyone was right scared of their kids dying because Jeffrey said he could bring them back. When, at a spring picnic, someone asked Helen where Jeffrey had gone to, she went pale and said that he’d gone back to hell.”

There were, however, those who didn’t take so well to Jeffrey Halcomb’s excommunication. “Lots of people had come down from all over to listen to Jeffrey preach, and lots of people really did believe he was doing God’s work. So when Veldt told [Jeffrey] he had to go, some of those who came from far away weren’t happy at all about it. Jeffrey was real
charismatic,” says Ellison. “Lots of the young girls fell for him. I remember, after Pastor Halcomb announced that Jeff was gone and not coming back, some of them started wailing like they’d just seen someone die. A few of them demanded the pastor reveal where Jeff had gone to. Those girls were determined to find him, to follow him out to wherever he had gone.”

Jeffrey Halcomb left Veldt for San Francisco, arriving sometime in the summer of 1959. There, he held a few odd jobs bagging groceries and helping to organize protests in the Haight-Ashbury district. “He seemed like a good guy,” says Trevor Donovan, the head organizer of a peace group called California Change. “He didn’t participate in our group for long, but all the girls dug him. I think he went down to L.A. He was nomadic. You can’t pin a guy like that down.”

In Los Angeles, Susanna Clausen-King—a drifter—states that she spent a few nights with Halcomb on a beach outside of San Diego in the mid-sixties. “I was hitching, got picked up by a dude in a VW bus, and Jeff was in the back. I remember him because he had a face you don’t forget. Real pretty. But he had some weird ideals. I split after he started yammering about how everyone deserves a clean slate, how you should forget your past, something like that. He said his pop exiled him, said he was something like the new age Jesus.”

Janessa Morgan, mother of Laura Morgan, tries to keep her composure as she speaks about her daughter over the phone. “When I saw Laura’s photo on TV, I thought I was losing my mind.” This past March, at the time of Laura’s suicide, she had been nineteen years old. “She was a free spirit. She wasn’t a runaway like any of those other kids. She left
Boulder in search of adventure, said she wanted to see California. She’d been saving up her money to get out of town, and when she graduated from high school, I told her to be careful and sent her on her way. She was a straight-A student, a really good girl. She wrote me a few letters, but not once did she mention [Halcomb]. A few weeks after her letters stopped, I contacted the police, but they told me she was an adult. They weren’t going to go searching for a girl who was ‘on vacation.’ ” That vacation began in the summer of 1980, only weeks after fiery-haired Laura had graduated as valedictorian of her class. At the time of her death, Janessa Morgan hadn’t heard from her daughter in nearly two years.

Other than Laura Morgan’s mother, none of the families of Halcomb’s brood would come forward to comment.

One parent, however, did not need to speak with
The Seattle Times
to shed light on just how cunning Jeffrey Halcomb was. Washington congressman Terrance Snow (R) lost his only daughter, Audra, on that fateful March afternoon. While Halcomb refuses to reveal any information about why he or his followers had been staying at Congressman Snow’s beachside home, police are confident that they had been residing there for at least a few months. While Halcomb may have lost his congregation in Veldt, it’s clear that he was actively seeking members to share in his own faith-based views, and Audra Snow—a pretty and affluent young socialite—gave up everything under Halcomb’s sway.

The Jeffrey Halcomb trial will be lengthy, with the prosecution seeking a charge of ten counts of first-degree murder. “It’s one thing to convince some people to follow you,” Ellison says. “It’s another to kill a baby the way he did. I hope he gets what he deserves.”

17

W
HEN LUCAS ARRIVED
back in Pier Pointe, Mark had parked his car in the driveway beside the U-Haul truck. The scent of freshly baked cherry pie hit him as soon as he stepped through the door. It should have been comforting, but it only made him feel more edgy. The fruity chemical scent of Selma’s air freshener still coated the back of his throat.

Selma and Mark were in the kitchen. Jeanie, on the other hand, was nowhere in sight. Lucas stalked across the living room, trying to shake off the thwarting feeling of defeat, but it was tough. His foul mood was poisoning him from the inside out, tainting his blood, making him grit his teeth. All he wanted to do right then was throw himself into his desk chair and sit in a dark and quiet room. He didn’t want to talk, to
deal
with anyone. Why Mark felt the need to drive down to the house when Selma was already there was baffling. Like the guy had nothing to do but drive back and forth between Seattle and Pier Pointe. Like he had all the money in the world to burn on gas. Like Lucas really wanted to stare at Mark and his pretty girlfriend because it
wasn’t
a cruel reminder of the things he’d lost.
Christ,
he thought.
I don’t need this right now.
He wanted to tell them to go.

