Deadly Vows Read online

  However, signs began to show that the woman who had personified the name “Joy” was starting to have troubles, either with her lifestyle or with the husband who had led her into it. It was hard to tell which, because she wasn’t really talking about the issues—which was also a new thing for Joy. Usually, she could be depended on to just blurt out whatever she was thinking, but now she seemed less bubbly than usual, less carefree, more dour than she had ever been, and she wasn’t talking much about whatever was obviously bothering her.

  “Something just seemed a little bit off,” Rino said. “I remember that. I can’t remember exact words of what she was saying, but she kind of intimated that she was wanting to go to school. She made it appear that she was making her exit plan to get out of that situation, although she didn’t just come right out and say that.”

  Joy made the same kind of intimations to all the guys in the group. Whether she was feeling them out for reactions or whether it was just something bubbling up and over inside her, no one will ever know, but the group came to the same consensus: Joy was well down the road toward being done with the polygamous marriage, and now she was trying to think of graceful ways to call an end to the whole thing and take her kids in some new direction where their mother wasn’t married to a man who was also married to someone else.

  “We all talked later, and we thought, ‘she’s going to leave this guy.’ We started talking to see if there was anything we could think of to do to help her.”

  Joy’s friends’ conspiracy to help her out never had time to gel into an actual plan; they really didn’t realize that there wasn’t going to be time to put anything into action to help Joy get away from Sean. The last time Rino saw Joy was at his wedding.

  “I have this one picture of her from the wedding,” Rino said, his voice changing, getting sadder. “I carried it around in my wallet for the longest time until it just disintegrated. It was Joy how I remember her best: dancing by herself. That’s the Joy I remember. I remember her smile, her laugh, the genuine way she spoke and listened, and even though she seemed a little down at the wedding, she still loved to dance in that graceful way that was so unique about her. She seemed full of hope that when she got out of the situation, she could be happier.”

  She was going to go to school and get a good job so she could take care of her children, she said. She would move on with her life after the weird experiment with polygamy.

  “I’m back to the drawing board,” she wrote on her web page about her job search and plans for the future. “But that’s all good. I’m still young. I have time.”

  But time was one thing Joy didn’t have. Sean had already been planning meticulously how to make sure that Joy could never carry through with her plans.

  On September 19, 2003, I got a phone call from Joy. I had flown to San Diego from my home in Oklahoma to attend a creative meeting with Morris Cerullo, for whom I was then chief writer.

  “Leif,” Joy said in a hushed voice. “You have to come to San Diego on the second. We’re having a surprise birthday party for Sean.”

  Sean’s birthday is October 2, and though I knew that, we had never really celebrated either of our birthdays; in fact, I don’t remember ever getting him a present or him getting me a present for our birthdays. Neither of us considered our birthdays a big deal, so I guess it just never came up. But Joy was young. She loved a good party and I could hear it in her voice as she begged me to come help celebrate what would be Sean’s thirty-sixth birthday. The idea was attractive; I thought San Diego was probably the most beautiful city in America and I loved being there.

  “If you’re going to be homeless,” Sean said one day when we both lived there, “you should be homeless here. The weather is perfect; you can just sleep on the beach.”

  I hemmed and hawed when Joy invited me to the party, not because I didn’t want to go, but because I was trying to stay within my budget. My meeting with Cerullo wasn’t until later in the month, so if I went to Sean’s party, it would be two trips across the country in one month, not to mention I’d have to take extra time off from my day job as an editor at my town’s newspaper. And I’d have to book a hotel room. The flights from Tulsa to San Diego were expensive and they already took a significant bite out of my profits from the writing gig with Cerullo. Plus, I wasn’t too keen on spending twice the normal amount of time in cramped airplane seats. The flight from Tulsa to connections in Dallas or sometimes Atlanta was almost always on a commuter jet or worse, a prop plane.

