“It’s just us out here,” said Mike. “Whether we survive or fail is left up to us. We could do everything right, and one dip in the temperatures that we aren’t ready for—like last year’s 27 degrees below—and we’ve lost an entire crop.”

Mike Appel and Emily Oakley bought the farm—six-plus acres of farmland in Oaks, about an hour east of Tulsa on Oklahoma 412. A wooden barn, an ancient spring cellar, and a forlorn 1920s farmhouse came with the purchase of the land. The couple tore down walls in the home to make a living room, added a second bathroom onto an old mud porch, ripped up linoleum and carpet, and busted a hole into the attic to make more living space.

“We looked at probably over 150 different properties before we bought this one,” Emily said. “The house was in rough shape—it didn’t have any interior doors, heat, air conditioning—but the land was perfect for organic farming.”

The couple raises kale, strawberries, green beans, spinach, and anything else the soil and the weather allows. They stretch the April-to-October market season with a succession planting process. Meaning, as one bunch of carrots becomes ready for the dinner table, another row is planted. As they plant carrots, they harvest carrots; they plant some, they harvest some, and so on.

“A lot of people think it can’t be done,” Emily said. “People were telling us, ‘You won’t make it here with this soil. You can’t be organic and grow fruits and vegetables in Oklahoma and make money at it.’ But eight years later, here we are, making a living at it together.”

They alone run their business and work the land throughout the 115-degree summers, pulling weeds, hoeing rows and corralling their two dogs and three cats out of the greenhouse. There are no workers, no grad students to help out, and no easy fixes.

The way on and off the farm is over a makeshift bridge of twin steel I-beams. Once crossed, it’s over an hour back to Tulsa and suburbia, where most of the produce is found under fluorescent lighting and cellophane wrapping. At least until April, when Mike, Emily, and 70 other vendors will provide tender piles of produce at the Cherry Street Farmer’s Market, and bring the farm back into the city.

They waited to kiss one another until they were standing at the altar. Instead of the standard luxury cars medical doctors often sport, Kris drives a 10-year-old black truck—a gift from his father-in-law—and Nicole a five-year-old gray sedan. Nicole gave up her profession and her paycheck in order to stay at home with their son, Riah.

“I didn’t quit my job as an R.N. directly because of Riah. I enjoyed nursing a lot,” she said. “It was financially a hard decision at the time. But with everything that was going on—dealing with Postpartum depression, working full time, learning to be a mother—it was the best decision for us.”

The couple is accustomed to making hard decisions together. They’ve chosen to do without while they stick to a three-year plan to pay off Kris’ medical student loans, bucking the trend of a 30-year plan most doctors assume. When they’re debt free, they plan to move to Africa, India, or anywhere that will have them, to practice medicine and help the poor. They aren’t fixated on any one country or even what job. Just “not someplace nice or easy.”

“It’s what I was meant to do,” said Kris. “It’s what we were meant to do together, as a family. Nicole is so adventurous. We went to Africa while she was pregnant with Riah. She’s sitting in the car, bouncing around on these back roads with her belly, and smiling. She’s up for anything, and she’s incredibly strong. That’s what I love about her.”

“Kris loves to volunteer. That’s sort of how we got together. He volunteered one night to help me put the chairs up on the table at the coffee shop that I was working at, so I could sweep,” Nicole said. “But, sometimes he volunteers a little too much, and we have to talk about that. He makes good decisions and that’s why I can trust him to make decisions for our family.”

Their family is about to get bigger. Nicole is 33 weeks pregnant with a baby girl—the second of six children they plan to have—and probably the last to be born in the states.

Kris practices family medicine at In His Image in Tulsa. He and Nicole have been married for five years and live in West Tulsa.

Kathy loved to cook. She’d been doing it every day since she was 13, when her mother became too sick for kitchen duty. She was brought up to think that a way to a man’s heart is through his stomach—“It was very important to know how to cook, and for the ones you love to enjoy your cooking,” she remembered.

But as she listened to the familiar voice on the other end of the line—the voice that had been part of her life since she started dating her husband, Steve, the self-appointed Leon Russell archivist who’d had the idea for this birthday bash concert for which she hadn’t thought twice about cooking a feast—her mind reeled. She grew up to be a dental assistant, a cheerleading coach, a wife, a mother. It was spring, 1986, and she was talking to Leon Russell on her home phone in south Tulsa. His request was ringing in her ears. She did a mental search of a recipe for a dish that she’d never made, nor even considered eating. But he knew exactly what he wanted: Steamed mussels. A dish for which the Tulsa-raised Lawton native had acquired a taste during his time in California, she guessed. “Whatever he would have chosen, I would have figured out a way to do it,” Kathy said.

Kathy’s not much for seafood—even now, she rarely cooks what swims. She got her recipe from a chef at Bodean’s and returned the next morning for her mussels, as many of the palm-print-shaped bivalves as she thought a man could eat. It was almost more than Kathy could handle, standing at her kitchen sink, using her fingertips to rip the beards from the live animals concealed inside the smooth, black shells—“That was one of the grossest things I’ve ever done in my life,” Kathy said. She popped them into a steaming broth of butter and herbs, and they sighed and opened under the lid of her big stockpot.

Kathy enlisted her mother to help her cook Leon his dinner and feed his crew before the show (except for Leon—he never eats until after he performs). The duo conspired on a slew of dishes, created Thanksgiving-style, Kathy and her mother doing most of the preparation the day before the concert and rising early to finish the cooking. The trip to deliver the mussels to the bus in the parking lot at Brady Theater was the last of the many Kathy had taken that day, sustaining the crew on a steady rotation of chicken, potatoes, Texas lasagna, Bixby corn, and broccoli casserole, served up in Crock Pots.

When Steve and Kathy moved to Texas, they opted to hire a caterer for Leon’s birthday bashes, putting in orders for barbeque at Wilson’s and the now-defunct Pampered Pig (Leon loves barbecue, Kathy said). The desserts were the exception—she even flew from Dallas to Tulsa with a homemade chocolate tunnel cake on her lap once. Her mother made Leon banana pudding, cooked the old-fashioned way on the stove, none of that instant stuff. She’d slice the bananas paper thin, which she’d tell her daughter was the secret to the whole thing. On top was a cloud of hand-whipped cream, already six inches deep before that crowning moment.

She couldn’t bring herself to wrestle a mussel for even one taste before she schlepped the dish across town in her Chrysler minivan. She wanted to serve Leon herself, “to make sure everything was fine, that it tasted like it should.” She boarded the bus and made her way to where Leon was waiting, making sure not to spill the broth that shimmered like the walls of those shells. In the darkness, she tripped. The liquid sloshed onto Leon’s shirt and into his lap.

He was startled at first, Kathy said, “but he kept telling me, ‘It’s going to be fine.’ ” He ate them all up, her husband likes to report— “we almost had to hose him down afterwards.” She never made steamed mussels again.

“Cardiology” by Niklaus Faith

One.
Heart melts into ink.
Burns in the Arctic eternal night.
Melts snow to drips.

One.
Drip drips down manicured lawns. Fills thirsty, floral bellies.
Absorbs light.

One.
Day I’ll move this tower of stone.
And launch your brain into space.
Children of your children will sail past
Oh          so           slow.

One.
Child will spend his Weekends in a brothel in Spain.
The year of Our Lord one-thousand nine-hundred and thirty-three.
He will drink port and smoke French cigarettes.

One.
Cigarette will burn down a forest.
Give your legacy cancer.
Cause the heart to quicken her tempo.

Two hearts, glued together. . . .

Thunder growls through glistening teeth,
Exploring sonic sea-scapes. . . .
One low rumble.

Oh, One.
Bug dead on the moving sidewalk at O’Hare.
Brief images from the grandiose life it led. How vast.
One bug heart, and mine, and yours.

Nicklaus Faith is a self-described “homegrown Okie” whose poetry has appeared at The Curbstone Collective, a literary blog.

“Keep a tight grip on your cameras, and stay aware,” the guide said as he walked toward the nomads with a confident stride. “Don’t wander off alone.”

The ragged children crept to the edge and waited for the mothers with their rustling streams of bright silk and clanging bracelets. As news of the Americans drifted around the thatched zupadas and curled up the footpaths toward the temporary stable, the men lifted from their naps and tucked away their country-made liquor. Within minutes, the welcome party swarmed with Bollywood smiles and clumsy intentions, bumping change loose from purses and slipping tiny fingers into pockets. The children giggled and posed, then held out two hands for payment. An ink pen. A packet of gum. Rupees, please. Namaste. Around the corner, a mother pounded dough on a rock while the little girl ducked and laughed in a peek-a-boo game with a stranger. So innocent. So quaint. So surprising when the child faked a cry and helped her mother demand money for broken eyeglasses, the same ones stolen from one of us just minutes ago.

The men pressed tighter, offered murky bottles of Desi sharab and grew bold with affection.

“Let’s go,” the guide said. “Hurry.”

The Banjaras weren’t eager for the party to end so they scrambled to capture some memory of the visit. A hair clip. A hat. Almost a shoe. When the final vehicle door closed, a boy clung to the side of the machine taking the visitors away.

“You can’t go,” the guide told him. “You have to stay home.”

There are few true nomads in this world any more. Even the gypsies of India are settling down. The government would rather pay them to stay in a roadside village than deal with them stealing their way across a vast desert. Maybe, tourists will one day stop at the gypsy camp, trade coins for photographs and leave not so empty-handed. Perhaps. The business plan has a few flaws. First up, someone needs to explain that you can look like a gypsy, sing like a gypsy, dance like a gypsy, but not steal like a gypsy. It’s a lot of give and only a little take in this game of cultural exchange. If I were a Banjara, I’d hit the road and never look back on Gypsyland. I’ve crossed paths with many gypsies, tramps, and a handful of thieves in my travels. The encounters always make me feel a bit more adventurous and bold. People back home love to hear stories darkened by a little danger. Tossing the word “gypsy” into party conversation breaks a lot of ice. I’ve traveled with people who can’t imagine giving a gypsy even a moment of their day, but I love it when I brush up against a country’s underbelly.

On a busy sidewalk in St. Petersburg, Russia, I watched a band of young gypsies juggle and skip around a clapping crowd filled with good thoughts of these jingle-jangle free spirits. Thirty minutes later, I nodded as we met them down the street, and they smiled back then linked arms and bumped into our friends, dislodging a camera and whisking it quickly out of sight. The police came, and there was a lot of waving and shouting by our Russian friend, who spent the next three days cussing gypsies, homeless people, and folks who were just wearing ugly clothes.

Last year in Paris, a dark-haired teen strolled by me on a bridge, then turned and asked if I had lost a gold ring. She insisted we keep it in case we found the owner, who surely was English because it was sooooo expensive. It took her only a few steps to turn back and ask for money because, after all, she was giving us a valuable gift. Oh, and she needed tea and a pastry at the Internet cafe. She would call the police, she said. We had her ring. I knew of the dropped ring or coin or necklace ploy so, when we refused to take the bait, she whirled around and stomped across the bridge to find another victim.

You can dream a hundred dreams of a flutter-fly life where each day dawns on a fresh land and each night nestles against the unknown. You can flit around the world now and then until it’s time to come back to your cocoon and release the stories of your gypsy ways. Deep down, you know it’s just a magical masquerade, a gossamer ruse borne on the wings of a passport and a suitcase.

Blakely’s role at the shop was installing Merz’s stellar graphic designs on signs, walls, and vehicles. He says he never saw anyone knocks the socks off of clients like Joe.

“Personally, I think what makes a good designer is the ability to sit down and listen to a customer. You have to figure out what the customer is actually telling you and what they’re trying to tell you, which is especially hard if they only give you four or five reference points to work from. Somehow, Joe knew how to turn that conversation into a beautiful piece every time. He was always busy, always in demand, and the client always needed their designs yesterday. Somehow, he kept up.”

Merz’s talents were entirely self-taught, giving him a competitive edge over more classically trained designers. When he passed away suddenly last May, Meeks interviewed endless candidates to fill his position, but found that Merz’s black boots were big shoes to fill.

“Joe never took any classes or anything, and what he taught himself was amazing. It became difficult to fill the orders that he would usually fill, so we were always jumping through hoops to get it done. We met with people who had been through college and all this impressive training, but they just weren’t up to his speed. I would say he was a graphics genius.”

Over the past two years of working together—Merz was at another shop for many years before Meeks bought them out—Blakely and Merz often filled the long working hours with conversations of his other intense passions: blood and beer.

“He loved horror movies, and would go on about titles I had never heard of. He knew them all, and used to talk about the ones he saw with his daughter. And he was a big McNellie’s fan, and would always tell me about their last Pint Night, when they would bring out different beers from all over the world. He was definitely a beer-taster, and got pretty excited for that.”

Merz worked as a graphic designer for more than seven years, until he died in a single-vehicle accident, having lost control of his motorcycle.

“It devastated all of us,” Blakely said. “I remember that it was a Sunday when I found out. It’s still tough to this day. We see cars all the time riding around the streets of Tulsa that he designed and worked so hard on. I always think, There goes Joe Merz.”

The day I went, a crowd filled the gallery, all of us still in our church clothes. We squinted to sharpen the details in the hand-penned lyrics, journals, and photos there, selected from nearly 3,000 song lyrics, 500 photographs, and 700 pieces of artwork, letters, and postcards, captured, saved, and catalogued in spite of a whirlwind life, shining out at us then from behind Plexiglass. In the same room they’d put letters to the Guthries from President Kennedy and John Lennon and Nora’s copies of Bound for Glory in languages like German, Swedish, and Japanese alongside the things that prove Woody Guthrie was actually a man, a robust one while he lived, a decrepit one when he died. All of it was set forth in the same way, under spots of dim light, behind glass, in temperature-controlled boxes.

One of the things pulled from the archives was the only known handwritten copy of “This Land Is Your Land,” written in black ink on a sheet of three-hole notebook paper, signed with Woody’s iconic signature. The song had originally been penned with the title “God Blessed America,” but why be limited by the words of the same guy who wrote the song, “There’s No Business Like Show Business?” Woody had taken a pencil and crossed out those words by Irving Berlin, unnaturally straight as a former sign maker would, replacing it with the line our nation took as its unofficial anthem. Behind an asterisk at the bottom of the page he wrote: “All you can write is what you see”

His May-Bell guitar was in the corner, propped up behind glass with its case, opened, lined in purple felt, with his name and a scroll carved by hand above the soundhole. A collection of 13 postcards Woody sent home to family hung in a frame on the wall, one of them to Marjorie signed “All of Me” in Woody’s perfect cursive, another with a line of squatty music notes sketched in the margins. One had an alligator on the front, his mouth open wide; on the back was a note to Arlo, explaining that if he’d give the reptile a peanut, his belly wouldn’t feel so hungry; on another was a polar bear, playing a guitar doodled in by Guthrie. There was the shirt issued to him at Greystone Park State Hospital, small like a child’s, almost see–through and hovering on a transparent hanger. In a nearby display is a pencil case he sent to Marjorie in 1951. He’d begun to show signs of Huntington’s, the disease that would hospitalize him and leave him unable to write, to draw, to focus his eyes, until his death almost 20 years later. Inside Guthrie had written the words, “MOMMY FIX DADDY.”

The observations from the gallery were mixed:

“He’d write on anything and everything.”

“Man, he moved all over the place didn’t he?”

“Where’s Okemah?”

We’d all stood to learn something. Outside, I tried to decide as I walked to my car whether or not a man, who had asked during a quiet moment in the gallery, “Is he dead?” had meant Woody. A woman had cooed in amusement, but I don’t know, maybe that wasn’t such a dumb question, since we, the Oklahomans, decided just recently that he ever lived.

It’s as if those first three lines had been wired into my brain. As if they’d always been there, since the first flutter of consciousness. The rest of the lines were extraneous. What more could one need after the rousing excess of that famous opening, followed by the later self-soothing appraisal, “You’re doin’ fine.” Not great, not good, just fine. I always found comfort in that lack of pretension.

I fixed midway between a soundless mouthing and a whisper. The lines didn’t hold up under the restraint. “O.K.” especially needed volume and emphasis. I stopped after three sotto voce renditions. I rolled down the window and leaned my head out. It would have sounded great out there. How loud, I wondered, would I have to shout “O.K.” into the wind for it to have the necessary brio. My mother’s voice was sharp, “Robbie, get your head back in. And roll that window up. Now.” I slid back in the seat. I didn’t take “Roll that window up” literally but more as another way of saying, “Don’t do it again.” I had no intention of doing it again. I formed my mouth silently around the words, exaggerating my facial expressions for drama. I kept it up until we reached the next town, which is when my father turned the car around.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of six volumes of poetry, most recently, The Bride of E and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in St. Louis and teaches at Washington University.

He’s on the cover. A shirtless skinny young man sits crossed legged with his left knee drawn up toward his body and cradled in his left arm. He is perched on an unmade bed with plain white sheets tousled in the background. With a subtle smirk on his face, he grips a 32/20 revolver in his right hand and loosely points it upward. There is a cool steadiness to his demeanor with an undertone of wild rebellion. The photo is reminiscent of James Dean’s bad boy in Rebel Without a Cause, but the man in the photo is no actor. I scour the picture with a magnifying glass, desperate for any detail that might reveal something about the man. He is wearing a wedding ring. The picture must have been taken before 1964, unless he continued to wear his wedding ring after the death of his wife, which is unlikely. If the photo were taken around 1964, it would make the man’s age close to 20. His name was Billy Joe Mann, born in 1943, the same year as his friend, Larry Clark. Billy Mann, iconic cover boy of Tulsa, was my father.

Larry Clark is a Tulsa native, and a controversial photographer, writer, film director, and producer. Drugs, teenage sex, and violence are reoccurring themes in his work. Some of his film titles include Kids (1995), Bully (2001), and Ken Park (2002). Clark’s first success, Tulsa (1971) is a black and white pictorial of the drug scene in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Larry photographed his friends shooting drugs over a period between 1962 and 1971, but Larry wasn’t just an innocent bystander, he indulged in shooting drugs too. The book was raw and disturbing, especially for the time. The pictorial exploits the recklessness of youth, the turning point of naivety, and the utter abandonment of self-respect. It inspired such films as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish (1983), and Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (1989). I haven’t seen these movies in years, but I remember a raw grittiness and undercurrent of desperation in some of the characters in those films, similar to the characters in Tulsa. However, the characters in Tulsa were real people— desperate, indulgent, and addicted. Some of those people, to this day, are friends of my family. And some of those people were my family.

In the spring of 2009, a gnawing feeling began to fester in my gut. It occurred to me that Larry Clark and the people who might be able to tell me something about my father were, like me, getting older. If they die, I thought, I’ll never know anything about my father and my roots. I searched the internet for information about Larry Clark, then posted a comment on his MySpace page and other blog sites with links to Larry and Tulsa. No one responded. One night in March of 2009, I ran across one particular website that had several postings about Larry and his work, but mostly his debut piece, Tulsa. There was a phone number, so I called. I knew it was a long shot but I didn’t have anything to lose. I told the site owner my story and he said that he would get my phone number to Clark. Soon after, Larry called me. He knew who I was and seemed sympathetic to my plight. He promised to look through old boxes located in his basement in New York as soon as he could; Clark was in LA at the time. Larry is a very busy man and we have been in sporadic communication, with long silences in between, ever since. I expressed my concern about his old gang of friends and their age.

“Larry, if you guys die, I don’t know how I’ll ever learn about my father,” I told him. “The things that I want to know, only you can tell me.”

Clark recalled that he had old 16mm footage of Billy and he had a reel-to-reel tape recording of an interview with him, as well. I think the year of the interview was around 1969 or 1970. My father died in October of 1970. The fact that the tape recording exists torments me. His words are so close, yet achingly out of reach. Does my father reveal any redeeming qualities in that interview? What did he say, feel, and believe about life? What was the purpose of the interview anyway? The thought of viewing images of my father alive and animated, and hearing his voice for the first time since I was an infant, caught me off guard. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I hushed a gasp under my breath and tried to keep my composure. I didn’t know that I had so many emotions about my father. I want to see his face, his eyes. I want to read his body language. I want to experience him living and breathing. I want to know him too. When I talked to Clark on the phone and asked him about my father, he didn’t share many personal details about Billy Mann, but I believe that his creative property can tell me volumes about my father. In early 2011, after his Paris showing of “Kiss the Past Hello,” Clark said that he had put together a book of pictures for me of my family: my father, mother, sister, and me, that he had taken back in the day. He said that we would get together, just he and I, to watch the film and listen to the reel-to-reel. That was over a year ago; I am still waiting. I believe that he is in France working on a new film. He is a very busy man. The photos are important to me because I don’t have any family pictures of me with my mother and father. Not one. After my mother’s death, Billy refused to give any of the photos that they had to my grandparents. After my father’s death, they were lost forever. It won’t change the past, but at least I’ll know.

I remember the first time that I laid eyes on Tulsa. Larry’s artistic portrayals of his friend, Billy Mann, are the only pictures that I have ever seen of my father. If it were not for Tulsa, I would not even know what my father looked like. It was 1972. I was living with relatives in California, and while they were at work, my sister had been rifling through their closet and found Tulsa hidden away in a box on the top shelf. From the second floor of our brand new two-story home, I heard urgent yelling beckoning me to come.

“Shaaan! Come quick! Hurry, it’s a picture of our father!” she bellowed.

“Huh? Whaaat?” I yelled as I raced up the stairs and into the master bedroom. “Let me see! Where?”

“Auh,” I gasped as I knelt down in front of the book.

“Look, it says, ‘Billy Mann.’ That’s our father’s name,” she said as she looked at me and then pointed to one of the only pictures in the book tagged with a name.

I sat on the royal blue shag carpet on the floor in the walk-in closet mesmerized by the photos in Clark’s book. There were clothes and boxes all around me, but the only thing that I saw were the dark images of Clark’s black and whites. I sat there staring, trying to make sense of a book that is not fit for a child’s gaze. I wanted the pictures to reveal something about this man that was supposed to be my father. Did I look like him? Was he famous? Why was he in a book? As I flipped through the pages, I saw nudity, people shooting drugs, and a dead baby in a casket. There was a photo of a man with a gunshot wound to his upper thigh, his face flushed with agony. Another picture showed a man gripping his knee and writhing in pain. I looked to see if he was shot too. He was, but it was with a needle, not a gun. The pictures scared me. I didn’t know what it meant. I wondered if I was the one on my father’s belly in the picture of him lying in bed smoking a cigarette while clumsily holding a baby. I wondered who took these pictures and why. Was the lady in the housecoat my mother? I didn’t understand. I was nine years old.

By the time my relatives returned home from work, our little minds were full of questions. We told them what we had found and asked them to explain what it meant. They scolded us for getting into their stuff and made their bedroom off limits. That night I learned a little about my father, and they confirmed that the picture of the woman in the housecoat was indeed my mother. I suspected it but wasn’t sure because there was no name to accompany the “dead” caption under her picture. They told me that my father was a drug addict and that he was not very nice to my mother. There wasn’t much more to tell a 9-year-old little girl. Even then, it was clear to me that they were trying to be diplomatic but there was definitely bad blood between them. I grew up knowing that my father was a drug addict who did bad things. I just didn’t know how bad. I remember asking if my mother did drugs too. They answered, “No.”

As a child, I labeled my father as bad and I didn’t want to have anything to do with anything bad. I was more interested in my mother and curious about how she died. I wanted to know what really happened to her. All my life I was told that I looked like my mother and that I acted like her too. I found comfort in those words.

I have researched and questioned my family history since as far back as I can remember; Tulsa lingers in the background. In the early eighties, and my early twenties, I found myself living in Tulsa, Oklahoma once again. Eager to know something about my mother, I looked up the man who found her dead on St. Patrick’s Day, 1964. The first time I met him, Roger Johns had nothing to say outside of the official story, which was not very pretty. 25 years later, I spoke to him again and asked him the same questions about my mother. It was 2011, he was nearing his 69th birthday, and his answers were very different.

Johns appears in Tulsa in one of the filmstrip segments. His back is to Clark’s lens so he is not easily identifiable, but in a phone conversation, he recalled the scene to me as if it were yesterday.

“They were wild times, man,” he reminisced.

Johns confessed that he is grateful that his identity was concealed. He’s not proud of the fact that he appeared in the book.

“My life is different now. Most of the people I know don’t even know that shit about me and I’d like to keep it that way,” he huffed.

He was a friend of my father’s; they met shortly after Johns was released from Granite in December of 1963. Four days prior to his release, he had his 21st birthday. He had been locked up since he was 16 years old.

“Your dad helped me out when I really needed it,” he added. “I never had a beef with Billy. He was a good friend to me.”

Because of their close friendship, my father asked Johns to check on my mother while he was out of town “working.” Mann didn’t have a regular job. Rumor has it that he was selling stolen goods to a fella down in Texas. According to a family source, it was three days before the police could question him about my mother’s death. He was out of town.

Johns described that horrible day my mother died in vivid detail. I’m sure that he thought my questions were odd.

“Where was the gun? Where were her hands? What was the position of her legs? It’s important,” I almost pleaded.

I wanted to know everything. I wanted the raw uncensored truth and nothing less. I wanted to see the scene as he saw it. Still, hearing his account was surreal. Johns said that he would never forget that day for as long as he lived.

He came over to the apartment after school, around 5 p.m., to see if my mother needed anything. He climbed the stairs to the second story apartment and knocked on the front door. There was an old quirky furnace in that apartment on 5th street. Often it would make loud banging noises until someone adjusted it. From the stairs, he heard the furnace clanging and babies crying, so he waited patiently for my mother, Deanna, to answer the door. The furnace kept clanging and Deanna never answered. He tried the doorknob—it was locked. He made his way around to the terrace to investigate. Johns climbed through the bedroom window of the tiny apartment. He noticed Deanna lying on the floor next to the bed. Her hands were above her head in a stick up position. Her legs were tangled; one was awkwardly bent backwards and squirreled underneath her, the other leg was bent with the knee facing away from her body. He reached for her hand, grabbed and shook it and said, “What are you doin’, sucker?” He had not yet realized what had happened. He thought she was kidding around. Johns sprang into full panic when the coldness of her hand registered and he looked at her face, visually taking in the bullet’s entrance wound—near the midline, just above her right eyebrow.

“Did you see the gun? Where was the gun?” I queried.

“Yeah, it was just above her hand on the floor,” Johns explained.

“Which hand? Do you remember?” I became more intense.

“I think it was her right hand, yeah, it was above her right hand. Boy you’re askin’ me to remember stuff that I haven’t thought about in years,” he confided. “Then I went into the other room to check on you kids and you were okay, just crying hard,” Johns continued. “I knew it was a bad deal and I had just gotten out of prison … Man, I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

I didn’t tell him that my mother was left handed, I just listened.

Adrenaline charged through his body as Johns raced out the front door, down the stairs and a couple of blocks to a phone booth on the corner. He dialed “O” for the operator (that was what we did before 9-1-1). He told the operator that a woman was dead, she’d been shot. When he hung up the phone and turned to exit the phone booth, the police pulled right up in front of him.

“I don’t know how they got there so fast. Man, I was scared! I couldn’t tell you how long I was on the phone with the operator, I just turned and they were right there,” he explained.

Back at the apartment, my sister and I were in a crib in the next room. My 19-year-old mother’s time of death was estimated between 8 a.m. and 12 noon. I was 17 months old, my sister was 6 months. According to Johns, the officers conducting the investigation found a closet full of stolen merchandise and credit cards. When the police were finally able to question Billy about the stolen property, he blamed it on Deanna, telling them that she had a problem. It was a lie.

On March 18, 1964, on the front page of the Tulsa Daily World, above the weather report, the story headline reads, “TULSA WOMAN FATALLY SHOT Victim’s Husband Hunted by Police.” The article went on to explain some of the details of the scene. “Police said a single bullet had been fired recently from the gun. The woman, clad in baby doll pajamas, was struck between the eyes. An autopsy was ordered.” The article also revealed, “…a piece of the gun handle had been broken off.”

I have a copy of my mother’s autopsy reports, newspaper articles, and death certificate. There are a few inconsistencies made about her death. In a document signed by the state medical examiner, there is a section at the bottom with the directions, “Please check MANNER” (short for manner of death), the six choices included Natural Cause, Suicide, Accident, Homicide, Other, and Undetermined. The examiner typed an “x” for Undetermined. On page one of the autopsy report, the “probable cause of death” states, “Bullet perforation of brain with basal skull fracture and massive blood aspiration into lungs.” On the “Comments And Interpretation” page of the autopsy, the second paragraph reads, “The direction of the shot is from front to back, in a horizontal level, and slightly from left to right. It is perfectly compatible with a bullet wound self-inflicted by a left hander (as the victim was).” On her death certificate, the “Cause of Death” section has the words, “Laceration of Brain … Gunshot” hand written into the space. Three boxes appear below that section: Accident, Suicide, and Homicide. Accident is checked.

The next day, March 19th, the same newspaper printed, “Police said Wednesday Mrs. Dianna Mann, 20, of 823 E. 5th Place, apparently fired the shot which took her life on Tuesday.” Her name was actually Deanna and she was 19 years old, not 20. The story continued, “Officers said a polygraph test supported her estranged husband’s story he was not home at the time of the shooting, and paraffin tests showed Mrs. Mann had recently fired a gun.”

In March of this year, I met with Dr. Michael Dobersen, the Arapahoe County Coroner, Medical Examiner, and Forensic Pathologist located just outside of Denver, Colorado. I wanted a professional opinion on my mother’s 1964 autopsy report. Dobersen was warm and welcoming. I braced myself for what he might tell me. I wanted the truth, a modern interpretation of the 48-year-old documents. I wanted to know if he thought that, scientifically, suicide was the only plausible interpretation.

“I’m impressed with the thoroughness of the report.” Dobersen commented.

I wondered if the scientific procedures had changed all that much. I imagine that they have. Dobersen pointed out the three conflicting comments, “accident,” “self-inflicted,” and “undetermined.” We spoke for almost an hour. He concluded that, all things considered, if it were him, he would have no choice but to characterize the death as undetermined. I agree that there are too many unknowns to sign off on suicide. Due to the question concerning my mother’s cause of death, the Catholic Church would not allow my grandparents to bury their daughter in the regular part of the cemetery. She was banished to the back row. I guess with the other perceived sinners.

There is one more thing that I need to tell you about my mother. When I heard it, I was grateful that it was not revealed to me 25 years earlier. Deanna entertained a guest the evening prior to her death. The young man was her lover. He was also a good friend of Billy Mann. He spent the evening with her well into the night, he told me it was probably between 12 and 1 a.m. when he left. His name was Roger Johns. He mentioned something very strange that happened the eve of my mother’s death.

“Your mom did not shoot drugs,” Johns insisted.

He did mention that once in a while she did barbiturates with the common street names of red birds and yellow jackets. That night she had taken a couple of red birds. There was a gun laying on top of a tall chest of drawers. Deanna picked up the gun and walked over to Johns, who was lying on the bed. She pointed the gun at his face.

Very calmly she said, “I ought to shoot you.”

Johns was adamant that he did not get angry about her behavior.

“Why would you want to do that? I haven’t done anything,” he replied to Deanna.

