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  deadly vows

  Copyright © 2014 by Leif M. Wright

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever, including electronic, mechanical or any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission should be addressed to:

  New Horizon Press

  P. O. Box 669

  Far Hills, NJ 07931

  Leif M. Wright

  Deadly Vows: The True Story of a Zealous Preacher,

  a Polygamous Union and a Savage Murder

  Cover design: Charley Nasta

  Interior design: Scribe Inc.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013935928

  ISBN 13: 978-0-88282-455-0

  New Horizon Press

  181716151412345

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is based on the author’s experiences and reflects his perception of the past, present and future. The personalities, events, actions and conversations portrayed within this story have been taken from interviews, research, court documents, letters, personal papers, press accounts and the memories of some participants.

  In an effort to safeguard the privacy of certain individuals, some names and identifying characteristics have been altered. Some characters may be composites. Events involving the characters happened as described. Only minor details may have been changed.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1Holy Fire

  2OU

  3Four Corners

  4Antioch

  5India

  6“Come to San Diego”

  7Worldwide Ministry

  8“Like Watching the Sun”

  9The Mormons

  10Secret Marriage

  11Sulimon

  12The Perfect Murder

  13Separation

  14The Scorching Desert

  15Calculated Cover-Up

  16“Pray for Me”

  17Strange Confession

  18“Goddamn CSI”

  19Greco v. Arena

  20Closing Arguments

  21The Aftermath

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  On January 9, 2004, a lone camper hiking around the desert near his campsite stumbled upon a strange rock structure resting on the baked earth.

  In his many travels through the area, he’d never seen a rock formation quite like the one underneath the palo verde tree about three hundred feet north of the nearest unnamed dirt road. The area was just north of the Barry Goldwater Air Force Base, and that was just north of the Mexican border. There’s nothing in the vicinity except scrubby desert but the hiker loved the area and spent lots of time exploring it. Buried under the palo verde tree lay a mystery. A mystery that looked very much like a tomb.

  And he also had never smelled that scent before. He had smelled plenty of dead animals in his day, but this?

  “You could smell...a different smell from an animal,” he said. Anyway, the tomb, he said, was “too big to have an animal like a dog buried there.”

  The next day, the hiker’s son, a federal ranger with the Bureau of Land Management, went out to the area his father described and began gently moving the stones to see what lay underneath.

  “I found a partial portion of a head and a torso,” the ranger said. “It just became apparent it wasn’t an animal.”

  Investigators were horrified when they found the decayed remains. Was it a man or woman, old or young? The story the bones told was violent, graphic and desperately depraved. The body, which was almost completely decomposed except for the bones, a little flesh on the legs and ten-inch dreadlocks still clinging to the skull, was laying on its left side in a loosely fetal position beneath the rocks that had entombed it. The badly decayed body was brought back to the medical examiner’s office for autopsy.

  Dr. Laura Fulginiti is the forensic anthropologist in Phoenix, Arizona, who examined the body. The first thing she did with the remains is the same thing she does anytime someone brings in skeletal remains: she laid the body out carefully, putting each piece as close to its anatomical position as she could. Some answers came quickly. Fulginiti determined the victim was young, female and African-American; it became apparent rather quickly that some pieces were missing and her skull and ribs were practically screaming that something terrible had happened to the poor woman. It was clear from her bones, especially her hip bones, that she had given birth at least once.

  But Fulginiti’s discoveries soon became more alarming. The bone where the chest connected to the clavicle and to which the first rib attached had been completely severed just a centimeter above the sternum. The aorta, the largest artery in the body ascending from the heart, lies directly beneath that bone. The end result of such a wound would be massive and fatal bleeding. The left side of that same bone, which is where most people assume the heart sits, had deep cuts, as if someone had jammed a knife between the woman’s first and second ribs, beneath which her vital organs sat vulnerable to the blade.

  Her sternum, which was just below that bone and the bone to which the rest of the ribs attached, wasn’t completely there, but what was there bore signs of trauma, with scratches and cuts all over it. Several of the multiple stab wounds alone were enough to be fatal, Fulginiti said.

  Many of the ribs recovered from the woman’s left side were rife with signs of being stabbed through, including two that were completely severed by the knife. Whoever had killed this woman had wanted to make damn sure she was dead. In fact, her hyoid bone, which sits in the neck just below the chin, directly above the “adam’s apple,” and helps control the tongue and larynx, had been damaged by what appeared to be a saw blade as if someone had tried to cut the young woman’s head off.

  Whoever had stabbed this poor woman to death had been aiming to kill. The injuries were all to the left side and center of the chest, where the heart is located. And whoever had done it was trying very hard to make sure the woman was good and dead.

  But that kind of trauma wasn’t really unusual in homicides. It certainly wasn’t something the forensics investigators hadn’t seen before. Killing was a brutal, nasty business, and the damage it left behind was almost always stark and compelling.

