By that time, Emory Lamb had closed the general store in order to focus on the Ministry of F.O.U., which had begun to take on the cultlike characteristics of tithing its flock and supplementing its overhead by parasitically farming out the labor of its female members: Lamb’s wife and daughter were now both waiting tables at the Ozark Cafe in Jasper, and soon so was Kate Haigler, and the three women turned all the money they earned there over to the Ministry of F.O.U. Keith continued to drive around Northwest Arkansas distributing pamphlets and putting up posters. When they were not proselytizing or working, Lamb conscripted Keith and Kate into the urgently important labor of building chest-high pyramids of rocks on his property, constellated in mystical Stonehengesque rings about twenty feet in diameter. (Many of the pyramids are still there, and you can check them out yourself if you’re ever in Jasper—just ask the locals for directions to Fou’s old place.)

  Keith started counting the 1,260 days that the witnesses would prophesy on January 21, 1979. That meant that the day when they would have finished their testimony, when the beast shall ascendeth out of the bottomless pit and make war against them, and overcome them, and kill them, was to be July 3, 1982. (After which their dead bodies shall lie in the street for three and a half days, whereupon the spirit of life from God shall enter into them, and they shall stand upon their feet, and great fear shall fall upon those who see them.) These are the same numerological schemes the Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, Inc., was drawing from: 1,260 is the Jewish lunar calendar of 360 days multiplied by 3.5, half of the mystical number seven; the prophetic seed “a time, times and half a time” planted in the Book of Daniel bears fruit in Revelation.

  In June 1982, with the three and a half years of testimony almost up, Keith and Kate journeyed again back to California, this time to Los Angeles, to NBC Studios. From 1979 to 1984, NBC ran a program called Real People, a kind of proto–­reality TV show whereon the hosts would interview “real people” (as opposed to celebrities) with quirky hobbies or unusual occupations in front of a live studio audience. It was a popular show, and people with goofy, eccentric personalities played well on it; among other notables, Richard Simmons’s appearance on the show launched his career as a fitness guru. Keith and Kate Haigler intended to go on the show and tell the world about the coming apocalypse foretold in Revelation, which would begin with their violent deaths in Jasper, Arkansas, on July 3. Whoever was working the front desk of whatever office lobby at NBC Studios Keith and Kate somehow managed to muscle their way into succeeded in turning them away without bothering any higher-ups about it. Oh, well. Keith and Kate turned around and drove back to Arkansas.

  At eight thirty on the morning of July 3, 1982, Keith and Kate Haigler boarded Continental Trailways bus 22303 at Union Station in Little Rock, Arkansas, with .22- and .38-caliber handguns concealed in their clothes. The bus was bound for Wichita, Kansas, with stops along the way in Conway, Harrison, Branson, Springfield, and Joplin. At about noon, as they neared the small town of St. Joe on Arkansas State Highway 65, Keith Haigler moved to the front of the bus, put the muzzle of his pistol against the temple of driver Bill Carney—who had his eight-year-old son, Kore, riding on the seat behind him that day—and ordered him to turn off on Highway 123 and drive the bus to Jasper. While Keith held a gun to the bus driver’s head, Kate stood up in the aisle, pulled out her pistol, and ordered all of the other passengers to move to the back of the bus.

  Toward the end of the forty-minute diverted ride to Jasper, a seventy-seven-year-old woman on board had a minor heart attack, which threw an unexpected stick between the spokes of their plan. Once they got to Jasper, Keith ordered Carney to park the bus sideways across the bridge along State Route 7 over the Little Buffalo River, a tributary of the Buffalo that runs through Jasper, blocking traffic in both directions. Once the bus was parked across the bridge, Keith ordered James Murray, an able-bodied forty-year-old man on the bus, to carry the elderly woman who’d had a heart attack to a nearby motel, call an ambulance for her, and then return to the bus. He did. Once Murray was back on the bus, Keith took an envelope from the inner chest pocket of his motorcycle vest, handed it to Carney, and instructed him to go to Newton County Courthouse in the middle of the town square—the building is within sight of the bridge over the Little Buffalo, less than a five-minute walk—and deliver the letter to Sheriff Ray Watkins. Bill asked to take his son with him, and Keith allowed him to do so. Bill took the envelope from Keith, took his son by the hand, and walked with him from the bridge into Jasper’s town square. On his way to the courthouse, he glanced inside the Ozark Cafe across the street and saw a uniformed police officer inside. It was Sheriff’s Deputy Richard Russman, in the middle of eating lunch with his wife, Newton County’s emergency dispatcher. Bill and his son went into the restaurant, explained the situation to Russman—that his bus had been hijacked by two people with guns who were holding the passengers hostage—and gave him the sealed envelope Keith had given him, on the outside of which was scrawled in pencil, “For Sheriff Ray Watkins.” Deputy Russman radioed the State Police for backup and ran across the street to the courthouse, where he called Ray, who at that moment was at home a few miles outside town, fixing his bathroom sink.