She paused as if thoughtfully considering his words. “You’re right,” she said and put the gun back on the chest of drawers.

Johns had never told a soul about his relationship with my mother in nearly 50 years. He told me that it felt good to get it off his chest. He was hesitant to tell me though, because he didn’t want me to think that my mother was the type of girl that ran around. He insists that she was not. Johns cared for my mother. He said that she was beautiful and that he was crazy about her. Johns also told me that Deanna was depressed about the situation with Billy. He said that my father used to run around on her a lot.

A family source remembers Billy bringing a girl over to the apartment where we lived to show his new lover his children. Of course, my mother was there caring for my sister and me. What kind of man has the audacity to do something like that?

“Billy was shooting dope and runnin’ around with that girl,” Johns informed me.

Johns wanted me to understand that my mother was a good person and that she loved my sister and me very much. She wasn’t like all the rest. She was different. Johns was concerned that I might lose respect for my mother.

“She was just in a bad situation. She was 19 years old and she had two kids. Her husband was a doper, a thief, and he ran around on her,” he preached.

Two weeks before she died, Deanna asked one of her sisters to take her family to California. Her sister said no because she didn’t have the money. My mother was trying to get away and make a new life for herself and her children, away from the destructiveness of her current life with Billy.

Around March 20th, my father made a phone call to the parents of his dead wife. My aunt answered the phone.

“If any of you black-ass Mexicans want a piece of me, you know where to find me!” he told her, then hung up the phone.

What motivates someone to be so cruel and insensitive to others? I don’t know how to justify that comment in my mind. I guess I can’t. People that knew Billy said he was a drug addict, an armed robber, a thief, and, at times, a pimp. Rumor has it that he trafficked stolen goods for associates that I can’t mention. It is hearsay that he was in the pocket of a disreputable attorney and may have been a snitch as well. He was cruel and abusive toward women. He didn’t seem to have any self-respect or respect for life. That is the way Billy Mann lived and died.

In order to try to piece together who my father was, I’ve had to poke around and ask a lot of questions. Around 1992, I met David Roper, a dominant figure in Tulsa, on the docks of a produce warehouse on North Trenton. Roper told me that my father was a good guy. I think it was the first time that I had ever heard the words “good guy” associated with my father. It gave me hope that maybe he wasn’t as bad as I had believed all my life. I pressed for details about what happened back in the ‘60s but he said that he didn’t know anything. I could tell that he didn’t want to rehash this part of his life, and who could blame him? Still, there’s a strange code of silence between the fellas that ran in that crowd. I wonder what they are protecting. I shifted the conversation to my father. I asked him to tell me about Billy Mann. Roper did share a memory of himself and my father sitting in a car in the ally across from where I lived when I was little. They parked, lit a cigarette and then watched me and my sister play in the front yard. Roper told me that my father loved me. My heart softened a little as I imagined that my father cared.

For most of my life, Billy Mann was just a story to me. I never felt any connection to him because I didn’t know anything about him or his side of the family. Over the years, I have spoken with several of his friends, two of his lovers, and some of his criminal associations. I still don’t feel a connection to him, but I’m beginning to understand the kind of man he was. He lived a terrible, addicted, lawless life. He used people and people used him. I’ve combed through public records and found that he was charged with armed robbery and numerous other crimes, but for some reason, the charges were often dropped.

In 2008, I sent away for Billy Mann’s military records. It took some time but I finally received them in April of 2009. When I read his History of Service and his Psych Eval, I cried. According to the records, my father stole his first car in 1956, at the age of 13. He did it again in September of 1960, while AWOL from the Marine Corp. Mann did not join the military out of duty or the desire to serve his country, he joined to avoid punishment for a crime committed in May of 1960—reckless driving and destruction of public property. He managed approximately one year of service, most of which was spent in military prison or AWOL. Mann was court martialed, May 22, 1961. The records reveal dimensions about his character and his family history that no one else has been able to tell me. The documents explain that Billy’s father died when he was about 9 years old. He was very close to his father. Billy had four older half- sisters; one committed suicide around November 2, 1960. Another sister attempted suicide by way of overdose of pills when Billy was 10. Billy confessed that prior to his enlistment with the Marines he had thoughts of suicide. At the age of 17, he said, “I would not mess around trying to cut my wrists, I would cut my throat.” In another section of the bulky file on my father, there is an evaluation made about his mental status. It states, “He is emotionally unstable, immature, insecure, resents authority, is suspicious and seclusive [sic], lacks the ability to exercise sound judgment…” It goes on, but you get the idea. There is a little girl inside of me that wants to look up to my Dad or to be proud of him in some way, but virtue is scarce by Billy Mann. From the military records, I did learn that my father had green eyes. I didn’t know that.

I located the woman that was the last person to look into his green eyes. We spoke on the phone a few times. I will call her Angelina. She told me that Billy admitted to beating up his wife, my mother, just for the fun of it. I have no way of knowing if that is true or not. She told me about her life with Billy, about their shady dealings and drug use. She said that Billy had punched her in the stomach once while she was pregnant with his child. They were together for a couple of years, right up until his death. She was his lover and the mother of his youngest child. She was also his niece.

Angelina recalled the events of October 7, 1970, in a phone conversation with me in February of this year. Billy and Angelina were staying in the country, at her grandfather’s house in Kellyville, a small town outside of Tulsa. They decided that they wanted to get clean, get completely off drugs. Billy wanted to marry her and try to get custody of his children, my sister and I. On that fall day, they planned to leave the state so they could get away from the local drug scene, which they knew all too well. Inconsistent with their plans, they took one final ride out into the woods to shoot up; that’s just what addicts do. They had moved from California in July in an attempt to kick heroin. Trying to get clean, they replaced heroin with Demerol that Mann stole from a drugstore. Billy tried to give his girlfriend her shot but her fragile veins wouldn’t take another hit. Billy took her shot. They drove back to the house and parked the car in the gravel driveway. Still hungry for a fix, Angelina slipped into the house to cook some drugs. Billy stayed outside to work on the car. From inside the house, she heard her grandpa yelling at Billy, “Hey, are you okay?! Hey!” She looked up and saw Billy still sitting in the driver’s seat with his head flopped backward over the headrest, his mouth agape. She ran. She ran as fast as she could and pulled Billy from the car. Once on the ground, Angelina began to beat on his chest, trying to do chest compressions. Frantically she called for someone to help her. People came, but no one in the crowd stirred to help the dying man and the frantic girl, they only watched.

Billy’s eye’s caught Angelina’s and he softly spoke his final words… “Not so hard.”

The young 18-year-old girl begged at the crowd for someone to go call an ambulance but no one responded to her pleas. Finally, she ran to borrow a neighbor’s truck. They put Billy in the back and her grandfather drove them to the hospital, which was located about 10 miles away. She did mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions all the way to the hospital.

“I was working on a dead man,” she recalled.

Billy Joe Mann died that day of a drug overdose; he would never see any of his children again. He was 27.

When I heard the news of my father’s death, I was eight years old. I was in Tulsa at the time, visiting sick relatives. My aunt came out to the front yard where I was playing with cousins and showed me the newspaper article. She told me that my father was dead. At that age, I didn’t know what to do with the information. Dead? Who was Billy Mann? He was my father but I didn’t know him. What was I supposed to do? I remember thinking it was creepy that he died two days after my birthday. I shrugged it off and continued playing with my cousins. I never shed a tear.

Larry Clark’s Tulsa has tormented some, and others have narrowly escaped its wrath. It nestles up to some of the worst parts of humanity. It’s difficult to look at lost souls squandering the potential of their precious lives and inadvertently the lives of others. It is even more difficult when they are your parents. I have spoken with several of the people that appear in the book. I listened to them tell their stories and remember a time in their lives that was caught on film, a time that most are not proud of. I listened to them tell me what they remembered about their relationship to my mother, but mostly my father. One woman from the book seemed shaken that I found her. We spoke only once, but I will never forget the shame that I heard in her voice. She was just a teenage girl when those pictures were taken and at 60-something, she still carries shame. A couple of the boys from the later photos revealed that police harassed them. They said it was because of Tulsa. I wonder what it must have been like for those that survived the inauspicious lifestyle of drugs and crime. What about their families? Those that lived, what did they grow up to become? How did they explain Tulsa to their kids?

I grew up but I did not walk in my father’s footsteps. I didn’t become a junkie or a criminal or a social outcast. I walked a different path. In the early ‘90s, I owned and operated a health food restaurant and juice bar in Tulsa, on the corner of 51st and Yale. It was a lot of hard work, but the reward of doing what I loved was worth it. My lease came up and I made a decision to close the restaurant while I looked for a new location. Things didn’t work out the way I planned and I was not able to get it up and running again. In 1996, I took a road trip to Colorado. 11 days later, I stuffed a U-Haul full and moved to the Rocky Mountains. I’ve been here ever since.

Some of my friends and family members don’t understand my interest in this early part of my life. They say things like, “It was so long ago … just let it go!” or “Don’t live in the past.” Last year, I went through a period of weeping and sobbing, but strangely, I didn’t even know the reason why. I was purging. I’ve felt anger toward my father and confusion about my mother. I have felt anger over the stupidity of it all. I dove deep into the dark abyss of my past and reaped what was there. I don’t fear it anymore, I just feel it.

Tulsa was the way my life began. I am still in the process of discovering who I am and learning about my roots, but I know so much more now than ever before. When I flip through the pages of the book, I don’t just see nameless faces anymore. I see real people, some who are alive and some who are not. I know many of their names and I hear their stories. The people that gave me life are on those pages. I have learned details about my mother and my father that have turned those flat one-dimensional photos into complex multi-faceted human beings. It is their humanity that compels me.

Like my mother, my father is also buried on the edge of a cemetery. Billy Mann’s grave lies in an open space and sits on top of a hill outside of Tulsa. The view is expansive. The sun was shining and it was unseasonably warm that day in January when I visited. His headstone reads “At Rest.” I wonder if that’s true. I knelt down beside my father’s grave just like I had my mother’s grave, earlier that day. With my fingertips, I swept the debris from the face of his headstone and stared into it as if it might respond. There was only silence.

I drove by The Church Studio on Third Street one morning in 2006 and found that its then-owner, musician Steve Ripley, had a hand-made “For Sale” sign stuck in the yard of the legendary recording studio he had owned for the last 20+ years. He had written his cell phone number on the sign.

As a musician and fan of the studio, I put my car in park outside of the building and dialed the number on my cell. Ripley answered. I said I was outside and would love to see inside. He said, “I’m here. Come on up.”

I skipped up the stairs to the double doors. Steve let me in and for the first time, I peeked around at what was any musician’s dream-come-true recording studio: a school gym-sized recording room that looked like it hadn’t been touched since the ’70s, a luxurious control room with exposed brick walls and a Neve board, and rock memorabilia lining the walls. Music equipment dotted the floors—items Steve was moving out.

“So, what do you do?” Steve asked me. “Oh, I play violin, write songs,” I said. “Well, I have one piece of advice for you,” Steve said.

“Get out of the music business.”

Despite the warning, Ripley and the building charmed me, and I wasn’t the only passer-by to notice the historical site for sale. Within months of my 2006 studio visit, local attorney Randy Miller saw the sign and called the number, getting the same response from Ripley. Miller made an offer to buy the building—and got it.

In 2010, I learned that Jacob Miller, the red-headed son of Randy, was running the building. My future husband, Mark Kuykendall, and I became friends with Jacob and we moved all our recording equipment into the Church Studio. I became enamored with the building’s history and its role in the community. We all became well acquainted with the building: the knotty pine staircase, the quirky cowhide wallpaper in the bathroom, the old hitching post outside where you could tie up your horse back in the day, the original church windows. It’s easy to fall in love with the place.

The Church Studio rests within the Pearl District, a neighborhood whose association had been working tirelessly for years to develop their community—and they had been quite effective at making things happen. They had gotten a park created, a community center built, sidewalks laid, and excitement stirred all around the studio. I began attending the neighborhood meetings and at the mention of my Church Studio involvement, countless Leon memories surfaced from the neighbors.

“I saw Bob Dylan on the stairs outside one day in the ’70s.”

“I heard Eric Clapton recorded in there.”

“I think George Harrison was there too, he was definitely in Tulsa while it was open.”

“The Gap Band made their Magician’s Holiday record there.”

“We need to do something to honor these memories.” As soon as it was brought to the table, the Pearl District Association pounced on the Leon Russell Road project.

As The Pearl District board began to plan the honorary road sign details, Leon’s popularity began to surge. In 2010, he made a joint record with Elton John called The Union. With popularity comes tension; anyone who heard about the honorary street naming had an opinion about where the road should be and what it should have been named. At one particular meeting, someone even suggested naming the street “Studio Row” or “Music Row.” Longtime Tulsa musician David Teegarden, formerly of Bob Seger’s Silver Bullet Band, was in attendance and he piped up.

“What are we talking about here?” he asked. “I came to this meeting to talk about Leon Russell Road.” And it was pretty much settled.

Because of the Pearl District’s strong track record working with the city, the Leon Russell Road project was approved by the City of Tulsa almost immediately with the help of city councilor, Maria Barnes. Even prior to the official naming, however, there was some confusion as to whether the road would be located in Downtown Tulsa’s Blue Dome district, or in the Pearl. In the end, the Pearl District prevailed.

The official location of Leon Russell Road became Third Street between Utica and Peoria avenues, hugging the Church Studio doors where so many musical memories were made.

The Pearl District Association put together a Kickstarter.com page to raise funds for the creation and installation of street signs as well as a sign unveiling ceremony. The financial support for Leon Russell Road was near instantaneous with 20 private donors in less than 3 days.

A week after the road sign unveiling ceremony, Leon Russell was set to play a concert at the BOK Center with Elton John. The day of the show, Russell himself appeared at a celebratory luncheon at the Mayo Hotel.

I asked Leon if we could get a photo together with the road sign, and Leon replied, “I’ll keep taking pictures if it means I don’t have to get a real job.”

When I showed him the street sign, he looked at it carefully. “What’s it say on the other side?” Leon joked.

“That’s just how he is,” Margee said. “I’m content and he’s always wondering how I can be so content. I told him, ‘I have what I want and I don’t have what I don’t want.’”

A week later, Margee’s mantra was about to be put to the test.

Scott was doing his usual core strength training in the gym at Tulsa Community College. The exercises included rounds of lifting weights, pushups, and jumping rope. Bending down to replace his weights, he got lightheaded and sat down. He began to sweat profusely, then vomited on the floor of the gym. Some friends saw his body going into seizure; one of them called an ambulance, and then Margee. He was rushed the two miles to St. John Medical Center.

It was Valentine’s Day, 2012, and Scott’s heart had given out.

Margee remembers she was in a great mood that morning, headed to her adult painting class at TCC’s west campus and looking forward to seeing her students. A colleague approached her in the hallway with a note to call the metro campus immediately concerning her husband.

She and their two sons, Jesse and Dylan, beat the ambulance to the hospital. Scott was looking worse than hospital staff expected. Surgery was imminent.

Margee prayed for Scott in a private hospital waiting room as two stents—mesh “pipes” that inflate like a balloon—were placed inside of Scott’s heart to remove the blockage. The surgery was a success. A few hours later and Scott was recounting his near death with his wife and kids.

“All I really thought about was Margee and my boys,” Scott recalled. “I didn’t want to leave them. But, I was stable. The main feeling I had was gratitude.”

Once released from the hospital, what Scott needed was a dose of mood medicine. He and Margee stopped by Church Studios where their oldest son, Jesse, was putting the finishing touches on his song called, of all things, “Love is Life and Life is Love.”

“We spent a couple of hours listening to the guys put the finishing touches on Jesse’s amazing song,” Margee said. “It was magic and healing for Scott.”

Scott is currently “taking it easy,” no easy task for a man whose many hats include songwriter, poet, family therapist, and radio host. Margee continues to teach art at the Gilcrease Museum, Kaiser Rehab, and the Tulsa Art and Humanities Council, but never strays too far—just in case Scott’s heart needs her again. She welcomes even the brief respite.

Scott still gets antsy from time to time, opting to sit through mental health workshops to further one of his careers, instead of resting in his pajamas and lounging in bed.

“To be honest, it has been tough,” he said. “Not every day is happy. But, every day is good.”

Scott and Margee will celebrate 33 years of marriage together this year.

Melody Charles was born in Texas and raised in California and Colorado. She’s been based in Tulsa since 2004, when she moved here to attend the University of Tulsa. In 2008, she edited Volume 7 of Stylus: TU’s Student Journal of Art and Writing.

We respect Chief Jordan’s efforts to clarify matters. The story is sad and insulting to him and the other professional men and women of the Tulsa Police Department who protect us daily at constant personal risk. Their uniform should be a symbol of pride to every citizen of this community. But this story involves, among other things, the debasement of that uniform by two officers engaging in various sexual activities. That is one reason why this story is so important.

Here’s the background: Keena Roberts, with whom Capt. Shawn King cohabitated, approached the TPD Internal Affairs team with alleged evidence of inappropriate sexual conduct by Capt. King both on and off duty. She claimed they were photos of King and a female officer on a laptop. TPD declined to investigate that evidence and returned the laptop to her, unopened. The materials were presented to This Land Press and we reported it online last Thursday.

The statement released by Chief Jordan explains the TPD basis for deciding not to investigate. It reports that the sexually explicit photographs in question “were stored on a privately owned computer and were password protected.” It also explains that when that laptop was presented the City Legal Department advised that TPD was “unable to legally access that information.”

The legal theory is not spelled out but it appears that ownership and the password were the key barriers. We assume there is more to the decision than the statement tells us, but it is all we know at this point.

This all seems very weak: It’s 2012. We can’t imagine that TPD simply walks away from otherwise legally-obtainable, potential evidence just because a password is in the way, especially when it is brought to investigators. According to Ms. Roberts, when she handed the evidence to Internal Affairs, she wrote the password on a Post-It note and stuck it to the laptop. The password was still there when the laptop was returned.

The ownership question seems to be a possible reason to delay an investigation of evidence, but not to decline it. Ms. Roberts believed she owned the laptop, viewing it as a family computer. If the lawyers had questions about ownership, why didn’t they try to answer them? Why just stop? Moreover, if they had such questions, why would they return property to Ms. Roberts that might not belong to her?

The obvious question here is the level of zeal with which the lawyers and Internal Affairs pursued the investigation. The internal affairs process is essential to protecting the integrity and safety of every officer. And our safety too. It should be aggressive and uncompromising.

TPD has now asked This Land Press for the laptop photos. Originally, we declined to produce them but after some deliberation and consultation with counsel, we will pass them onto the police. If they were stolen, then they should be given to authorities; if the photos contain evidence of wrongdoing, the police should also have them. We don’t know exactly what Roberts told Internal Affairs when she handed over the laptop and that conversation, of course, should remain between those parties. Attorneys R. Thomas Seymour and Scott Graham are now representing Roberts and will speak for her publicly, hopefully clarifying some of these details.

The other reason this story is important is coincidental but heartbreaking.

Capt. King was disciplined, even without the evidence on the laptop, for engaging in sexual acts with Ms. Roberts in the parking lot of Mohawk Park while on duty. Punishment for that conduct was ultimately handed down against the backdrop of the Good Friday shootings. Capt. King had an important leadership role in North Tulsa as a first-shift captain over the Gilcrease Division where the shootings occurred. On April 3rd, Chief Jordan wrote Capt. King a letter notifying him of his suspension, which would begin on April 8th. Between those two dates, on April 6th, the shootings occurred.

Tulsa is a city with a long history of difficult racial relations. The men and women responsible for law enforcement play an essential role in moving our community forward. At a time when we needed a leader the most, Capt. King was facing suspension for conduct unbecoming an officer.

Adding to the urgency of the matter, a court in Osage County Friday issued an emergency protective order against Capt. King. Sadly, it includes allegations of sexual acts by Capt. King involving a minor.

Again, This Land Press has the deepest respect for the many members of the Tulsa Police Department who keep Tulsans safe. They acted with tremendous bravery and skill in apprehending the suspects in the Good Friday shootings so quickly. That is why we care so much about this story. We know the TPD cares about it too and were heartened by the request for the photos. We look forward to further action.

We all want the best for Tulsa and the men and women who keep our city safe every day. We owe it to them.

There were a number of obstacles to my experiment: First of all, I wanted to survive, so this precluded certain parts of the city where pedestrians are routinely mowed down. In fact, the very day I set out on my journey, an elderly woman was struck by a car while trying to cross 21st Street. If a walk to Med-X could kill you, I might want to take some precautions, like seeking out neighborhoods with ample sidewalks.

Just off Cherry Street, there were unbroken sidewalks for blocks. Then, they randomly ceased in front of some houses in Maple Ridge, only to resume a couple of houses later. Who maintains these sidewalks? Why do some houses have them and others not? The patchwork of sidewalks resulted in a sort of hopscotch in and out of traffic. At one point, I nearly hopped on a decomposing squirrel that must have been rotting on a 19th Street sidewalk for days. The only other person I saw on this particular stretch of the walk was a 30-something monk—at least he was dressed like a monk, wearing an ankle-length, hooded black habit and rosary beads—walking a Jack Russell terrier.

Another obstacle was determining a final destination. Every journey implies a starting point and an ending point. Where was I going? I traced old streetcar routes, courtesy of Michael Bates, who has mapped Tulsa trolley lines onto a Google map. I thought about walking one of these lines, but most of them ended after a mile or two. I wanted something with more of an epic sweep to it. I considered walking the old Sand Springs Interurban line, but this prospect depressed me, thus predetermining my psychogeographic experiment.

I threw out all these options and opted to become a flâneur in the drift of the city. The flâneur is a bit like the American buffalo: a creature who moves randomly across the landscape, picking out bits of food here and there, digesting on the move. Unlike the buffalo, though, the flâneur usually inhabits the densely packed streets of the big city, moving against the grain of a consumer society. Nobody really thinks of Tulsa as a big city, but a quick glance at Wikipedia reveals that the Tulsa metropolitan area has a population of just under one million souls—about the same as mid-19th century London and Paris, the cities that gave birth to the modern flâneur in the works of Charleses Baudelaire and Dickens.

“An idle man-about-town,” Merriam-Webster defines the word, perhaps with a note of disdain. The flâneur is, after all, a French creation, a by-product of Parisian splendor and squalor. He is one who strolls about the city not looking to acquire knowledge or consumer goods, Walter Benjamin once wrote, but to experience a city as a work of art. Most people interested in pedestrian issues want to get from point A to point B without getting run over or mugged on the way to work. I was more interested in loafing, seeing what secrets the city might reveal to me that I never noticed in three decades of car travel.

•••

The voyage started out with promise: a mild, bone-dry December day just after Christmas, the kind of day that brings the earmuffs off the dog walkers and prompts the joggers to doff the leg warmers for sporty shorts. A day, in sum, that should have pushed the citizens off their couches and into the streets. Cars swarmed around the Brookside QuikTrip, but I was on foot. Crossing 36th Street, humanity disappeared. I walked for two blocks, waiting for my first encounter with a fellow pedestrian.

There’s a website that has developed an algorithm for walkability—walkscore.com—and it claims that Brookside is one of Oklahoma’s most walkable neighborhoods. Walkscore.com talks a big game: walkability is not only the answer to climate change, it says, but the ability to walk your neighborhood also corresponds with a longer lifespan, a smaller waistline, and higher property values. In fact, Brookside is supposed to be Tulsa’s model for pedestrian-automobile encounters, with what urban planners call “textured crosswalks” that “make the pedestrian space easy to determine for a motorist.”

A stylish shop on the west side of Peoria caught my eye. Scandinavian-looking kitchen instruments posed in the windows, urging this buffalo-flâneur across one of these model crosswalks made of bricks.

In Canada, where I live, cars screech to halt whenever the pedestrian dips his toe into the river of traffic. Pedestrian right-of-way is a sacred concept, even in suburbia. I waited patiently at the crosswalk, trying to catch the gaze of motorists, hoping to shame them into stopping for me. As I do in Canada, I stuck a foot in the street to let people know I was serious about getting across the road, but no one stopped. I started to count the cars blazing by me and got to 28 before a pick-up truck stopped and gave me a finger wave, urging me across. But then I was stranded in the right hand lane, with the left lane still buzzing with traffic. I must have looked like one of those squirrels that can’t decide whether to dart across the road or retreat to the curb.

Hey lady in your green Volkswagen bug with a daisy in the flower vase, surely you will stop for me? No. You, the bearded Volvo driver with the fading Obama/Biden bumper sticker, surely you will help a brother out? If I am regarded at all, it is as a crazy person. I am positive that a stray dog would have had more luck crossing Brookside than me on its model, textured sidewalks.

Finally, I am across, but there is little to keep my attention. It’s almost noon and I want to at least make it downtown. I pick up my pace and walk for almost a mile before I encounter my next pedestrian, the monk (Is he Benedictine? Eastern Orthodox? What is doing here?), who gives me a wise nod, just past the decomposed squirrel. I catch a glimpse of a lowrider on a bike struggling up the hill on 21st street, and that’s about all the humanity I see for the next half hour.

“I am moving to Tulsa from Denver and am wondering if it’s safe to walk the streets,” someone on city-data.com posted. Someone else replied with this warning: “I think the biggest hazard of walking repeatedly to and from work in downtown Dullsa (oops, I meant Tulsa) is getting killed or injured by boredom.”

•••

I am at 18th and Boulder at 12:43 p.m., but there is still no sign of life on the streets. I am getting hungry, so I stop in The TreeHouse for some barbeque. It’s toward the end of the lunch rush, but I am the only diner in the place. My journey is starting to take on a Twilight Zone quality. Three employees hover around me, making idle talk about the weather.

I pick up the old Main Street trolley line and spot my first post-lunch pedestrian outside New Age Renegade, a gay bar that seems much less formidable in the bright, early afternoon sunshine than it does at 2 a.m. I shuffle along behind my fellow walker for a few blocks before he stops to examine the stranger following him downtown. I consider catching up with him to explain my experiment and possibly interview him, but he sets off in a sprint across the street. Now we are walking parallel to one another down Main Street. We make it to Ninth and Main before he is sufficiently freaked out to take off running again, this time in a westerly direction down Ninth Street. This is also where I see only the second pedestrian since lunch, a homeless woman who stops me to ask for some change.

“Do you do a lot of walking around here?” I ask.

“Naw,” she says, “I’m just trying to get some change to get the bus back to my apartment.”

In the heart of downtown—“The Deco District” they have apparently rebranded it—I spot a few people actually walking places. One guy stumbles down a staircase adjacent to Orpha’s Lounge and nearly falls on top of me. Now I am a true flâneur, I think. I am anonymously adrift in the big city with its big buildings. But the thing that really appealed to the flâneur par excellence— Charles Baudelaire—is nowhere to be found:

The street about me roared with a deafening sound.
Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,
A woman passed, with a glittering hand
Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt.

Where are the “agile and graceful legs” that obsessed the Bad Boy poet? “The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills” is nowhere to be found. A half a mile north, I encounter a couple of teenagers making out at the Center of the Universe, but that’s about as sensual as my voyage gets. The City of Lights, Tulsa is not.

I’ve made it downtown by 3 p.m. so I set off for Greenwood, imagining the blaze of madness that engulfed Tulsa ninety years ago. There are plaques on Archer Street commemorating the businesses and residences destroyed in the Riot, sometimes three per block. How long have these plaques been here? Once again, I am the only pedestrian in sight, raising the question of who ever reads or notices these small plaques in the sidewalk. I walk up and down Greenwood, my head buzzing with noise of I-244 and thoughts of the Riot. A man with a three-legged dog is talking on his cell phone.

I cross back over the track and spot a couple of pedestrians heading into McNellie’s. It’s almost 4 p.m. and my legs are weary. The drift is pulling this buffalo-flâneur towards the bar, so I follow the couple inside. I take a seat by the window, watching for others caught in the drift of the city. After a few minutes, the Edward Hopperish loneliness wears off and I am simply bored. I check my iPhone and text my wife. I need a ride home.

When I met my wife, Louise, I was a long-haul truck driver, and I’d been on the road long enough that my connections in Tulsa had grown tenuous. I’d been living in the cab of my truck, and all the people I’d once known so well had begun to feel remote to me. Truck driving will do that to you after a while. You spend all your time on the road either completely alone or in the company of strangers you’ll never see again. I no longer had a place to stay in Tulsa, or at least it felt that way. By the time I quit trucking, I’d been seeing Louise whenever I’d pass through town, but staying at her place was out of the question, so I’d been sleeping in the truck when I stopped in Tulsa, just like I did in any other city. So, when I parked my truck for the last time in the Oklahoma City truckyard, drew my final pay, and drove my beloved old saab back to Tulsa, my first stop was an army surplus store. It was July—hot and humid.

I bought a sleeping bag, mosquito netting, insect repellent, a coffee percolator, galvanized plates and cups, a couple of lightweight tarps, a backpack, and other supplies, including a very cool pith helmet (the only hat I’ve ever looked good in, although Louise has a different opinion about this). Then I stopped at a liquor store and got a pint of W.L. Weller bourbon. Lastly, I stopped at Walmart and bought a rod and reel and some tackle. Then I drove up north, past Skiatook to Candy Creek.

Candy Creek has wallowed out a wild valley from the prairies of the old Osage Nation. Over the years, I’ve hiked every one of the valley’s 25 or so miles, and fished much of the creek, from its source to its mouth, through the wild horse pastures in the upper end, down into the broader, partially wooded lower end where it feeds into Bird Creek. Candy Creek Valley formed the back pastures for a series of large ranches along its course, so virtually no one lived in it. The lower end had been acquired by the Corps of Engineers for a dam project. The project was abandoned while still on the drawing boards. Once this happened, the valley became orphaned land—owned by the public but managed by no one. It had always been wild, but in its abandonment, it began actively returning to an earlier, wilder state.

I knew of some limestone springs that never went dry, out there deep in the valley. The water was cool and sweet. I drove as far as I could down the  abandoned valley road, hid my car behind a sand plum thicket, and then hiked to the springs with my gear. The first thing I did was dip my cup into the spring and drink, again and again, until I could feel the water’s weight in my belly. I spent the hot, humid July afternoon setting up a lean-to camp in the deep shade near one of the springs. I caught a couple of bass out of Candy Creek which I filleted, wrapped in foil, and cooked in the coals of my small fire, next to the chiming streamlet that tumbled out of the stone.

As the sun went down I sprayed myself with mosquito repellent, arranged my small fire so that I’d have something to look at as it slowly burned down, and sipped on Weller’s and spring water from my tin cup.

“You need to make a plan,” I said to myself. “Yeah, but not right now,” I replied.

Summer nights in the wild, tanglevine Oklahoma bottomland are noisy. All around me, near and far, all the creatures of the world, it seemed, howled, bellowed, and screamed all night long. Packs of coyotes on the move howled back and forth to each other, cattle bellowed on the distant upland pastures, dogs on the hunt yelped for joy, hoot owls and whippoorwills sang to themselves, frogs rang together like a thousand stuck doorbells, and countless species of insects created a collective, high-pitched drone. There was also the tormenting whine of mosquitoes probing around me for a way past the DEET.