But rather than kicking his best friend out, he forced a smile when Selma peeked out of the kitchen with a look of surprise.

“You’re home early,” she said. “Everything go okay?”

Lucas stepped over to the breakfast table, then slouched in his seat. Mark raised an inquisitive eyebrow at him from across the room. He was leaning against the counter, a plate full of cherry pie balanced in his left hand, a fork in his right. Lucas tossed his messenger bag onto the chair next to him and pushed his fingers through his hair.

“Want a slice?” Selma asked.

No, he didn’t. The mere scent of it was cloying.

“Sure.” He ignored the knot in his stomach, tried to push the fact that he was totally screwed out of his mind. “Where’s Jeanie?”

Selma handed him a plate. “Upstairs. We took the truck to the grocery store to pick up a few things, and she looked just about ready to fall asleep in the cereal aisle. I don’t think she slept.”

Lucas slid his plate of pie onto the table, untouched. “She woke me up last night,” he murmured. “Thought she was dying.”

“Dying?” Selma looked alarmed.

“Obviously an overexaggeration on her part. She thought she had a brain aneurysm.”

Mark snorted through his nose, then took another bite of his pie.

“She’s got this . . . thing,” Lucas said, waving a hand over his head.

“A WebMD thing,” Mark clarified.

Selma’s expression only grew more concerned.

“You guys should have taken her to the hospital,” she said, giving Mark a stern look. Mark blinked, suddenly caught in her crosshairs. “What if something had happened? She could have gone to sleep and never woken up.”

“She’s
fine
,” Mark insisted. “Alive and well.”

“Right.” Selma rolled her eyes. “And she’s
not
fine. I hardly even recognized her this morning. How long has she been dressing like that?”

“A few months,” Lucas said. “Six at the most.”

“Do you think that’s something to be concerned about?”

“Oh my God.” Mark slid his plate onto the kitchen counter and pushed off.

“What?” Selma frowned at them both.

“You sound like my grandmother, that’s what—a stereotypical old-world Italian.”

“I’m not trying to suggest that she’s into something she shouldn’t be into,” Selma said, focusing her attention on Lucas, trying her best to ignore Mark’s disparaging comparison. “But we saw you guys not that long ago. Last summer, right? It’s just such a drastic change and a little disconcerting. I just have this feeling.”

“Of what?” Lucas asked.

“I guess it’s just this sense of . . . almost fear?”

“Fear. Huh.” He peered down at his pie. If Jeanie was afraid, they were in the same boat, because Lucas was
terrified.
This whole thing—the house, Washington—was supposed to make everything better. But then a guy sitting in a prison cell snapped his fingers and everything was worse.
Snap.
Here’s hope for the future.
Snap.
Never mind.

“I heard about you and Caroline.”

Selma’s voice suddenly grated on his nerves. His aggravation began to bubble again, threatening to spill over in an ugly, angry tirade that neither she nor Mark deserved.
So what?
he thought.
You heard about me and Caroline. So fucking what?
That was the thing with friends; the moment a major disaster struck, they didn’t know when to keep their mouths shut. They always wanted to help, always wanted to talk it out.

“Great.” He continued to peer at the table, trying to keep his frustration in check.

“I don’t mean to pry, Lou, you know that,” Selma said. “I just thought that maybe . . .”

“Maybe it’s my fault, right?” His gaze darted up to her face. Selma blanched at the razor edge in his voice.

“It’s not your fault,” Mark cut in. “She wasn’t saying that.” He gave his girlfriend a hard glance.

“I wasn’t saying that,” Selma verified. “Lou, I swear.”

“Hey, it’s fine.” Lucas lifted a single shoulder and let it slump a second later. “Why shouldn’t it be my fault, right? I screwed up my kid. I screwed up my marriage. I screwed up my fucking
life
. We don’t need to beat around the bush.” He smirked, shook his head. “After all, we’re all friends here.”

The kitchen went silent.

Lucas stared down at his hands, imagining that both Mark and Selma had vanished, leaving him to stew in his own pissed-off misery.

No such luck.

“What happened at Lambert?” Mark asked.

The question set his teeth on edge. “The fucking guy stood me up.”

“Why? What was his reason?”

“He doesn’t
need
a reason.” Lucas felt his lip curl over his teeth. “You can talk a bunch of people into suicide by poisoning, but don’t worry: your right to privacy will stay intact.”

“What bullshit,” Mark scoffed. “Leave it to the system. You going to try again?”

“What choice do I have? I mean, other than digging my own grave around the back of the house.”

“You’ve got
nothing
?”

