Deadly Vows Page 2

  And Jake’s way of ministering had a clear and profound influence on Sean, who even looked like Jake when he preached.

  Jake’s church, inside an old gas station turned sanctuary, was loud, raucous, emotional—and packed just about every service as believers crammed into the tiny building to hear the dynamic preaching that thundered from the pulpit with a conviction and moral authority few others could muster and none could challenge.

  But if visitors expected to hear “The Old Rugged Cross” played on a venerable pipe organ, they had another “think” coming. Jake, an aging former hippie who sang and played guitar for the church’s music service as well as preaching just about every sermon, sounded more like an amalgamation of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Bob Dylan than something you’d expect at a fundamentalist church. Amps cranked all the way up, Jake would fire up his Stratocaster and launch into the first, droning chords of Dylan’s “Saved,” and you’d swear you were at a concert, not a church service. The drummer, Jake’s daughter—who for all intents never hit the snare drum unless it was a booming rim shot—pounded along in time. Jake’s son thumped along on the bass guitar as Sean’s mother rounded out the sound on piano and harmony vocals with Jake of the perfect kind only siblings can ever hope to fully achieve. As the music built and roiled, congregation members sang, wailed loudly, praised God, lifted their hands and jumped up and down in time to the music, eyes slammed shut, tears streaming down their faces. Song after song built on the raw emotion until it reached a climax, another Dylan song, “Pressin’ On,” in which Dylan proclaims People try to stop me/shake me up in my mind/saying ‘Prove to me he is Lord/show me a sign.’

  If it was signs they wanted, Jake’s church was the place to be. Divine healings were so common that the congregation was more surprised if they didn’t happen than if they did. Every service opened with a “testimony” period, where parishioners could stand and tell the rest of the congregation what wonders God had worked for them recently, the stories frequently ending in tears and shouts of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” from everyone as the service built in tenor and power, arcing toward the sermon, which was when the real fireworks began.

  The miracles they reported weren’t of the pedestrian kind, either. God was very real, very present in the lives of the members of Jake’s church. When God worked a miracle, it was something you knew was a miracle, not something that could be interpreted as a miracle. Doctors were frequently flummoxed in the stories as God’s impossible healings blew their over-educated minds.

  But if the song service and the testimony period were a spectacle, the real show didn’t start until Jake stood up, set his guitar down and began to preach, the rhythm in his voice carrying over from the just-finished songs that were still ringing in the congregants’ ears. As the sermon began to build in cadence and power, Jake’s voice changed from preaching to a combination of shouting and singing, both lyrical and staccato at the same time, mesmerizing, captivating as he bounded from one side of the stage to the other. His piercing blue eyes—a defining symbol of the clan that Sean inherited—rested on each and every person as he delivered a sermon tightly woven with passion and emotion, calling the congregation to mortify the sins of the body, reject the lust of the eyes and press themselves into God’s “anointing” so he could invest them with the power to live holier lives.

  Sin, always waiting at the door for just the tiniest crack to slip in through, was an ever-present danger lurking behind every believer, just biding its time until it could rob them of that “anointing,” a term that stood for the active power and presence of God in their lives.

  A signature of the family’s preaching style—including Sean’s—was an unwavering and unassailable moral conviction based on the unshakeable belief that God is real, alive and active in determining the most minute details of the lives of those who serve him. God wasn’t far off, letting events on earth unfold as they would; the same God who could count the hairs on every one of six billion heads could certainly get his hands dirty cleaning up the gritty details of your life.

  Sickness wasn’t just a cause for aspirin, it was an affront to a life dedicated to a God who heals. In Jake’s church, long before big-time TV preachers such as Benny Hinn began aping the phenomenon for effect, people would drop to the ground, stunned, as the power of God overwhelmed them. The event, called being “slain in the Spirit,” happened so often that people began to stand behind those being prayed for in order to catch them as they fell onto the hard concrete floor. Jake, however, wasn’t having it.

  “If someone falls and hurts themselves, it wasn’t God who knocked them down,” he thundered from the pulpit one day in 1989. “If they’re faking and get hurt, they get what they deserve. Don’t catch them.”

  No one caught any falling parishioners after that, though to preserve the women’s modesty, they did throw pieces of cloth over their exposed legs as they lay on the ground, enraptured with the “anointing,” some shaking, some chattering in tongues, some just laying there, soaking up the glory, eyes jammed shut, hands reaching into the air as if to physically grab hold of the God who had knocked them to the ground.

  Words ring hollow in describing the feeling in Jake’s church in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There was a raw power there, hanging in the atmosphere, like a cat waiting to pounce—even before the services began, it felt like a place where people just knew the darkest secrets of your life, because in that place God revealed everything. Over the years, Sean took many friends from college on the three-hour trip from the University of Oklahoma in Norman to Jake’s church in Locust Grove. It was a significant number of people and none of them left unimpressed. The most skeptical ones might not leave Jake’s church as believers, but they also wouldn’t walk away unchanged. It was an amazing place that, for that time at least, seemed to have captured an intangible something that embedded itself in the minds of everyone who experienced it.