The Weller’s and the campfire diminished at about the same rate. By the time the bottle was empty and the fire was out, I’d added my own voice to the chorus. The first time I howled, every other creature stopped to listen. After about thirty seconds, the insects could stand the silence no more and started up again, quickly rejoined by the frogs, and then all the others. At my second howl, they all quieted down just for a moment and then carried on.

By the third, my voice just blended in.

* * *

In the bright morning sunlight, I pulled the coffeepot off the fire. Once it stopped perking, I could hear the little stream tumbling away from the limestone spring. I poured a cup of coffee and sat with it in my hands, looking at the blue smoke rising like a genie. “You know what your problem is?” I asked myself.

“No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me,” I replied.

“You need more ritual in your life.”

A long-haul truck driver is a human pinball, bouncing randomly all over America, never knowing where or how far you’ll bounce next. I thought about that for a while as I drank my coffee.

“Maybe you’re right,” I replied, once I’d emptied my cup and stood up to break camp. “And I still need a plan, too,” I said.

Well, my plan was simplicity itself. I packed out, drove the old Saab to Tulsa, got an apartment by noon, and a job by the next day. Louise and I married and bought a house, and she and I and her son, Robin, whom I came to call my own son, moved into the house, and then he grew up and moved out. Then it was just the two of us in our small home, which we’d filled with books, music, and art. Much of the art is of her own creation. She is a brilliant and passionate painter.

Over the years, I remained a frequent visitor to Candy Creek. Sometimes, I camped close to its banks and fished its deep holes. Other times, I rambled the meadows, glassing birds, and  sometimes I just walked, exploring the rocky side streams that tumbled down from the surrounding uplands. Occasionally, I mused about the lack of ritual in my life. I’d wonder what it was like to take comfort in ritual. If you perform an act over and over again, an act that may otherwise be meaningless—that would almost certainly be meaningless if done only once—and you perform it in the same way each time, and at specified intervals, what do you get from that? Why is that attention to form so comforting to so many, so central to their identities? I felt that I must be missing out.

One day out there, I looked across the valley from the eastern ridge and noticed on the opposite ridge, about three miles distant, an isolated knob a little higher than the surrounding terrain. It had a pleasing curve and a copse of blackjack oaks on the crown. As I dropped down into the valley, it disappeared from view, so I walked across the valley floor, and then up the opposite hill, sensing my way toward it by dead reckoning until it re-emerged above me. Before long, I was standing on top of it. Just as I’d known I would, I had a clear view of the distant horizon in all directions. Looking east over the valley to the opposite ridgeline from where I’d come, I decided to build an observatory on the spot, where I could witness the sunrise on the first day of spring and the first day of autumn every year. I would make it a ritual and see what came of it.

I stacked fieldstones, ruddy sandstones, into a cairn about a foot taller than myself. At eye-level I left a window about six inches square, for a viewfinder. In the base of the window I placed a flat stone that protruded out from the cairn and came to a point that pointed due east, according to my compass. In the stone I cut a groove in a straight line as a sightline that ended at the point. Standing up to the cairn on its west side and looking into the viewfinder and following the sightline groove, my eye landed on the spot on the far horizon where the sun should pop up on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

I admired my observatory from various distances as I hiked the several miles back to my car. Its form and function were pleasingly mysterious. Once the grass had covered my footsteps around its base, and healed the scars where the stones had been removed, it would be difficult for anyone to know how old it was, which also pleased me.

* * *

Fall approached and I took three days off from work. The last day of summer, I packed up and went out there. I found a pretty site in the edge of the woods at the base of the observatory hill and set up camp in the afternoon. I built a hearth and a lean-to and gathered firewood. Then I searched among boulders in a shady draw until I found the right one and, using a chisel and hammer, cut an image of a horse into its side. I’d stolen the design from a centuries-old Chinese drawing. I returned to camp and got a fire going. I heated up some beans and made coffee. After supper I climbed up to the top of the observatory hill.

First I inspected the observatory, but avoided looking through the viewfinder. It was unchanged in the months since I’d erected it. Then I found a good place to sit and faced west, where I watched the sun lower itself down to the horizon and melt like butter on a griddle. Once the first star came out, I walked back down to camp. I stared into the fire for a while without thinking. Then I stared up at the Milky Way for a while, and scanned it with my binoculars, not looking for anything but beauty, which was there aplenty. I didn’t have a watch, but I imagined it was still pretty early when I crawled into my sleeping bag and fell asleep.

When I woke up it was cold and deep dark. The Big Dipper had spun around the sky. I stoked up the fire and fell back asleep. When I woke again it was still dark, but it felt like morning inside me. I dressed, banked up the coals in the hearth and put on coffee. While the coffee perked I grew alert to the changing light of the sky. I hadn’t overslept and missed my first observation. I took my coffee and drank it standing out from under the trees, in the chilly wind, watching the sky closely as the stars dimmed.

I climbed to the top of the hill and stood around the observatory watching the eastern horizon. I felt more like a kid at Christmas than a man in September. The sky grew lighter until finally the sun was seconds from rising. I took my position and looked down the sightline and waited. There he was! My sightline was off a couple of degrees, so I quickly adjusted it with a few nudges. It was now empirically correct. Once the sun had cleared the earth I stepped back from the viewfinder, having completed my first observation.

I felt as if I hadn’t merely witnessed the turning of the earth, and swinging of the seasons, but that I had actively participated in these. After savoring the experience for a good long while, I went back down the hill to camp and had a leisurely breakfast in the crisp fall sunshine. Over breakfast, I pondered how the sunrise swings back and forth along the horizon between the spring and fall equinoxes. It behaves like a pendulum.

A pendulum’s speed varies constantly during its stroke, reaches maximum velocity at the bottom, and slows to a stop at each turnaround point, before reversing direction and accelerating back to the bottom. The sun’s apparent speed, as measured by its changing day-to-day position on the horizon, as it swings out the seasons, also varies constantly and in the same manner. Around the equinoxes, the sunrise positions change most rapidly. Approaching the solstices, the position changes slow to a stop, reverse direction and begin accelerating back to the next equinox.

Why should the sun behave like a pendulum? It seemed like a clue to something.

* * *

I spent that fall day exploring the woods and prairies around me. Just before sunset, I climbed back up the hill and observed the sunset by looking back through the viewfinder from the opposite side. I spent another night, and the next morning I broke camp after breakfast and walked down the valley to my waiting car. I got back to Tulsa mid-afternoon.

That became my twice-a-year ritual for the next several years. It was important to seal off a full 24-hour period on-site, in order to fully inhabit the place. I remember waiting atop the hill near the observatory, in the chilly pre-dawn, sometimes wrapped in a blanket, sipping coffee, my heart pounding, and my smoke-stung eyes riveted on the horizon beyond the valley as the sky grew lighter and lighter. I remember a feeling of victory as the top rim of the sun shimmered into view right at the end of my viewfinder sightline.

Leading up to each spring and fall season, as the pivotal day grew closer on the calendar, I became more and more restless in the city. By the time I headed out, I’d been thinking of little else for several days. When I came back from out there, I felt satisfied and serene for days afterward, so it seemed as if I’d found what I was missing out on.

One late afternoon out there I looked up at the hill from the edge of the woods by my camp and saw that one of the hilltop oaks was on fire. Studying it, I saw that it wasn’t really aflame but was glowing strangely, unlike any of the trees around it. Unlike anything I’d ever seen. I climbed up for a better look and, to my wonder, discovered that it was covered with monarch butterflies, thick as leaves, thousands of them basking in the late-afternoon sunlight. They’d stopped to spend the night during their migration to Mexico. I laughed out loud, and thanked God for the gift.

After several seasons of not allowing anything to get in the way of my semi-annual three-day ritual, one spring I let something stop me from going. I don’t recall what it was. My usual feelings of mounting excitement and restlessness had been muted that year. I witnessed the equinox sunrise from the driver’s seat of my car on my way to work. I couldn’t have missed it, actually, since Tulsa streets lie on a cardinal grid, and the sun rose right out at the end of the street, blinding all eastbound drivers. I’d be willing to bet that auto accident records for Tulsa would show a spike on the equinoxes.

I was so disappointed in myself that, the following fall, I set everything else aside and went out to the observatory. I had a fine time, as always, but my observation felt rote, my emotional involvement forced. The following spring was similar. And then I missed the following fall and subsequent spring.

I went out one last time the following fall but the spell had been broken. I sat on the hill and pondered it. I realized that I’d put the cart before the horse by trying to manufacture meaning out of ritual. Rituals arise out of pre-existing meaning. They confirm something meaningful. That’s what I learned about the power of rituals. Since then, I’ve returned to my old ritual-free way of life.

Although I continued to occasionally hike, fish, and camp in Candy Creek Valley, it was several years before I trekked back up to my observatory hill. I was surprised to find that my cairn had collapsed into a random pile of rubble. I blamed it on cows, those dumb agents of entropy. The only remaining signs of my having been there were the crude hearth at my old campsite, and the images I’d pecked into certain boulders.

King’s ex-fiancee, Keena Roberts, found the material and attempted to report it to Internal Affairs and the FBI, with little results save for a 40 hour suspension without pay for King for an on-duty sexual dalliance with Roberts.

Now, after a private investigation and extended counseling sessions with a forensic therapist, one of Roberts’ children has stated that King repeatedly molested them over a period of two years. The child was under the age of consent at the time of the
molestations.

Earlier this afternoon, Roberts filed a petition for a protective order against King in Osage County through her attorney, Keith Bergman. Judge Gambill granted an emergency protective order on behalf of Roberts and her minor children until a full
hearing can be conducted. The date of that hearing is May 22.

This Land Press obtained copies of both the petition and the emergency protective order, which contain detailed descriptions of King’s alleged crimes. He’s accused of groping, kissing, and forcibly using his fingers to rape one of Roberts’ children,
a minor. According to the petition, these were not isolated incidents, but repeated violations that occurred over a period of years.

The petition also states that King repeatedly threatened the minor with violence. “He has threatened harm over and over. He has told all the kids that I would be dead or (the child victim) would be dead…”

Later in the petition it states, “We are scared of what will happen.”

The punishment for King breaking the Court order is a fine of up to one thousand dollars or imprisonment for up to one (1) year in the county jail, or “by both such fine and imprisonment.”

Finally, the order states “Possession of a firearm or ammunition by a defendant while an order is in effect may subject the defendant to prosecution for a violation of federal law even if the order does not specifically prohibit the defendant from
possession of a firearm or ammunition.

Roberts, along with family members and her attorney, are meeting with the Osage County Sheriff to discuss the opening of a criminal investigation.

King is expected to be served the emergency protective order today.

I took a seat in the front row, between what looked like a local high school kid and a woman who, rather than taking notes, sketched in miniature the storm diagrams on the screen. A radar can’t see a tornado, per se, Ed told us. Debris is highly reflective, rendered in bright red on a radar screen in something a meteorologist would call a tornado debris signature. That’s the only clue a desk jockey has that a tornado is on the ground, when the jumble of mud and wet grass and people’s laundry and pets and photo albums distort the signal. Radar upgrades won’t improve tornado warning lead-time, Ed said, the national average for which is 12–13 minutes—“All the measuring is nothing compared to a human set of eyes,” he said. The computers and scientists were lost without us, we in jeans and camo hats. It was exactly what we’d come to hear.

Last year was one of the most exciting years ever for Oklahoma storm spotters. We set records for cold, heat, drought, and hail, a six-inch lump of which fell from the sky last May in Gotebo. Sprinkled in throughout the presentation were photos of impossible clouds and the curiosities of total destruction, all casualties of what Ed was fond of calling wet, juicy air masses. We leaned slowly back into our seats. To Oklahomans, rapid-fire severe weather factoids delivered with a drawl plays like a lullaby. It seemed more like foreshadowing than forecasting, that we’d see these images on the back end of one of the warmest winters in recent memory, just weeks before the first tornado watch of the year scrolled across the bottom of everyone’s TVs.

Sheila Dry sat on the aisle, just a few rows behind me. She lives south of the river, in the house next door to the one in which she grew up. That’s where she was when she found out her grandmother’s house in Depew had been swept away by a tornado. “I grew up around people with a lot of fear of the weather—my mother was scared to death of tornados,” she said. “I probably don’t have enough fear. I’d rather stand out there and watch it than get in the cellar.”

The class wasn’t her first rodeo with storm spotting. As a longtime volunteer emergency worker, she was just there for a refresher course. Dry said she noticed that we’d lost several of our classmates at the break. The information presented in the time it’d take to watch three DVR’d episodes of Survivor is what lots of people spend a lifetime studying, she admitted. “The majority of your average citizens are interested in knowing when they look out their front door, what they’re seeing, what to look for.” Listening to her, I realized why last year’s videos from Joplin—the storm that took almost the same number of lives as the Oklahoma City Bombing—had been saved for the end, just before we lined up at the table near the door. Waiting there was a stack of storm-spotting certificates, our names to be written in on the top line in our own hand.

Tulsa Police Department Captain Shawn King is a first-shift captain in North Tulsa’s Gilcrease Division. He appears to have engaged in lewd and deviant sexual behavior while on duty, and is suspected of sexual-related crimes.

Hundreds of explicit photographs and videos obtained by This Land Press depict a man identified as King by his former partner, Keena Roberts. It depicts an officer engaging in various acts of extreme sexual behavior, at times while in uniform both on- and off-duty.

The materials found on King’s laptop include videos of King masturbating and then ejaculating onto his TPD-issued work shirt and photographs of a uniformed King masturbating in his work office. He then sent the videos to a subordinate Tulsa Police officer with whom he was having a sexual relationship.

Earlier this month, King, 42, was disciplined by TPD Internal Affairs for “engaging in inappropriate behavior while on duty,” according to a Personnel Order dated April 3, 2012, and signed by TPD Chief Chuck Jordan. The disciplinary action constituted a five-day suspension without pay for King.

Keena Roberts, 39, who made the complaint that instigated the investigation, is dissatisfied with the outcome and believes King should be fired.

“I’m totally outraged on how this was handled,” Roberts said. “I feel like I’ve been thrown to the wolves.”

In 2009, Roberts, a Skiatook real-estate agent, met King through Match.com. The two quickly began a romantic relationship and King soon moved into Roberts’ home. Because of their opposing work schedules, they slept in separate bedrooms.

Then, one evening last November while King was at work, Roberts heard a text alert on King’s iPad. Roberts soon discovered a series of sexually explicit text message exchanges between King and Tulsa Police Officer Christy Kellerhals, a subordinate who works out of east Tulsa’s Mingo Valley Division.

This led Roberts to search her home for more clues and signs of impropriety. What she found was far more than she bargained for: a laptop, locked in the closet of King’s personal bathroom. Roberts opened it and discovered thousands of pornographic images and videos involving King and Kellerhals, as well as hundreds of images, likely pulled from the Internet, of young girls who, to Roberts, are made to appear to be under the age of 18 and engaged in a variety of lewd and degrading acts with significantly older men.

Roberts, a mother of four, was horrified.

“Many of the girls in the pictures looked as young as my own children,” Roberts said. “I have a 12 year-old daughter, I know what they look like.”

That November, Roberts immediately confronted King about the material and ended the relationship, encouraging King to seek help. Eventually, Roberts learned that King had moved in with another family—family with minor children. In February, out of concern for the situation, Roberts submitted the laptop to TPD Internal Affairs and filed a complaint. While making the complaint Roberts admitted to IA personnel that she herself had engaged several times in sexual activity with King while he was on duty.

“It was oral sex in his (patrol) car,” Roberts told This Land. “It was early on in the relationship.”

Once the complaint was filed, King panicked. On February 24, he sent Roberts a text message that read: “Please stop all of this. You understand that you are going to destroy my career, get me fired and I will lose my pension right? Please if you ever loved me at all stop all of this.”

Days later, she received the computer back from IA.

“They said that there was a legal issue on opening it,” Roberts said. According to her, Internal Affairs simply returned the laptop unexamined and without additional explanation.

Roberts then contacted a therapist who specializes in child-abuse cases, who advised Roberts to contact the FBI immediately.

“I called the FBI, and informed them of the laptop and its contents. Somehow, they were already aware of it. I gave it to them and didn’t hear back for several weeks.” The FBI eventually gave the laptop back to Roberts, claiming it was impossible to verify the ages of the “children” in the pictures.

Roberts later received a separate letter from Chief Jordan advising her that her claims had been substantiated and that “corrective action has been instituted.”

In the April 3 Personnel Order from Chief Jordan to Shawn King, Jordan informed King that he would be suspended without pay for 40 hours for violating Rules and Regulation #8, which addresses Conduct Unbecoming of an Officer. On April 6, a northside shooting spree in Tulsa caught the attention of the nation. Shooters Alvin Watts and Jake England were apprehended April 8, the same day that King’s suspension became effective.

“In 2009, during first shift hours, you engaged in sexual activity while on-duty, in your patrol unit, in an area near the Tulsa Zoo (5200 E. 36 St. N.),” the Order read.

The incident for which King was disciplined turned out to be the same on-duty dalliance involving Roberts that she’d previously admitted to Internal Affairs. There was no reprimand for any of the other lewd conduct while in uniform.

“I just feel like it’s a slap in the face, to ignore my concerns as a mother and a citizen,” she said. “Then they give him a slap on the wrist for something that involved me while completely ignoring the contents of that laptop.”

Roberts is worried about how much time King spent with her children over the last several years. She said that King had been close with the children and would often take them shopping and buy them gifts.

“I don’t wanna be seen as an unaware or unfit mother,” Roberts said. “But TPD had always led me to believe that Shawn King was on the up and up. He was a police officer, for God’s sake. They’d put him on TV as a department spokesperson!”

TPD Media Relations Officer Leland Ashley declined to comment for this story, except to say, “If there are additional allegations, they will be investigated. Any time there are any allegations brought forth by a citizen to the police department it is investigated.”

When asked who determines the type and severity of disciplinary action, Ashley said, “Recommendations may be made through the chain of command, but ultimately that’s the Chief’s decision.”

Roberts has since hired both a private investigator and a forensic therapist to help determine the extent of King’s sexual habits.

As she wrote years later, “He came to Chandler, bought a homestead from another fellow, paid him $25 for his rights. They had to pay $1.25 per acre to the government.” Since the original Land Run a year and a half earlier had opened the Unassigned Lands to white settlers, there had been a consistent push for more land to become available, so several tribes were forced to accept a federal government offer and relinquish their “excess” land.

On September 22, 1891, more than 20,000 folks surrounded the defined area, champing at the bit to claim one of the 6,097 160-acre homesteads. It only took a few hours for all the available allotments from the Iowa, Sac and Fox, and Shawnee-Pottawatomie lands to be occupied. And that is where my great-great-grandparents started farming. Today, the Turner Turnpike cuts through the original McBride farm.

But life back then was not easy, according to Dora. “In the following year of 1892, the Bank at Chandler went broke and Father lost $1,200, all he had. For three years they hardly ever saw a dollar.”

Nine years and seven children later, Dora and her husband John also left Missouri and immigrated to Oklahoma Territory. “They say the wind in Oklahoma always blows quite hard and it surely does do that,” she wrote. “Next summer John caught the Oklahoma fever.” He rented half of the McBride farm and “… in December [1900], myself and five youngest came down.”

Roy, the second oldest of the Krumme clan and 8 years old at the time, later wrote: “My memory is not too heavy on details but we children did not seem too happy.

“Dad was to come to Chandler in an immigrant car to be loaded with our household goods, farm implements, harness, wagon, potatoes, shelled corn and miscellaneous items in the farm home and any item or items used on the farm.” Roy explains that, after the railroads were built in the Twin (Oklahoma and Indian) Territories, “… they wanted more farmers in their territory so the railroads offered migrant rates to encourage people to move into Oklahoma at or near their railroad stations. This lower rate was an inducement to my parents to make the move.”

* * *

In August 1901, the Krummes’ eighth child, Vilena—my grandmother—was born. She was the first of the Krumme kids (there would eventually be fifteen) and the first of my three grandparents to be born in one of the Twin Territories.

By then, the family of Vilena’s future husband, John Landers, was also in the region near McAlester in the Choctaw Nation, Indian Territory. Unfortunately, there weren’t prolific writers on that side, so the family history is pieced together from the family bible and random newspaper articles—and unfortunately way too many obituaries.

John Landers’ parents, J.T. and Annie Landers, also emigrated from Missouri at the peak of Land Run fever, probably in the late 1880s, since all twelve of their children were born in either Indian Territory or, in the case of the two youngest, in Oklahoma after statehood.

With a pack of mules, J.T. made a living hauling “stuff” for people, including moving houses, which he accomplished by jacking a house off the foundation, and maneuvering the structure onto big skids that were pulled behind the mules. By the early 1900s, he was hauling vast amounts of stone for the construction of the McAlester penitentiary.

As a child, I was mesmerized by this great-grandfather. He would rock for hours on a front porch swing, and always had a spittoon nearby for his chewing tobacco.  As an adult and parent, it’s hard for me to imagine the emotional suffering of J.T. and Annie, who produced seven children who died before ever reaching adulthood, including their first set of twins, stillborn, and five sons.  Their oldest son died at 20, and their next son at 21.  The third was only two and a half months and the fourth just two years.  Then their eleventh child, Orvil, died when he was just one.  The heartache knew no end: Annie died during the swine flu epidemic in 1920, and then J.T. lost a daughter to cancer.

Four children lived to eclipse J.T.’s 92 years— the youngest son, Virgil; twin daughters Lillie and Lillian; and their eighth, my grandfather, born in 1903 in the Choctaw Nation.

(J.T.’s brother worked for the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific railroad and it was discovered years later that he had a wife and children at each end of the rail line. What family doesn’t have a bit of salacious scandal?)

* * *

My dad’s family, likewise drawn to this mysterious new land also staked a claim in pre-statehood Oklahoma. Luckily, my paternal grandmother, Mattie Marsalas Logsdon, was committed to tracking down her ancestors, possibly because she was orphaned at age nine. She was a prolific writer, authoring three books on our family heritage.

In Climbing the Cherry Tree, she chronicled my great-great-grandfather, Isaac Cherry, who wished his “foresight was as good as his hindsight” since he and his daughter “made the Run in 1889.” Not happy with their original lots south of Oklahoma City, “Isaac traded his for a team of mules and Sophia traded hers for a trunk, which became her hope chest, and they went back to Arkansas.” It apparently didn’t take long for Isaac to realize that probably wasn’t the smartest business move he’d ever made.

“The statistics seem to say that the Cherry men were a restless people, always hunting better farm land— more land—and/or they did not want to feel fenced in or crowded.” Repentant, in 1893 Isaac moved his family, including my 15-year-old great-grandmother Martha “Mattie” Cherry, back to Indian Territory, this time settling around Tecumseh. Mattie Cherry became a teacher in the Seminole Nation and, in 1902, married Thomas P. Marsalas, who was eighteen years her senior.

Now, this wasn’t Thomas’ first marriage, and it wasn’t even his original name. Thomas Marsalas Mothershead was married in Texas in 1886 but the marriage was enormously volatile, according to family accounts. So after a “stormy session” his wife declared, “I wish I didn’t even have to use your name.” And Thomas replied, “I’ll take care of that immediately.” In Mattie Marsalas Logsdon’s book My Mothershead Family, she explains, “He simply dropped the name Mothershead and never used it again.” And then he left for Indian Territory.

“[H]e came to the little village of Holdenville. Then he leased land from a Creek Indian at Yeager, where he raised hogs and cattle for the market at Holdenville.” Eventually, Thomas was involved in banking—a building in Holdenville that for decades bore the Marsalas name.

Thomas’ second marriage ended tragically after just eleven months when 23-year-old Mattie died in childbirth. In the grief, no one ever named the baby girl until an aunt finally started calling her “little Mattie.” My grandmother never even knew her exact birthdate, since her Social Security card said December 12, 1903, but her mother’s headstone lists the 11th as the day of her death.

Mattie Cherry Marsalas was buried in the Holdenville cemetery near her grandfather, Joel Cherry, who had been murdered two years earlier.

In February 1901, Joel and his farm employee, Obe Hayden, headed to Wewoka, Indian Territory to buy corn.  Hayden “remembered seeing two Indians watching them while making the purchase but forgot about them until later.” Hayden left to do another errand and then came back to meet Joel and discovered the horses loose and eating the corn out of the wagon.

According to Climbing the Cherry Tree, “He found Joel on the ground with a bullet hole through his head and one through the back.” The men were caught and “a mob composed of Joe’s neighbors shot one Indian (the story was that there were 32 shots in his body).  The sheriff succeeded in getting the other one to Muskogee for trial. When asked why they did this, his answer was that they thought all white men had money, so they decided to rob him. He had only fifty cents in his pocket, for he always took only what he expected to spend when he went to town.”

Racial tensions extended beyond the whites and local Indian tribes to the relocated eastern tribes who had displaced the native plains peoples originally in the region. The Indian state of Sequoyah was proposed but defeated. Another idea was to make Oklahoma an all-black state. That was even more of an uphill battle, given the African American community’s even more diminished clout in Washington. Many of the territories’ black population were “freedmen,” descendants of Native American slaves also forced from their homes to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears.

Jim Crow laws, a poll tax required to vote, and communities that prohibited black citizens were common. When the Krummes moved to a farm near Okemah in Indian Territory, blacks were not allowed in the town after 7 p.m. A few miles away, Boley, one of the state’s numerous all-black towns, was established by a Creek freedman, although my great-grandfather was a welcome visitor.

In 1902, John Krumme and his brother-in-law bought a water well drill and, according to my great-grandmother’s journal, “They went down in Creek Nation. Drilled 1st well in Boley, a colored town. They had reserved a couple rooms in a hotel for a while. Salesmen stayed there when they came through. So they was welcomed there when another white wasn’t allowed to stay in town or hang around town unless they had some kind of business.” In addition to drilling the first public well, the two men were present in 1903 when the citizens voted for the franchise that would make Boley a city.

* * *

By the time the U.S. declared Oklahoma the forty-sixth state on November 15, 1907, five land runs, land lotteries, and auctions had parceled and allotted all the state land, including the original Indian Nations. The cultural and industrial change witnessed by those early settlers over the course of the 20th century was staggering.

My grandparents got around by horse and wagon but were ultimately all seasoned airline passengers. Despite their rural upbringing, both my grandmothers were college graduates and my granddad, with only an eighth grade education, began a very successful oilfield business. In fact, my nameless grandmother ultimately made a name for herself. The Mattie Logsdon Memorial Library in Ada also houses the Ada Historical and Genealogical Library. Her painstaking family research, decades before computers, placed her Cherry ancestors in this country in the early 1600s, providing documentation for her inclusion in the Daughters of the American Revolution. In fact, my Krumme ancestors were also in this nation before the American Revolution. So it makes sense that these restless ancestors continued to move westward into the next new territory finally bringing them to Oklahoma.

In 1988, the Oklahoma Genealogical Society established the First Families of the Twin Territories association to celebrate early settlers like my grandparents and their families. And while some historical groups focus on European lineages, First Families embraces the heritage of everyone who was part of this state’s history and encourages membership of anyone who can prove they are a direct descendant of an early pioneer or Native American family. With one grandmother born in Oklahoma Territory, another born in the Creek Nation, and my grandfather born in the Choctaw Nation, I’m fortunate to be a First Families member times three.

Because of the violence, the streets of Ramallah were deserted. Israeli tanks were scattered around the city. The next day, March 30, I was walking down one such deserted street, with my cameras hanging off my shoulders, when I heard a single shot from a rifle. I ran over to where I thought the sound came from and saw Anthony on the ground, with his fixer kneeling over him. He was shot in the shoulder and bleeding.

It was an uncomfortable feeling, seeing him like that, in stark contrast to how he was just earlier—as I had just talked to him an hour before, at some Ramallah intersection with a large banner of Arafat’s face glaring down on us.

The number for the Red Crescent was already saved on my mobile phone, so I called and, remarkably, an ambulance arrived less than 10 minutes later. Anthony gave me the number to his editor at the Globe and I called to inform him of the incident.

He wasn’t bleeding too much but, even so, it must have hurt like hell. His fixer was pressing down on the open wound before the paramedics arrived. You can see him grimacing in this photo. He was not only conscious but cracking jokes, and in Arabic, to the smiling paramedic who was inserting an IV into his arm.

That was Anthony: making sure people around him were comfortable and calm, even in the most dangerous situations.

Years later, in 2006, I spent time with him in southern Lebanon. At that time, he was working for the Washington Post and I was on assignment for an Italian magazine. We were covering the Israel-Hezbollah bombing war. From our hotel in Tyre, we filed our stories and pictures. When he was writing, he did not look up from the screen of his laptop, nor was he distracted by others in the room. But once he sent his story, he’d smile at everyone gathered around him—mostly other reporters who wanted to know how his day went.

Anthony Shadid, an Oklahoma City native, died last month on assignment in Syria for the New York Times.

The government, of course, had every reason to be defensive. The ATF had had a pair of eyes and ears in Elohim City and pulled her1 out, not because she was failing to pick up indications of serious criminality—she was—but because the agency was too afraid to act on them. It adopted a posture of studied ignorance and hoped for the best.

After the bombing, the ATF wanted desperately to avoid talking about Elohim City. Even after the FBI was given the Carol Howe file, [agents] Bob Ricks and Danny Defenbaugh never quite believed they had the full story. “Shame on them,” Defenbaugh said. “In upper case—SHAME ON THEM. Sometimes dealing with other players in this is like pulling teeth from a toothless tiger. Ask them why [they didn’t tell everything they knew]. They didn’t ever give me a good reason.” A contrite Magaw2 did not say a lot in the ATF’s defense. “He’s right,” he responded when Defenbaugh’s words were read back to him. “If we did know something and didn’t bring it forward, then shame on us.”

The FBI was far from blameless itself, having avoided looking into Elohim City for years. The decision to expend only token energy on the community after the bombing was the bureau’s alone. That mystified some of the FBI’s old pros, none more than Danny Coulson, who had spent his career chasing right-wing radicals and found the idea of shying away from Elohim City offensive and ridiculous.

“You still do your job, I’m sorry,” Coulson said. “You’ve taken an oath. You’re a professional, you figure out a way to do it. They’re afraid of another Waco … If that’s your attitude, get out of the business. Go into the shoe business. Be a chef. By its nature it’s risky. You’ve got to be smarter than that.”

***

Late one night in February 1995, Tim McVeigh was walking across the Colorado River bridge from Nevada to Bullhead City, Arizona, when a man in a Ford Mustang slowed down and asked if he wanted a ride. McVeigh had no better idea how to get back to Kingman, which was thirty miles away, and offered him $5. The man, whose name was Richard Rogers, laughed off the offer; he was looking not for payment but for casual sex. He had spent the evening at a casino in Laughlin and, as he later told the FBI, was feeling “a little horny.”

McVeigh’s camouflage fatigues and combat boots did not exactly fit the sexpot mold. But Rogers recognized him from an earlier hitchhiking encounter and remembered how McVeigh played with his penis and asked if he wanted to party. Rogers hadn’t been interested at the time, because he was on his way to meet another friend.

The conversation quickly turned to sex, and McVeigh asked Rogers, as he had six months earlier, if he wanted to party.