“Not anything a person with half a brain and an Internet connection can’t find on their own in old articles and reports. There are a couple of guards at Lambert Correctional that may be able to help, but the guy I talked to seemed kind of reluctant. I’m guessing they can only tell me so much before losing their jobs. What am I supposed to offer them in compensation? A thank-you in the acknowledgments, a sorry-I-got-you-fired?”

Mark frowned at the floor. Selma chewed on her bottom lip,
then gave both men a pained sort of smile. “I think I’m going to head back.”

“Okay, I’ll see you at home,” Mark told her. She leaned into him and gave him a quick kiss before crossing the kitchen, stopping just shy of Lucas’s chair.

“Everything is going to work out.” She gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Come out to the city soon?”

“We will,” Lucas said. “Thanks for the car.”

“Of course.” She gave him a wink, gathered her things, and stepped across the living room to the front door.

She left Lucas and Mark in silence. The clattering of Mark’s plate scraping against the bottom of the sink punctuated the quiet.

Eventually, Mark cleared his throat and leaned against the counter again.

“So, I’m going to ask you this once,” he said.

Lucas glanced up, apprehensive. “Oh, here it comes,” he murmured.

“Well, if you’d offer up some information now and again . . .” Mark countered.

“Offer up what?”

“This house. What’s the story? This isn’t what I think it is, is it?”

“Which is what?” Lucas was playing dumb, but he knew exactly what Mark was getting at.

Mark sighed. “You know how you said that any idiot with an Internet connection could look this stuff up? Well, guess what.” He tapped his chest. “This idiot has an Internet connection and looked it up. I put in the address, found articles about a congressman and his kid, found out that kid was . . .” He paused, shot a look toward the living room, lowered his voice so that Jeanie wouldn’t hear. “. . . that some satanic cult slashed the kid up.
In this very house
, Lou. And, surprise surprise, the dude in charge is now sitting in Lambert, asking you, and only you, to take a meeting with him.”

Lucas said nothing.

“
God,
Lou. Is that what you meant when you said you had a deal out here? You agreed to live in his house of fucking horrors?”

“It’s a house, Mark. It’s got walls and a floor. It’s just a place to live in.”

“Right. Like Amityville was just a house.”

“Amityville was a hoax.”

“So you’re saying you don’t believe in any of that stuff?” Mark asked. “Not a single shred of belief in your whole entire body? Because you might want to mention that to Jeanie. I went upstairs to see what she was doing, and you know what I found?”

“A girl with a black eye?”

“Books,” Mark said flatly. “A lot of books about shit twelve-year-old girls don’t normally focus on. Parapsychology? Ghosts? She had them spread all over her bed.”

“Lots of kids read about ghosts.”

“She’s got things bookmarked—she’s in deeper than you think. If Jeanie finds out what this house is . . .”

“But she isn’t going to find out, is she?”

Mark held up his hands in surrender. “I’m just saying, you’ve gotten yourself into some crazy shit here. I love you like a brother, Lou. But I have to tell you, there’s something intrinsically
fucked up
about what you’re doing here. And now, with this guy standing you up the way he did. What was the deal—that you’d live here in exchange for him talking to you about what happened?”

Lucas nodded.

“Then why would he stand you up? It doesn’t make sense. I mean, something’s not right.”

“You know what’s not right?” Lucas’s agitation breached the levy of self-control. He rose from his seat, pushed the chair away a little too hard. “Where my life has gone. Your life isn’t my life, okay? If I haven’t
lost it yet, I’m in the process of losing it and everything I care about. Remember how that feels? I didn’t know what the fuck else to do.”

“But how does
this
make sense?” Mark asked, his tone steady, undeterred by his best friend’s outburst.

“Because it’s the only plan I have,” Lucas said. “I saw an opportunity and I took it, and now things have changed and I don’t know what any of it means. But I don’t have the cash to turn it around, and I’m all out of ideas for material. I’m going to lose my kid, Mark. Caroline, I mean, I wish I could fix that . . . I’m going to do everything I can. But at the end of the day, it isn’t Caroline I give a shit about—it’s the fact that if I lose Caroline, I lose Jeanie, too.”

Mark pushed his fingers through his hair, then shook his head as if not sure what to say anymore. After a moment, he spoke. “Give me the truck keys.”

“What?”

“The keys to the moving truck. Give them to me.”

Lucas grabbed the keys off the kitchen table and arced them through the air toward Mark’s awaiting hand.

“I’m going to pick up your car for you. You keep mine.” He tossed his own keys back at Lucas. “We’ll trade when you come up for dinner. And maybe you should consider staying with us—if this place gets too heavy, I mean.”

Lucas nodded.

“I still think this whole thing is crazy,” Mark said.

“Maybe it is,” Lucas replied. “But normal isn’t going to fix this.”

“I guess you’re right,” Mark said. “I mean, normal never was your thing.”