  Plus, it was only a few weeks away, and just two years after 9/11. Sometimes rush tickets like that—besides being expensive—raised suspicions and I had no desire to sit in the office of the newly organized Department of Homeland Security answering questions about why I suddenly had to fly to San Diego twice in one month instead of my regular once-a-month visit.

  “Couldn’t you have given me a little more notice?” I asked.

  Joy laughed. It was a throaty, magnetic guffaw that you couldn’t help but join with your own. Whatever Joy was doing, you wanted to do that, too, including laughing—especially laughing. Everything Joy did was executed without a net; when she was in, she was all in. There was no halfway with her. No middle ground. It was part her youth, part just Joy. With her, there was a sense of being outside time: she had been born thirty years too late, missing her appointment with the Aquarius generation’s carefree, flowing existence.

  “You know I don’t plan, fool!” She laughed again. I smiled. “Come on! Everybody is going to be here! Don’t let me down. You have to come!”

  I said I’d see what I could do. I had no intention of going but you just didn’t tell Joy no. She had a way of being relentless about getting people to go along with her, so I thought I’d just defer the decision on whether to go until it was too late and then pretend like I had forgotten. I would still have to endure a good-natured ribbing about it but at least I wouldn’t be stuck on a commuter jet twice in one month. Plus, there would always be another opportunity to see both Sean and her. It just wasn’t worth the extra money and the extra time traveling.

  Joy, appeased by my saying I’d think about it, gave a bouncy “Yay!” and hung up the phone.

  That night, Sean’s first wife took a trip to Santa Barbara with all three kids. Sean had told her he was going to use the night as a chance to try to “rekindle” his relationship with Joy—and short of that, to give her an ultimatum: shape up or ship out.

  With his first wife and the kids up north, Sean took Joy to his favorite place in San Diego: Coronado Island, a beautiful tourist trap more like the Hamptons than something you’d expect to find on the West Coast. There, they went to Sean’s favorite place, an opulent hotel where they had an expensive dinner of Kobe beef. Sean liked his extra rare.

  “I want to hear it moo,” he used to tell me as he ate bloody steak and laughed at the horrified faces I would make. Even before I was a vegetarian, the thought of bloody meat disgusted me.

  After the dinner, Sean and Joy went back to their house in Kensington, a hamlet inside the greater San Diego area. There, Joy somehow got sedatives into her system. Whatever had transpired between Sean and Joy leading up to that moment, after they arrived home the docile and helpful preacher turned savage.

  The self-proclaimed man of God murdered his junior wife.

  “We need to come to the place where we take on a warfare mentality,” he had preached early in his ministry. “We need to take an attitude of violence toward the enemy and have our eyes set on the war that is before us. Everybody has specific evil things that come against them. It’s time to decide you’re going to go into warfare—all by yourself, if necessary, and you’re going to rise up in power and defeat the enemy.”

  Though he had preached about spiritual, not physical, violence, it seems Sean now viewed Joy as an enemy. Somehow, the only way he saw out of the situation was violence—brutal, bloody violence. With the sedatives promethazine and codeine coursing through her system, Sean easily could have smothere
d Joy with a pillow and the final result would have been the same: her life would have ended. But Sean didn’t kill Joy with a pillow after he had sedated her with the drugs. Instead, he attacked her, stabbing her again and again, deeply enough to scar her bones, brutally enough to sever her sternum.

  Sean Goff wasn’t mercifully ending a problem that had cropped up. He was attacking an adversary with all his might. He was going into warfare against the “evil thing” that had “come against” him. Joy was an enemy who had to be dealt with. She wasn’t just an inconvenient side note. She had to be decisively destroyed.

  “There is an accuser of the brethren, accusing them night and day,” he preached in the same sermon. “We’ve got to deal with the accuser of the brethren. We’ve got to deal with it in warfare, in power and determination.”