  Ray Watkins had officially served as the sheriff of Newton County for almost four years, but during the six years before that, under Hurchal Fowler’s tenure, he had been the only full-time law enforcement officer in Newton County who regularly enforced the law, and the only one with any official training. Hurchal had been a road grader operator before he had run for sheriff; the reason why he’d done so was that he was already the local chairman of the Democratic Party, which held a Tammany Hall–­like power grip on Arkansas politics for a long time. The party that Bill Clinton had risen up in was a daisy-chain network of handshakes in smoky back rooms that began in Little Rock and radiated out to rural counties like Newton; the Machiavellian skullduggery was in fact much more nakedly in operation in such places, where the entire government might constitute only a handful of people—fewer knowers of secrets, no whistleblowers—and all the official positions, including judges, prosecutors, and sheriffs, were elected ones. The party had pressured Hurchal Fowler to run for Newton County sheriff back in 1972 because he was a known and trusted entity, a loyal Democrat, and already a party official. The only reason Hurchal had wanted to be sheriff was because the Sheriff’s Office collected the county taxes, as well as all the legal fines and so on, which meant he could make money on the side from the interest the county coffer would collect before he had to turn it over to the state.

  “That money all went to the sheriff,” Ray Watkins told me. “He had control of it. It all went into a bank account and collected interest on that money. And we collected nearly a million dollars in taxes each year, and we didn’t have to pay [it to the state] until the following March or something like that, five or six months later, after they got finished collecting taxes. So you could make pretty good money with just the money you had in the bank.”

  “So you would collect all the taxes,” I said, “let it sit in the bank account and accrue a bunch of interest—and then the sheriff could just pocket that interest?”

  “Yes,” said Ray, “because there was no legal statutes or anything saying what they had to do with the interest money. The only thing it said was, you’ll collect the taxes and then on a certain date, whatever that date was, you would pay in what you collected on the taxes.”

  Ray had already been serving as a part-time deputy under the previous sheriff, Toot Wagner, and after Hurchal beat Toot in the 1972 election, he asked Ray to take the job of full-time officer. “He told me,” Ray said, “‘I’ll take care of the taxes, and you’ll take care of the law enforcement.’ ” So during the next six years, Ray did most of the actual work of law enforcement in Newton County, while Hurchal focused on delivering the county for the Democrats and skimming the interest money off the taxes. In 1978, when Ray ran uncontested for the job he’d pretty much unofficially already been doing for six years, he also ran as a Democrat, which was typically the main qualification for the position as far as Little Rock was concerned, but he was much less of a party apparatchik than Hurchal had been. Hurchal had been pressured to run for sheriff because he was a Democrat, whereas Ray ran as a Democrat because he wanted to be the sheriff. Ray is still proud of the fact that at the end of his first term in 1982, the Democratic Party, apparently displeased with his insufficient loyalty, ran another candidate against him for sheriff, Jerry Jones, who beat him in the primary, but in the general election in November, Ray won a second term as an independent write-in candidate, beating Jones by twenty-three votes.

