Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier

by Tom Kizzia

  As far as she could tell, such erratic behavior had been part of her husband’s makeup since he was young. It was crazy rage that got the best of him with Kathleen Connally, he had always insisted, and the poor confused girl couldn’t take it—pregnant, a disappointment to her father, trapped in a dumpy apartment far from home with a husband furious about a bathtub ring. Bobby felt guilty and searched twenty years for answers before he found Jesus. But it was like the parable in the Gospels about the house that has been swept clean, Rose thought. Her husband’s evil spirits were banished and went away into the wilderness, until he allowed himself to become proud in the mountains of New Mexico. The devil found a way back in. And he came back, as the Bible says, bringing seven spirits even more wicked. That number again.

  Rose wished she had known something about manic depression. But she was only sixteen when Bobby Hale took her in, and young even for that, too eager to build a rebel lifestyle all her own, too proud to admit a mistake, too foolish to see the warning signs in an older man who never got over another innocent sixteen-year-old.

  This was how things began to look to Rose when she gazed back on her life. But people didn’t want to hear her say anything that sounded like she was explaining or defending her husband. She tried to keep her mouth shut.

  A YEAR after Robert Hale was arrested, I received a jailhouse letter addressed to Neighbor Tom. The defendant wanted me to know he always felt I had done an “Honest and Admirable job of Reporting.” He added: “I held you in heartfelt prayer as I recall the hardships and sorrow you personally went through in your life—I’m not writing but to say that you now could pray for me, that the Truth of my situation will be brought forth.”

  Actually, he wanted something else from me: a photo of his family. He dangled the possibility of an interview and signed the letter “Papa.”

  I went to the jail but was turned away by orders of his lawyer.

  Several months later, though, I was invited to visit the Buckingham home. It was right before Christmas 2006. The trial, after many postponements, was scheduled to begin in two weeks. The Buckinghams decided it was time to let people see how the children were doing.

  I arrived at Lazy Mountain early, in time for morning chores and Bible study. I squirmed through lessons from Thessalonians and Luke, watching for the first light of winter solstice and trying to recall my own distant Sunday school days.

  The Buckinghams had doubled the size of their log cabin to accommodate the Hales. A nave-like log addition perpendicular to the original provided a living room ringed by comfortable old couches. Counting Martha Buckingham’s parents—former missionaries in New Guinea—the cabin had become home to twenty-eight people. Eight girls shared a bedroom upstairs and hung their thrift-store clothes outdoors on a balcony. The boys bunked in cramped basement rooms down a stairway choked with overcoats and coveralls.

  Breakfast, including four loaves of freshly baked bread, was ready at eight a.m. sharp. The house was managed with military punctuality: Every room had a wall clock, synchronized with such precision that even the second hands seemed to march in step. Homeschooling started at nine. Martha’s missionary mother taught reading and phonics (“Parts of speech are a wonderful gift from the Lord”). Older boys sat around the big dining table with their little siblings. Apart from Elishaba, none of the Hales was able to read much past a second-grade level when they arrived.

  The Hale boys were shorn and scrubbed and smiling. The girls from two families sang hymns in the afternoon as they frosted cookies in the kitchen. There was no Christmas tree—a tradition of Teutonic nature worshippers—but they strung garlands and lights on the log beams. If the tableau felt a bit staged, it was no more than most American households might contrive for a holiday visitor.

  They thanked me for the stories I’d written. They made me feel I had played a small supporting role in the rescue narrative they were using to rebuild the children’s lives. The newspaper’s front-page photographs had first brought the Hales to the attention of the Buckinghams. The stories had dragged hidden things to light, prodded authorities, and provoked conversation inside the family. Joseph told me about his brainwashing joke and how mad his father got.

  Everyone called Mr. Buckingham “Papa.” They conceded this was a little strange, but no other designation had stuck. They referred to their biological father as “Pilgrim” or “Mr. Hale.” When we found space upstairs to talk privately, Jim Buckingham was grave and on message. Martha, who radiated more emotion, participated fully in our conversation and in managing the entangled families’ complicated lives.

  The Buckinghams said they were not sure how long the housing arrangement was going to last. They were still trying to sort out God’s plan. They said the children faced many fears and difficulties. They were still tempted to lie and hide things to stay out of trouble. There were, too, the strains and jealousies of blended families: the grown Hales chafing at new rules, the clash between the Hales’ rugged sledgehammer approach for dealing quickly with problems and the Buckinghams’ overly deliberate style. They were learning from one another.

  Jim Buckingham had little to say about the crimes of Papa Pilgrim. That was for the trial, he told me. Only later did I realize how angry he was, when I saw a letter he wrote to Pilgrim around this time in which he called the man a fake and a charlatan, and described the horror the children lived with “behind closed doors under the pretense of your being a godly old sage that had forsaken the world to protect his family.” The children were praying and fasting, he wrote, in hopes that their father would repent. He deplored Pilgrim’s response: “that you are willing to go to jail and possibly die there to protect the now shattered image of the enigmatic leader of the Wilderness Pilgrim Family rather than openly embrace the truth of your sins and your crimes and begin the process of reconciliation with all those you have hurt so badly.”