  And Sean did deal with the enemy he had identified, his favorite wife, the young, happy, footloose mother of two of his children. He dealt with her the same way he dealt with every other obstacle that found itself in his way: he methodically planned the best and most effective way to deal with the situation. In Sean’s mind, spiritual victory and physical victory were one and the same if done in the name of advancing the work of God.

  Did he believe God had led him to kill Joy?

  “When Abraham was walking up onto the mountain, he wasn’t worried about killing his son,” Sean preached in 1992. “When God moves in your life, you can’t deny it. When God moves in your life, you know it’s God and you can’t say it was coincidence. I’m reminded of Moses: when he was growing up in Egypt, he saw one of his brothers, an Israelite, being come against by an Egyptian and he said ‘I’m going to do something about it,’ so he took the Egyptian and killed him, and later, when he found out it was known, he fled. He thought he had dug himself a hole so deep that he could never come out. Listen to me tonight. He said ‘I’ve made too many mistakes, I’ve done too many things wrong, and God can’t use me anymore.’ But through that experience and his time in the desert, he was humbled and he became a greater man of God.”

  In Sean’s mind and preaching, there was literally no difference between the God revealed in the pages of the Bible and the God he served. He spoke many times about what people today would do if God told them to kill someone as he told several of his heroes in the Bible.

  “People today would just think they were crazy and go see a shrink,” he said to me in 1997, smiling between bites of a sandwich at a downtown San Diego deli. “People think they serve God, but when he asks them to do something difficult or even illegal, they don’t really serve him. They just give him lip service.”

  If Sean thought God had asked him to kill, he believed he would not hesitate. To him, serving God meant you gladly went to prison, you gladly laid down your life if necessary to fulfill the will he had revealed to you. Could such a belief system include killing the wife whose departure might destroy your ministry to “patriarchal Christians?” Could it include killing her if she threatened to take the sons God had given you and raise them according to her will, not yours—the man God had appointed to be spiritual head of the family? Just how far would Sean take his belief in a God who had not changed from the Old Testament stories to modern times?

  Maybe lesser believers would say “God doesn’t do that anymore,” but to Sean, that was part of their great weakness. God was a violent God who demanded absolute service, no matter what that entailed.

  He once proudly told me the story of a young man in Florida who had taken literally the Bible’s admonition to “cut off your hand if it offends you,” and had cut off his own nose because he could not stop himself from snorting cocaine.

  “He’s misguided,” Sean said as we stood near my cubicle at Morris Cerullo World Evangelism, “but you have to admire his commitment.”

  To Sean, especially when it came to acts of faith, there was a fine, almost indiscernible line between faith and insanity. Did the man who once proclaimed that every action of his life was a result of God’s call on him believe that God wanted him to kill Joy?

  It’s hard to say, and Sean certainly isn’t telling.

  Whatever actually happened after the dinner on Coronado Island, only Sean knows. What is known is that, likely using the contractor’s sheeting he had purchased a short time before and the duct tape he had bought at the same time, Sean somehow managed to kill a full-grown woman and only leave a few tiny drops of blood in the house.

  He stabbed Joy at least a dozen times, according to the autopsy report. He sliced her sternum off. He nearly decapitated her. The lack of blood at the house in Kensington suggests that however Sean set up his “kill room,” it was mostly effective in keeping Joy’s bodily fluids contained as he stabbed her to death. Her stab wounds alone should have soaked every surface within several feet of her body, but Sean wasn’t done with his messy work—it was about to get a lot messier.

  When he was sure she was dead, Sean used a knife to sever her fingertips and then he methodically sawed her teeth out with a hacksaw. As a final measure to make sure she was unidentifiable, Sean bashed Joy’s face in. He knew that many bodies were identified through dental records, so her teeth had to go. Fingerprints could also be used to identify her body, so he removed them—along with the tips of the fingers that held them. Both of those operations should have produced a flood of blood, but the Kensington house was almost completely bereft of it.