  In Jake’s church, when you came up to the altar for prayer, you had better be serious about it, because Jake could tell. As dozens of people shouting in tongues filled the air with the cacophony of their prayers, Jake would slather his hands in olive oil, straight out of the bottle, and then lay them on the heads of those seeking prayer, praying in loud, rapid-fire staccato tones that commanded the sickness to “leave! Right now! In JESUS’s name!”

  There was no gentle asking God to heal. There was no “if it is your will.” In Jake’s preaching, it was God’s will to heal; he was simply waiting on people to speak that will into the air so that he could get about the business of healing.

  One man came to the altar, Sean once recounted, asking God for healing for his hands, both of which were bloodied and broken. When Jake asked the man what had happened, the man said he had hurt his hands beating up his son-in-law, who had been smacking the man’s daughter around.

  “I believe God isn’t mad at me,” the man told Jake, “and I’d like him to heal my hands.”

  According to Sean, after Jake prayed, that’s exactly what happened. Whether or not it was true, Sean believed it enough that he told the story frequently.

  Stomping his feet in time with the music, swaying with the beat, eyes closed, mouth pursed between smile and wince, Jake would lay his hands on each member of the congregation who came up for prayer, each one leaving with the impression that they had been forever changed by the power of God. And if Jake was in the mood, he would “prophesy,” which is church lingo for proclaiming to someone their deepest thoughts, fears and prayers, and then purportedly God’s answer to those prayers.

  “Sister,” Jake would say to one woman, “God says you’ve been praying late at night, begging Him to draw your husband in. He said you weep and cry and pray, and I want you to know God has heard your prayers, hallelujah. You stay faithful, sister, and know that God is going to do what you’ve asked when his time has come!”

  The woman would jump up and down, hands raised to God, eyes slammed shut in thankfulness, tears rolling down her cheeks
as she spoke in tongues and cried, thanking Jesus for hearing her prayers. But unlike some who were fakes and would “prophesy” in sweeping generalities that could apply to anyone, Jake seemed to be the real deal. He called people out for things that it seemed no one could know without supernatural intervention.

  “Brother,” he said. “I know you’re feeling those lustful thoughts for the woman you work with who wears the jean skirts, but I want to tell you that God is here to strengthen you, to tell you to resist, because the temptation of the devil can’t overcome you while Jesus is in you.”

  Jake’s church was exciting, powerful and unforgettable, but Sean’s nature would not let him avoid looking for ways he could improve it.

  “That church should have 5,000 members by now,” he said to me on one of our trips back to Norman in his white Daihatsu Charade, which tore down the road on a tiny three-cylinder engine (“It has a Trinity of cylinders,” he used to joke.). “If Jake knew how to manage, that church would be huge!”

  The idea that Jake might not want a huge church never occurred to Sean. It wasn’t in him to think small. No matter what someone had going on, Sean saw a way to improve it, to make it bigger, and not in a disrespectful way. Sean openly admired people like Jake while still thinking of ways to make him better. It’s a mean balancing act, but Sean pulled it off.

  That virtue—seeing the bigger and better in everyone, no matter how good they already were—served Sean well through the years. It made him a valuable person to know, for everyone from college students struggling to figure out what to do with their lives to multimillionaire TV preachers who needed someone to infuse them with fresh ideas for expanding and improving their ministries. Sean could not stop himself from helping them, from brainstorming ways that they could accomplish their goals.

  It was one of his strengths, and ultimately, it would be part of what led him down the dark and terrible path to a ghastly decision.

  But Sean wasn’t always a powerful preacher and he also wasn’t always a confident guy who just seemed to know the answers to everyone else’s problems. When he was a child growing up in the small northeastern Oklahoma city of Wagoner, Sean wasn’t even Sean.

  He was “Bear.”

  Until his senior year in high school, that’s how everyone knew him. His high school yearbooks even list him in pictures and indexes as “Bear Goff.” The Goffs raised their children in a lower middle-class neighborhood in Wagoner. Both parents worked for the phone company, scrimping and saving money when they could to help their children when they became adults.

  When he was a child, someone asked Sean what he wanted to be when he grew up. His reply was simple: “A bear.”

  And the nickname was born—and stuck. The entire time I knew him, Sean’s brothers still called him “Bear,” as did his cousins and extended family. It was a nickname that, at least as an adult, bothered him to no end. He accepted that people from his past were going to use it, but he didn’t like it and he didn’t want anyone new to use it. In school, however, he was anything but a bear. Sean quietly made the honor society each year. He quietly assumed a position on the student council. He quietly became the president of the foreign language club (his language was French). Everything he did, “Bear” did as a leader, but one who didn’t really stick out in people’s minds.

  “Bear would make an interesting story, for sure,” said Adam Miller, who served with him on the student council. “He was affable, aloof, smart and cheerful for the most part.”

  The oldest Goff brother was out of school by the time Bear was getting around. Sean’s next oldest sibling was ahead of him by a year, and his youngest brother was two years behind him, so he always had family around him, and when it wasn’t family, it was a group of Oklahoma teenagers who had grown up with the slight, silent yet incredibly smart boy.