  I should make it clear that I’m not trying to paint Ray Watkins as a Gary Cooper in High Noon sort of figure, the lone man of principle facing down a corrupt system. The sheriff’s departments in these rural counties of the Ozarks were notorious for corruption back then, and even the most honest cops couldn’t afford to fight against it all the time; it behooved them to work within it to varying degrees, depending on the situation. The suspicious selectivity with which rural sheriffs chose to enforce drug laws was the stuff of legend among the men who wound up behind bars in Arkansas in the 1970s and ’80s. The mountainous and lightly populated counties of the Ozarks—Madison, Carroll, Boone, Marion, Searcy, and Newton—were a hotbed of illegal marijuana farming; they had a reputation as the Humboldt of the South, and on college campuses across Dixieland strains of grass from northern Arkansas were nicknamed “Krazo” (“Ozark” spelled backward) and “Razorbud.” Much of the police corruption involved classic Mafia-style collusion between organized crime and law enforcement, kickbacks and bribery and so on. Just eight months before the unfolding of this particular afternoon of insanity on the bridge over the Little Buffalo River, there had been a bubble-pop of political controversy concerning Haroldean Lepel, a biologist who had been assigned by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission to manage the large swath of recently acquired government land—the Buffalo National River Wilderness and the Upper Buffalo Wilderness—more and more of which was coming under federal protection as private inholders’ grace periods were ending and they were being squeezed out. Lepel was technically a sort of cop, and he wasn’t from around those parts; he was an outsider and a somewhat naive man who assumed that part of his job was to call the State Police—i.e., not the local sheriff—whenever, in the line of his official duties studying fish populations and things like that, he discovered something indisputably illegal, such as a large marijuana farm—which he discovered fairly often. In August 1980, Lepel led State Police to one of those illegal pot farms near Richland Creek; the following night, he got a threatening phone call from an unidentified man. “The caller said I’d made people mad and that I should have gone about my job and left people alone,” he told the Northwest Arkansas Times. “He said people were mad enough to kill me and had contracted to have me killed. Then he said I would soon be having some bad luck, and he just wanted me to know where it was coming from.” He had been busting pot farms without paying attention to whose pot farms they were. Some pot farms are fine to bust—it’s the law, in fact—whereas others . . . well, Newton County is a small place where everybody knows everybody. Some people are friends with or related to the sheriff or judges or the circuit prosecutor, and some people may have slipped someone a gift in wink-wink assurance that what a man does with water and sunshine and the dirt on his own private property is none of anybody’s damn business. Some of those people even vote in local elections, as do their friends and relations, and in a county with a population of less than seven thousand, every vote really, really counts—and if the people in the smaller places that the people in the bigger places know they can work with are voted out and replaced with unknown entities, that could negatively impact things down in Little Rock. Some locals were not happy with Haroldean Lepel’s Goody Two-shoes approach to blindly administering justice. Phone calls were made, and the chain rattled from the bottom to the top and then back down again: In October 1981, Lepel got a call from his boss at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission notifying him that he would immediately be transferred to Drew County, way down in the southwest corner of the state, where there aren’t any marijuana farms because every spare acre of that area is nice wet flat arable land that has been planted in cotton and rice for generations.

  Well, there are no heroes and villains in real life—at any rate, no one is a hero all the time or a villain all the time. But it is true that on the afternoon of July 3, 1982, Ray Watkins was a hero to fourteen innocent people who had boarded a Continental Trailways bus from Little Rock to Wichita that morning.

  Over the phone, Deputy Richard Russman quickly briefed Sheriff Ray Watkins on the situation, and Ray—who, like Hurchal Fowler before him, did not wear a uniform—pinned his brass star to his short-sleeved plaid shirt, buckled on his gun and holster, and sped down to the Route 7 bridge over the Little Buffalo River, where by now several other police cars had formed blockades at safe distances on either side of the bridge and busy preholiday traffic was stacking up behind them on both sides of the river. No one had yet attempted to communicate with anyone on the bus, which was parked sideways across both lanes in the middle of the bridge. The hijackers/kidnappers had specifically asked for Sheriff Ray Watkins by name, and everyone was waiting for him.