  Then he systematically gathered up his tools and the contractor’s sheeting, crammed Joy’s body into a plastic container he had acquired at the same time, put her into the back of an SUV he had just rented and drove her two hundred and fifty miles away into the desert country of Arizona.

  Where he disposed of her teeth and fingertips has never come to light.

  A business card from Sean Goff’s early days as a minister in Oklahoma.

  Sean Goff and Leif Wright both worked for pentecostal televangelist Morris Cerullo, seen here preaching to thousands of enthusiastic followers.

  Photo © Tara L.B. Walzel.

  Photos © Tara L.B. Walzel.

  Joy Risker, Sean’s second wife, loved posing for art photos shot by her friend, Tara Walzell.

  Joy being Joy.

  Photos © Tara L.B. Walzel.

  Joy worked with Sean at Morris Cerullo World Evangelism.

  The wedding kiss: Sean and Joy were “married” on the beach in 1997.

  Photos courtesy of Maricopa County Medical Examiner.

  The cairn in the Arizona desert where Joy’s remains were found.

  The jumble of bones was painstakingly reassembled by Dr. Laura Fulginiti, a forensic anthropologist.

  Photos courtesy of Maricopa County Medical Examiner.

  Joy’s teeth had been sawn off and were missing from the remains.

  Joy Risker’s skull was reconstructed and a forensic artist created a sketch based on her remains.

  Sean Goff’s polygamy Web site offered advice to both polygamists and monogamists.

  Sean composed fake e-mails to Joy’s friends to explain why she had disappeared. The messages, uncharacteristic of Joy’s personality, led friends to contact police.

  Photos courtesy of NBC Television (from trial pool video).

  Sean Goff’s defense attorney Albert Arena addresses the jurors.

  Prosecutor Matthew Greco emphasizes a point during the trial.

  During sentencing, Sean Goff (shown here with attorney Arena) continued to blame Joy for causing the crime.

  Chapter 14

  THE SCORCHING DESERT

  I suspect these thoughts were running through Sean’s mind as he made the long drive to his destination out in the Arizona desert, deep inside Gila Bend, just north of the Mexican border: The tomb had to be scavenger-proof, he had decided. He couldn’t just trust that nature would take care of hiding everything; he had to make sure himself. His life depended on it.

  She had forced his hand. He hadn’t wanted this, but she had left him no choice. Jezebel. If he buried her body in the ground, chance
s were some hungry scavenger would dig her up—the desert was full of animals scraping by to eke out a living, and a rotting corpse would be just too much temptation, too much ready and easy-to-digest protein, he knew. And if something dug her up, the chances she’d be found—and identified—rose exponentially. He couldn’t have that.

  If his story was going to work, it was absolutely essential that she never be found. He knew there would be no way to hide the brutality of her death if investigators had her body, so his plan had two layers. First, make sure it was as unlikely as possible that anyone could stumble across her remains. Second, he knew that even the best-laid plans sometimes didn’t play out as the planner intended, so he had to have a fail-safe to go into action if someone did manage to find her—to make sure it would take an act of God for them to figure out who she was.

  An act of God. Ironic choice of phrase? In another circumstance, another time, he would have smiled, but he wasn’t feeling very humorous at the moment. She had taken even his mirth. The anger welled up inside him again, but he slowly fought it back. It was done. She had gotten what she deserved. He focused back on the task at hand.

  A lone palo verde tree poking up defiantly against the desert, with its roots deeply ensconced in the floor of the barren wilderness, seemed like the perfect place, he decided. It was far enough away from everything else that you would almost have to come out this way on purpose to find it. And the tree’s very presence meant the elements he needed to fall into place were all most likely present. The roots would keep the sand from eroding with an unexpected downpour—like the kind that the Arizona desert’s flash floods had become famous for—and exposing the body. If he put her near the roots, they should make sure the ground stayed relatively solid. Plus, they’d discourage digging coyotes from trying to scrape up an easy meal.