Rogers responded: “What do you mean?”

McVeigh spread his legs and groped himself. “We could have a really great time,” he said. McVeigh started rubbing Rogers’s penis through his clothes.

An hour later, the two of them were in Rogers’s trailer ten miles north of Kingman, sizing each other up and half-wondering if this was really a good idea. McVeigh talked about Waco, nobody’s idea of good foreplay, and peppered Rogers with questions about an airstrip in the desert hills. At 3:00 a.m., McVeigh grabbed his crotch again and said it was time for bed.

They took their clothes off and went at it. McVeigh’s tongue and throat action, Rogers later told the FBI, was “incredible”: “He was good at what he did.” McVeigh expressed an interest in anal sex, but Rogers turned him down, because he didn’t have a condom. According to Rogers, they were both too tired to reach orgasm. In the morning, Rogers made McVeigh eggs and bacon, and drove him into Kingman. Apart from brief sightings in the grocery store, they never saw each other again.

Assuming this story is broadly true—the FBI found Rogers credible enough to interview him seven times—it suggests that McVeigh, like Pete Langan3, had some personal baggage he was not in a rush to share with the rest of the Patriot Movement. Rogers thought it unlikely he was actually gay, just fooling around. He told the FBI McVeigh was most likely bisexual.

Intriguingly, this is the one intimate encounter of McVeigh’s anybody has ever come forward to describe—either in the graphic detail offered by Rogers, or any other way.

Of all the mysteries surrounding Elohim City, none is more vexing than the question of whether McVeigh visited and, if so, whether he derived any part of the bomb plot—inspiration, training, manpower—from the contacts he established in the community. Nobody has come forward with definitive evidence that McVeigh spent time at Elohim City. On the other hand, a large number of people—from law enforcement, the federal prosecution team, the radical far right, and even Elohim City itself—have dropped hints that he was there, that the government either knew or strongly suspected he was there, and that the information was kept quiet to prevent the criminal case spiraling out of control.

We know McVeigh called Elohim City for just under two minutes on April 5, 1995, because there is a record of it on the Daryl Bridges4 card. Millar’s daughter-in-law took the call and later said the young man on the line was looking for Andi the German5. McVeigh told her he was thinking of visiting in the next few days, and Joan Millar replied that, as a friend of Strassmeir’s, he was welcome any time.

The timing of the call was interesting: McVeigh had just spoken to a Ryder truck rental agency in Lake Havasu City, not far from Kingman, and was presumably making his bomb delivery plans. Was Strassmeir, or his planned visit to Elohim City, part of the calculation? Was he, as an FBI teletype later surmised, looking for new recruits because he did not think he could count on Nichols or Fortier?

The FBI files contain a reference to a second call from McVeigh to Strassmeir at Elohim City, this one on April 17, the day the Ryder truck used in the bombing was rented from Eldon Elliott’s. The information on this call is sketchier, because it was never linked to a specific set of phone records. According to an FBI teletype discovered in 2003, the bureau heard about the call from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the anti-extremist campaign group, but the SPLC has been reluctant to vouch for its authenticity ever since. Richard Cohen, the group’s president, said it was possible that the line in the teletype referring to a call “two days prior to the OKBOMB attack” could have been a clerical error and that the line should have read “two weeks.” In other words, just another reference to the April 5 call.

Over the years, the SPLC has backtracked from a lot of information connecting McVeigh with Elohim City. Twice in the 1990s, the group’s founder, Morris Dees, was quoted saying that he had information that McVeigh visited numerous times. He said it in answer to a reporter’s question at the Denver press club in May 1996, and he said it in an interview with the Indiana State University criminologist Mark Hamm in 1999. But when he addressed the issue again during a talk at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in 2004, he played down his previous statements. “McVeigh probably was at Elohim City, based on evidence we’ve been able to pick up—stuff I really can’t go into,” he said. “But I don’t think the entire connection is really there.”

If Dees was suddenly tentative on the question, other SPLC officials were emphatic: as far as they knew, McVeigh never went to Elohim City. “[Dees] may have said it,” a surprisingly dismissive Mark Potok, editor of the SPLC’s Intelligence Report, said in 2010, “but I very much doubt it’s true.” Both Potok and Cohen sought to minimize Dees’s role in the organization’s intelligence-gathering, and refused to make him available for interview.

All of this was starkly out of character for the SPLC, which usually broadcasts any sinister connection involving the radical right as loudly as it can. One possible reason for its reticence was its close relationship with the Justice Department, which had every reason to play down links between McVeigh and Elohim City. (Its official position throughout the federal trials was that no such link existed.) If the government had information, even secondhand information, placing McVeigh at Elohim City, failing to hand it over to the defense teams could have constituted a serious violation of the rules of evidence.

Did the government have such information? Bill Buford, the former ATF chief in Arkansas, said he was briefed on both verbal and written reports putting McVeigh at Elohim City. The material was not handed over in discovery, he said, but was put into a summary report written by the FBI and sent to the Justice Department. “I’d heard it by word of mouth and it was also in the report,” Buford said. “There’s a lot of information in there that has not been made available to the public.”

Buford could not remember the specifics, but the information referred to an actual visit, not just the April 5 phone call. How sure was he about this clamorous revelation? “I’m sure,” he said.

A number of other senior law enforcement officials were approached about Buford’s information, and none denied it. Bob Ricks said the FBI had found no evidence that McVeigh spent evenings or nights at Elohim City, but acknowledged: “He was always passing through.” Danny Defenbaugh said he could not remember what was in the FBI reports sent up to the Justice Department, but did not exclude it. Perhaps the most revealing line came from Scott Mendeloff, one of McVeigh’s prosecutors, who sought to argue forcefully that Elohim City was irrelevant to the investigation. “It’s not like we didn’t think he was there,” he said testily. “So he visited, but so what?”

When McVeigh’s own legal team asked about Elohim City, he did not acknowledge having been there, but he seemed to know all about Strassmeir patrolling the perimeter and standing guard in the driveway when visitors pulled up. McVeigh told his defense lawyer Randy Coyne that Elohim City was “pretty fucking hard- core.” And he said that Strassmeir and he were “brothers in arms.”

When would McVeigh have been at Elohim City? He received a traffic ticket just over the Arkansas state line in the fall of 1993, and spent the night in a nearby motel on September 12, 1994. Those have to be strong possibilities. Another intriguing date is November 1, 1994, when Tom Metzger, one of the godfathers of the radical right, paid a visit to Elohim City with Dennis Mahon. As Metzger remembered it, he spoke for half an hour in the church, watched the kids perform a dance, shook a few hands, and left again. But he also dropped a hint of more. “Those stories about sitting in another room and talking about stuff,” he said, without prompting, “that didn’t happen.” Was this Metzger pointing to the very thing he sought to deny? It is tempting to think McVeigh would have been there to take lessons from the master, and it was not far out of his way—he was driving from Kansas to upstate New York at the time. It would also have been an opportunity to meet Strassmeir, McCarthy, and Brescia.

The last time McVeigh could have visited—following the intentions he announced in his phone conversation with Joan Millar— was during the two weeks before April 19. This would put Elohim City at the center of the bomb plot. The timing would have been tight: McVeigh checked out of the Imperial Motel in Kingman on April 11, bought an oil filter in Arkansas City, Kansas—just over the Oklahoma state line—on April 13, and arrived at the Dreamland in Junction City on April 14. But it is also possible that he made a quick trip to the Midwest between April 7 and April 11. He was checked into the Imperial Motel on those dates, but the owner later said he did not see him, he used no towels, and his bed was undisturbed. There was a flurry of Daryl Bridges calls from the Imperial up to April 6, then nothing. Would McVeigh have wanted to keep paying for an empty motel room? He might have done if, say, he was transporting blasting caps, or the second Ryder truck seen by Lea McGown and her son on Easter Sunday. It was one way to cover his tracks and minimize the risk of exposure.

If all that sounds speculative, it is. The first two weeks of April are a big mystery when it comes to McVeigh’s movements, activities, and associations. On Saturday evening, April 8, a dancer at the Lady Godiva strip club in Tulsa was told by someone she later believed to be McVeigh that on April 19, 1995, she would remember him for the rest of her life. He was with two other men. Did they travel from the club to Elohim City? Kirk Lyons, of all people, did not exclude it—and he would have had an opportunity to know, because he was Strassmeir’s lawyer and confidant. “It’s possible he went through there on a weekend before the bombing,” Lyons said of McVeigh. “That’s possible.”

Grandpa Millar also did not exclude that McVeigh had been to Elohim City. A defense investigator who spoke to him in 1995 reported Millar saying “it was possible that he could have met Mr. McVeigh once or twice and that it was also possible that Mr. McVeigh could have visited Elohim City.” Millar was fiercely protective of his community, more interested in damping down speculation about criminal associations than in talking them up, so the indiscretion was unusual. In 1997, he was strikingly forthcoming once again when asked by the journalist Jonathan Franklin if any Elohim City residents were involved in the bombing. “There are legitimate questions to be asked, though I don’t know the answers,” he said. “I don’t mind an honest investigation.”

By that point, of course, Millar knew that no investigation had taken place, and after the trials there was little danger of one starting up. He had played the government masterfully for more than a decade. Jim Ellison’s disenchanted former deputy Kerry Noble summarized it neatly. “Two things the government doesn’t want,” he said, “another sedition trial that fails, and another Waco that fails. What have you got with Elohim City? A possibility of another sedition and conspiracy trial that fails, and another raid that fails. That makes Elohim City, unfortunately, have the upper hand.”

“We cannot stay another year; we want to go now, before another year has passed, we may all be dead, and there will be none of us left to travel north.”

—Chief Morning Star of the Cheyenne Oklahoma, 1877

We all came from the wound. Dry red dirt on the soles of their feet, the families of the fighting Cheyenne escaped an Oklahoma prison camp in darkness. Big land, Oklahoma, and fertile like the arms of a lover. But in the dawn of that age a tide of destiny was made manifest and rode west like a beast of prey, and none were safe and none secure and all were eaten and devoured and scattered. “North, we must go north,” said Dull Knife, “and if we die we die north. Not here, where we die like dogs.” And so Dull Knife’s band gathered their small number and fled under cover of night, fighting at the rearguard with pursuant Cavalry, advancing with the vanguard back to the home country. Their teeth dry and white, they moved fast, and water pulled at their wind-torn eyes and night went to day and day fell again to night.

Farther north and farther west they met their end in an unholy place made desolate with body and bone and blood.

Northward, flurries of snow placed white ledges on the limbs of trees and as the band progressed the sky turned densely opaque until land and sky were one and the edges of the world had smoothed into a blanket under which their dreams and desires slept like animals of a forgotten country, like bears under the dark pull of den and body and breath.

Split and split again, the band was small, and tracked and cornered, captured. Imprisoned a second time, the shadow of a raven’s wing fell on the heads of women and men. Led by Big Bear, the number only 30, the people undestroyed, they stood together and pronounced what must not be pronounced. Surrounded by sentinels at Fort Robinson, locked in, starved, the men were separated from the women, and the women on occasion allowed to go to them. Here the women spoke fiercely to their husbands, “Take your stand. Die fighting. We cannot go back. We cannot go forward. Die with dignity. We are with you. We love you forever.” And Big Bear answered, “Yes. I have lived enough. I am ready.” And together, the men said, “If our women are willing to die with us, who is there to say no? If we are to do the deeds of men, bring us our guns.” And the women smiled and in their hearts they sang the dying song, and aloud they said, “We have hidden your weapons in the folds of our clothing,” and under concealment of night and sky the women brought forth pieces of the weapons, and the men assembled the weapons and stored them under a floorboard for the appointed time.

The men killed the sentinels first, and took their guns. Then the Cheyenne fled to the nearest gully, women and men and children, and braced themselves. The blue soldiers came on with vengeance in their eyes and rage in the marbled pillars of their necks, hordes of men alive in the predawn dark.

The Cheyenne warriors raised their guns until the bullets were gone.

Then they bared their chests to the enemy.

The women stood and held their children up toward the oncoming light.

They died together in that place. Black wound against the winter white.

Shann Ray holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Alberta. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Narrative Magazine, Story Quarterly, and other publications. He played college basketball at Montana State University and Pepperdine University, and played professional basketball in Germany. He lives with his wife and three daughters in Spokane, Washington, where he teaches Leadership and Forgiveness Studies at Gonzaga University.

As a precaution to listeners, the following audio program contains emotional triggers that might distress those affected by bombings or wartime atrocities. Not recommended for children.

Produced for the 2012 TCF ShortDocs Challenge.

This podcast uses these sounds from freesound: deep bass rumble 2 by ERH, USAT Bomb by sandyrb, 10 by CosmicD, Chip016 by HardPCM, Dronetail46 by Jovica, ambulance siren by vedas, city noise by gezortenplotz, public spaces by digifishmusic, Bell Tones by johnnypanic, healing bells by klankbeeld, Drone2 by HerbortBoland, walking.shadow by dobroide.

Find This Land at even more of your favorite Tulsa businesses, here.

Two hours earlier, during a special session of night court, Tulsa judge T.D. Evans had declared them all guilty of the crime of not owning a war bond—a conviction that smacked of political and ideological retaliation. All defendants but one were members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a worker’s union. The “Wobblies,” as they were commonly called, were opponents of the war effort and of capitalism. None of the men had a criminal record, but all men were fined a hundred dollars. [1]

They weren’t expected to pay for their crimes, at least not in money. Once the trial ended, policemen rounded up the seventeen and loaded them up in squad cars. Instead of jailing them, the police delivered the convicted men into the custody of the black-robed Knights of Liberty, [2] who were waiting for the Wobblies at the railroad tracks near Convention Hall. [3] The Knights kidnapped the Wobblies at gunpoint, tied them up, threw them into their cars, and drove them into the area west of town. [4]

“We were ordered out of the autos, told to get in line in front of these gunmen, and another bunch of men with automatics and pistols,” Joe French, one of the Wobblies, would later testify. One by one, they were pulled from the lineup and tied to a tree a Knight then approached each man with a double piece of hemp rope and whipped the victim’s back until blood draped his skin. Another man stepped forward and slathered boiling tar on the victim’s back with a paint brush, coating him from head to seat. In a final act of humiliation, the Knight then padded the victim’s back with feathers from a down pillow. [5]

“I’ve lived here for 18 years, and have raised a large family,” pleaded an older man in the group. “I am not an IWW, I am as patriotic as any man here.”

The man’s cries were ignored; every man was whipped, tarred, and feathered. The incident became known “The Tulsa Outrage,” and was reported in the national press. According to multiple interviews conducted by National Civil Liberties Bureau investigator L.A. Brown, two men were repeatedly identified as perpetrating the torture: Tulsa’s Chief of Police, Ed Lucas, and W. Tate Brady, one of Tulsa’s founders. That’s Tate Brady, as in Brady Theater, Brady Arts District, and Brady Heights. [6]

The following day, November 10, 1917, the front page of the Tulsa Daily World would make an announcement to the city regarding the flogging of the Wobblies: “Modern Ku Klux Klan Comes into Being: Seventeen First Victims; [7] Black Robed ‘Knights of Liberty’ Take Prisoners from Police to Lonely Ravine.”

THE SEGREGATION OF HISTORY

According to the Oklahoma Historical Society’s Encyclopedia of Oklahoma, Tate Brady was a “pioneer, entrepreneur, member of the Oklahoma Bar, politician, and early booster of Tulsa.” The Brady Heights Historic District website calls him “a pioneer Tulsa developer and entrepreneur, who was a powerful political force in the state’s early years. He was Oklahoma’s first Democratic National committeeman, and he built the Cain’s Ballroom and the now extinct Brady Hotel.” Tulsa World wrote: “Brady, a pioneer merchant, was an incorporator of the city, as well as a political leader at the time of statehood.”

All of these accounts exclude any direct mention of Brady’s less-than-honorable traits: his violent behavior, his attempts to segregate Tulsa, his deep involvement with the Klan and affiliated organizations, and his abuse of power.

“Well, it’s political,” one employee of the Oklahoma Historical Society said, when asked about the gaps in Brady’s biography.

Despite the widespread segregation of memory surrounding Brady, a rounder, more accurate portrait of the man emerges when all of the history is taken into account.

THE MAKING OF COMRADE TATE

Wyatt Tate Brady was born in Forest City, Missouri, in 1870, and moved to Nevada, Missouri, when he was 12. By the time he was 17, he had taken up work at W.F. Lewis’ shoe store, where he encountered his first brush with real terror—as a victim.

In the early morning hours of March 3, 1887, a customer unfamiliar to Brady entered the store. The stranger asked to see samples of shoes and offered to pay for them. Suspicious of the customer, Brady slipped his revolver from under the counter into his pocket. When Brady went to the safe for change, the stranger rushed Brady and shot at him, sending a bullet through Brady’s left ear. Brady fired a shot back, missing the robber. A disoriented Brady was then pistol-whipped and the robber made his getaway.

Undeterred by the assault, Brady set out for a new frontier.

Three years later, in 1890, the young bachelor headed toward the Creek Nation, Indian Territory, to make his mark as a merchant, providing goods for the established cattle trade and railroad. By Brady’s arrival, Tulsa had a cemetery, [8] a Masonic lodge, a post office, a lumberyard, and a coal mine.

Five years after his arrival in Tulsa, on April 18, 1895, Brady married Rachel Cassandra Davis, who came from a prominent Claremore family. She was 1/64th Cherokee, which gave her new husband special privileges among the Cherokee tribe. [9] Together, the Bradys had four children: Ruth, Bessie, [10] Henry, and John. Three years later, January 18, 1898, Brady and other prominent businessmen signed the charter that established Tulsa as an officially incorporated city. Tate Brady was now a founding father of Tulsa.

“Indian and white man, Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, we worked together side by side, and shoulder to shoulder, and under these conditions, the ‘Tulsa Spirit’ [11] was born, and has lived, and God grant that it never dies,” Brady wrote in a Tulsa Tribune article.

Brady was operating a storefront by this point and preparing to expand his operation when an event occurred that would forever change Tulsa’s history.

In 1901, the Red Fork oil field was discovered, which catapulted Tulsa onto the scene of world commerce. As the city began to swell with oil-minded entrepreneurs and workers, Brady saw an opportunity: the visitors needed a place to stay. In 1903, he opened the Brady Hotel, located at Archer and Main street, just a short walk from the railroad tracks. It was the first hotel in Tulsa with baths. By 1905, with the discovery of more oil in the Glenn Pool south of town, the Brady Hotel found itself with a rush of clientele. [12]

With his hotel and mercantile businesses thriving, Brady began broadening his scope of influence. He lent financial support to an early paper called the Tulsa Democrat, and he began to buy and develop land near his businesses. [13] along the way, Brady became a true Tulsa booster. In March of 1905, he, along with a hundred civic leaders, a 20-piece band, and “the Indian” Will Rogers, hired a train and toured the country to promote Tulsa as a city with unbound potential.

Brady’s Confederate sympathies ran deep—sympathies that would steer his actions in later life. His father, H.H. Brady, had fought as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War. By 1912, Tate Brady’s name had already appeared in Volume 20 of the Confederate Veteran. The magazine listed him as the commander of the Oklahoma Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. In 1915, Nathan Bedford Forrest, General Secretary of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, visited Tulsa. In the Confederate Veteran, Forrest wrote that he consulted with “Comrade Tate Brady,” and together they made plans for “an active campaign throughout Oklahoma.”

Forrest, it should be noted, was the grandson of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a pioneering leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Nathan Bedford Forrest II, General Secretary of Sons of Confederate Veterans and a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Click thumbnail for larger image.

THE TULSA OUTRAGE

Tulsa’s oil was an important national resource during World War I. By 1917, the city was selling a tremendous amount of Liberty Bonds, a type of war bond that helped bolster the USA’s financial position during the war. Because the war effort consumed so much oil, however, Tulsa stood to gain massive economic benefits. Any opposition to the war was  viewed as a threat to personal prosperity and success.

To help support the war effort, the national defense act established the state Councils of Defense. In Tulsa, the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce fulfilled that role. Its members were asked to report any seditious activities, including statements of dissent, acts of industrial sabotage, or “slackerism” (the refusal to participate in work or war). In Tulsa, this essentially put business leaders in charge of finding and reporting anything or anyone they found threatening to the war effort.

No group was more hated or feared in Tulsa than the IWW. As individuals publicly opposed to the war effort, wobblies felt compelled to dampen industrial productivity by encouraging workers to strike. If such a strike were to occur, it could impact oil production and threaten the supply of oil to the military campaign. Tulsa’s economy was vulnerable to an act of worker sabotage.

On August 2, 1917, a sharecropper’s uprising in southeastern Oklahoma resulted in the arrest of several hundred people. The Green Corn Rebellion, as it came to be called, essentially ended the socialist movement in Oklahoma. It also proved that anti-war sentiments had not only reached a wide level of social acceptance among working-class Oklahomans, but had escalated to the point that many were willing to take up arms in opposition to the war.

Brady held a particularly strong antipathy for the Wobblies. Just a few days before the Tulsa Outrage, on November 6, 1917, Brady saw a rival hotel owner, E.L. Fox standing at the corner of Main and Brady streets. A year prior, Fox had leased an office to the IWW, unaware of the Wobblies’ mission. Their presence in the neighborhood infuriated Brady.

“When are you going to move those IWW out of your building?” Brady yelled at him.

“There’s no North Side Improvement Association anymore,” Fox replied, implying that Brady had no authority over Fox’s business affairs. [14]

An aggravated Brady punched Fox, knocking him to the ground and beating him into the gutter. dozens of people witnessed the assault, which was reported in the Tulsa Daily World the following day.

The Council of Defense had no better ally or mouthpiece than the Tulsa Daily World, Tulsa’s largest newspaper. Historian Nigel Sellars called the World “the most pro-oil industry, pro-war, racist, anti-foreigner and anti-labor paper of them all.” [15] Throughout 1917, most of the paper’s vitriol was aimed at the IWW, whom the World accused of being a German-controlled organization.

In what is arguably one of the lowest points in the paper’s history, Tulsa Daily World published an editorial titled, “Get Out the Hemp.” [16]Glenn Condon, a managing editor for the World, wrote that “the first step in whipping Germany is to strangle the I.W.W.’s [sic]. Kill ’em as you would any other snake. Don’t scotch ’em; kill ’em. And kill ’em dead.”

The day after the article was published, the seventeen Wobblies were convicted of a minor charge and handed to the Knights of Liberty by Tulsa’s own police. Brady was a ringleader in the kidnapping and ensuing torture in the woods west of town. Only two people in the mob were not robed—a reporter and his wife. The reporter was Glenn Condon, [17] who at the time was also serving as a member of the Council of Defense.

A month after the incident, in the December issue of their magazine Tulsa Spirit, the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce included this note:

“The Tulsa social event of November to attract the most national attention was the coming out party of the Knights of Liberty with about seventeen I.W.W. in the receiving line. As is usual in such social functions, a pleasant time was not had by some of those fortunate enough to be present.”

Glenn Condon, Managing Editor, Tulsa Daily World. Click thumbnail for larger image.

DIXIELAND

Terrible as it was, the Tulsa Outrage foreshadowed an event that would soon eclipse it in violence and notoriety. By 1918, extralegal violence, including lynchings, had spread throughout the state and had appeared to gain a quiet acceptance and collaboration among law enforcement, politicians, and business leaders. during this heated period of racial tension, Tate Brady and the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce brought the Sons of Confederate Veterans 28th Annual Reunion to town. [18]

Back then, the Sons of Confederate Veterans wasn’t merely a benign Civil War re-enactment club, as it is so often portrayed in today’s media. One of its organizing principles was, and remains, “the emulation of [the Confederate veteran’s] virtues, and the perpetuation of those principles he loved.”

As the largest gathering of Confederate veterans since the Civil war (more than 40,000 attended), the 1918 Tulsa convention celebrated Southern nostalgia and ideologies. Tulsa leaders banded together to raise over $100,000 to cover the cost of the event. Reunion visitors were treated to the best of Tulsa’s marvels: tours to the oil fields, free trolley tickets, and lodging with modern-day heated quarters. Although Tate Brady was the primary organizer of the reunion, its committee members included judges, ministers, and influential names that are still widely recognized in Tulsa: R. M. McFarlin, S. R. Lewis, Earl P. Harwell, Charles Page, W. A. Vandever, Eugene Lorton, and J. H. McBirney.

The event was so popular that it took up several columns on the front pages of the Tulsa Daily World, which helped promote a number of other ancillary events happening across the city. While the reunion was largely received as an economic boost of Civic Pride, history won’t excuse the darker attitudes that motivated the organization and its leaders.

The reunion’s figurehead, Nathan Bedford Forrest, served as the KKK’s Grand Dragon of Georgia, and an “Imperial Klokann” for the national Klan. [19] The Klan actively recruited its members from the Sons of Confederate Veterans. A few years after the convention, Forrest served as the business manager of Lanier College, the first KKK college in Alanta. “our institution will teach pure, 100 percent Americanism,” Forrest told the New York Times.

The 28th annual Sons of Confederate Veterans Convention demonstrated that Tulsa’s most powerful and influential leaders at the very least tolerated—and at the most promulgated—the beliefs and biases that primed Tulsa for its most violent display of racial tension, the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Publicly, there was no dissenting voice, no expressed opposition to the Tulsa Outrage or the reunion.

Many prominent Tulsans helped promote the Reunion, which was officiated by Nathan Bedford Forrest, a KKK leader.  Sons of Confederate Reunion letterhead courtesy Eddie Faye Gates. Click thumbnail for larger image.

BRADY AND THE RIOT

Tate Brady’s prominence and wealth increased with each passing year. In their tenure, his retail stores sold some $5 million worth of goods (60 million in today’s dollars), and the Hotel Brady did $3 million in business. He began to invest in coal mining operations and farming interests. In the early twenties he began expanding his property holdings, spending $1 million in property acquisitions— some of which was in Greenwood.

In 1920, Brady built a mansion overlooking the city and modeled it after the Arlington, Virginia, home of one of his personal heroes, General Robert E. Lee. The home contained murals of famous Civil War battle scenes favorable to the Confederacy. Brady and his wife held galas celebrating Lee’s birthday.

By 1921, Brady was a recognized city leader and a tireless booster of “Tulsa Spirit,” a term he coined. Yet despite his position at the top of the town’s social circles, he managed to find time to volunteer when civic duty called.

When the Tulsa Race Riot occurred on May 31, 1921, mayhem broke out in Greenwood, with buildings catching fire just two blocks from the Hotel Brady. During the early morning hours of June 1, white mobs numbering in the thousands were spotted on each major corner of the Brady district. [20] They headed eastward, invading Greenwood.

Brady and a number of other white men volunteered for guard duty on the night of May 31. During his watch, Brady reported “five dead negroes.” One victim had been dragged behind a car through the business district, a rope tied around his neck.

The following week Brady was appointed to the Tulsa Real Estate Exchange Commission. The Exchange, created by the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, was tasked with assessing the property damage. [21] The loss was estimated at $1.5 million. In conjunction with the City Commission, the Real Estate Exchange planned to relocate black Tulsans further north and east, and to expand the railroad’s property over the damaged lands.

“We further believe that the two races being divided by an industrial section will draw more distinctive lines between them and thereby eliminate the intermingling of the lower elements of the two races,” the Exchange told the Tulsa Tribune.

The Exchange then created new building requirements that made rebuilding in the area difficult. The Exchange reasoned that if residential property could be inhibited, commercial property would take its place, increasing its value by over three times its original cost. Greenwood’s property value could skyrocket, and the races could be separated. To the Exchange commission, it must have seemed like an ideal plan.

Accusations of land-grabbing tormented Brady so much that he publicly issued a $1,000 reward to anyone who could prove that he benefitted from the Tulsa Race Riot. Brady, incidentally, owned rental properties that were destroyed in the riot, and tried to collect insurance on them, but did not succeed.

Despite the Exchange’s efforts, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court overruled the proposed ordinances, allowing Greenwood citizens to rebuild. [22] Black Tulsans were left to rebuild their homes without any aid from the city or from insurance companies. [23]

BRADY’S CURSE

Following the riot, Klan activity increased. A large parade of Klansmen, women and youth was organized in the months following the riot. In 1923, the Klan, established as the Tulsa Benevolent Society, paid $200,000 for the construction of a large “Klavern” or gathering hall that could seat 3,000 members. Beno Hall, as it was known, was located at 503 N. Main St., on land owned by Brady. [24]

Brady’s prominence in Oklahoma politics suffered a setback when Oklahoma Governor John C. Walton targeted the Klan. In August of 1923, Walton put Tulsa under martial law to investigate Klan activity.

During a related Oklahoma military tribunal in September 1923, Brady admitted his membership in the Klan. [25]

“I was a member of the Klan here at one time, “ Brady said, claiming he resigned his membership by October of 1922. “I have in my home the original records, some of my father’s membership in the original Klan, and I think that you [the current Klan] are a disgrace.” he didn’t like the Klan telling him how to vote, he explained. [26]

Brady’s testimony hinted at a larger social predicament. Oklahoma’s Democratic Party was losing its dominance to the republicans, putting Brady, a committed democrat, in a weaker position politically. Nevertheless, he still appeared outwardly hopeful.

“As I look about me during this my thirty-fourth year in Tulsa, I see locks, once raven, sprinkled with snow, and life’s fires burning low in the eyes of pioneers once bright,” Brady wrote. “As we start this new year of 1924 may the spirit of the pioneer—the spirit that built Tulsa—prevail as of yore. Cursed be he, or they, who on any pretext try to divide our citizenship and destroy this spirit.”

While he saw a sunny future for Tulsa, Brady’s own situation did not appear as golden. By 1925, his considerable holdings had been reduced to about $600,000, according to a Tulsa Daily World estimation, which also suggested that he was indebted on those holdings. [27] In the spring of that year, his son John Davis Brady—a promising law student at the University of Virginia—died in a car accident.

Lacking the political power he once held through both the Democratic Party and his Klan affiliations, diminished in his fortune, and aggrieved by his son’s death, Brady began to fall apart. Tulsans reported seeing him dining at his hotel alone, staring into space and leaving his meals untouched. Gone was the steeley-eyed entrepreneur. A portrait published in the Tulsa Daily World around this time shows an aged Brady looking weary and morose.

In the early morning hours of August 29, 1925, Brady walked into his kitchen and sat down at the breakfast table. He propped a pillow in the nook of one arm, and rested his head upon it. With his right arm, he took a .44 caliber pistol, pointed it at his temple, and pulled the trigger. [28] Brady, who worked to divide Tulsa along racial lines, died a victim of his own curse.