  “The most stunning thing is the back of the sternum is sliced off,” Fulginiti said. “That’s the most startling thing. The sternum is thick, but not so heavy. When the knife went in, it must have caught, and (the killer) pulled down on it so hard that (the killer) literally sliced the back half of the sternum off of the front half.”

  That wound, Fulginiti said, is the most striking aspect of what happened.

  “I have never seen that before,” she said. “And I never expect to see it again.”

  But this poor woman had been through more than just a brutal, vicious stabbing death, unusually violent as it may have been. The skull to which the long dreadlocks had been attached, even after an extended period of decomposition, was missing something important: a face. The familiar smiling skull with which anyone who has been spooked on Halloween is familiar wasn’t all there. Between the orbs that once housed eyes, there should be a bone called the maxilla, which forms the nasal cavity and at its bottom houses the top row of teeth. That bone was mostly missing, though the part that should have contained teeth was still there. The woman’s cheekbones had been smashed, and lay in pieces near the skull to which they had once been joined.

  But the bone that should have held her top row of teeth? It had been sawn clean on the bottom where the teeth would have been attached. The teeth hadn’t just been sawn out; the bone that held the teeth had been sawn away, and the sawing had been done so violently that the blade had ended up
cutting into a wisdom tooth at the back of the bone that the killer probably hadn’t known was there.

  “It had to be a pretty bloody, gory business,” Fulginiti had said. “[The killer] would have had to cut the skin away on her face several inches, sort of like the Joker. I bet [the killer] couldn’t see the wisdom teeth because of all the blood and gore.”

  That lone wisdom tooth had a twin on the jaw, where the killer had also sawn away the bone so violently that the blade had become buried in the actual bone that attaches the jaw to the skull. On the other side, part of the wisdom tooth that was hiding there had also been sawn into. On both the top and the bottom, the roots of this woman’s teeth were visible, where they had been exposed by the killer’s saw.

  The front of the woman’s jaw showed cuts that indicated what might have been false starts with the saw blade that had cut her teeth out. But finally, the killer had gotten an angle he or she liked and had made one clean cut all the way across her entire jaw, hacking and hacking away at it until there were no more teeth—and no more gums—left in her mouth.

  Her killer hadn’t been satisfied with just stabbing the woman brutally and trying to cut her head off. When that had failed, the killer had instead violently and repeatedly bashed her face in with what looked to be a hammer, from the marks it left, and then had sawn her mouth completely off.

  But that wasn’t all the killer had done.

  As she examined the bones that were laid out in front of her, some were missing, but that was to be expected with the condition the body was in. What wasn’t expected was that each hand was too short. By one bone on each finger.

  Human fingers are composed of three bones each, with the smallest bone lying between the fingernail and the fingerprint. On this woman’s hands, that bone had been cut off of each finger, likely by the same blade that had so violated her mouth.

  “Goddamn CSI,” Fulginiti said. Her anger was triggered by the condition in which they found the body, as if someone had planned to prevent investigators from identifying her. “Somebody had watched too much TV and they knew exactly what to get rid of to try to thwart us.”

  Chapter 1

  HOLY FIRE

  Sean Goff was outgoing, charitable and the kind of guy people often describe as a person who would “give you the shirt off his back.”

  I even saw him literally do that once.

  He was raised on a fundamentalist Pentecostal doctrine that is opaque to outsiders. Fundamentalist Pentecostal women almost always wear dresses and almost never use makeup. Jewelry, if it is allowed at all, is generally restricted to a wedding ring, but certainly not necklaces or earrings, which are considered flashy and prideful. Generally, their hair is kept long, because the Bible tells them that God has invested the glory of a woman in the length of her hair. Such a notion is completely sensible to those who interpret the Bible as literally breathed out of the mouth of God and onto the page from which they read it.

  “Did you know that the word of God spoken by a Christian is the only way the supernatural world is bridged into the natural world?” Sean preached in 1995. “You see the words on the pages of the Bible? Do they do you any good laying on the page like that? No, they don’t. When you read the story of the upper room, you know what is there but nothing has been spoken; it only goes into your mind. It is still just a spiritual thing until you speak it, which is when it becomes natural. That’s when God’s word comes into the natural world from the supernatural world.”

  Preaching, fundamentalist Pentecostals believe, is the way God’s will is communicated to the faithful. Even those who read the Bible every day can’t understand the fullness of God’s will for their lives unless a preacher who is inspired (they say “anointed”) by God reveals it to them. As Sean said, the Bible is just words on a page until someone puts those words into action, either by speaking them or acting them out. That’s why they don’t see it as odd that women, following the commandments found in the New Testament, grow their hair long, refuse to wear pants and eschew most jewelry and makeup. It’s not just because those things are on the page but because preachers for generations have hammered “holiness” into them as the primary virtue to be aspired to.

  Holiness is the ultimate goal of every fundamentalist Christian and that means even if you look foolish to non-fundamentalists (who fundamentalists call “the world”), following God’s will as revealed through his “anointed” servants takes precedence above all other considerations.