  It was early afternoon on a cloudless day at the height of summer, with the sun at its zenith, the light harsh on the baking concrete bridge, the shadows short and sharp, the temperature around 90 degrees Fahren­heit. As Ray walked out onto the bridge alone, he realized that he recognized the two people standing in the open doorway of the bus: “Baby Fou,” as Keith Haigler was known around town, and that pretty young beach bunny of a wife he’d brought back from California, Kate. Again, everybody in Newton County knows everybody. Those two colorful wingnuts were hard to miss, and for the past couple of years Kate had been waiting tables at the Ozark Cafe, the social heart of Jasper. When he came within earshot, Keith—attired per usual in biker cosplay: motorcycle vest, leather Harley cap, jeans and cowboy boots, and (not per usual) holding a .22 pistol—leaned forward against the door frame of the bus and said to Ray, “Afternoon, sir. You want to take that weapon off so we can talk?”

  Ray shrugged, took the Colt Python out of the holster at his hip, held it out at arm’s length so they could see it, walked back to his car parked at the police barricade, put the gun in the car, shut the door, and walked back out across the bridge to the bus unarmed.

  “Look, Ray,” Keith said when he returned. “We don’t want to hurt anyone. We just want to get our message out.”

  “Okay,” said Ray. “What’s your message?”

  “It’s all in the letter,” said Keith.

  Ray didn’t know what he was talking about. Deputy Russman had forgotten to mention it. There ensued a brief, confusing conversation in which Ray kept telling Keith that he needed to let the passengers off the bus before they could talk, and Keith kept telling Ray to read the letter he’d addressed to him.

  Ray walked back to the barricade of cop cars, saying that Keith was talking about some sort of letter he was supposed to read. A cartoon lightbulb dinged above Deputy Russman’s head; he apologized for forgetting, fished the folded-in-half envelope addressed to Ray out of his pocket, and handed it to its intended recipient. Ray opened the envelope and unfolded the handwritten letter inside. It read:

  The world is to know the messiah is here. Contact KY3 News Reporter Jim Caldwell or Jerry Adams and have them come to Jasper for coverage. You have two hours to accomplish this. After two hours, we will shoot one person every half hour until this demand is met. If any attempts are made to come close to the bus, we have the dynamite to blow it apart.

  We are the witnesses spoken of in Revelation Chapter 11. After we are killed this afternoon, our dead bodies are not to be tampered with, embalmed or any other means of society’s funeral rites. The bodies are to be taken to the land of the Messiah, Emory Lamb, whereupon they will lie until July 7, when the spirit of life will enter into them and we will stand on our feet. This demand must be met, or Jasper will be destroyed. Once again, it is not our wish to hurt anyone.

  Sincerely, with the kindest of thoughts,

  Keith FOU Haigler and Kate FOU Haigler

  KY3 News is a local TV news outlet based in Springfield, Missouri, covering northern Arkansas and southern Missouri, and Jim Caldwell and Jerry Adams were two of its most frequent on-the-scene anchors at the time. Ray gave Russman the okay to go ahead and call them, and Russman went back to the courthouse, found the number for KY3 in the Rolodex in the court clerk’s office, called the station, and after a few baton passes managed to get ahold of Jim Caldwell at his home in Springfield. Caldwell was enjoying a day off after reporting for ten days straight, but the bizarreness of the situation on the bridge down in Jasper and the fact that the apparent religious nutcase gunman had specifically requested him by name was certainly enough to get him out of the house. He made a few calls, and within the hour he and a cameraman were snipping across the rolling Ozark Mountains in a KY3 News helicopter headed for Jasper.

  While the helicopter was on its way, Ray kept talking with Keith on the bridge. Throughout most of the afternoon, he was standing right outside the bus, and Keith and Kate were leaning against the doorway, sitting in the driver’s seat, or crouched on the steps at the front of the bus. Keith had been living in the area for the past six years and was no recluse. Keith and Ray knew each other well enough to have a friendly conversation, in spite of the circumstances. Ray remembers Keith telling him that he’d voted for him in the primary he had recently lost to the more reliably party-loyal guy the Democrats had run to replace him, Jerry Jones, and telling him that he was sorry Ray had lost. That summer—before he won as a write-in candidate—Ray felt he was almost certainly a lame duck with half a year left on the job; he was then sketching plans to reopen his auto repair business come January.*

 

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