John Davis Brady. Student Photo, Central High School, 1921

THE BRADY DISTRICT TODAY

Today, the Brady Arts District is the focal point of multi-million dollar developments involving local organizations such as the George Kaiser Family Foundation, the Oklahoma Museum of Music and Popular Culture, the University of Tulsa, Gilcrease Museum, Philbrook Museum, and the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa. Local businesses also thrive in the district: numerous bars and restaurants, [29] the family-owned Cain’s Ballroom (which once served as Brady’s garage), and the Tulsa Violin Shop, to name a few. A large new ballpark separates the Brady district and the Greenwood area. [30]

In 2005, the National Park Service/US Department of Interior published The Final 1921 Race Riot Reconnaissance Survey commissioned in 2003 by the Oklahoma Historical Society and the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Memorial of Reconciliation Design Committee. The purpose was to determine if Greenwood possessed enough “extant resources” to merit national significance. The survey concluded that the Tulsa Race Riot is significant because it is “an outstanding example of a particular type of resource,” and “possesses exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the natural or cultural themes of our national heritage.” In addition to the findings, the report explained Brady’s role in segregating not only Tulsa, but Oklahoma. [31] Despite these findings, the Tulsa Race Riot area, including Greenwood, remains unregistered.

Preservation consultant Cathy Ambler stated, in a February 2010 PLANiTULSA proposal: “Today, there is a faction of Tulsans who take issue with some of the associations and choices that Tate Brady was involved with, but there is no denying that he was a huge supporter of Tulsa and played a very big part in its early development.”

In September 2010, the Brady Arts District was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, owing to its significance as a place of commerce. It enjoys the full benefits allotted under the designation.

This article was originally published on Sept 1, 2011

Footnotes

1. Five men present were witnesses for the defense. Judge Evans convicted these men, along with the men charged, stating, “These are no ordinary times.”

2. Referred to as a “faction” of the Klan, the Knights of Liberty were a short-lived secret order with cells throughout the nation. In Oklahoma, they carried out extralegal action on behalf of the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce and its Council of Defense, in the tradition of the reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, the “Invisible Empire.” After the end of the war, the Knights of Liberty, in some areas of the country, turned against the Klan.

3.The Convention Hall building is now known as the Brady Theater.

4. The area where the Tulsa Outrage tortures occurred was then known as Irving Place Editions, an area today understood as a combination of the Crosby Heights and Owen Park neighborhoods.

5. The act of tarring and feathering is a medieval form of torture, dating back to the 12th century. The application of hot tar burned the skin; the inclusion of the feathers added insult to injury. The most recent case of tarring and feathering occurred in 2007 in Ireland.

6. The L.A. Brown Papers were acquired by This Land Press from the New York State Archives. L.A. Brown was the investigator of the Tulsa Outrage for the National Civil Liberties Bureau (now the ACLU).

7. According to the Oklahoma Historical Society, the Klan did not officially arrive in Oklahoma until 1920 when the Invisible Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Inc. registered in the state. However, as far back as 1907 there were reported incidents of extralegal activities by “white cappers.” The existence of a Ku Klux Klan prior to 1920 is well-documented. For instance, altus organized its own KKK in 1917, around the time of the Tulsa Outrage.

8. The cemetery was located at 2nd Street and Frisco Avenue—underneath the western half of the BOK Center.

9. Brady served as the General Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Cherokee Nation. According to Kiowa County’s Mountain Park Herald, Brady sought to recover lands and money given to Cherokee freedmen since 1866, which were then valued at $30 million.

10. Bessie Brady would eventually marry Eugene Sloan Adkins, father of art collector Eugene Brady Adkins. Philbrook Museum of Art and the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art share the $50 million Eugene Brady Adkins Collection.

11. This term was adopted by the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce and can be seen in use today on Tulsa Police Department patrol cars.

12. Not all of the clientele were oil-based. The Hotel Brady also served as a meeting place for Democrats. According to A Century of African American Experience (Don Ross, 2003), the hotel was “where Democrats headquartered, laid plans to control the Constitutional Convention leading to statehood that barred blacks, and also designed plots for segregation after statehood.”

13. Around this time period, in 1908, Brady sustained a serious—perhaps life- threatening—injury when he fell from a streetcar. It’s unknown whether he sustained any ongoing complications from that injury.

14. According to the Tulsa Daily World, Brady founded the North-Side Improvement Association, which “combined some of the functions of Civic Club and Chamber of Commerce on the north side.” Brady wanted Tulsa to develop toward the north into the Cherokee Nation.

15. Oil, Wheat and Wobblies: The Industrial, Workers of the World in Oklahoma, 1905-1930.

16. The editorial “Get Out the Hemp” appeared without a byline on the op-ed pages. The managing editor at the time was Glenn Condon. According to Sellars, the editorial may have been written by editor Eugene Lorton.

17. The year following the Outrage, Condon left Tulsa on a secret mission on behalf of the Council of Defense. He eventually settled in Tulsa in 1926, becoming a founder of the radio station KOME, “The Magic Empire.” He was also a well-known radio personality for KAKC and later KRMG. Condon was an early member, then president of the Tulsa Press Club and Benevolent Association. He died in 1968.

18. Merritt Glass and Tate Brady founded the Tulsa Chapter of Sons of Confederate Veterans in 1908, at the Hotel Brady. During the convention of 1918, the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce provided meeting rooms for Forrest, who was headquartered at Convention Hall. Following the reunion, the Chamber of Commerce wrote that Tulsans had raised a considerable amount of money toward the event, and that it was “the best investment in friendship and hospitality ever made by any city in the South.”

19. An “Imperial Klokann” was one of four positions known as an auditor; together with other administrators of the KKK, the Klokanns acted as an advisory cabinet to the Klan. Grand Dragons were leaders of state Klan organizations that were supported by 11 cabinet members. At the time of Forrest’s leadership, Georgia had about 156,000 members in the Klan, which earned Forrest an estimated 2.5 million annually in today’s dollars.

20. The pogrom consisted of Oklahoma National Guard units, Tulsa home Guard units under the command of Patrick J. Hurley, and various whites who were armed.

21. The real estate exchange was established by the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce.

22. The ordinance was overturned by the efforts of B.C. Franklin, father of noted historian John Hope Franklin.

23. By the summer of 1922 an estimated 85 percent of the Greenwood area was rebuilt.

24. Today, the location is an empty lot owned by the Oklahoma State Department of Highways.

25. The Klan played a role in impeaching Walton.

26. John C. Walton Papers, Box 14, folder 27, Proceedings of the Oklahoma Military Commission in the Matter of Klan Activity of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries, Norman, Oklahoma. Read and listen to the full transcript here.

27. A former owner of Brady’s mansion, Tim Lannom, told Tulsa World that Brady “committed suicide so his wife could collect a million dollar insurance policy … That was back in the days when you could get away with that.” In a follow up editorial, Lannom apologized for the statement, writing that he had done research and could not substantiate the rumor, and added that he could not find any evidence linking Brady to the Klan. Lannom died in 2007, the victim of a gunshot wound to the neck.

28. Tate Brady was laid to rest in Oaklawn Cemetery. Dr. Clyde Snow, a forensic anthropologist who consulted for the Tulsa Race Riot Commission in 1999, believes that a mass grave of Race Riot victims is located at Oaklawn. The City of Tulsa prohibited the Commission from excavating the site.

29. Disclaimer: Vincent LoVoi, publisher of This Land Press, is a partner in the McNellie’s Group, which operates The Brady Tavern restaurant.

30. The ballpark was originally to be located at 3rd Street and Greenwood Avenue, outside the areas identified in the report. It was relocated to its current location, which rests upon those lands designated as historically significant.

31. The report stated “a Tulsa city incorporator, and one of its first alderman, Brady built the first hotel in the city in 1903, where Democrats headquartered and laid plans to control the constitutional convention leading to statehood that provided the legal foundation for segregation.”

The title of this work comes from the Dreamland Theater, located in Greenwood.

Editor’s Note: Following the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995, The New Yorker editor Tina Brown assigned reporter Gerald Posner to investigate the possibility that there was an additional suspect in the bombing. Posner traveled throughout Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Texas gathering interviews, and accessed a large cache of FBI 302 files. In time for the second anniversary of the bombing, Posner filed the story with The New Yorker, but Brown never published the piece, fearing the FBI could release information that would sabotage the article.

While shorter excerpts of this article have appeared in TIME and The Daily Beast, it has never before been published in full. Posner has updated portions of the article to reflect new findings. In This Land Digital for iPad, you can read the entire 9,000 word article as written in 1997. Included with this exclusive work are 7 pages of discovery timelines and 20 pages of Posner’s notes from the field–notes that he took from internal FBI files that remain sealed to this day.

The article is only available in This Land Digital for iPad, which is available for download in the iTunes app store. Each edition of This Land Digital costs $3.99.

Excerpt from the article:

The Dreamland Motel, in Junction City, Kansas, beckons drivers along Interstate 70 with its large red, star-shaped sign, its name in flashing lights, underscored with the motto “Clean, Quiet, Reasonable.” All twenty-four rooms in the 1960s-styled one floor stone building face the highway. On Good Friday, April 14, 1995, Lea McGown, the 44-year-old German-born owner glanced up from the wooden counter in the motel’s main office as a battered, rusty yellow Mercury drove slowly down the driveway’s steep incline. She was tired after spending the day celebrating her son’s seventeenth birthday, but as she did seven days a week, she rose to meet her new guest.

She was accustomed to all kinds of visitors at the motel she had owned since 1988. Left with two young children ten years earlier by the American soldier she had married in Germany, she had created a successful business. McGown had also earned a reputation for her fierce independence, including personally protecting her property with her double-barreled shotgun to running off drug dealers who frequent small Midwest motels that line major interstates. When Timothy McVeigh walked into McGown’s office that Friday, of course, he would have judged her incorrectly—by her appearance she seemed merely a petite, pretty blonde, with kind, blue eyes. The inquisitive mind that developed as the daughter of a policeman, or the fearlessness with which she conducted her own late night security checks in a town with one of Kansas’s highest crime rates, was not immediately evident.

“I am quite isolated,” McGown told me in the Bavarian-style apartment she lives in behind the motel’s office. “We are way out in the middle of nowhere, and he sees a single woman, and a foreigner at that. He probably figures it’s the perfect place to be nobody.”

Read the rest of the article in This Land Digital for iPad, or subscribe to our print edition today.

Her daughter, Brenda Paquette, agrees. “I’d say her biggest accomplishment was her ability to make everyone feel comfortable and totally at ease around her. She met Hillary Clinton once, through her many business contacts. Hillary was an attorney for the company she worked for at the time, and she managed to be introduced.”

Other encounters went beyond simple acquaintance—like the time Stone dated Jimmy Dean, the country crooner turned sausage king.

“Yes, the real Jimmy Dean,” Paquette said. “She was Secretary to the Senior Partner at Arthur Anderson, a huge accounting firm, where Jimmy Dean was a client. When he was in the office, she would fetch coffee for him and the executives, and I guess she made an impression. He called later that evening and asked if she would like to go to dinner. I was living with her at the time, and I remember him coming to the door. He picked her up in a limo and they went to dinner.”

Paquette says she also went out with Bob Hower, Tulsa’s first news anchor at Tulsa’s first television station, KOTV Channel 6. “He was a local celebrity at the time. Very handsome and dignified.”

But she eventually married Troy Stone, an avid hunter who left behind one of the largest private collections of mounted birds and animals when he passed away. In an effort to share his rare and unique collection, Norma donated it to the Oklahoma Aquarium in Jenks, the State Capitol building in Oklahoma City, and a Nature Center at the Hackberry Flat Wildlife Management Area.

After Stone retired from Arthur Anderson, the company was found guilty of criminal charges involving the Enron scandal, having shredded documents from their auditing of the energycompany.

“She was disgusted,” Paquette said. “She was so proud to have worked for so long for them. It was a prestigious company, and it was just destroyed by greed and people that were unscrupulous. All the employees that worked for this company lost their 401Ks, everything. People’s entire retirements were gone. One of the employees killed himself. It was huge. She was very disappointed.”

According to Paquette, Stone had many mantras to help guide her in confusing times.

“ ‘Just be easy,’ she would say. ‘Just be easy.’ It was something she said to remind us to calm down and be grateful, to let others be themselves and avoid getting too aggressive and upset. She would also say, ‘Don’t let things bother you. Before you know it, it will be the past.’

“She was so easygoing. In high school I was in a ton of rock and roll bands, and she would drive me to my gigs, even if they were like a hundred miles away. But she was always careful to not embarrass me—she’d stay in a hotel, away from me, just to keep me from being embarrassed. When I wanted a ride to the parking lot where my friends hung out, she would lay down in the seat so I’d look like I was by myself, not with my mother. She just wanted me to be happy. She was up for whatever.”

Bad men are drawn to the City of God. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls it the meeting ground for America’s most sinister extremists. Many Oklahomans regard it as the most dangerous and mysterious place in the state.

For 30-plus years, a small, isolated community in Northeastern Oklahoma has been the subject of endless scrutiny. Law enforcement agencies and conspiracy theorists insist that Elohim City is a breeding ground for neo-Nazis and anti-government militias hell-bent on overthrowing the “Zionist Occupied Government” (ZOG) of the United States. The most damning accusation suggests Elohim City played a central role in the planning and execution of the Oklahoma City bombing.

When asked if she’d ever had the chance to visit Elohim, a woman with the Stilwell Democrat Journal deadpanned, “No, we like to breathe.”

* * *

“I find them to be quite upstanding citizens of my community,” says Adair County Sheriff Austin Young.

A sharp, stern man with a military presence, Young has the towering, no-bullshit persona of a Clint Eastwood character. His white hair is neatly cropped, his eyes maintain contact and rarely blink.

“What I read in the papers, I never experienced that with them,” he says.

Young says that, as game warden of Sequoyah County (just south of Adair) in the early ‘80s, he once received a report of poaching that ultimately led him to Elohim City, where the suspect resided. As he approached the entrance of the community, he was met by Elohim City founder Robert Millar and several armed guards. Young politely told Millar that the weapons made him a little nervous.

“Robert said to me, ‘Well, you have a firearm, don’t you think that makes us nervous,’ ” the Sheriff remembers. “So I unholstered my weapon and placed it in my vehicle. And then he sent the armed guards away.”

This encounter began a 30-year rapport between Young and Elohim City. Young ran for sheriff in the mid-‘90s, when neo- Nazis, a German Nationalist, the Midwest bank robbers, and Timothy McVeigh were supposedly frequenting the compound.

“I campaigned in all parts of the county, including Elohim, and as far as I know, they supported me,” Young says.

Shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, a rumor spread that members of Elohim were planning a terrorist attack in Stilwell during the town’s annual strawberry festival. Young called and asked him point blank if the rumor was true. Millar answered, “Of course not. We would never do that.” The strawberry festival went off without incident.

After offering his opinions (“they’re not violent, not resistant, not how the media paints them”), Young suggests we go straight to the horse’s mouth.

He dials up John Millar, pastor and de facto leader of Elohim, and son of the community’s late founder. When Millar picks up, he explains that he has a couple of journalists from Tulsa who wish to visit Elohim. But instead of waiting for Millar to respond, Young offers the receiver to us.

“You’re not interested in repeating all those lies that were told about us?” Millar asks. And then he invites us for a visit.

* * *

Stephen Jones is a towering figure in Oklahoma’s legal community. Over his 46-year career as a defense attorney, the Enid native has represented a slew of high-profile pariahs and controversial characters, including anarchist Abbie Hoffman, serial killer Bobby Wayne Collins, suspected SLA radical Harawese Moore [1] and, most recently, indicted Tulsa Police Officer Jeff Henderson. But it was his work as Timothy McVeigh’s court-appointed defender for which he’s best remembered.

“When the Oklahoma City bombing happened, it didn’t surprise me at all,” Jones tells us one Saturday afternoon in his Enid office. “I was shocked that it was Oklahoma City. But that somebody would blow up a building and kill a lot of federal employees? That wasn’t a surprise at all. I had sensed for some period of time that there was a significant alienation of people in the Great Plains. There was a genuine hatred of the federal government, a hatred of the Clintons. I had not seen anything like it since I worked for the republican state committee in Texas when the Kennedys were in office in the early ‘60s.”

Jones believes that this anti-government sentiment reached a tipping point on April 19, 1993, when ATF and FBI agents assaulted another eccentric religious community: the Branch-Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. When the siege was over, 81 men, women, and children were dead.

“You have the primitive evangelical community,” Jones says. “And the defining moment for a lot of those people—and this narrows down to Elohim City—was the assault on the Branch-Davidians … Tim McVeigh told me that he sat in a Bradley tank; he knew what those tanks could do. And those images of that tank punching holes in that building, for several million people, probably more than 10 million people, that was a Biblical prophecy come true.”

McVeigh watched closely, first on television and then in person, as the nightmare at Waco unfolded. This proved to be his breaking point. Disturbed by what he witnessed, McVeigh began to plot his own revenge on behalf of the Branch-Davidians. Two years later, his vengeance became a reality when 168 people, including 19 children, died in the Oklahoma City bombing.

It’s well documented that Jones did not buy the government’s conclusion (re-enforced by McVeigh himself) that McVeigh conceived and executed the bombing almost entirely alone, with only the most minimal assistance from Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier. Jones believes the government was desperate for swift, quantifiable justice and chose to focus only on developing an airtight case against McVeigh and Nichols rather than fog the issue of their guilt by fully exploring the possibility of a broader conspiracy. Jones does not believe the evidence against Elohim City provides a sufficient answer.

“There is no smoking gun that shows involvement of any of the people in Elohim City,” he says. “There is certainly, in two or three instances, against the backdrop of this, a pretty convincing case that some people in Elohim City may have been involved.”

For the man who spent years studying every tiny pebble of the mountainous evidence, Elohim City is just another “what if?” scenario, doomed to float in the ether, a question mark whose answer is forever unknowable.

He agrees, though, that Adair County is a poetic fit for the community.

“Throughout the history of (Eastern Oklahoma), there has been more chicanery, isolationism, parochialism, xenophobic attitudes, distrust of outsiders, ‘We settle things our way,’ ” he explains. “So Elohim City, yes, is comfortably located. Very comfortably. Historically, it blends in.”

* * *

You won’t find Elohim City on any map. The FBI has dedicated an incredible amount of time, money and manpower to investigating and monitoring the town’s activities. Yet, this idyllic hamlet (known to its residents as “God’s City,” the Hebrew translation of Elohim) remains well hidden, impossible to find without the assistance of one of the few people in the world who’ve actually been there. Some reports reference Fort Smith as the nearest town, others Sallisaw, Muldrow, or Stilwell. They’re all more or less right, but also dead wrong: Elohim City is not “near” any town; its 400 acres are situated as far as possible from nearby civilization.

The western edge of the Ozarks begins here in Adair County, a sparsely populated spread of bucolic communities with a mere 22,000 residents (43 percent of whom claim Native American blood) over 577 square miles. The pastoral beauty of the majestic, unpredictable terrain stands in stark contrast to the rural poverty that plagues much of its population. Roadsides are often littered with garbage—discarded, empty cans of Busch beer, cast-off plastic grocery bags, cigarette butts—and road signs are peppered with bullet holes. Gutted shotgun shacks and ramshackle houses with landfill front yards rest precariously next to forests of resilient pines and dead, twisted post oaks. Multitudes of modest white churches adorned with hand-painted signage offer a point of communion for residents to congregate and socialize.

Underneath the surface malaise and natural wonder of Adair lies an explosive history, one that informs Elohim’s existence. This is the heart of the Cherokee Nation, the last stop on the Trail of Tears where 11,000 Cherokee Indians were forcibly relocated. The area’s history is America’s history, fraught with instances of revolt and rebellion, of fierce individualism repeatedly clashing with a government status quo. This is the territory where Cherokee general Stand Watie held out against Union troops, making him the last Confederate general to surrender at the end of the Civil War, thus ending the South’s campaign for secession. It’s the home of Ned Christie, a Keetowah Cherokee traditionalist falsely accused of killing a federal marshal. When he wouldn’t surrender, a posse of hired guns from Fort Smith pushed a burning wagon into Christie’s fortified home.

The James Gang hid out here, as did Belle Starr and her bunch, the Dalton Boys, and Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd. In 1977, Gene Leroy Hart, a Cherokee, was accused of the brutal rape and murder of three girl scouts in Mayes County. Hart was a violent local fugitive who’d previously been convicted of raping two Tulsa women. Despite the public outcry, a Mayes County jury acquitted Hart.

Today, the Cherokee Nation is humble home to small-town Oklahomans, many of whom are largely untouched by 21st century development. The landscape is wild and primitive, and self-governance is necessary for day-to-day survival. And the area’s legacy of isolationism and individualism continues, carried on in large part by Elohim City.

* * *

For five miles, a dirt path snakes alongside a mountain. Then suddenly you see it: a poster featuring the Ten Commandments tacked to the silver gate of a barbwire fence. Nearby, a mangled, abandoned mailbox limply hangs, begging to be put out of its misery. Several hundred yards later, the incline abruptly levels as the trail penetrates the outskirts of Elohim City.

Serenity permeates the village. The day is bright and sunny, and the view of the Ozarks is breathtaking. For all the violence and racism assigned by outsiders, the town feels more like a spiritual oasis than a terrorist compound. There are no armed guards waiting. A small terrier roams free while children play in the road. A quirky collection of huts, trailers and cottages spread across the property intermingled with several hulking, alien-like stone structures whose bubbled, dome roofs betray the off-kilter eccentricity of their builders and inhabitants.

A modest cottage rests on the side of the town’s only artery, its Main Street. A tattered, faded American flag waves in the front yard not far from a child’s jungle gym.

The portly, white-haired man on the porch is John Millar.

“Y’all get lost?” he asks, smiling, in a country drawl. His tone is relaxed and friendly and he invites us in.

Millar’s home could be a model showroom for Pottery Barn— simple, clean, and elegant, with hardwood floors and a modern kitchen furnished with contemporary appliances. The décor is exact and unobtrusive. On one wall hangs a large digital clock, on another a faux-rustic bronze piece etched with the phrase “The Destination is the Journey.” Framed photographs of family on coffee and end tables are given ample room to breathe. You could mistake the locale for middle-class suburbia.

Millar settles into his chair. “So, what do y’all wanna know?”

* * *

In 1973, an ex-Mennonite pastor from Canada named Robert Millar, acting on what he believed was a vision from God, moved his family from rural Maryland to a large patch of land nestled high in the Ozarks, a mere stone’s throw from the Oklahoma-Arkansas border. Elohim City was conceived as a spiritual city of refuge for followers of an obscure offshoot of Protestantism called Christian Identity, which teaches a racialist, Eurocentric take on Old Testament fire-and-brimstone piety. Though the elder Millar’s vision that prompted the move could be called “apocalyptic”—he claimed to see future wars, natural disasters and civil unrest—John Millar maintains that Elohim was not created to be a spiritual bomb shelter.

“We didn’t come out here to escape like some people do,” Millar tells us. “They think the world’s going to explode or fly away or something, and that’s their right to believe that. But that’s not our vision. Armageddon is not our vision. We came out here to express what we feel the Holy One, or God, is wanting to express through us. And so our hearts are turned towards the heavenly spiritual realm.”

The pastor insists that his community is focused on heaven alone. Not the government, not a race war, just peaceful communion with the Creator. He cited factoids—“None of us have ever been convicted of a felony”—and repeatedly renounced the idea that they’re a hate group. “People think that because we believe in Christian Identity that we hate other races. We don’t teach hate. We don’t put up with that.”

Millar is polite, generous, and accommodating throughout the interview, never once taking the hardline on any issue. The idea of a “white separatist compound” conjures images of a completely autonomous community forbidden from interacting with mainstream society; this is not Elohim City. When Millar speaks of politics and morality, his ideas have a surprisingly Libertarian, live-and-let-live bent to them.

Many of Elohim’s residents, for instance, hold jobs in town. The children are homeschooled in communal fashion—most of the parents take an active role in the education of not just their own kids, but in their neighbors’ as well; it’s Hillary Clinton’s “It takes a village” concept realized in the most literal sense. Weekly trips to town to eat at local restaurants, visit the library or see a movie are not uncommon. The homes even have Wi-Fi. There’s little difference in living conditions between Elohim and your typical Edmond or Moore outliers.

Millar does acknowledge that Christian Identity’s racially charged theology is at odds with modern notions of equality and color blindness.

“We teach that the scripture is against intermarriage with other races,” he confesses. According to the Oklahoma Department of Commerce, 26.3 percent of marriages occurring between 2008 and 2010 were between two people of different races, ranking Oklahoma second in the nation for interracial couples. “[Intermarriage] is a big issue; most of your churches want to promote that. We think that’s totally unscriptural. That doesn’t mean we hate them, not at all. We think you destroy both races when you marry in.”

The core philosophy of Christian Identity is an uncomfortable mixture of traditional Judeo-Christian mythology and a passive form of modern white supremacy. Elohim residents observe the Sabbath on Saturday, and many adhere to the ancient dietary restrictions of the Old Testament, though Millar is careful to point out that it’s not a requirement. According to Identity, when ancient Israel fragmented, the tribe of Judah, “God’s chosen people,” migrated to northern Europe and eventually the U.S. In other words, the true Jews, according to Millar and Identity followers, are Caucasians. [2]

“That might sound really strange to you,” says Millar. “But we believe that your Scandinavian, your Germanic, your Anglo-Saxon, your Celtic people, are different waves of immigration that came through. They’re really all cousins and they’re part of the same people from ancient Israel.”

Since the OKC bombing, three things fueled suspicion about Elohim’s complicity: the company Elohim founder Robert Millar chose to keep, the testimony of a government informant named Carol Howe who infiltrated the community, and circumstantial evidence suggesting that Timothy McVeigh may have been in contact with Elohim residents in the months leading up to the bombing.

“For over a year we were scrutinized by the FBI,” Millar tells us. “We didn’t like it, but we thought it was the duty of the federal government to chase down whoever did that. So we were scrutinized sideways, every which way you could think.”

Millar maintains that the residents of Elohim never held a violent agenda against the government, nor any desire to participate in some apocalyptic religious battle. But according to Mark Hamm, a professor of criminology at Indiana University, in the early ‘80s, the peaceful residents and elders of Elohim became radicalized as they developed a rapport with a similar white Separatist group from the northern Ozarks called The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA). Unlike the benign Elohim City, the members of CSA didn’t just passively distrust the U.S. government—they were stockpiling weapons and conducting rigorous military training in order to overthrow it. Furthermore, CSA had close ties to the Order of the Silent Brotherhood, a shadowy organization of bloodthirsty neo-Nazis who fashioned themselves as Aryan Warriors in the tradition of the Phineas Priesthood. [3]

From Hamm’s 2001 book In Bad Company: America’s Terrorist Underground:

Originally a pacifist community, Elohim City began a long, slow tilt toward militancy following Millar’s 1982 address before another far-right group’s gathering—the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord’s national convocation at CSA headquarters in nearby Bull Shoals Lake, Arkansas. It was there that Millar met CSA founder James Ellison, a militant neo-Nazi who would later join forces with Robert Mathews’s Order in what was to become what is called the War of ’84—a campaign of terror against ZOG including a series of assassinations, fire-bombings, and robberies. “Millar taught CSA about God, and they taught Millar about guns,” said a former CSA member to a reporter.

The FBI considered the CSA to be the “best trained civilian paramilitary group in America,” and was closely monitoring its activity.

On April 19, 1985, exactly ten years prior to the Oklahoma City Bombing, the FBI surrounded CSA and demanded the surrender of Ellison, who was wanted for conspiring to acquire automatic weapons. For four days, a tense cold war ensued as Ellison refused to surrender. Robert Millar traveled to the compound under the guise of negotiator, but according to Ellison’s right hand man Kerry Noble (who ultimately renounced the CSA and now writes and speaks on the dangers of right-wing extremism) Millar was actually there as a witness in the event that the government drew first blood. Later, the newly militant Millar bemoaned the fact that Ellison ultimately surrendered peacefully.

“Jim was wrong to surrender,” Millar told Noble while visiting him in prison. “He should’ve shot it out with the feds.”

Millar also served as spiritual adviser to Richard Wayne Snell, one of CSA’s most violent members, who was put to death for the murders of a black state trooper and a pawn shop owner whom he believed to be Jewish. [4] During the trial, Millar testified as a character witness on Snell’s behalf. Snell was executed on April 19, 1995 in Ft. Smith Arkansas, twelve hours after the Oklahoma City Bombing and ten years to the day after the FBI’s siege of CSA. Millar and his son John later retrieved Snell’s remains from the state and ultimately buried him in Elohim City.

When asked about his father’s relationship with Snell, Millar’s tone becomes sharp.

“Snell’s body is here,” he says. “I went to pick it up with my dad, his remains, at the request of his wife, okay?”

By forging a relationship with Ellison, Snell, and the CSA, Elohim City effectively laid the foundation for the scrutiny, suspicion and rumors that would plague the community in the years to come, reaching a fever pitch in the mid-‘90s.

* * *

“We didn’t know Timothy McVeigh,” Millar insists. “Never heard of him until the bombing. No connection whatsoever.”

In the grand jury indictment of McVeigh, the government alleged that the plotting of the bombing began in early September of 1994, while McVeigh was staying at a motel in Vian, Oklahoma, less than an hour away from Elohim City.

“It is true that Tim McVeigh was there that day, that’s what the hotel registration shows, and it is true that that’s off the beaten path for him,” Jones acknowledges. “Tim McVeigh almost never went to Eastern Oklahoma via Western Oklahoma.”

It’s believed that during this time, McVeigh was in contact with members of the Aryan Republican Army (ARA), a ragtag group of white supremacists who executed a series of bank robberies in order to fund anti-government activities (earning the media nickname “the Midwest bank bandits”). Evidence suggests the ARA was in Elohim City at the same time McVeigh was in Vian. The exact nature of McVeigh’s relationship with these men (Pete Langan, [5] Richard Guthrie, Scott Stedeford, Kevin McCarthy and Michael Brescia) and, by proxy, Elohim City, is foggy. People like Mark Hamm hypothesize that the ARA helped to fund the bombing with their loot and used Elohim as a sort of safe house, an idea known as the “theory of multiple John Does.” In Hamm’s book, ARA leader Pete Langan, who is currently serving a life sentence plus 35 years for his role in the robberies, is interviewed extensively and appears to be honest and forthcoming about his criminal activities. But he denies any connection to the bombing, and he minimizes Elohim’s significance as anything other than a spiritual refuge. McVeigh denied the existence of accomplices to his dying breath. It’s argued that there are a multitude of potential reasons for both men to lie, but the fact remains that nothing has been proven.

* * *

In March of 1995, the government had planned to raid Elohim City based on ATF informant Carol Howe’s allegations.

Howe, a 24-year-old Tulsa debutante-turned-skinhead trophy queen, was brought to Elohim City by her boyfriend, white supremacist and would-be celebrity of the militia movement, Dennis Mahon. A former Imperial Dragon of the KKK, Mahon was now leader of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) in Tulsa. [6]

Jones calls Mahon a “freakshow,” a “burlesque figure of comedy,” a man prone to “making extreme statements and engaging in extreme acts of self-promotion.” John Millar calls him a friend.

“I don’t know what he’s done in his life,” Millar demurs, when asked about Elohim’s relationship with Mahon. “He seemed like a decent man to me. I agree with some of his thoughts. Not all of them, not by a long shot, but I do agree with some of his thoughts.”