  The eldest brother was “the toughest man I ever met,” Sean later told me.

  Sean’s next oldest brother is an imposing man, with a voice as commanding as his stature. When they were younger, he became the brunt of a family joke when he said, out of the blue, “When I sing, I can sound like anybody. Anybody. I don’t know. I just can. It’s a gift.”

  Sean’s mother, without missing a beat, dead-panned: “OK, let’s hear some Ethel Merman.”

  Sean’s older brother didn’t brag about his singing after that, but occasionally, one of his other brothers, out of the blue, would quip, “When I sing, I can sound like anybody. I don’t know, it’s a gift,” and the older brother would jab at them, smiling.

  Sean’s younger brother, three years his junior, was also much bigger than Sean, who was always delicate. The younger brother was a star quarterback at Wagoner High School, and he had received “plenty” of scholarship offers, Sean told me proudly, but he had decided to not play college football because he believed God didn’t want him to.

  Sean was no football star, no homecoming king, a member of the student council but not the president. Academically, he was ahead of just about everybody else, but socially, he fit nicely into the background. He was not a nerd, but he also wasn’t the life of the party.

  His freshman yearbook features a quarter-page photo of Sean solving a Rubik’s Cube, then the nation’s biggest craze, lauding the fact that the “whiz kid” had the ability to solve the deceptively simple puzzle “in a flash.”

  “His mannerisms were unusual,” Adam said. “I remember sitting over and behind him; he had these long, delicate fingers, and he would move them like he was playing piano while he was sitting in class. Maybe he just did that when he was bored.”

  Though he seemed cheerful enough, “Bear” kind of kept to himself, appearing at school and extracurricular functions but never really being the center of attention.

  “He knew he was smarter than just about everybody else,” Adam said. “But he didn’t try to rub your face in it. If he was asked, he would answer a question in class, but he was more introverted. He wasn’t like goth or anything but he also wasn’t a joiner. He didn’t sit with his head on the desk wearing all black or broody or anything. He was just more mature than the rest of the kids in the class.”

  He also wasn’t the chick magnet he eventually became, classmates agreed. No one seems to be able to remember “Bear” having a girlfriend at all, though he did go on one date with a girl, taking her to church with him.

  “It was real strange,” a friend of hers said. “He took her to this weird church up in Locust Grove, and they were all speaking in tongues and acting crazy. She was petrified during the service and she started crying and screaming at him to ‘take me home!’ She cried all the way back.

  “I don’t think they ever had another date.”

  If “Bear” had any girlfriends in high school, he was discreet about it, because no one seems to be able to recall him having one.

  “If he had a girlfriend, it would have been a real wallflower type,” Adam said. “He wasn’t a cocky guy strutting down the hall with a gal on his arm. He didn’t go out on Fridays or Saturdays to hang with the guys. He didn’t really socialize a lot.”

  “Bear” was already showing signs of his future behavior in high school.

  “He liked to control his immediate environment,” Adam said. “He was meticulous. His handwriting was like everything else about him: delicate. He was probably the most docile and effeminate guy I knew there who wasn’t gay.”

  Sean’s mannerisms weren’t limited to playing air piano, either. Unlike most guys his age, Sean crossed his legs at the knees like a woman, instead of putting one ankle on the other knee—a habit he carried into adulthood. But his introverted childhood was already preparing “Bear” to become Sean, the powerful preacher, the chick magnet, the advisor to people in power.

  “There’s a lack of Bible study in the church today, isn’t there?” he preached in 1992, when he was twenty-four. “We have conditioned ourselves to whatever buzzwords and scriptures are going on our television sets, and through whatever movement we’re in, we’ll stu
dy those things and those things alone. You find very few people in any church have read the whole Bible. Listen, by the time I was twelve years old, you couldn’t preach on a scripture that I hadn’t heard. Either I heard it at church or read it at home or something. And it sure helps when someone is preaching something that’s not true if you’ve heard the story before. Otherwise, they can give you all kinds of heresy and it’ll just soak right in.”

  His time not hanging out with the other kids—reading books, studying the Bible, taking friends and girls to his uncle’s innovative church—was about to pay off, making him a respected minister. But that period was also laying the foundation of a systemic misogyny that would ultimately lead him to rage against a woman who wanted to usurp his control and leave him.

  Chapter 2

  OU

  “Darryl? Is that you?”

  As the summer of 1987 waned, Sean and I had known each other less than two hours and we were already fast friends, hanging out in my dormitory room at the University of Oklahoma, beckoning to every student who was lugging his belongings up the stairs to the second floor, trying to find Darryl Hoyt, the lanky country boy who was to be my roommate.

  Earlier in the day it had been just me, my amplifier cranked, jamming as hard as I could on my Flying V guitar, hoping to make my mark early and let everyone know I was there. I was scared, just as everyone else probably was. It was my first real time away from home, and it felt like I was responsible for my own life—a terrifying proposition.

  The guitar blast had worked, too. I had already met my next-door neighbor that way, an incredibly nice guy named Kevin Thornton, who would later go on to fame in ’90s pop group Color Me Badd.