The Dead Priest of Sedona

by Charles Williamson

  I did find some possible connections. Circles were important in containing the energy used in magic, and we had found the body in a circle of trees. The magic rites often used candles, and I had found red wax at the murder site. Red was the magic color of autumn. Nothing I had read so far talked about Halloween; however witches had been one of the symbols of the holiday for as long as I could remember.

  I took a break from reading and called Sheriff Taylor to see if he had any new information from the medical examiner or crime lab. Sheriff Taylor took my call himself. I reported on the boot print and tire casts that Chad had made on the approach to the crime scene. I explained that I would send them down to the state crime lab this morning.

  Sheriff Taylor said, “Mike, I received a call just minutes ago; the DNA evidence shows our murder victim is Father Sean Murphy. I’ll call Bishop Kelly right after you finish your report. I don’t have anything from the FBI lab on the blue stuff, the candle wax, or the tissue and bone samples we sent to Washington. That should take another day or two. We have an expert welder coming by to look at the cage this afternoon.”

  I finished my report to the Sheriff, and said I would call when we had something new. I asked one of the deputies to drive the tire and foot casts down to the crime lab in Phoenix. It was about a two-hour drive each way.

  I got myself another cup of coffee, and finished scanning through the magic books from Father Sean’s room. In all of the morning’s tedious reading, I hadn’t found anything remotely related to human sacrifice at midnight on Halloween. I decided that it was time to introduce myself to the owner of the Mystic New Age Bookstore.

  CHAPTER 9

  As I entered her store, Alicia Magnus, the proprietor of the Mystic New Age, greeted me. She was a middle aged, plump lady with long very red hair that looked like it had been manufactured from thin copper wire. It was not the hair color that would naturally accompany her brown eyes and olive complexion. She had a southern accent and a singsong high voice. I guessed she spent a lot of time chanting rituals and such. A black cat wandered around the shop. There were no customers present. I felt out of place in the little bookstore, and the furtive cat made me uncomfortable as he eyed me from a shelf.

  I introduced myself and started by explaining, “Ms. Magnus, I want to learn more about Celtic customs associated with Halloween and about the pre-Christian European Halloween rituals that predated our modern customs.” She corrected my pronunciation; I had used the name of the basketball team rather than the K sound.

  The proprietor didn’t show the slightest sign of surprise to find that the local sheriff’s detective was asking about Halloween customs of ancient Celts. “I do have a number of excellent books that might help with your research Lieutenant Damson. Is your interest related to a case or are you just interested in Halloween in general?”

  I avoided any detailed explanation. “My research involves a confidential case. Elements of special interest include any connection to trees and to fires associated with the holiday. I’m also interested in both Celtic customs and the Wicca religion.”

  The woman led me to a section of books labeled Wicca and another nearby shelf labeled Druids and Celtic Magic. “Lieutenant, please call me Alicia. You’ll find a lot of information on these shelves, but I suggest that a good starting place for everyone interested in ancient practices is the classic in the field, The Golden Bough; A Study in Magic and Religion by Sir James George Frazer. I have one of the 1951 editions in my used book section.”

  She went looking for the old book while I examined others. I was hoping for some direct information and not a lot more stuff to read. When she returned with The Golden Bough, I said, “Alicia, please call me Mike. After all, we are practically neighbors working here in the same mall. I was hoping that you could shorten my research by telling me more about the customs of Wicca and the Celts. Maybe you could point me to the correct passages.”

  Alicia looked down at my left hand, maybe to see if there was a wedding ring on my finger. I thought I could see a slight note of disappointment in her eyes when she saw my gold band. “Sure Mike, I’m glad to cooperate with the cops. Trees, fires, and Halloween, it sounds like you are looking for the Celtic customs rather than the Wicca celebration.”

  She pulled a book from the shelf and turned to a chapter called Samhain. “The Celtic religious practice was to date the end of summer to October 31st. The end of summer festival was called Samhain in Gaelic or Halloween or Hallowmas in English. The pre-Christian Celtic priests were called druids. They used groves of trees as their sacred place rather than churches. The Celtic countries have a very ancient tradition of using fires on Halloween night as part of their customs. You’ll find an account in this section of this book. You’ll also find a chapter in The Golden Bough about the Hallowe’en Fires. The custom of building fires on Halloween continued well into the Christian period in Scotland and Ireland.”

  “If you could tell me a little more,” she said, “maybe I could help.”

  “Thank you Alicia, but I’m not able to discuss the case right now. If I get the OK later, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and ask for your help. I’m interested in what you know of Sedona’s pagans.” That comment produced only a raised eyebrow followed by a slight grin. I selected one of the Wicca books from the shelf. I bought the two books and took them with me back to my office.

  CHAPTER 10

  When I got back to the substation, I checked on Chad’s progress with Father Sean’s laptop. He had taken the hard drive out of the laptop and hooked it up with cables to his own computer. “Father Sean made use of the Windows password function, so I haven’t gotten into the system yet,” Chad said. “I’m copying his hard drive onto mine in a way that will let me avoid knowing his password. I should have access to his whole system in about ten minutes. Check back in half an hour, and I should have some information.”

  Back in my office, I quickly read the sections of the two new books that Alicia had indicated might help. Within a few pages, I was getting a pretty clear picture of the connection of the murder scene to the rituals. The Golden Bough had a 1922 copyright, but it had a lot of information useful to a twenty-first century homicide investigation.