Mahon had plucked Howe from her privileged existence and taken her as a lover and protégé. He delivered her to his friends at Elohim for spiritual indoctrination, but she’d already been contacted by the ATF and turned into an informant. Upon her arrival, she began reporting her findings. She claimed Millar and company were stockpiling weapons, preaching increasingly aggressive anti-government rhetoric, and, most importantly, discussing plans for an attack of some sort. This seemed to confirm the government’s worst fears: Elohim City was a powder keg of anti-government rage, a place where, in Hamm’s words, “every resident down to the smallest child was armed and dangerous” and “underground bunkers held vast stores of ammunition, grenades, and explosives, even chemical and biological weapons.”

Howe’s was one of the more sensational puzzle pieces of the bombing case. When investigative reporter J.D. Cash broke her story in the McCurtain Daily Gazette during the Terry Nichols trial, a national media feeding frenzy ensued. She was profiled in numerous magazines and newspapers, interviewed by Diane Sawyer, frequently referred to by reporters as “glamorous” and “beautiful.”

In linking Elohim to Oklahoma City, many conspiracy theorists point to Howe’s testimony in the Nichols trial, in which she claims to have witnessed Timothy McVeigh’s presence at the compound. From the court transcript:

Q. Now, are you familiar with what Timothy McVeigh looks like, Ms. Howe?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. Have you seen photographs of Timothy McVeigh?

A. Yes, I have.

Q. Did you ever see Timothy McVeigh at the Elohim City compound?

A. I believe I did.

Q. All right. When did you see him?

A. It was in July of 1994.

Q. Okay. And where did you see him?

A. He was at a section of the compound walking across a lawn near the church building.

But Howe was problematic. She had a history of lying. Her stories were inconsistent and contradictory, and with more attention each story grew more elaborate.

“Like many former Soviet spies that come to the United States, Howe’s story tended to get better over a period of time,” Jones says now. “And then there’s always new revelations as [informants] think they’ve been abandoned or forgotten or they want to increase their stipend or whatever. They remember something new.” Jones says he discounted everything Carol Howe said after she acquired an attorney and was thrust into the spotlight.

The FBI’s March 1995 planned raid against Elohim never materialized due to growing doubt on the government’s part over Howe’s credibility. Furthermore, Howe was ultimately deemed unreliable and her testimony in the Nichols trial was thrown out, making it unavailable for consideration to the jury. Mention her name to Millar, and you can almost see the blood boiling beneath his skin.

“They wouldn’t even use her testimony,” he says with incredulity. “She’s so unstable they wouldn’t even use her testimony. That’s one of the things we don’t appreciate about our government. They use people who are unstable, give them money and finance them to do unethical things. And that’s what they found—she was so unethical they wouldn’t even use her as a witness, okay?”

* * *

Another difficult question regarding Elohim’s connection to the bombing centers around Timothy McVeigh’s relationship with a German Nationalist named Andreas Strassmeier. Strassmeier wore fatigues and a swastika, was obsessed with firearms, and lived in Elohim City. McVeigh met Strassmeier at a Tulsa gun show in 1993.

“There was a lot of speculation on how they made contact,” Millar says. “We don’t know. We have a little over a hundred residents, and if they go to a gun show or a movie or a restaurant, I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I’m not interested. But I don’t want them doing anything illegal, okay? And we make that very clear.”

In Kingman, Arizona, shortly after he’d rented the Ryder truck he would eventually convert into a weapon of mass destruction, McVeigh used a calling card to dial Elohim City. McVeigh asked the woman who answered if he could speak with “Andi the German.”

According to Howe, Strassmeier was the community’s head of security, though Millar vehemently denies this.

“Never—he was here, but he wasn’t head of Elohim City security,” says Millar. “He liked playing with guns, so maybe he thought he was head of security and wanted to walk around with that. We let people think what they want, we believe in freedom. But we never gave him that position of authority.”

The question of plausible deniability looms large over Elohim. The racialist ideology of Christian Identity and the geographic seclusion of Millar’s community no doubt attracted men with agendas, but are the community’s elders responsible for the behavior of every guest that passes through? For his part, Robert Millar quickly expelled Andreas Strassmeier from Elohim City soon after he became aware that the FBI was looking at Strassmeier for possible ties to McVeigh and the bombing. Strassmeier ultimately fled to Germany and was never prosecuted.

* * *

“I have a niece who’s going to a local college,” Millar tells us. “She wants to be a lawyer. Her criminal justice professor was talking about terrorists and the Arabs and the Muslims, and then he said, ‘Well, we have [terrorists] right up our hill from here, and if you go up there, they hate other races and they’re liable to just shoot you for anything.’ And my niece raised her hand and said, ‘I live up there! That doesn’t happen!’ ”

Millar is clearly vexed by this judgment. He points out that in the 38 years of Elohim’s existence, nobody’s ever been shot on its property, unlike the surrounding communities. “But because of the stigma and because of us not being politically correct in the eyes of the media, we have a professor in the Criminal Justice class who throws us in with the terrorists. I don’t appreciate that, and he will hear from me. That just happened two weeks ago, okay?”

He pauses, then adds: “You can write that: ‘We’ve never had anyone killed here.’ ”

Before we depart, Millar gives us a tour of Elohim’s new sanctuary, still under construction. The Reverend leads us into the beautiful, cavernous chapel, built with the hands of the residents. He apologetically explains that he would normally show us their current church, but the community has no doubt already congregated, and reporters aren’t allowed to sit in on their services. Outsiders still make the community uncomfortable.

After the tour, we say our goodbyes and Millar leaves us to find our own way out. With its residents all gathered for service, Elohim City is a ghost town. The air is still and peaceful. The warmth of the sun, the soothing hum of the natural ambience, the majestic view of the Arkansas wilderness—in this moment, it’s obvious why these people are here. On the way out, we notice a primitive, white sign mounted on the side of the road, adorned with a bright red spray-painted phrase: “Jesus Saves.”

* * *

After decades of scrutiny and mountains of circumstantial evidence, the government has still found no cause to take action against Elohim City. A second Grand Jury investigation of the bombing, convened by State Representative Charles Key to examine loose ends Key and others believed the government did not address to satisfaction in its initial investigation, came up empty-handed on the community.

“We have made every effort to try to identify any plausible connection between [Elohim City] and the bombing,” it concluded. “In spite of a possible telephone call from Timothy McVeigh to Elohim City in April 1995, we have been unable to find such a connection.”

Does God’s City deserve to be granted peace? The questions raised by its proximity to violent right-wing extremism will likely continue to haunt the town for the span of its existence. Image rehabilitation is hardly an option, considering the endless documentation devoted to impeaching the community’s collective character. It doesn’t help that Millar’s own sympathies to violent men ensure that Elohim City will continue to attract them. Then again, Millar and his community aren’t seeking social acceptance; they want the right to exist peacefully, outside the parameters of mainstream society. Whether or not society allows that is another matter.

Footnotes

1. Coincidentally, like Jones’s most famous client, Moore was also accused of bomb- ing the Murrah building. In 1998’s controversial tome on the OKC bombing, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, author David Hoffman writes, “In the mid-‘70s, Oklahoma resident Harawese Moore was convicted of planting an incendiary explosive device outside both the federal courthouse and the Alfred P. Murrah Building.”

2. References to the Christian Identity belief can be traced as far back as The Declara- tion of Arbroath on April 6, 1320 in which 37 Scottish Chieftains wrote the Pope asking for assistance in Scotland’s battle against England.

3. In the book of Numbers, upon discovering an Israelite man and a Midianite woman copulating, the Jewish warrior Phinehas bludgeoned the couple with a spear as pun- ishment for the interracial relationship (race-mixing was expressly forbidden by God). For the execution, Phinehas was rewarded by God with “an everlasting priesthood.” Many militant white supremacists believe that they are called by God to carry on this legacy and it’s been speculated that historical figures such as John Wilkes Booth and Jesse James considered themselves to be Phineas Priests. Robert Mathews and his organization the Order of the Silent Brotherhood are among the most violent recent examples of men committing heinous acts of murder and mayhem under the banner of the Phineas Priesthood.

4. In 1983, Snell, Ellison, and Noble traveled to Oklahoma City to case the Murrah Federal building as the potential target of a CSA attack. However, during preparations, the men interpreted a weapons malfunction as a sign from God and the plan for
attack was canceled. There’s been some conjecture that the Murrah building may have been chosen as the target of the April 19 scheduled for execution the same day.

5. Langan was the ARA’s unofficial leader and a self-proclaimed mem- ber of the Phineas Priesthood. Upon Langan’s arrest in 1996, authorities discovered that his toenails were painted pink and his entire body was devoid of hair. It later came out that Langan was a pre-op transsexu- al who, when not robbing banks, cross-dressed and lived as a woman named Donna.

6. In February, 2012, Mahon was convicted in federal court of a 2004 bombing in Scottsdale, Arizona that injured Donald Logan, a black city official. Mahon’s sentencing hearing is May 22; he could face up to 100 years in prison. Evidence against Mahon was produced in large part through information provided by Rebecca Willams, a government informant who met Mahon and his twin brother Daniel (who was also tried but acquitted) at a Catoosa, Oklahoma trailer park in 2005.

Bluford Johnson was head over heels for the special effects and witty cracks of Hollywood motion pictures. His over-2,000-piece collection ranged from black and white to animated Technicolor, from Wolfman to The Little Rascals.

“In his little apartment, he had boxes crammed full of VHS tapes that were stacked high,” Robinson said, “and those plastic storage drawers full of them, too. Then there was a hutch, a DVD tower, and bookcases, for the DVDs. And then there were many that were lent out to friends. He was always so generous with everything he had to give—which wasn’t always much.”

Johnson was physically disabled for most of his life, after a work-related accident in July 1962.

“Dad was 28 years old and had a railroad job,” Robinson said. “He was shutting a railcar, and the door came off its tracks. It fell on him. When they finally got it off of him, his head was laying on his right ankle. It just bent him in two. It shattered his right hip, they had to put in a steel ball and a rod going down his femur. His shin was shattered, too. The doctors had to puzzle piece it together.

“It took him a long time to recover—and I don’t know that he ever really recovered from it fully. He was in a wheelchair for a long time, but my dad was determined to get out of it. He was not going to stay in that chair. Eventually he managed to walk with a cane or crutches. He was fiercely independent.”

Robinson says her father was covered by some insurance, but needed the help of a lawyer to obtain the full compensation he needed for medical expenses. “He was working with this great lawyer who was very old and actually died in the middle of the process. The next lawyer he got didn’t seem to have as much enthusiasm, and dad only ended up with a $10,000 settlement, even though he suffered from that injury for the rest of his life.”

Being forced to sit still and recover only heightened Johnson’s mammoth movie obsession. Having served eight years in the Naval Reserves and being a self-taught student of military history, he delighted in documentaries about the Second World War.

“My son also likes history, so that’s something they got to enjoy together. They would watch the movies together and my dad would comment with stories about his own experiences, or detailed trivia about other battles. It would mesmerize my son. My dad was always really proud of him. He said having a grandson would make him immortal.”

When Robinson’s kids signed up for karate lessons, Johnson dug out the VHS tapes of the original Kung Fu classics starring David Carradine. “He loved watching movies with his grandkids, and telling them everything about each one. We would be watching something together, and he would say, ‘This is the longest flight scene ever recorded.’ He would make notes on Ebert and Roeper’s reviews and be sure to watch the ones they said were best.”

Keeping up with the newest releases even into his last days, Robinson says his last movie was probably The Fighter. “Someone had given it to him as a gift, and he was so excited. When they handed it to him, he immediately rattled off the actors’ names, the praise it received, and all the trivia.”

“Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, Errol Flynn, and the old Tarzan,” she said, listing them from memory. “Those were probably his favorites, the good clean movies. He loved the classics. I can’t tell you how many VCRs he’d worn out.”

Authors spend a ridiculous amount of time researching and writing books, and I am certainly no exception. My interest in former Tulsan and rock ’n’ roll legend Leon Russell began in the mid-Sixties, when, as a pre-teen growing up in a small town just outside of Tulsa, I would hear stories about a talented musician from Tulsa who played on records for The Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and many others. I heard these stories from the butcher at Jesse’s Grocery in downtown Bixby. The butcher with the soulful voice was Bill Davis, who moonlighted various Tulsa clubs and interacted with the best musicians in town.

Davis would sing while he worked and also regale me with stories about this mysterious musician, who helped crank out the hits from the L.A. recording studios, and who also reportedly appeared as a band member on one of the hot new rock ’n’ roll shows on TV, ABC’s Shindig! I didn’t know the name of this mystery man until 1970, when, in the middle of my high school drafting class, a classmate handed me an album with an outrageous looking individual with long, grayish hair and a beard to match staring out from the cover. “His name is Leon Russell,” the classmate told me. “He’s from Tulsa. He plays piano and sings real cool!”

Soon after my discovery, I began to collect any memorabilia that I could find on Russell (who was beginning to gain recognition nationally as a solo artist), and commenced what has been an ongoing labor of love to research and document all of his session work. Beginning with what limited credits I could find on labels, album covers, and sparse liner notes, I eventually and logically ended up at the American Federation of Musicians Union Local 47 office in Hollywood, home to all of the detailed session contracts from decades of union sessions. The AFM only allowed employee access to the files, but I was able to hire two of the staff to research their voluminous archives, after-hours, for any of Russell’s sessions during the Sixties, when he all but lived in the recording studio.

Their year-long efforts yielded hundreds of sessions from 1961-1969, and revealed a virtual Who’s Who of the recording industry. During my 40-plus years of digging I have also attempted, sometimes in vain, to find the actual record album or 45 single that sprouted from the session, to have an image available should I ever decide to publish my findings.

My paying work—I’ve had various oil company gigs over the years—afforded me the opportunity to travel the country, especially to the west coast, where I was able to prowl a variety of old record shops when they were still plentiful. The session logs from the Local 47 contained a wealth of information—session date, studio, recording company, song title, and session leader—but lacked one key element: the artist’s name. I found that many times in a recording session basic tracks were recorded with no mention of an artist. For years, I would go into a used record store with lists of songs and a label and try to match this up to a record that was released 20 or 30 years earlier. I made some remarkable finds over the years doing this, and would fill a hole or two in my session listings every time I was able.

The Internet and the remastering of older recordings on CD have facilitated this task and, finally, I’m ready to publish the fruits of my labors. I’m calling it Longhair Music: The Songs and Sessions of Leon Russell.

Teenage Idol

One of the windfalls of my research has been meeting many of the singers, musicians, producers, family, friends, and characters from Russell’s storied career. Many have been by happenstance, including one from 1976 at the Tulsa International Airport. I was working for Skelly Oil, in their Automotive Division, and was responsible for purchasing all of the passenger cars and light trucks for the field operations in the states. One of my occasional duties was driving Skelly management to and from the airport. One Friday afternoon, I was sent to the airport to pick up our general counsel, who was returning from the Getty Oil offices in Los Angeles.

As I stood outside the gate for the plane to disembark, down the jetway came our counsel talking with Ricky Nelson, America’s first teen idol, in town to perform at the Copa Hilton Club. Our man must have seen the puzzled look on my face, for he immediately explained how he’d been seated next to Nelson in first class. He introduced me briefly before a crowd closed in around us. I knew Russell had worked for Nelson during his session days in LA, and rumor was that Nelson had him on retainer for special gigs and performances. So, while we were waiting in the baggage claim area, I told Nelson about my project and had heard he had used Leon and was curious if this was true. He looked at me with those blue, blue eyes and said, “Leon is my favorite piano player of all time. You know he sang backup on many of my records.”

And then he got into a limo.

Elvis’ Drummer

A few years after that, I was in my office in downtown Tulsa—Getty Oil had become Texaco by this time—when I got a call out of the blue from the most prolific drummer in rock ’n’ roll history.

Hal Blaine and I had been corresponding for several years about Leon’s studio work. Now, he was coming through town and had a lengthy layover, and called to see if I wanted to get together for the day. I picked Hal up at the airport and brought him back to the office so I could tie up a few loose ends before leaving for the day. He was sporting shades and some type of gig jacket, and got more than a few glances from people around the office. Cutting to the chase, I told them he was Elvis’ drummer. Hal had played on the Elvis hit “Can’t Help Falling In Love With You” and on Elvis’ film soundtracks in the ’60s. His best-known affiliation, though, was with Phil Spector and those lavish “Wall of Sound” productions that he and the so-called “Wrecking Crew” had churned out. By Hal’s own estimation, he played on over 35,000 sessions over the years. Colleagues I hadn’t seen for months were popping by to check out Elvis’ drummer, much to Hal’s amusement.

We left after a couple of hours and went to my home in Bixby, where he entertained my family with story after story of his illustrious career. One in particular involved Leon and Glen Campbell, who were running late for a session. Time is money at those sessions, especially when you have a large group of musicians sitting around on the clock. Glen finally arrived, apologetic and red as a beet due to his embarrassment as the producer dressed him down in front of the others. Eventually Leon arrived, about 15 minutes late, and as soon as he got to the piano the producer started in on him. Leon closed the lid of the piano, got up, and walked out of the session, leaving the producer to find another piano player on short notice.

Hal also recalled a gig he played in late 1962 that involved himself (drums), Leon (piano), Campbell (guitar), David Gates (bass), and Steve Douglas (saxophone) billed as the popular recording group The Champs for a performance in Pismo Beach.

“We were all together in the car heading to Pismo Beach when we saw a car hit a pedestrian and speed away. Leon saw a policeman and stopped the car to tell him about it, but the policeman chewed him out for stopping on a busy highway. So much for being a Good Samaritan!”

According to Hal, Leon’s piano work was right off the wall. “Every piano part was a winner—and they were totally his. No copycat stuff. He was strictly an original, and of course, still is.” I hooked up with Hal several more times over the years, including a few visits to the boat he used to keep at Marina del Rey. Hal was one of the first to furnish me with rare photos from those early sessions.

Skyhill

During the course of my research I was told by Tulsa percussionist Jimmy Karstein—who was in LA with Leon shortly after he first started doing studio work—that Russell would go for weeks at a time before dropping by the Local 47 office to pick up a stack of checks. Blessed with precision, consistency, perfect timing and a quiet demeanor, Russell was an immediate studio favorite, and studio work became plentiful, so much so that in the spring of 1964 he was able to buy a house in the Hollywood Hills, near Universal City studios.

Inspired by the home studios of Ernie Kovacs, Gary S. Paxton, and Les Paul, he built a recording studio in Skyhill in the summer of 1965 with state of the art recording equipment. Dubbed Leon Russell Recorders, many just referred to it as Skyhill Studio. Tulsa musician J.J. Cale was dubbed the studio’s unofficial chief engineer. I first visited Skyhill in the early ‘80s, long after Russell had sold it to a former employee and friend, Diane Sullivan. I became acquainted with Diane via a Leon Russell fan newsletter that she published called The Russell Rag. Her Leon memorabilia put my own collection at that time to shame.

Though the recording equipment had long since been removed from Skyhill, there was evidence that the residence had been a serious recording studio. Double-walls, sound-proofing, and elaborate electrical wiring, all from the Russell days. Skyhill was a big, split-level house, so different instruments were set up in various places, i.e., drums in the den, keyboards in the living room. The bathroom was the reverb chamber. One of the bedrooms served as the control room. Cale told me in a 1982 interview that the first legitimate union session at Skyhill was for Glen Campbell, and that the neighbors thought some Hell’s Angels lived at Skyhill because of all the cars, motorcycles, and loud music at all hours of the day and night.

The Electric Prunes, a California surf-garage band, recorded their famous reverse guitar intro to their big hit, “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night),” at a Skyhill session. Ultimately Russell recorded his Asylum Choir albums at Skyhill, along with portions of his first few solo albums before removing the equipment and shipping it to his Oklahoma studios when he relocated back to Tulsa in the early ’70s.

And it was normal to have a father who made his living in the backyard, in a three-car garage he converted into a studio, where he painted pictures all day and people came over to buy them. One day I was mowing the backyard when a car pulled up and out stepped a mountain of a man. I stopped the mower and the man asked where my father was. When I said he wasn’t home, the mountain thundered, “Tell him Sampson came by. Will Sampson.” Of course you can sell artwork from your backyard to people, including famous actors, and make enough to send five kids through private schools and college. This didn’t seem strange. I mean, no stranger than a rock star moving onto my block.

I grew up in Tulsa, in Sunset Park, which is somehow located within Maple Ridge South. Neighborhood divisions barely make sense to me now, and definitely didn’t when I was a kid. Growing up I had no idea that my neighborhood had an official name. I simply lived on Sunset Drive, a street that is only four blocks long and travels parallel to numbered streets, which I now realize is not normal for Tulsa. People asked where I lived and I said, “Sunset Drive.” No one knew where that was, so I clarified: “It’s by Woodward Park.” Everyone knew where Woodward Park was.

In the early ’70s the predominant neighborhood topic was Dutch elm disease, which was destroying our elms—at the time the overwhelming majority of our mature trees—at an alarming rate. We lost seven trees on our property alone, and the introduction of sunlight where there had once been unrelenting shade transformed the whole look and feel of the neighborhood. Then something else quickly changed the topic of conversation and psychologically altered the neighborhood: a rock ’n’ roll legend at the apex of his fame had decided to move into the old Aaronson mansion at 21st Place and Woodward Boulevard, a monstrous Georgian-style home on two acres, built around 1917 by oilman Lionel Aaronson.

Leon Russell was coming back to Tulsa one more time.

***

The teenagers in the neighborhood were flipping out. The parents, even if they didn’t know who Leon was, heard “rock star” and saw the writing on the wall: every kid in the neighborhood was about to get hooked on heroin.

I was 10 in 1972, so the name Leon Russell didn’t ring a bell. I was into rock music as much as a 10-year-old could be. I had started playing the drums around that time, was already listening to the records my older siblings played— Beatles, Stones, Doors—but Leon’s music had yet to trickle down to my ears. It was about to.

My brother, my friends, and I used to roam freely together throughout the neighborhood, and one of our favorite hangouts was the backyard of the Aaronson mansion, although we didn’t call it that. It was simply the big house with the empty swimming pool and the beat-up tennis court. Next door to the west was my friend Jeff Heckenkemper’s house, and next door to the east of Leon’s future home lived the Shackelford family, where Ted Shackelford of Knots Landing fame grew up. My house was around the corner from Jeff’s, two doors away.

Jeff’s side yard offered easy access to the Aaronson property, via the vine- and weed-covered tennis court. There wasn’t a fence, so in our minds that was permission to trespass. I don’t remember ever seeing anyone in the house or on the property before Leon moved in. If it was occupied, the owners (the Mathews family last lived in the home before Leon) couldn’t have easily spotted us in one of our favorite hideouts—a bushy area at the corner of the property by Jeff’s front yard, hidden from the street by a brick wall, where we liked to hide and lob snowballs at cars going up and down Woodward Boulevard. During the summer it was our station for shining flashlights in the eyes of the drivers. Anything to make a car stop and chase us. But that little hideaway was no more after Leon moved in.

The first sign of a rock star in our midst was the massive brick wall being built around the property. One day we were outside playing football in Jeff’s front yard when we saw the new owner walking the perimeter, inspecting the wall’s progress. The image of God in our young minds was like that of most people: an old man with long white hair and a beard. Suddenly there was a slightly younger version of God walking among us, only he wore teardrop mirrored sunglasses. Mrs. Heckenkemper was outside and went over to Leon to introduce herself. We interrupted our game and followed her. Leon was friendly, right neighborly, and shook all of our hands. He had a very weak grip and a puffy, ashen hand.

“Any of you guys play music?” he casually asked.

“I play the drums,” I squeaked. The other guys giggled. Leon then said one of two things to me: either “All right” or “Right on.” I can’t be sure; all I knew is he was saying something directly to me, in reply to something I had said to Him, I mean, him. And he said it with a hint of encouragement, of mild enthusiasm, which led me to believe that Leon would be asking me to come over and jam with him sometime. Sure, the guy who had recently stolen the show in a concert with George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Ringo Starr would simply die to have a 10-year-old kid lay down the beat for him. This would have made perfect sense in my perfectly normal childhood. But, inexplicably, Leon never called.

***

I saw Leon again a few months later when I went with my mother to buy tennis shoes. Leon was there, shopping where all the great rock stars shop for shoes: Kinney Shoes at 51st & Peoria. He was by himself, and my mother approached him to introduce herself and then me, which made me roll my eyes and shake my head because Leon and I were already well acquainted, had musical kinship. But Leon acted like he’d never met me! Man, these bigshot rock stars.

During the legendary Tulsa residency of Leon Russell, everyone who was anyone stopped in to visit the Master of Space and Time. Joe Cocker graced the ’hood, J.J. Cale paid visits, Clapton and his bandmates dropped by—sightings reported by every kid in the neighborhood. From his attic window, Jeff Heckenkemper spied on Leon, and one day he’s pretty sure he saw Leon and George Harrison ambling through the backyard. It’s highly plausible, since George played his first and only concert in Tulsa in 1974, and would have surely looked up his old bandmate from The Concert for Bangladesh while in town. Other sightings strain credibility, like the time we were sitting on Jeff’s front steps when we think we saw Paul and Linda McCartney drive up in an old white Cadillac. Whether my imagination was working overtime or not, this was the day it really hit me that our new neighbor might be somebody pretty important.

In the summer of 1973 an invitation came in the mail to all of the neighbors: Leon was having a party to meet everyone—or so my parents interpreted the invitation. The catch was it would cost $7 per person to attend. “What kind of crazy thing is this, charging neighbors to come over to your house?” exclaimed my parents in words to that effect. So, my family didn’t go, and for years I was under the impression that you had to pay to not only see rock stars perform, but also to visit with them in their homes. In reality, the event was a fundraiser by the Maple Ridge Association to help pay for legal action against the building of the Riverside Expressway (successfully opposed, thank goodness), and Leon had graciously allowed the Association to use his house as a meeting place. He was on tour at the time so he didn’t attend, which further rankled my parents.

My chance to establish a long-lasting friendship and working relationship with Leon finally came, I thought, when I inherited my friend Bobby Alexander’s paper route in the fall of 1973, when I was in sixth grade. Bobby was starting high school and wouldn’t have time for his afternoon delivery of the Tulsa Tribune anymore, so he bequeathed to me the route that included my friend Leon’s house. Because the house sat way back from the street and was hidden from view by brick, the routine was to simply heave the paper over the wall in the direction of his front door. Every day the routine included hearing the paper land on the ground with a thwap, followed immediately by the sound of guard dogs barking and ripping the paper to shreds. Every day I wondered why Leon took a paper.

Because my route had only 54 houses, I collected the $1.95 monthly subscription from each customer in person. Tips were better that way. But collecting from Leon always required at least two or three attempts. Sometimes the doorbell went unanswered. Sometimes a voice came over the intercom saying to come back because nobody had any money, which even a naïve 10-year-old didn’t buy. Then, just before the 15th of each month, the mandatory deadline before paper service was suspended, somebody finally came to the door and coughed up the dough.

But it was never Leon. Every month during my two and a half years on the route—or several times a month, in this case—I would ring the doorbell and hope Leon would be there and have a free minute to pay his paperboy and maybe give me some insight into life, wax nostalgic about his days as a lad in Lawton and an adolescent in Tulsa, those carefree times when the world wasn’t so demanding of his talents and forcing him to live in a fortress. Maybe some tips for an aspiring drummer. But no. Every month it was someone different who finally came to the door, more often a young woman than a man—groupies, perhaps, or relatives, or backup singers. The one I vividly remember was a tall, skinny woman with long, straight hair who sniffled a lot and asked me if I would like a brownie. “They’re freshly baked,” she added. I considered it for a second, but then imagined my mother’s reaction if I told her I had eaten a brownie from Leon Russell’s house. “No, thank you,” I said, feeling suddenly, intensely nervous. But it was nice of the girl to offer.

***

When I started high school, I turned the route over to the next kid, and a year later, in 1977, Leon sold his place and moved to California. Tulsa was great for Leon when he was an anonymous high school kid at Rogers, but being a celebrity here proved to be a burden. The police suspected Leon of being connected to “local drug activity” and questioned (some would say “hassled”) him about it. He was sued for allegedly backing out of some investment deals. Then he almost burned his house down.

I remember the night the fire trucks came screaming down Woodward Boulevard to Leon’s house. A blaze had damaged part of the second and third floors, and opened a hole in the roof. The neighborhood assumption was that Leon and his friends were having a pot party and caught the house on fire. Pot was the only drug my friends and I had any concept of at the time, and a vague understanding at that, so our logical minds concluded that pot was to blame, what with all that lighting of the reefers and the bongs that those pyromaniac potheads are always doing. But I don’t know what really happened. Probably not that.

Charlie Holmes, a local attorney, bought the house from Leon and owned it for about ten years. It was acquired by a real estate developer who tore it down one early morning in November 1987 to the unhappy surprise of the neighborhood. According to John Brooks Walton, resident authority on Tulsa’s historic homes, among Leon’s many modifications to the house was the installation of a recording studio in the basement that caused some structural damage to the home. Some say the damage was irreparable and razing the mansion was the only solution, but others disagree.

Either way, it’s gone now, and four large homes occupy the property that was the focus of the neighborhood’s attention for many years.

In all of our discussions about Leon while he lived in the neighborhood, the subject of why he moved there never came up, at least that I can remember. I mean, of all the mansions in Tulsa, why that one? My crazy artist father, at age 84 still working every day in the backyard, indirectly provided the answer years later, when I was in my 20s, by taking me to the Celebrity Club at 31st & Yale to see Tommy Crook play. Dad said, “You’re not going to believe this guy.” And for once the old man was right: I didn’t believe it when I saw Tommy then, and I still don’t believe it now. The Buddy Rich of the guitar—that’s the best way I can describe him. It was during one of the many evenings I returned to marvel at Tommy and his magic fingers that he, in between sets, told me this story:

In the late 1950s, Tommy was in a band with Leon, then known by his real name, Russell Bridges. In 1958, Russell Bridges and the Starlighters were booked to play a private party at the McClintock home, 1151 E. 24th Place in Tulsa—also known as the future home of Leon Russell. The band’s lineup rotated on occasion, sometimes including guitarist J.J. Cale and/or bassist Carl Radle. For this gig, the band’s namesake was accompanied by Tommy, drummer Chuck Blackwell, saxophonist Johnny Williams, and bassist George Metzel.

They were teenagers, fresh off of a tour with Jerry Lee Lewis, so they had reason to be full of confidence when they rolled in the driveway right up to the front door in their big, black, ’53 Chrysler “funeral car,” as Tommy put it, with the band name emblazoned on the side in big white letters—you know, like they owned the place. The party’s host was aghast that the group had the nerve to arrive at the front door, being hired help and all, and directed the boys with a few harsh words to go around to the back. This didn’t sit well with any of them, particularly Leon, who vowed aloud to show those rich bastards someday by coming back and buying the place.

Thanks for taking revenge on the establishment, Leon. It made my childhood pretty special.

I’m talking to Tim Kent, and he’s towering over me as we stand by the fat, back tires of his midget car, painted red, white, and blue. Earlier he’d smiled and yes-ma’amed me when I asked if it really was possible for him to fit behind the wheel.

“Not killed at the race track, but somewhere else—it’s not the same.” Tim was looking at me straight on then, even though his eyes had started to water. “It’s a different deal.”