  The men, even in homes where the wife also has a job or a career, are served literally hand-and-foot by the women, who are considered “help mates,” which is a term from the book of Genesis generally interpreted by literalists to mean that women were put on the earth to assist men.

  The man’s role is clearly defined: bread-winner, family defender, spiritual leader, lawmaker. The woman’s is just as clear: mother, nurturer, housekeeper, caregiver.

  Sean loved recounting the story of how his uncle once sat at the dinner table, served by his wife, Sean’s mother’s sister. After his wife had cooked the meal, she served it up on plates for Sean’s uncle and their children. By the time she had served up everyone’s plates (the uncle’s was first), Sean’s uncle was getting low on tea, so he simply rattled the ice in the glass and his wife silently and automatically got up from her just-started meal, fetched the tea pitcher and filled the glass. When he was done eating, he sat back, pushed his plate away and grunted “Sumpin’ sweet!” His wife got up from a meal she had taken only a few bites of and fetched a piece of pie for him.

  In Sean’s opinion, that was a good view—if a bit cartoonish—of what family life should be. The woman was designed by God to be a helper for the man, whose role was to support the family and protect them. And the woman’s role was to be absolutely submissive to the man, whom God had appointed as the “priest” of the household—the family’s intermediary with God.

  In actual practice, the roles are often more fluid, but in Sean’s mind that was one great failing of the church, which he thought had bowed to the will of Jezebels who had demanded to be treated as equals to men—in clear defiance of God’s will. It was a recurrent theme with Sean that didn’t become obvious as carrying such importance until someone had known him for a long time. But the structure of the family was near the very top of his priority list, and he had no respect for anyone who strayed from that God-inspired structure.

  He once told me he resented his mother—and in some ways his father for allowing it to happen—because his mother “ruled the roost” in their home as he grew up. She, he told me, was an expert at manipulating his father and the children to get her way, and in the Pentecostal tradition manipulation is an evil on par with witchcraft, which is an abomination in the eyes of God.

  Such statements make outsiders wince, and some question whether anyone could actually believe such things in modern times, but fundamentalist Pentecostals believe in a very real devil whose only purpose for existing is to deceive good folks into stepping off the straight and narrow path that leads to heaven. That spiritual danger is always lurking behind the scenes, manipulating circumstances to push believers into a place of vulnerability where they become susceptible to the devil’s primary weapon: the subtle whisper of temptation, which becomes ever more reasonable as circumstances guide the believer down the devil’s winding trail of deception.

  In some fundamentalist churches, Satan is preached about far more often than God is, with “spiritual warfare” strategies doled out by the dozens to help believers fend off the never-ending attacks from a devil still furious at being kicked out of heaven by a God who refused to let anyone else receive worship.

  “We have to come to the place where we feel good about the warfare we’re fighting,” Sean preached. “We did not enlist in this army to stay in one place and let other people fight for us. We need to come to the place where as far as our integrity and our anointing are concerned, we have our eyes set on the war that is before us. I believe it is God’s will fo
r me to come into this service this morning and impart into you a spirit of warfare.”

  Such preaching is not considered fringe inside fundamentalist belief, which propounds a very real and ongoing war between God and Satan in which humans are both pawns and prizes. And in that war, the devil is willing to stoop to any depth to ensure that we turn away from the truth and anointing of God so he can steal our souls from heaven.

  “We are continually in warfare,” Sean preached. “We have to be vigilant against the attacks of the enemy; the word of God declares that we should not fear and we can go into battle and, even though the enemy may come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord will raise up a standard against him.”

  Pentecostals, like other fundamentalists, believe the Holy Bible to be literally “breathed” by God, word-for-word, as a letter to mankind spelling out the path to redemption from a sinful nature passed down to everyone from Adam and Eve. That belief provides its subscribers with a solid foundation from which to reject the encroachments of moral relativists and those who adulterate old-time religion with modern compromise.

  “You got some new Bible?” I had once heard Sean’s cousin preach while defending the King James Bible against new translations. “Why? Are you serving some new God?”

  That belief in the literal inspiration of scripture is comforting to fundamentalist Pentecostals, who find it reassuring to have an unchanging standard by which to compare every situation—even if that standard may be somewhat subject to the interpretation of the denomination reading it.

  Sean’s uncle Jake pastors a truly miraculous and stunningly raw fundamentalist Pentecostal church off the main highway that runs through Locust Grove, Oklahoma, in the lush, green foothills of the Ozark Mountains. The area is a flyover state paradise, surrounded by lakes and rivers, green well into December and January, protected from outsiders by Oklahoma’s “dust bowl” image, which eastern Oklahomans use to their advantage.

  Jake fit in perfectly with the close-knit community of northeastern Oklahoma. He’s one of them; a white Native American married to a full-blood Native American with mostly-Native American kids. He has a gentle southern drawl just deep enough to identify him as an insider while not pigeonholing him as a hillbilly.