  Kurina Rose stopped by for dinner. Afterward, everyone found seats on the perimeter of couches for even more Bible study and lessons about character building. Today’s lesson involved initiative versus idleness. Then Jim Buckingham read from Proverbs.

  “ ‘Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.’ What does it mean, to trust the Lord?”

  Elishaba was the one who answered.

  I could not yet appreciate how hard the long wait for a trial had been on the leading witness. Later she told me how she had come down from the mountain in the Wrangells feeling stupid, worthless, soiled forever. She blew up and said hurtful things. She woke up screaming at night from dreams about New Mexico and getting beaten in the head. Yet the thought of testifying and bringing her father to ruin terrified her.

  Angry and depressed, she ran away from the Buckingham home several times to live in the woods. The last time out, hiding from the rain under a spruce tree as she read her Bible, a description of lost souls as lambs brought a happier memory from the Sangre de Cristos, of a time they had all gone out to hunt a missing lamb. It was a little black newborn that no one had bottle-fed or cuddled yet, so there was little hope it would respond to their calls. The coyotes would finish it off in a night. But as they hiked the cliffs at dusk, bleating their calls, they heard a reply and found the black lamb huddled in dense brush.

  As Elishaba sat alone, remembering the hunt for the lamb, she heard her brothers calling across a canyon, and she cried out. David, Moses, and Jonathan delivered provisions and a message from the Buckinghams, who suggested she let go of her anger at her father and look instead at her own failings. It seemed to help. She returned to live in an outbuilding, and eventually moved back in to the main house.

  Elishaba spoke now with her cowgirl twang over the soft click-click of knitting needles: “Trusting the Lord means God doesn’t do evil to us. He forgives us as we reach out to Him. He gives us trials, so we can learn to know Him better.”

  All day I had struggled, I admit, with how the family still looked to heaven to sort out their lives. “God’s grace” sound
ed like more magical thinking to me, a catchall explanation for good things that happened, the way “God’s plan” offered a consoling shrug when things went awry. But grace, at least, was something the children could reach for. It was shaping their recovery. Whatever the Buckinghams were doing, it was working. The family had not yet produced any drug addicts or felons, nor even any apostates. They had found a perfect Christian halfway house.

  After the lessons there was time for music. The Pilgrim Family acoustic instruments remained packed away, mournful reminders of a time of strife and false appearance.

  This time it was the singing of hymns and Christmas carols. At the request of the boys, the seven oldest girls—Elishaba, Sharia, Lolly, Jerusalem, Hosanna, Christina, and Maryanna—harmonized a cappella:

  Well the winds of despair were blowing in my face

  Til the day I felt the gentle breeze of “Amazing Grace.”

  Then I charted a brand new course,

  Let the Savior be my guiding force

  And put my anchor down in Peaceful Harbor.

  TWO DAYS after Christmas, Robert Hale agreed to plead no contest. There would be no trial after all.

  Richard Payne had initially resisted any kind of plea deal. The more he learned, the more heinous the father’s crimes seemed. The family members were resolved to tell their story, and to Payne it seemed an important story for the world to hear. Their escape would inspire others in desperate domestic situations, he thought. Who could feel more trapped than the children in Hillbilly Heaven? Plus, Payne looked forward personally to boxing the old hypocrite’s ears, partly as society’s avenger, and partly—he felt a twinge of guilt about this—as a lawyer planning to go into private practice after the show-trial prosecution of a widely loathed figure.

  It was Payne’s wife who softly but persistently urged him to offer a deal. She said it was right for the children. In court, the defense would surely attack Elishaba and raise humiliating allegations about others in the family. So Payne talked to doctors about how long the sixty-five-year-old defendant was likely to live, given his many medical problems—diabetes, blood clots, infection, advanced cirrhosis from so much sacramental wine. Payne did a complicated piece of legal math, doubling the prognosis and calculating good time and other factors. He figured a sentence of fourteen years would keep Hale in jail until he was dead.

  Hale might do much worse in a jury trial. He discussed the offer with his public defender. Frail and in a wheelchair, Hale then appeared before the judge and said he didn’t have long to live and had decided it would be best for his family if he pleaded no contest. But, he added, “I want to make it clear that I never in any kind of way sexually assaulted anyone.”

  The lawyers started to prepare for sentencing. But Rose and the children, noting the absence of repentance, weren’t so sure. They feared Pilgrim would find a way to keep himself the center of attention.

  “Nobody is breathing a sigh of relief that this is a done deal,” Jim Buckingham told me.

  They were right to worry. In April 2007, one week before his sentencing date, Hale dismissed his public defender. Acting as his own lawyer, he asked to reverse the plea, saying he had been heavily medicated and confused when he agreed to Payne’s offer.

  The canny prisoner had picked apart the legal code in the same way he teased lessons from the Bible. Hale had found a legitimate justification for getting out of a plea agreement. A court date was set to consider his new request, and an independent lawyer appointed to represent him. His family could not relax. Even from jail, Papa Pilgrim had extended his control over their anxious lives for two full years.