Third-generation Oklahoma dirt track racer Donnie Ray Crawford’s grandfather had come after him with a gun that morning as they were heading out for the races, news reports had said. He’d been slain less than six hours before I’d met Tim at his trailer behind the stands at the 26th annual Chili Bowl, which race organizers proudly tout as midget car racing’s answer to football’s Super Bowl.

Morale at the Chili Bowl Championships that night would be way down, by Tim’s reckoning. Normally, the sound of the cheers of the Chili Bowl fans competes neck-and-neck with the ear-splitting, pissed-off-mosquito sound of the dozens of four-cylinder motors, crammed into the pointy noses of the cars. But with red-rimmed eyes, the Chili Bowl devotees persevered, wearing earplugs on cords around their necks and work boots on their feet.

They love a miniature car on the track, but my Ford Focus was dwarfed by the 4X4s and motor homes in the parking lot outside. I saw plates ranging from Maryland to Arizona between where I parked and the front door, 17 different states all in a line. Inside, the line for the bathroom was, for a change, on the men’s side.

“This is vacation for a lot of people,” Kent said, smiling like you do at a newbie at a family reunion. Racing teams were perched in lawn chairs with their elbows on their knees, their shoes in the dust that fell from the tires of their car, spooning Crock-Pot chili out of Styrofoam bowls. “Instead of going to Disney World, they come to the Chili Bowl,” he said. “We’re just a different breed.” Behind us, two women with long, white-blonde hair sunk back into a couch somehow maneuvered high on top of a trailer. Their eyes were trained on the  dozens of cars spinning and sliding around the dirt track, simulcast on a huge screen.

I once wrote a post on my blog about how much I didn’t know about this mega-event, the Chili Bowl—couldn’t you get high from the fumes from all that racing indoors, and didn’t we all agree at some point to stop using the word midget? A former classmate of mine— Sara was the class president, in fact—left a comment. She’d married into the world of midget car racing. Her husband was a star of the football team where we went to school, the all-state lineman who wore the jersey with the name KENT across the shoulders. But now, for them, racing was the big thing.

Tim’s evenings and weekends are spent in the shop or on the road with the Oil Capital Racing Series, a circuit of tracks within 250 miles of the Kent residence in south Bristow. By day he works in heat and air, pulling ten-hour shifts four days each week. It takes a lot of money to make a car go, Tim said, so he and his cousin, who also races, split the proceeds of a fireworks stand each summer. It’s enough to fuel most of their race season.

Sara was in the stands three years ago when the tire of another car invaded the cage of Tim’s car. The crash broke his collarbone, his sternum, and his arm. “The other stuff is shocks, radius rods and stuff, getting inside the car with you and poking you or stabbing you,” Tim said. “And then, there’s always fire.” But everyone takes risks, Sara said, no matter what you do for a living. But now she makes sure they’re together when he goes to the track.

“There’s nothing like playing in the dirt, going 100 miles an hour,” Tim said. “This is something everybody wants to do. Tony Stewart grew up in this. This is where we all come from. Most of your true dirt car guys would rather run dirt than the NASCAR deal.”

“Get the fuck in the truck!”

“You kidding me, old man?”

“If I were kidding would this fucking Glock be pointed at your dome? Get the fuck in the truck!”

Kevin Durant cradled the four basketballs under his massive wingspan and obediently stepped up onto the back of a twenty-six foot U-Haul.

“Got you, too, huh Kev?” came a baritone voice.

“Sure did, Perk.”

“Westbrook and Harden are under the tarp playing dominoes sharing a turkey sub.”

“Where we headin’? Back to Seattle?”

“Nah. Too obvious. That’s the first place David Stern would look. I think I heard the old dude with the gun and the temper mention something about Santa Fe.”

“So we’ll be the Santa Fe Thunder?”

“He wants us to pitch him team nicknames on the way. There’s an intercom on the wall over there.”

“This could be really fun,” said GM Sam Presti as he folded towels into thirds. “I love the marketing side of basketball.”

“How about the Santa Fe Nets?” said a hopeful Nazr Mohammed, seated in a tiny folding chair on Serge Ibaka’s lap.

“There’s already a New Jersey Nets,” proclaimed Presti.

“Yeah, but when they move to Brooklyn in 2012, I heard they’ll be changing their name. So we’ll only be sharing it for a season.”

“How about the Santa Fe Westbrooks?” came a voice from under the tarp.

“A little too on-the-nose. But press the intercom and pitch it,” blurted coach Scottie Brooks, stepping out of the shadows. “You never know.”

“Dirk, what the hell are you doing here!? You’re not even on our team!”

“Thabo Sefolosha called me up and asked if I’d help you guys move. Said there was some free pizza in it.”

“Must’ve been Dwight Howard pulling another prank.”

Then the old man with the Glock reappeared, fired several warning shots through the roof of the U-Haul and said Mapquest had fucked up the directions and he was now moving the team to Little Rock, Arkansas where they’d be nicknamed the Slammers.

Brian Frazer is a former stand-up comic who has also written for a variety of television shows, including Mad TV, The Tom Green Show and Blind Date, where he met his wife, Nancy, when they were both thought-bubble writers. He now writes regularly for Esquire and ESPN the Magazine, and has a monthly column for Los Angeles Magazine. Brian has also written for Vanity Fair, Premiere, and Maxim. He is the author of the book, Hyper-Chondriac: A Memoir.

EXCLUSIVE: Must credit This Land Press.

Late one night in February 1995, Tim McVeigh was walking across the Colorado River bridge from Nevada to Bullhead City, Arizona, when a man in a Ford Mustang slowed down and asked if he wanted a ride. McVeigh had no better idea how to get back to Kingman, which was thirty miles away, and offered him $5. The man, whose name was Richard Rogers, laughed off the offer; he was looking not for payment but for casual sex. He had spent the evening at a casino in Laughlin and, as he later told the FBI, was feeling “a little horny.”…

An hour later, the two of them were in Rogers’s trailer ten miles north of Kingman, sizing each other up and half-wondering if this was really a good idea. McVeigh talked about Waco, nobody’s idea of good foreplay, and peppered Rogers with questions about an airstrip in the desert hills. At 3:00 a.m., McVeigh grabbed his crotch again and said it was time for bed.

They took their clothes off and went at it. McVeigh’s tongue and throat action, Rogers later told the FBI, was “incredible”: “He was good at what he did.” McVeigh expressed an interest in anal sex, but Rogers turned him down, because he didn’t have a condom. According to Rogers, they were both too tired to reach orgasm. In the morning, Rogers made McVeigh eggs and bacon, and drove him into Kingman. Apart from brief sightings in the grocery store, they never saw each other again.

Copyright @ 2012 by William Morrow, and reprinted here with permission.

Looking at the crime scene, Nashville Metro Detective Pat Postiglione thought: serial killer. Postiglione, a small, wiry man with black hair, nearly black eyes, and the trace of a Queens accent, had encountered them before, and he saw several things that said “serial killer” to him here. Hulbert was naked and carefully posed, the soles of her feet pressed together so her legs made a diamond. There was no sign of a struggle. And there appeared to be little or no physical evidence. In fact, Nashville police really had only two things to go on: a sneaker-like footprint, and a grainy T.A. surveillance tape showing trucks streaming in and out of the lot all night. One truck—a yellow cab pulling a white trailer—had stayed only 16 minutes. As a lead, it wasn’t much.

Postiglione knew that another prostitute had been killed just a few weeks earlier in Lebanon, Tennessee, about 30 miles east on I-40. That woman had been shoved butt-down in a truck stop trash can, garbage piled on her stomach. The detective contacted the FBI’s Violent Criminals Apprehension Program (ViCAP) and asked them to query their national database for similar crimes along highways connecting to the Nashville region. An FBI analyst confirmed that there were cases that looked similar, including a prostitute killed at a truck stop in Alabama. Postiglione and his partner, Lee Freeman, decided to ask for every credit card receipt from the T.A. on the night of the murder. They figured they had a trucker to find.

At least twenty-five former truckers are currently serving time in American prisons for serial murder. There’s Robert Ben Rhoades, who converted his truck cab into a torture chamber, now serving a life sentence in Illinois. There’s Scott William Cox, a trucker who pled no-contest to two murders in Oregon. There’s Dellmus Colvin, who pled guilty in five murders to avoid the death penalty in Ohio; Keith Hunter Jesperson, serving life sentences from four different states; and Wayne Adam Ford, who finally got sick of killing and walked into a California sheriff’s office carrying a woman’s breast in a plastic bag. When trucker Sean Patrick Goble was arrested in North Carolina and confessed to several murders, ten states lined up to question him about their cold-case highway homicides. It seems our interstate highway system has become our Whitechapel, with truckers its roving Rippers.

A soft-spoken woman from Oklahoma City first saw the pattern. Terri Turner is a Supervisory Intelligence Analyst with the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation. In September of 2003, a homicide case landed on her desk: a body found along I-40. Turner immediately put out a teletype seeking other female bodies found, like hers, nude, near interstates, and with signs of having been bound. Within 72 hours, two responses came back from Arkansas and Mississippi. At that point, Turner knew she might be looking at linked crimes. She had her communications specialists monitor the teletypes for further cases. In seven months, they had seven homicides. She calls them “my seven girls.”

Eventually investigators identified two of the women. Both had worked as truck stop prostitutes. This was the breakthrough moment for Turner.

“The vast majority of truck drivers are good hardworking people and without them our nation would come screeching to a halt,” she told me. “But there are very few who have found that that particular job is very suited to this particular type of crime.”

In the spring of 2004, Turner decided to have a meeting in Oklahoma City for all the investigators working on her seven cases—and any others that might be related.

“I anticipated maybe 20, 25 individuals,” she told me, “but by the time word got around about the kind of cases we were going to be talking about, I ended up having 60 investigators from seven different states show up for that meeting. That was really the beginning of the initiative.”

FBI Analysts at ViCAP had even more surprising news. When they queried their database, they found more than 250 homicides connected to I-40 in the existing files, spread out across Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas. John Walsh’s show America’s Most Wanted broke the case. It aired the story of an Oklahoma City prostitute killed and thrown from an overpass in Texas. A woman called in and reported that her nephew, already in jail, had bragged about doing something similar. She gave police his name:

John Robert Williams, a 28-year-old long-haul trucker. “We had never considered the interstate highway system as a common linkage system,” ViCAP head Mike Harrigan told me. “We know now it’s been going on for years, but we had never picked out the pattern.”

* * *

“Are there more serial killers out there today than there ever have been?” Jim McNamara asked. “No. It’s just that there are units that specialize in helping catch and identify them, and through the increase in communications and technology, linkage is better.” Jim is a Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit—the profiling unit made famous in The Silence of the Lambs. We were sitting in a windowless conference room in a nondescript office building near Quantico, Virginia. There are no signs outside the building, just a sea of very clean cars; no name on the front door, just a buzzer commanding “Press here.” This is the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, where FBI agents wearing business attire and sidearms attempt to connect the dots between some of the nation’s most inexplicable crimes.

In early 2009, the FBI announced the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, focused on killers who choose their victims and dump their bodies along highways. Some of the victims are hitchhikers and stranded motorists, but most are truck stop prostitutes. In the 1980s, the FBI was accused of inflating the numbers of serial homicides, fomenting a serial killer “panic,” so they are careful not to overstate their case today. But recent studies suggest that the numbers of serial murder victims have continually been underestimated—even during the serial murder “panic.” The undercounting is because the vast majority of victims have always been prostitutes—as many as 75% according to one scholar. Research into prostitute mortality suggests that the homicide rate for prostitutes is 229 out of every 100,000. The U.S. national average is five. Press releases introducing the Highway Serial Killings Initiative included a frightening-looking map pinpointing more than 500 bodies found on or near highways and already in the ViCAP database. Represented by red dots, the bodies cluster around major transfer points in the interstate network: Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, Nashville, Indianapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, Pittsburgh. But no state is immune: the red dots spread along every interstate highway like a pathogen carried by car.

In 2007, its first full year of operation, the HSKI assisted in the clearing of 25 murders committed by three truckers. Excitement grew among law enforcement agencies about clearing a backlog of unsolved murders. Massachusetts has never cracked the case of nine prostitutes discovered dead along highways near New Bedford. Miami has 31 murdered prostitutes with unknown perpetrators on their books. San Diego has more than 40, all of whom vanished from truck stops. A series of bodies found along highways in four southern states is known as the “redhead murders,” because several victims had red hair. The list of around 200 suspects, the FBI press release bluntly said, was mostly long-haul truckers.

“No one here is saying. ‘Well, they’re obviously truck drivers,’” FBI Supervisory Special Agent John Molnar told me. “No, the only obvious assumption you can make is that it’s somebody using that road.”

* * *

A few weeks after Sara Hulbert’s murder in Nashville, Pat Postiglione and his partner Lee Freeman arranged to meet at the T.A. and go through the receipts. As Postiglione was driving over, he noticed a yellow truck with a white trailer cruising slowly down the Cowan Street “stroll.” It looked like his suspect vehicle. With Postiglione following, the truck passed the spot where Hulbert was last seen alive and then entered the T.A. and parked.

Postiglione radioed Freeman his whereabouts, then approached the truck and knocked on the door. After a few moments, a heavy man with stringy brown hair and glasses opened it, yawning as if he’d just been awakened. Postiglione said he was working on a murder investigation and asked to see the guy’s license. The trucker handed it over: Bruce Mendenhall. The detective noticed what looked like spots of blood on the inside of the cab door—and on Mendenhall’s thumb.

It’s a detective’s job not to jump to conclusions. Postiglione told Mendenhall that police were asking drivers of yellow cabs with white trailers to volunteer DNA samples. Mendenhall agreed to do so. Lee Freeman had arrived by this point, and he got out a consent form. Mendenhall came out of the truck to sign it. As he did, a voice in Pat Postiglione’s head told him to look inside that cab. He asked Mendenhall for permission to search his truck.

“Are you going to tear it up?” Mendenhall asked. Postiglione said no, he just wanted to look around. Mendenhall agreed, and Postiglione climbed into the cab. He was surprised at how spacious it was. He edged between the seats and into the living area behind. The top bunk was folded up; he sat down on the bottom bunk. Nearby, he could see a pair of black shoes. He picked them up. The tread looked a lot like the cast made of the shoe tread at the crime scene. There was a garbage bag near the bed, and Postiglione pulled it to him. It was filled with paper towels, women’s clothing, and shoes, all of it soaked with blood.

Mendenhall had jumped onto the running board and was watching Postiglione with an inscrutable expression. Postiglione asked him about the bloody paper towels. He had cut his leg, Mendenhall said. He pulled up his pant leg and displayed a smooth calf. Postiglione pointed out that it didn’t seem to be injured. Mendenhall switched his story. He’d had a girl from Indianapolis in the cab, he said, and she had cut herself. Postiglione asked if he had any women’s clothing in the truck. Yes, the trucker answered, his wife and daughter had some clothes there. Postiglione looked in the bag again. There was a lot of blood. Later DNA testing would link it to at least four women, all of them missing or dead.

“Bruce, am I sitting in the right truck?” he asked. Mendenhall shrugged. Postiglione asked again. “Is this the truck we’re looking for?”

“If you say it is,” Mendenhall replied.

“Are you the guy we’re looking for?” Postiglione asked.

“If you say so.”

* * *

To someone like Detective Pat Postiglione, it makes a kind of intuitive sense that long-haul truckers might be behind many of the highway killings. There were roughly three and a half million truckers on the road as of 2006, and the work force has changed along with the job.

“I’ve dealt with truckers a lot and truckers are a different breed,” Pat Postiglione told me. “A lot of them are regular good family people, but a lot of them are not.”

In the years since the interstate era began, the proportion of freight going over the road has steadily increased. After the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 deregulated trucking, the number of trucks on the road shot up even more. In the last 20 years alone, there has been an increase of 44 percent in registered large trucks and a leap of 86 percent in how many miles those trucks travel. Today, roughly 70 percent of all domestic freight goes over the road. To survive cutthroat competition, trucking has become leaner and more efficient. Unionized trucking companies have dwindled while smaller, low-wage ones have multiplied. Trucks have become “sweatshops on wheels,” with truckers driving harder, longer, and faster, for lower relative pay. Like pieceworkers, most are paid by the mile—on average around 39 cents.

As the need for drivers has expanded, the bar to entry has been lowered. Today, neither a high school diploma nor a clean criminal record is required to drive a truck. In fact, beginning with welfare reform in 1996, employers could get a federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit for hiring convicted felons, and many in the trucking industry did. Most trucking companies don’t care if drivers have a permanent address. It’s possible to drive a truck with drunk driving convictions on your regular license. Annual employee turnover at trucking companies is around 100 percent.

As trucking has changed, it has attracted a new demographic: less educated, less stable, less tied to unions, less rooted in family life. Has it also begun attracting a criminal element?

* * *

“At the end of this testimony,” declared deputy district attorney Tom Thurman, “there will be no doubt that there is a cold-blooded killer in the courtroom.” It was May, 2010, nearly three years after the murder of Sara Hulbert, and day one of Bruce Mendenhall’s trial.

The accused sat impassively between his lawyers. Mendenhall is no Dexter. In fact, even as real serial killers go, he gets low marks for mediagenics—he isn’t dashing like Ted Bundy, passionately deranged like Charles Manson, or eerily normal like John Wayne Gacy. He is 59, and not a youthful 59. He has a cartoon trucker’s body—beer belly, sloping shoulders, trudging gait. He is diabetic. His cheeks sag in deep hollows and his limp hair could use a trim.

The prosecution and the defense agreed on the basics. Sara Hulbert was killed in Bruce Mendenhall’s truck with Bruce Mendenhall’s gun. But they took differing positions on who had done the killing. Mendenhall claimed it was someone else. Two guys followed him around, he said, killing women in his truck, with his gun, and leaving him to clean up the mess. That was the story he had told Detective Postiglione immediately after his arrest.

* * *

Pat Postiglione had little doubt, when he sat down to interview Bruce Mendenhall, that he was dealing with a serial killer. “We seem to have more than our share of them in Nashville,” he told me. “I think it has to do with the interstates.”

Or with the truck stops. The back row at truck stops is known as the “party row,” because it’s typically where the truckers who want sex or drugs park. Private security guards attempt to stop the sex trade with varying levels of enthusiasm, but prostitutes—“lot lizards”—arrive in cars or slip onto the property from the back, then move unseen between the trucks, rapping on doors. Truckers who don’t want to be awakened by unceasing knocks post a sign in their window—a drawing of a lizard with a circle and a bar through it.

“You go to the truck stop and you stand there and 100 percent of the girls who come around there have a pimp within 20 feet,” Postiglione told me. “The girl’s so strung out you can spot it 100 yards away. And she’s ready to get into the truck with Ted Bundy, Bruce Mendenhall.”

It clearly bothers Postiglione that young women become so vulnerable. It bothers him that he arrested Bruce Mendenhall on July twelfth. Had he arrested him one day sooner, another young woman might still be alive.

“What made this case unique,” he said, “is we were chasing him as he was killing. Because he killed a girl June twenty-fifth and a girl July first … so it wasn’t like he’d killed and he stopped. When he came back to the truck stop that night he’d killed a girl the night before. We were kind of chasing a phantom.”

* * *

Clark Fine has chased the same phantom. Fine is a classic cop’s cop, a detective in the Sheriff’s office in Hendricks County, just west of Indianapolis. Even over the phone, you can hear the ghosts of thousands of cigarettes in his raspy, unfiltered voice.

In 2004, Fine had a cold case involving a murdered prostitute named Buffie Brawley, found dumped in an abandoned truck stop on Indianapolis’s south side. She had been beaten up, strangled, and run over with a truck. Fine attended Terri Turner’s Oklahoma City confab on the I-40 killings. Indianapolis is on I-70, but truckers frequently travel up from the southwest to the midwest via I-44 out of Oklahoma City, intersecting with I-70 at St. Louis. Anything going on in Oklahoma City could easily find its way to Indy. At Turner’s meeting, Clark Fine became friends with a police sergeant from Grapevine, Texas. Like Fine, the Grapevine sergeant had a case similar to Terri Turner’s—a truck stop prostitute who had been killed and thrown from an overpass.

“It’s kind of mind-boggling how many girls get killed every year doing that,” Fine told me. Eventually, John Robert Williams—the suspect in Terri Turner’s series—confessed to the Grapevine crime from prison in Mississippi. The sergeant called Clarke Fine and told him he ought to talk to the guy too.

“Myself and a partner drove down to Mississippi and we had specific things about our case—she had certain tattoos on her—to see if this might be the guy,” Fine recalled. At the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, John Williams told the detectives he remembered Buffie Brawley. Fine asked a few questions about the crime scene, and Williams got some right and some wrong. Fine asked him if he remembered a tattoo on the woman’s buttock.

“You have to remember, I don’t have sex with them, I just kill them,” Williams said. Fine was losing interest in Williams fast. He figured he had a serial confessor on his hands, someone who got a thrill bragging to cops about all the murders he’d gotten away with. But then Williams volunteered that he did remember a tattoo on Brawley’s leg. It said Ebony, he recalled. He told the detectives he thought that was funny, since “Ebony is usually a black girl’s name.”

“But the thing is,” Fine told me, “that girl had a daughter named Ebony, and so she had that tattoo. And then I knew this asshole was the guy that did it.”

For Fine, it closed what had been a long, sad case. At the start of it, he had gone down to the local truck stop to talk to other prostitutes who might know something. One woman he spoke to was Carma Purpura. “I interviewed her down at the truck stop and I said ‘This is dangerous life.’ And she said ‘I know, but I gotta make a living.’”

On July 11, 2007, Carma Purpura got into Bruce Mendenhall’s truck at a Flying J in Indianapolis. Her cell phone and clothing were in the bag of bloodied items discovered by Pat Postiglione the very next day. Some of the blood in the truck matched DNA provided by her parents. Her body has yet to be found.

* * *

For most of the trial, Bruce Mendenhall sat impassively. He showed no emotion as forensics experts recounted Hulbert’s injuries and held up the weapons found in his truck. Then the prosecution played the video in which he told Pat Postiglione the story about the “real” killers. As Postiglione, onscreen, deftly maneuvered him into waiving his right to have an attorney present, Mendenhall shook his head slightly, then hunched down in his seat, one hand pressed to his sagging cheek. It was the only show of emotion from a man who otherwise sat very still and stared straight ahead, concentrating on where this very large machine was taking him. It seemed appropriate that his prison nickname was “Truck.”

The tape had an electrifying effect on the jury. On it, Postiglione moves quickly to the events on the night of Hulbert’s death. Mendenhall describes driving all night, coming down from Indy. He stopped to fill up and get a sandwich at another truck stop, the Nashville Pilot. But in the fuel lane, two men he knew walked up.

“Where you going now?” they asked.

“None of your business,” Mendenhall told them.

“Well, we’ll make it our business,” they said. One of them got in his truck, determined to ride with him. Mendenhall relates all of this to the detectives with the kind of over-emphasis four-year-olds use when talking about their imaginary friends. It would be disarming if the man weren’t talking about a murder.

Mendenhall says the two men then followed him to the T.A., where he went inside for a sandwich. When he came back out, they were in his truck with a dead girl. She was sprawled out in his bed, naked, a bloody plastic bag over her head.

“I said ‘You guys, what the hell …?’ ” he continues. “And they go, ‘It’s your problem, not ours.’ And they got out and left.” He figured they had killed her with his gun, he says, because “they’ve did it before.” Mendenhall describes cleaning up the mess and putting the body on the grass for the grounds crew to find. As Postiglione presses him for further details, Mendenhall interrupts.

“They do it all the time,” he declares. “I don’t know …”

“Okay,” Postiglione says. He was born in Queens and raised on Long Island, but he has picked up the southerner’s way of saying “okay,” gently, the last syllable rhyming with “lie.” “You don’t know these guys.”

“Yes,” Mendenhall says, “I know one.”

“How did they know you were at the Truck Stops in Nashville?” Postiglione asks, and Mendenhall says, “That’s what I don’t know. They … they meet me everywhere.”

Postiglione is a deft interviewer. He plays along with Mendenhall’s story like a parent indulging a child. When Mendenhall tells him that the other two men had sex with Hulbert, Postiglione carefully puts the next question in the third person: “Did Bruce have sex with her?” Bruce insists that Bruce did not. Finally Postiglione asks Mendenhall for the men’s names. Mendenhall then makes his big mistake: he names two men he really knows, men with alibis two states away, men against whom he holds grudges. In the part of the tape that the jury was not allowed to see, Mendenhall goes on to describe a number of other incidents involving these fantasy killers. They caught up with him at a Flying J on I-465 in Indianapolis the night before, he says, and just as in Nashville, they killed a girl in his truck. He ran into them in Birmingham, Alabama, and he suspects they killed someone there because his gun was gone for a while, and “wherever them two are, them, they like killin’.” And, when Postiglione prods him to think about whether he’s ever been on I-40 east of Nashville, he recalls running into the killers again at the Pilot in Lebanon, Tennessee—where the girl in the garbage can was found.

It’s the lamest story imaginable, and Postiglione plays along gently, without ever really indicating whether he believes it. Finally, he tries to get Mendenhall to back off from the lie. “We’re not going to treat you any different now,” he says “if you tell us you were the one who actually did it. And these guys … they really had nothing to do with the homicides. If you’re the guy that did these killings …”

He leaves it hanging and in the pause, Mendenhall seems to realize the jig is up. “Get me a lawyer,” he says.

* * *

On the trial’s third day, the state brought out a long line of experts from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation to introduce the evidence found in Bruce Mendenhall’s truck. This included fingerprints, blood and semen evidence, a nightstick, a collection of knives, and the murder weapon, a .22 rifle. It also included the sex toys.

The defense objected before the prosecution could even mention the sex toys. The jury was sent out of the room and the haggling began. As the witness was questioned, the lawyers argued over each item. First up was the penis pump. The assistant prosecutor, a striking woman in dramatically high heels, insisted the penis pump was relevant because of the kind of genital damage the victim suffered. The judge examined the photos over his bifocals. “What does one do with a penis pump?” he demanded. “Does anyone know?”

The trial then entered a zone so darkly comic that no one dared look at anyone else. The court officers stared straight ahead, stone faced. The reporters looked intently at their notebooks. The lawyers hovered helplessly over their files. The one person in the room who could surely explain how a penis pump was used, Bruce Mendenhall, kept his eyes on the table in front of him. The prosecutor explained that this was why the jury needed to see the packaging: so they could read the instructions.

“Which box is it?” demanded the judge.

“The one with the baseball player.”

The judge read the box aloud: “Rookie of the year pleasure pump for the novice enlarger.” No one laughed, but the invisible vapor of self-control that always fills a courtroom wavered briefly into view.

The sex toys were ultimately allowed, but in truth they proved nothing. There was no DNA evidence on them. Like much of the prosecution’s evidence, they served a different purpose: to help the jury reconstruct the story. The prosecution introduced the items to make Mendenhall seem like a person who would kill, though none of these items is unusual for a trucker to have. Truck stops almost invariably sell the exact type of nightstick he had in his truck, and they frequently have large glass cases displaying an astounding array of hunting knives. Being ready to defend yourself is part of the ethos of the independent trucker. It is not unreasonable. The combination of on-the-job violence and vehicular accidents makes truckers six times more likely than average to die on the job. Driving a truck is among the top ten most dangerous jobs you can hold, according to the Department of Labor. Presumably, the statistics don’t include prostitution.

As for the sex toys, they might be seen as proof that truckers are a tribe of sex-crazed perverts, but they can also be seen simply as testimony to the fact that, after a long day of grueling driving, some kind of unwinding is desired. The defense could have pointed this out. But to do so would have asked the jury to imagine the difficult, damaging lives of long-haul truckers. And that is something almost no one wants to consider.

Consigned to the stressful world of the interstate, known to their dispatchers as a number, to the law as a license plate, and to their clients as a set of GPS coordinates, truckers are the gears that keep the machinery of global commerce running. But what’s going on in their heads? There has been almost no work done examining the mental health of the nation’s truckers. The only paper I could find on the topic was deeply disturbing. In a qualitative survey, truckers reported very high levels of stress related to time pressures, loneliness, bad health, and separation from their families. They described anxiety about their public image, and reported that the loneliness of the road led them to risky encounters with sex workers and to drug use. Some said they felt they were going insane.

I asked Pat Postiglione if he thought there might be something about trucking that could push some violently predisposed people over the edge.

“Sure,” he said. “You’re on the road for hour after hour after hour and all you’re doing is thinking. You’re not communicating with anybody. If you’re that type of person, it could evolve out of you. But it might also be that you’re a trucker because you are a serial killer type person.”

* * *

For the closing arguments of Bruce Mendenhall’s trial, Carma Purpura’s family came to Nashville. Purpura’s sister was small, with short, straightened brown hair and an easy smile. In the hallway outside the courtroom, she embraced Sara Hulbert’s like long-lost family, bonded by an unspeakable sorrow. Then they all hugged Pat Postiglione, who had also come for closing arguments. He and Lee Freeman, sharply dressed, bristled with controlled anticipation. In the courtroom, the Purpura relatives sat in the front row with Sara Hulbert’s family. The detectives sat a couple rows behind, on the same side. They had all been waiting for this day for three years.

The prosecution’s closing argument, accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation, outlined the most complete circumstantial case imaginable. It added up to a complete story. But—and this is one of the places where real trials differ from the ones in movies and on television—it didn’t tie up every loose end. There were gaps in the testimony, witnesses who hadn’t appeared, a tire track and a second footprint at the crime scene that had never been explained. The defense, in their summation, highlighted every loose end, then pounded the idea of reasonable doubt. Even if the jury believed Bruce Mendenhall to be guilty, it was their obligation to acquit. As the attorney spoke, you could see Hulbert’s family growing noticeably upset. Before he began talking, acquittal was like a ship sailing by on a distant horizon. As he talked, it turned and headed for shore.

“I’m asking you to do something difficult,” he told the jury in closing. “I’m asking you to follow the law.”

The prosecutor, on rebuttal, asked them to do the exact opposite. He offered them a story that made sense. He referred to the truck as a “killing chamber.” He told the jury Sara Hulbert was “doing the only thing she knew to do to support her habit.” In the final moments, he put up a slide of Sara Hulbert, a hopeful young woman, her brown hair restrained by a headband. “She had a right to live,” he declared. “She had a right to change her life and raise her children.” Sara’s relatives, and at least one juror, silently wept.

Once the jury had been charged and retired to their deliberations, the family was whisked off to the room set aside for them. The detectives headed out to get things done. The lawyers vanished into other parts of the courthouse. Only the reporters hung around outside the courtroom, unwilling to risk missing the verdict. I sat on the bench before the plate glass windows, watching the never-ending stream of cars and trucks flow around Nashville on its way toward St. Louis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Oklahoma City.

This is the world we have made. It’s worth asking what effect it might have on people who spend a long time in it. In the late nineties, an outbreak of interest in “road rage” and aggressive driving led scientists to research what happens to people at the wheel. Driving, they reported has psychological—even physiological—effects on drivers. This is your brain on the road: you are rendered anonymous, deprived of verbal interaction, body language, eye contact, your identity reduced to a make and model. Frustrated in your innate desire to be perceived as human, you become paranoid, attribute hostile motives to oblivious others, see them as objects. How many times have you found yourself screaming something in your car that you couldn’t imagine saying to a live human being?

