Cave Mountain – Benjamin Hale

Royal, Mark, Winston Van, and Lucy were all appointed public defenders. Tom Keith was appointed to defend Lucy on the day they were arrested. I don’t know the reason for the delay with the others, but they weren’t appointed counsel until May 26. All four entered pleas of not guilty on June 13 and again at their omnibus hearing on July 6. The court ordered psychiatric evaluations for Royal, Mark, and Lucy. For some reason it never ordered one for Winston Van. Everyone I’ve talked to who knew Winston Van described him as an extremely garrulous, headstrong, assertive guy; it’s possible that his personality did him no favors in the justice system; there were moments when it would have been wiser of him to keep his mouth shut.

Dr. Travis Jenkins, the clinical director of the Ozark Guidance Center, evaluated Lucy and Mark. Dr. Jenkins reported to the court that Lucy was competent to stand trial: “In my opinion there is no evidence to suggest that she is psychotic at the time of my interview with her nor was there any evidence to suggest that she was psychotic at the time of the alleged offense.”

But Jenkins wrote of the seventeen-year-old Mark Harris: I have seen Mark Harris today in psychiatric consultation. The background situation, as well as his current mental status, is very complicated. It is difficult for me to make the usual determination regarding competency and the presence of psychosis based on this one visit.

Therefore, I would like to recommend further observation and evaluation at the Arkansas State Hospital. The judge in Benton County, W. H. Enfield, had already decided to bypass the Ozark Guidance Center and send Royal straight to the Arkansas State Hospital in Little Rock for his evaluation.

Royal and Mark were both examined that summer at the Arkansas State Hospital, whose doctors ultimately declared them both competent to stand trial. The four months in jail awaiting sentencing were grueling. For one thing, they were all underfed; Mark Harris—a tall, skinny teenager—lost forty pounds in the months before the trial.

But Lucy’s experience was particularly harrowing. After being terrorized, beaten, and abandoned by her husband, Lucy—still only twenty-two years old—had endured three years of more terror, brainwashing, and physical abuse in the cult, at the end of which they murdered her daughter, and then she spent several months after Suzette’s release as the only woman being held in the two Arkansas county jails.

Cops often make under-the-table quid pro quo deals with inmates, offering favors for information having to do with other cases.

This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings: Change of font size and line height Change of background and font colours Change of font Change justification Text to speech Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780063398122 1kitap1.com/en Dedication For my parents, Charley and Leigh and in loving memory of my uncle, Jay Hale 1939–2024 1kitap1.com/en Contents Cover Title Page Map Note to Readers Dedication 1. Sunday, April 29, 2001 2. Hale Holler 3.

Cave Mountain 4. Dug Hollow 5. The Buffalo National River Wilderness 6. The Third Step to Joyful Living 7. The Tribulation 8. The Child Is Not Alive 9. Anathema 10. Nothing to Forgive 11. F.O.U. 12. You Have Almost Persuaded Me 13. Trust and Obey 14. Christ of the Ozarks Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Benjamin Hale Copyright About the Publisher 1kitap1.com/en 1 Sunday, April 29, 2001 ON SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2001, MY FATHER’S OLDER BROTHER AND his wife, Jay and Joyce Hale, took their granddaughter, Haley Zega—the only child of their only child—on a day trip to the Buffalo National River Wilderness in Newton County, Arkansas, in the heart of the Ozark Mountains.

Jay was sixty-two years old at the time, Joyce was fifty-nine, and Haley was six. That morning Jay and Joyce drove their powder blue 1984 Ford F-150 truck from their home in Pea Ridge, Arkansas, to the home of their daughter, Kelly, and her husband, Steve Zega, in Fayetteville, picked up Haley, and drove about an hour and a half to the Hawksbill Crag Trailhead on Cave Mountain, where they met up with their friends and fellow Sierra Club members Claibourne Bass and Dennis and Michelle Boles.

My uncle Jay and aunt Joyce had been friends with the Boleses—both public schoolteachers—for nearly thirty years, and Jay had been friends with Clay Bass since the two had met in the Cub Scouts when they were in the first grade. Jay and Clay, both engineers, had formed their boyhood bond taking machines apart and putting them back together, building things, destroying things—“Something got blowed up every day,” said Jay.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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