  In September, the Hales and Buckinghams filled the gallery in a small Anchorage courtroom to hear Robert Hale argue for the chance to change his plea back to not guilty.

  They were in for a surprise. The public defender’s agency, accused by Hale of inadequate counsel, showed up in court with boxes and boxes of documents and phone logs demonstrating extensive efforts on behalf of an exceptionally demanding client. The court recessed so the lawyers and judge could talk privately. When they reconvened, a gaunt and slurring Hale reversed course yet again, dropping his request to change his plea. The court could sentence him as a guilty man.

  Superior court judge Donald Hopwood asked several times if the defendant understood what was going on and was sure about his decision. Each time, Hale hesitated, letting his eyelids droop and touching his worn Bible, before saying he understood.

  So it was nearly over. The courtroom was reserved in November for a two-day sentencing hearing, at which point family members would finally get the chance to speak in public. Their father would have a last chance to speak as well. At the bang of the gavel, the children rose and filed out, never looking over their shoulders. Hale watched from his wheelchair, his face collapsing in a look of anguish, and cried out, “Family, don’t turn your backs on God!”

  Elishaba at Hillbilly Heaven (photo credit 18.1)

  THERE WAS not much at issue when Robert Hale was wheeled into the courtroom for the November sentencing clutching a Bible. He turned to make eye contact with the front row of spectators but did not risk a smile. The youngest children stared back. They had not seen their father in two years.

  Hale had agreed in the end to plead no contest to three consolidated counts of twenty-seven charges of rape, coercion, and incest, all involving Elishaba. Judge Hopwood had only to decide whether to add an additional suspended sentence and any conditions on probation—mere technicalities given that no adult in the room expected the ailing inmate would ever leave prison alive.

  Under Alaska law, however, crime victims get a chance to speak before a sentence is imposed. They are invited to court primarily to address sentencing conditions. But sometimes they are allowed to speak directly to the guilty party about what is pent up in their hearts.

  Hopwood had a reputation for running a tight hearing. It wasn’t clear how much rein the family would be given. The judge had already turned down a request by Jim Buckingham to speak.

  The Anchorage courtroom was small, with just three rows of spectator benches. Hales and Buckinghams filled the first two rows. I sat against the back wall, next to Kurt Stenehjem.

  For four hours, we watched transfixed as the Pilgrim Family talked back to Papa for the first time in their lives.

  Kurina Rose Hale was the first to speak. She addressed the judge directly.

  “On the outside, we looked quaint and could be quite charming when it suited us. But behind closed doors, a battle was always raging,” she said.

  Her notes trembled in her hands. Life wasn’t easy in a small cabin with a husband who “always made life sound so different from what you thought it was,” she said. “He demanded complete attention when he spoke, and he could go on for hours. Sometimes he would not allow me to feed the children their breakfast until way after lunchtime, because he had so many things to say about the Bible. The children learned to sit almost motionless, like in a trance, while listening to him.”

  The boys, she said, were trained to take the beatings. They turned the other cheek and never dishonored their father by fighting back.

  “He began to teach the family that if we sin we do not go to heaven.… He tried in every way he could to convince us that he himself was not a sinner, and that if we perceived that he had done something wrong we could be sure he was doing something God told him to do.… It took me a long time to grasp this doctrine, but the children were taught it from the time they could talk and so they always lived in fear of what it meant.”

  As she described how he punished her for showing disrespect, she broke down weeping. She apologized, saying she had never been able to speak of such things in his presence without fearing for her life.

  “Words cannot express how women like me need others to reach out and help us in our desperate situation. How different our lives would have been if I had a friend to reach out a helping hand. I have asked God and my family to forgive me for not making more of an effo
rt to get help.”

  After thanking those who did help bring them out of the wilderness over the past two years, she said she had only one thing to say to her husband. “I’d just sort of like to know where he’s at in his ‘progress.’ ”

  She asked to read a short excerpt from The Pilgrim’s Progress. It was the story of “The Man in the Iron Cage.”

  The book’s pilgrim, Christian, is introduced to the caged man. The man was once a flourishing Professor, making fair for the Celestial City, but is now trapped in despair for having “laid the reins on the neck of my lusts” and sinning against the light of the world. It was not his sin, though, that has built his iron cage, but rather that “I have hardened my heart so much that I cannot repent.”

  Hale’s court-appointed attorney stood to object.

  “To be read a long passage from a book to inflict whatever she’s trying to inflict on Mr. Hale adds nothing to the proceedings,” he said.

  Richard Payne responded that the book was a key to understanding the family’s story.

  “This individual names himself Papa Pilgrim. He derives that name from the book from which she reads. I think it’s very important for her to express this in words that I think are very well understood by the other victims in the family and by Mr. Hale.”

  The judge overruled the objection. Rose finished reading:

  MAN: I have despised his Righteousness, I have counted his Blood an unholy thing, I have done despite to the Spirit of Grace: Therefore I have shut myself out of all the Promises, and there now remains to me nothing but Threatenings, dreadful Threatenings, fearful Threatenings of certain Judgment and fiery Indignation, which shall devour me as an Adversary.…