Behind the wheel, we are all psychopaths. Around 3 pm, a runner burst from the courthouse conference room. Suddenly, everyone reappeared: the families, the detectives, the attorneys, thronging down the hallway into the courtroom. The forewoman read the verdict. She paused slightly before the word “guilty.” The judge stated that Mendenhall would receive a mandatory life sentence. The trucker gave no response as he stood to leave. For Bruce Mendenhall, this was only trial number one. He has been indicted by Tennessee for another murder, as well as by Indiana and Alabama. Sara Hulbert’s family looked relieved. For them, at least, this ordeal had reached its end.

“Do you have red wine?” I asked the bartender. She had a mullet, which made her an absurd stereotype.

She smiled, clearly amused. “I got wine in a box, honey.”

I nodded. “That’s fine.”

I joined my new friends at a table. The thing is, I wouldn’t have even guessed there was such a huge lesbian community in Oklahoma City. I realize there are gay people everywhere, but I was naïve about how much this community had developed its own culture, even here in a red state. I said as much to my friend who had taken me out with her lesbian friends. She replied, “Yes! Oklahoma City’s lesbian community is very established.”

Last year was my first time in Oklahoma—it was the year of Oklahoma City’s Red Earth MFA program’s first residency, and my friend, a native Oklahoman, and I were there as new faculty. So, to be fair, I didn’t know much of anything about Oklahoma, let alone its lesbian history.

We drank more and more, and when they all got up to line dance, I thought, Why not?, and I got in line to imitate their moves.

Soon the place started filling up, and they pointed out a girl one of them had been lusting after for years.

“She’s so hot,” the one I’ll call Nina said. “It kills me.”

Nina’s longing was familiar. It was how I used to feel in bars about men. Like my whole life depended on getting close to them, on getting one of them to love me. We discussed desire and women and men, and Nina joked, “You’re a lesbian too. You just don’t know it yet.”

I laughed, but I was quite sure I wasn’t. All of us—men and women—are somewhere on that continuum, for sure, but while I found women physically beautiful, I didn’t feel turned on by them. Like I told Nina: I like cock.

“No,” she said. “You don’t.” She took me onto the dance floor and we dirty danced, sliding hands up and down hips, shimmying and grinding. “You’re definitely a lesbian,” she said again when we were done. The truth was, if I were going to move further down the continuum, Nina would be the girl I would do it with. She was pretty, kind of butchy. If I were a lesbian, I’d definitely like the butches.

I smiled. “I would allow you in my bed, but only if my man were there too.”

She eyed me steadily. By now the other two were ardently listening too. Finally, she asked, “What would I have to do?”

“You’d have to fool around with him.”

“Ew!” all three of them shrieked.

I shrugged. “Then, it isn’t going to happen.”

Nina pulled me onto the dance floor again. I’d been here before, of course, just not with a woman. Plenty of men had done their damnedest to get me to sleep with them. I’m not being conceited. I’m just an average woman who made herself too available most of the time. That’s really all men require. But, with Nina, I didn’t know the rules. I hadn’t studied the way women work when it comes to getting laid.

And the thing was, for all the times I’d been here with men, for all the times I’d put myself in this position, this was the first time I felt, well … I felt safe. More than that, I believed her desire for me in a way I’d never ever been able to believe that men wanted me. They wanted my hole, sure. But did they want me? I’d lived my life in doubt of that.

When we sat, she said once more, “You’re a lesbian.”

For the first time, I wondered. Was I a lesbian? This is the thing about being a woman. We aren’t stuck in our ways, are we? We like sex. We like being desired. We generally aren’t like men, who tend to target what they want and rigidly (literally!) go after it. We like to weigh our options, try things out. We like—I’ll just say it—to shop. The ladies’ “ew” was making some sense. Men were kind of unappealing that way.

So, I imagined it. Why not? A kiss. The boobs. Putting my mouth “down there.” Ew. How could I be a lesbian? If I was grossed out by vag, but would willingly put a penis in my mouth—clearly something infinitely more disgusting—then some predetermined and chemical workings were in place. I could no more force myself to be a lesbian that night than I could get one of these girls to get into bed with me so I could watch her do things with my man.

Listen, I was drunk on boxed wine. Really, really drunk on boxed wine. So drunk, in fact, that when I woke up the next morning I puked, only the second time in my life I’d gotten sick from alcohol (the first being when I was thirteen).

Meanwhile, the “man” I’ve been referencing this whole time was feeling nervous. His first girlfriend—an almost five-year relationship— wound up realizing she was lesbian. He was afraid he was some sort of lesbian-turner. I tried to assure him that wasn’t going to happen amid my hangover. But there was something that had happened to me the night before, something it took me a bit to understand. I had stretched myself in a way I’d never dared before. I’d tried something on for a night, tried pushing myself somewhere I’d never before gone. And that is worth doing again in my life.

The thing that made Bill Blair different from many of the other film rental people, however, was that he would always try to sew up all the nontheatrical rights to the movies he acquired. This was, of course, long before there was anything like a home video market, but his sons Bob and Don—who joined Bill in the family film business— believe their father saw it coming.

When the whole idea of videotaped movies for home viewing began to take hold in the late 1970s, the rights that Blair had presciently purchased became the foundation of a whole new business, and his United Video, later VCI Entertainment, became a pioneer in selling movies on videocassette—at first to video rental houses and later, directly to consumers. His pioneering days, however, were just beginning.

By the time the early ’80s rolled around, Blair had also gotten in on the burgeoning cable television market, using his movies to provide all the programming for a local cable channel. Working with him on the production end was Linda Lewis, promotions director for Tulsa radio station KRAV. Because her position involved getting publicity for new features coming to Tulsa theaters, she was doing a lot of face-to-face interviews with movie stars, and videotaped versions of those sit-downs were the perfect thing to play between Blair’s pictures on the cable station.

“When I started being invited on the interview junkets, I went to Bill Blair and said, ‘I have this footage. Would it be something we could work with?’” remembered Lewis recently. “He said, ‘If you can learn to edit, you can do whatever you want with it.’ So I was working in his back room on his old three-fourth-inch editing machine, putting together these fifteen-minute Intermission with Linda Lewis shows.”

Lewis’s husband, Christopher Lewis, was hosting an afternoon newsmagazine show for Tulsa’s KOTV at the time—but he was itching to direct a feature film. And he had the pedigree. Not only was he the son of screen legend Loretta Young, but he had also gone to film school at the University of Southern California, where his pals included George Lucas.

Blair knew this, of course. And when his pipeline for new video releases began to shut down, thanks to more and more companies— including major studios—getting into the homevid act, it was probably only natural for him to start thinking about making his own picture.

Truth to tell, he’d thought about it before. He’d even cowritten a script with a then-Tulsa-based neurologist, Dr. Stuart Rosenthal (also the author of 1976’s The Cinema of Federico Fellini). They came up with a horror-style picture titled The Sorority House Murders, which Blair initially wanted to do as a theatrical film with his friend Buster Crabbe—a former screen Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Billy the Kid—in the lead. But Crabbe died in 1983, before Blair could get it going, and the script went into a drawer.

Then one day Blair brought it back out—and showed it to the Lewises. “He said, ‘I’ve got this script. What would it cost us to do a movie on it?,’’ recalled Christopher. “So we looked at it and we said, ‘Well, maybe $25,000.’ I made a couple of additions to the script—they had a snake in it that got in and scared somebody, but I wrote it out because it was too hard to get a rattlesnake. A couple of things like that. I said, ‘If you want to make it, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll see if we can talk Sony into giving us Betacams.’ The Betacams were very portable cameras, [using] half-inch tape, and all the TV stations were just getting them. They were just coming in. So we called Sony, and they said, ‘Yeah, we’ll give you a couple of the cameras and an editing system if you’ll say it was recorded on Betacams.’ Actually, I think they charged us a thousand bucks or something, but it was a very good deal.”

Lewis’s idea was to shoot a feature film like a TV soap opera. He’d gotten the idea from his sister, actress Judy Lewis, who had produced some episodes of the daytime drama Texas in the early ’80s. “I knew they taped an hour long show every day, and I thought if we used videotape instead of film, and edited it ourselves, we could do it,” remembered Lewis. “Then, if we used the crew from [the KOTV show] PM Magazine, and we all took our week-off vacation at the same time, with the weekend we’d have nine days to shoot.”

Although the film ended up costing a couple thousand dollars more than Lewis estimated, and a few pickup shots had to be done after the nine days were over, director Christopher and producer Linda were right in the ballpark with both their estimates. “We had to be right about the shooting schedule,” said Christopher. “We all had to be back at our jobs on Monday.”

Although Blood Cult—as the movie was ultimately titled—was a local production in every sense of the word, its cast featured one actor who had a handful of theatrical-feature credits—Julie Andelman was her name. A former Tulsan, her resume included the 1980 horror picture The Silent Scream. In Andelman was top-billed as Tina, the daughter of the local sheriff who gets involved in a series of killings on campus that point to a dog-worshipping cult.

“I think Bill Blair brought her up,” recalled Linda. “I think he knew she was a Tulsa girl, and we didn’t have to pay for a hotel if she was from Tulsa—she could stay at her mom’s place. That’s how cheap we were.”

The cast was rounded out by Tulsa-based actors Charles Ellis (in the sheriff role originally written for Crabbe), Josef Hardt (the TV announcer who’d previously costarred in the Oklahoma-produced Thirty Dangerous Seconds), Bennie Lee McGowan, and James Vance. McGowan was a local theater veteran, while Vance was a writer, an award-winning playwright, and a well-known Tulsa actor. (Most recently, he’s made his mark as the highly acclaimed scripter of the graphic novels Kings in Disguise and On the Ropes.)

“One thing about everybody we used: they all hit their lines and did their thing,” noted Christopher Lewis. “They were theater people who knew their stuff, and they were good at it. Everybody took it really seriously and did a good job.”

Despite its ultralow budget, the production was also aided by the reliable Oklahoma Film Industry Task Force and its coordinator, Mary Nell Clark. “Mary Nell really helped us in getting locations,” Christopher said. “We didn’t have enough money to pay anybody, so we pulled in favors.”

Even with Clark’s help, though, things could get a little rocky. Among the locations she found for the shooting was Cascia Hall, a private Tulsa high school where much of the dormitory footage was shot. Because this was a horror-exploitation film, there were lots of scantily clad young women present, along with a considerable amount of fake blood and gruesome makeup effects. A combination calculated to draw young male viewers to the movie, it also drew them to the filming.

“We had to take the boys who actually lived there and move them over so we could shoot in that part of the dormitory,” explained Christopher. “The girls were all in their little skimpy stuff, you know, and it was like heaven for the boys. They were drooling, looking through windows, all of that stuff, and word got around Cascia Hall that night that we weren’t on the up-and-up and maybe we were doing a porno film. So we wrapped it up there about one in the morning, and we’re due the next morning at the big library at the University of Tulsa. Mary Nell and I had called the president and personally cleared it through him. He’d okayed it a week or two before. But we show up the next morning and the security people tell us we can’t set up. We can’t film.”

As it turned out, the president, Dr. J. Paschal Twyman, was traveling and couldn’t be reached, and the group was told that no one else on campus had the authority to let them shoot. Christopher, however, believes that they were kept away from the campus because “word came over from Cascia Hall that we were doing a porno film.” He also recalled that a young woman had been violently assaulted on the campus not long before, and perhaps school officials thought that the Blood Cult crew was intending to exploit that incident.

“I didn’t even know about it,” Christopher said. “That was the farthest thing from our minds. All we wanted to do was do our story, and Paschal Twyman knew what the story was about. But someone who was in charge while he was out of town took on the responsibility of not letting us in there.”

Clark jumped to the rescue, securing a new location on the fly—Tulsa’s Central Library—and the production lost only a few hours. But it gained a tagline, one that ran across much of the promotional material that heralded Blood Cult’s release to video stores: “A movie so gruesomely realistic, it was banned from two mid-western campuses!”

Shot during March of 1985, Blood Cult was ready for distribution (at a cost of $59.95 per cassette) by August. It received a lukewarm notice in the August 21 issue of Variety, which found reviewer “Lor” taking positive note of director Christopher Lewis’s development of “some effective atmosphere, especially in night scenes”; the convincing work of special-effects makeup artists Dave Powell and Robert Brewer; and director of photography Paul MacFarlane’s “wide angle shots and moody lighting [that] prove horror via video can compete with the filmed variety.”

The people behind Blood Cult found out their film could compete in the video marketplace as well. According to Christopher Lewis, “It cost $27,000 to make. VCI spent $100,000 promoting it. But on the opening day of its release, because cassettes were selling at that time for sixty bucks a shot, it made $400,000.” The direct-to-video feature ended up grossing well over a million dollars and is still available from VCI.

Before Blood Cult, VCI had released a movie now and again that had never seen a legitimate theatrical release and had subsequently been acquired from filmmakers looking to cut their losses. Certainly, that was true for an early ’80s movie called Copperhead, made in Sedalia, Missouri, by a filmmaker named Leland Payton. He had shot it on one-inch videotape, hoping to bump it up to 35 mm for theaters. But that never happened, and Blair acquired it for VCI and took it directly to home video.

Copperhead, in fact, is sometimes cited as the first real made-for-home-video movie, and Blair in fact mentioned it in interviews as an inspiration for his own efforts. But the distinction is not so much about the medium as it is about intent. Payton and those auteurs before him went into their projects with the idea of being seen on the big screen, whether they were shooting on 35 mm or 16 mm film or—in Payton’s case—one inch videotape. Blair and the Lewises and Blood Cult did not have that intention—and that makes all the difference. As Bill Blair told the author in an interview for a May 19, 1985, Tulsa World story: “There are three markets in the movie industry that command big, big dollars. Those are the home video market, the theatrical market, and the television market. The way we feel is that when you can hit two out of three, you’re doing pretty well.”

They did more than pretty well with Blood Cult. They changed the face of the industry forever. The release of Blood Cult in August 1985 represents nothing less than the line of demarcation between the old definition of a movie and the new one, which continues to evolve even as these words are being written.

Reprinted with permission from Shot in Oklahoma: A Century Of Sooner State Cinema by John Wooley, courtesy University of Oklahoma Press.

When it rains, the light fixtures at what’s called The Cavehouse leak, and the walls bead up with sweat. The whole place was underwater when Linda Collier charmed her way through the front door. She’d told the realtor that she was a serious buyer, but really, she just wanted to see inside.

She showed me how she’d soaked plastic bags in paint and shoved them into cracks in the wall in the stairwell that leads from the kitchen to the hallway on the second floor. Before, she couldn’t get paint to stick, she said, but the wall finally stopped leaking when the bags dried.

When her only daughter was young, Collier installed a yellow slide from the bedroom upstairs to what she calls the porch room, a tree house-like space on the second floor that’s filled with plants, a giant terrarium and light. She used twigs she gathered by hand to build a bed frame for the bedroom and the window frames outside. Her collection of chicken and turkey bones she’s named for what they resemble—a giraffe, Sonny Bone Nose, the Bony Pony—sits on a shelf in the great room downstairs. Outside is a cross, magnetized to the front door. Linda, an elfin woman with long, stark blonde hair and smiling eyes, looks like maybe she came with the house, a relic of the quirks of some past resident.

I think I’ve done something big, she told her husband the day she spoke for the house. There’d been human feces on the walls, and the place smelled like, well, a cave. It was infested with bugs, frogs and snakes. The Realtor had refused to follow Linda to the second floor, up what she has come to call drunkard’s stairs for their pitch and irregularity. But she’d already been convinced. This was a gift from God, she was sure.

The Cavehouse is like a hotel for Tulsa stories. It originally opened as The Cave Garden, a Casa Bonita-like premonition envisioned by James Purzer and Joseph Koberling Sr., who Collier heard had decided that if he could butter a brick (he was a mason as well as a notable Tulsa architect), he could fry a chicken. Then there are the women who owned the home: one who collected keys in life and whose ghost reportedly steals the keys of visitors and stockpiles them in the yard, and The Rag Lady, who covered herself in fabric, all except for her eyes. She’d hang her scraps in the second-story windows to dry, Linda said, like stained glass made of the pieces from an old quilt. The house is an unofficial footnote in the history of Tulsa’s race riot, too, thanks to local lore that holds that victims’ remains are sealed by the structure into a passage carved into the hill. Three Halloweens ago, three men in white hoods showed up at her door asking how to line up a tour, Collier said. They told her that they thought the house had been a meeting place for the KKK.

And then there are the stories that are drawn in by Collier’s sign, propped up near the street, advertising her $5 “I’ve always wanted to see inside” tours. My grandmother was the cook at the chicken restaurant, one visitor said—my grandfather used to stop by here to get “water” during Prohibition, said another.

“No one is going to pay you money to go inside,” she’d told herself. But when she visited the house the next day to hide the sign, a line of people was waiting at her front door.

Linda is a survivor type—she and the house have that in common—and she has what haunts her, just as the house has its own baggage. Together they’ve battled cancer, thyroid disease and diabetes, break-ins, flooding, and ghost hunters. After her father died—a man who refused to go into the house when she first bought it—she took the memorial video shown at his funeral to the house to watch, alone. He was a baseball coach in the Petroleum League, and he played for the Skelly Oil Company team; part of the video showed him on the field, in his uniform. Over his shoulder was the house, peeking out from beyond the outfields of Newblock.

“I said, ‘Yeah, he’s watching over me,’ ” Collier said. “Through all of those things, I can come over here, and it truly does restore my soul,” she said. “It’s just good. Things are good over here.”

Impertinent, maybe, but the Senator held the cards. It was March 1924, and Sinclair was sitting before the Senate Committee on Public Lands. They asked ten questions regarding his suspect behavior uncovered during his acquittal in an earlier fraud trial involving a felonious Secretary of the Interior. Harry remained smug, knowing that back home, all those oil pumpers in the Midcontinent field were making him millions. Sinclair was equally at home doing vodka shots with Russian czars and strolling oil derrick grime. But he did not coddle or cotton.

His respect for the United States Senate was contentious. A year earlier, a New York Times front page headline in January, 1923 declared, “Sinclair Refuses Records to Senate; Oil Man Defies the La Follette to Delve into His Private Affairs. Fine and Prison Possible.”

“Will you produce the records and books called for?” demanded Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. “I will discuss the matter with my counsel and let you know later on,” replied Sinclair, who was smiling despite the tenseness of the situation. He told the legislators, “I will go to the Supreme Court, if necessary,” before submitting information about transactions he held personal and beyond the committee’s interest. Sinclair walked out of the committee room, suddenly ending the investigative session.

After two hours, Sinclair remained sequestered in a private room of the Senate wing with his attorneys—chief counsel J.W. Zevely of Washington, G.T. Stanford of New York, and Judge A.N. Chandler of Tulsa. With time approaching the five o’clock bell, committee chairman La Follette issued a subpoena via the Sergeant-at- Arms. Sinclair and his legal team returned to the chambers shortly after the committee adjourned. La Follette “refused to say whether Mr. Sinclair would be judged in contempt and thus made liable to fine or imprisonment or both.”

Sinclair was willing to roll the dice.

Harry Sinclair gambled the family drugstore to finance an oil lease and lost. Penniless, he shot his toe hunting rabbits, had it amputated, and collected $5,000 from an insurance claim. Some say he did it on purpose, while Harry said it made for a good yarn.

Oil derrick foundations needed timber. Sinclair used his coverage proceeds to buy lumber, selling it to the wildcatters who constructed pyramid-shaped structures on the oil patches springing up in the Mid-Continent fields of southeast Kansas. He learned that, with little risk, he could turn a small investment into a big dividend. With that, 21-year-old Harry Ford Sinclair was in the oil business.

Early in his career, Sinclair attracted the attention of wealthy speculators like Chicago meatpacker J.M. Cudahy, Pittsburgh capitalist Theodore Barnsdall and James F. O’Neill, president of Prairie Oil Company, a subsidiary of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of Kansas. Unlike his backers, Sinclair came from humble beginnings.

Sinclair was born in 1876 near Wheeling, West Virginia. The federal census of 1880 lists his father, John Sinclair, as a druggist and his mother, Phoebe, a housewife. The family headed west when Harry was young, settling in Independence, Kansas. John opened a drug store intending that his son become part of the family business. To that end, Sinclair graduated from The University of Kansas with a pharmacology degree. But oil proved to be a more seductive drug.

Banks more familiar with farmers, ranchers, and merchants were reluctant to fund black-gold prospecting. Sinclair realized that, at least in the short run, he needed to finance his own deals. After a decade spent prowling for undervalued oil leases across Kansas and Indian Territory, Harry hit it big with a strike in the rich Kiowa field that made him a millionaire before his thirtieth birthday.

When oil blew in 1905 at the farm of Ida Glenn south of Tulsa, Sinclair raced there from Independence and snatched up premium leases before prices rocketed. News spread of the bountiful Glenn Pool, and the place grew thick with wells and “corner shooters” who leased up property adjacent to a producing lease, usually on the corners, in order to leech from the known pool or formation. The magnitude of oil that arrived at the surface presented huge storage issues. “Get it fast and get it first” was the mantra—and figure out what to do with it later. Lease operators like the Sinclairs pumped crude into hastily constructed storage tanks and large, earthen, environment-be-damned lakes. Oil fouled streams and underground aquifers. Tank farms frequently burned, creating Red Adair-style fire hazards. Corner shooters and the “rule of capture” reigned—seven years later, the Glenn Pool was dry. But not before Harry Sinclair made millions.

The territory gushers ushered in an era of big banking. Lew Wentz, the Phillips brothers, Harry Sinclair, and a host of other wealthy oilmen believed banks to be sound investments. The effect of the oil industry working in concert with financial institutions was to create staggering economic growth. Yet there were periods of banking turmoil.

The young, restless Oklahoma economy rose and fell with the volatile price of crude. Lax regulations permitted banks the risky business of acquiring smaller banks. If economic conditions or poor management caused a subsidiary bank to suffer from depositor panic, mass withdrawals were a deathblow, resulting in a negative ripple effect on the consumer confidence of the owner bank. Wildcatter E.F. Blaise formed the oil-industry- friendly Farmer’s National Bank of Tulsa in 1903. Subsequently, Farmer’s bought the Kiefer State Bank that sprung up close to the Glenn Pool.

The Kiefer bank failed in February 1910. Feeling the onslaught of withdrawals from the Exchange stimulated by the Kiefer collapse, Blaise and his wildcatting business partner, Tulsa attorney C.J. Wrightsman, called an emergency, nighttime meeting of selected Tulsa oilmen for later that day. No sooner had the men exited the room did Sinclair, P. J. White, James Chapman, and Robert McFarlin buy Farmer’s, changing its name to Exchange National Bank and installing Sinclair as the new president. Harry Sinclair was now a bank owner. The chief counsel for the Exchange National bank was Joseph L. Hull Sr., the grandfather of Tulsa entrepreneur and attorney Joe Hull III. His office on Cheyenne Avenue sits across the street from the site of Sinclair’s Tulsa residence. “The interesting thing about grandpa,” Hull said, leaning back into his leather chair, looking out his office window, “was that he was blind, blinded by an optic nerve disease that today would easily be treated with antibiotics. He had a reader and learned Braille.” His grit was a perfect match for Sinclair.

As Farmer’s National, it was the most influential bank in Oklahoma; under new management, Exchange survived from an unprecedented policy of personally guaranteeing each dollar deposited. But the challenges of the Great Depression brought hard times. Thankfully, the onus of guaranteed deposits ended with the passage of the far-reaching Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 that, among other things, protected depositors and restricted the speculation arm of banks from owning other financial institutions. (The act was ultimately repealed in 1999.)

Undeterred, Sinclair, Chapman, and others reorganized the Exchange National Bank as the National Bank of Tulsa in 1933, establishing its global reputation as the “The Oil Bank of America.” Enlarging the 1917 construction of the ten-story Exchange building, the elaborate National Bank edifice included a dirigible mooring at the top of its middle section. Years later, the landmark building at 320 S. Boston became the Bank of Oklahoma. One block east of the Exchange was a luxurious counterpart.

Any deal worth doing was done in the Hotel Tulsa built in 1912 at 3rd and Cincinnati. The fifth floor was Sinclair’s lair. He commuted daily via train from Independence for all-night poker games, whiskey drinking, and deal making—including the formation of the Sinclair-White Oil Company. But the Exchange Bank and the Oklahoma oil fields proved too small for the big nature of Sinclair. He headed for New York. Firmly planted, his new address granted him immediate access to the power brokers.

In the fall of 1916, after meeting with Wall Street investors and attorneys, Sinclair announced a $50 million deal: the consolidation of 500 miles of pipelines, big-capacity refineries, the Cudahy marketing facilities, and personal control of 532 wells with the potential to produce 5.5 million barrels of oil a year. Sinclair borrowed another $20 million to procure undervalued assets in the Mid-Continent. Sinclair Oil and Refining Company secured a charter “in perpetuity” from New York State on May 1, 1916.

Sinclair maintained his presence in Tulsa by building the eight-story Sinclair building at Fifth and Main streets, circa 1919, plus the brick home at 1730 S. Cheyenne for his wife Elizabeth and two children, in the shade of the Creek Council Oak tree.

Located just outside the surveyed city limits of Tulsa on what was formerly Lochpoka’s ceremonial square, Sinclair, his brother Earl  who handled many of Sinclair’s business finances—Josh Cosden and others made quick order of greatly undervalued lots of a former Creek allotment purchased by important Tulsa real estate developer Grant Stebbins from the heir of Wehiley Neharkey. Years later, his multi-story mansion would fall to make way for an upscale condominium complex, but in its day Sinclair was big—big enough to threaten Rockefeller.

Oilman Edward Doheny became his intimate friend. He shared with Sinclair the mechanics of doing business in New York and Washington D.C. In 1921, Doheny confidentially bragged he had his son deliver $100,000 in a little black bag to Interior Secretary of State Albert Hall, greasing the awarding of a no-bid lease of the fertile Elk Hill, a wealth of California oil reserves owned by the federal government.

The success of Doheny’s business tactic encouraged Sinclair, who learned of a no-bid lease opportunity for the federal Teapot Dome in Wyoming, a federal reserve set aside for use by the United States naval fleet. The reserve was named after a desolate, windblown expanse in Wyoming whose landscape featured a rock vaguely resembling a teapot. Sinclair sent a deliveryman to Secretary Fall’s office armed with $200,000 in a handbag, along with his best regards to the 1920 presidential campaign of Warren G. Harding. The lease went to Sinclair, and his company spent $35 million dollars on the operation.

Interior Secretary Fall had been indicted for fraud as a result of his black-bag transactions with Doheny and Sinclair, who were subsequently and similarly charged. Fall was convicted—the first felony for a public federal official while in office. After a lengthy trial, Doheny was acquitted. During the three years between being charged with fraud and his trial, Sinclair continued directing his empire.

His first trial was declared a mistrial when it was exposed that Sinclair had hired detectives to follow jurymen. A second trial resulted in his acquittal, but a United States Senate committee would not let go of the jury-shadowing incident. The entire ordeal dragged out seven years. Not one to hide behind the Fifth—the due process amendment to the Constitution regarding self-incrimination—Sinclair testified before twelve separate legislative committees. On advice of counsel, he failed to answer one question—they reasoned it irrelevant regarding another man’s testimony concerning the Teapot Dome investigation, which was already in the Congressional records—and it cost him.

That omission landed Sinclair in the Washington D.C House of Detention, guilty of contempt of the Senate. With subsequent appeals to the Supreme Court unsuccessful, Sinclair served six and a half months in 1929.

Robert L. Owen, a Muskogee native, served Oklahoma as a United States Senator during the time of the Teapot Dome lease and investigation. Responding to a written request by Harry Rogers of the Exchange National Bank, asking for his views on the merit of the suits brought against Sinclair, the Owen wrote a lengthy review in the equally lengthily titled Remarkable Experiences of H. F. Sinclair with His Government: Some Dangerous Precedents:

“As a witness, Sinclair had been denied the right to have the constitutionality or pertinence of a question determined before punishment can be imposed upon him for refusal to answer. He was given six months in jail for criminal contempt of court, for an act in which he violated no law of Congress, no law of the United States, no existing rule of court, for an act, which had been practiced by the government and private individuals for 30 years.”

Sinclair got out in November 1929 just in time for the advent of the Great Depression and a tempest in Oklahoma. “I was railroaded to jail in violation of common sense and common fairness,” he shouted, storming out of the detention facility, continuing, “I cannot be contrite for sins for which I know I have never committed.”

An early post-detention business move involved Sinclair selling his pipeline subsidiary to his rival, Standard Oil Company, to have ready cash for buying flagging companies. The Sinclair group grew substantially during 1930-1936, acquiring companies and properties for pennies on the dollar.

“Oklahoma oilmen avoided control by the government which was seen as unwarranted interference with their liberties,” said Bruce Niemi, author of The Greatest Individual Act, with Sinclair squaring off against Governor “Alfalfa Bill” Murray in 1930-1931. The oil industry overproduced the Mid-Continent Oil Province during the 1920s in an atmosphere of inter-industry cooperation or “associationalism,” thus depressing petroleum prices.

As the issues became worse, the governor took dead aim at Sinclair and his fellow producers, threatening to shut down most Oklahoma wells so that production would cease for a period of time, allowing for prices to improve, and creating more tax money for the state’s education program. Challenged by the threat of an oilmen injunction, Murray erupted, “It’ll be like a jackrabbit trying to tree a wild cat.”

Niemi claims, “Alfalfa Bill drove Sinclair out of Oklahoma,” chasing him to his mansion on Long Island. Undaunted, his uncompromising spirit continued to drive his company in new directions with continued success. He was a walking poster child of American business swagger.

Sinclair netted $81 million in 1948, producing nearly 40 million barrels of crude. It was time to rest. He retired in 1949 at the age of 73. Never relinquishing his personal or corporate independence, he walked away from an enterprise worth $700 million dollars, nearly 100,000 stockholders and 21,000 employees. Sinclair died in Pasadena, California seven years later. Many were surprised at the death notice of the legend. They thought he was already gone.

One.
Drip drips down manicured lawns. Fills thirsty, floral bellies.
Absorbs light.

One.
Day I’ll move this tower of stone.
And launch your brain into space.
Children of your children will sail past
Oh          so           slow.

One.
Child will spend his Weekends in a brothel in Spain.
The year of Our Lord one-thousand nine-hundred and thirty-three.
He will drink port and smoke French cigarettes.

One.
Cigarette will burn down a forest.
Give your legacy cancer.
Cause the heart to quicken her tempo.

Two hearts, glued together. . . .

Thunder growls through glistening teeth,
Exploring sonic sea-scapes. . . .
One low rumble.

Oh, One.
Bug dead on the moving sidewalk at O’Hare.
Brief images from the grandiose life it led. How vast.
One bug heart, and mine, and yours.

Nicklaus Faith is a self-described “homegrown Okie” whose poetry has appeared at The Curbstone Collective, a literary blog.