  The Celtic Druids used groves of trees as their temples. They were especially partial to oaks, but oak trees didn’t grow on the high plateau where the body was found. Most telling was their celebration of the important festival of Samhain. October 31st was the start of a three-day period in which dangerous spirits walked the earth. They welcomed the holiday by building large fires and conducting sacrifices. Most significant and disturbing was the method of sacrifice. They enclosed their sacrifices, including human ones, in wicker cages. They hung the cages over the Samhain fires at midnight. The Druids danced around the consecrated bonfires until the sacred flames consumed their victims.

  The books reported that even in modern times, Halloween fires in Scotland involve tossing in straw effigies in lieu of the more ancient actual sacrifice of Samhain. Could some of my neighbors have resurrected this pagan sacrificial ritual using a Jesuit priest as the victim? That was truly hard to believe. It occurred to me that Alicia Magnus was very quick to point to the sections of a book that related to Druid customs. Did she have some hidden motive for implicating the ancient Druid cult?

  As I was reading another section of The Golden Bough, the phone rang. Sheriff Taylor called to warn me that a Robert Huff of The Arizona Republic had called inquiring about the murder of a priest. He said, “If the Phoenix paper has the story, the tabloids could not be far behind. Bishop Kelly will hold a Requiem Mass at St. Paul of Tarsus down there in Sedona at 3:00 tomorrow. If the word is out by then, the funeral could be a mob scene with the press and other crazy types. Have all of your local forces present and coordinate with the Sedona police. The Flagstaff Daily Sun will carry a notice of the funeral tomorrow morning. Bishop Kelly and some senior Jesuit would like to meet with both of us right after the Mass. Remember Mike, if you get a call, we sho
uld only say ‘no comment’. After we brief the bishop, we’ll see what he wants us to disclose. I did confirm to The Arizona Republic that we believe that Father Sean was murdered, and that his body was discovered by a hiker from Texas named Kevin Riker.”

  I read Sheriff Taylor several of the relevant sections of the two books I had bought that morning. I explained the ritual of the ancient Druid priests. The sacrifice was burned in a wicker cage. There was good evidence that they sometimes used human sacrifice to placate the spirits that roamed the world during Samhain, one of their most important festivals. We now call this holiday Halloween, the day of our murder. The sheriff responded with a plaintive obscenity and asked, “Why my county? God damn it. This murder was just a few miles from the Yavapai county line.”

  I called the Sedona police to tell them about the funeral and the possibility of crowds, and I asked them to coordinate with our senior uniformed officer. Margaret was on hold when I had finished the coordination discussion.

  She had some news. “Mike, I’ve had four customers this morning who’ve mentioned Father Sean’s murder, including Ethel Hoag.” Margaret regarded Miss Hoag as the local equivalent of the town crier. “They all seem to know that it was a bizarre murder sometime Halloween night in the wilderness area above the West Fork. Mike, so far no one has mentioned that the body was burned, but this story will soon be out.”

  Margaret indicated that Kevin was taking the bike to the Dry Creek Road area, but he would be back for dinner. She suggested that we go to the Monsoon for Chinese tonight. She was not in the mood to cook.

  I thanked her for calling and mentioned that a reporter from The Arizona Republic had already contacted Sheriff Taylor. We might read about it in tomorrow’s papers. After the phone calls, I went into Chad’s cube to see if there was any progress on the laptop.

  “This guy was very security conscious for a priest,” Chad said. “He has a shredder function on this computer. Instead of a normal erase, where I could recover data, a shredder overwrites the deleted information with ones and zeros. There is no way to recover a shredded electronic document. I found that there are no letters in his e-mail files. Every time he sent or received any e-mail, he shredded it.”

  “So it may be a dead end?” I said.

  “I did find something interesting. His system is set to automatically add names to the address file when Father Sean used the reply function to answer e-mails. So even though we have no record of the actual messages, I found the e-mail addresses of several people our victim was writing to. I noticed one of the e-mail addresses had the country code of the Vatican. When I looked up the name on the Internet, I found that Father Sean Murphy of Sedona, Arizona was corresponding with Monsignor Francisco de Navarro, superior general of the Society of Jesus. This de Navarro is the most senior guy in the whole Jesuit deal. It’s a little like an army lieutenant in Alaska having the e-mail address of the Secretary of the Army. I also found the address of a Sharon Murphy, a relative I assume, and six addresses of men and women at Universities.”

  “Good, I’ll need to call this big shot Jesuit,” I said with less confidence than I felt. I’d gone to Catholic schools, and I was still a little intimidated by men with Vatican addresses.

  “In the MY DOCUMENT section of the START MENU, there are seven documents listed: Report Fifteen, Wicca in Sedona, Red Rock-Secret Mountain, Druids, Natural Dyes and Rituals, and Grove of the Great Juniper. None of these WORD documents are still on the computer’s hard drive thanks to that shredder function. My guess is that if we want copies of these reports, we should ask de Navarro.”

  “Good job Chad. You’ve done a hell of a lot more than I could have. Any suggestions?”

  “Mike, I’ll work on it some more, but our next step should be to send it to the experts at the FBI. However, I’m not optimistic that they will find anything.”

  Some of the report names were pretty obvious. Red Rock Secret Mountain was the full name of the wilderness area north of Sedona. We had found Father Sean’s remains within its boundaries. I knew that I‘d been in the Grove of the Great Juniper. It was a giant juniper tree from which the cage was hung. I didn’t think the dye document necessarily had anything to do with crime, but the other reports would be interesting. I would meet a senior Jesuit tomorrow at the funeral and ask him if he could find the reports for me. They might lead us directly to the murderers.

  I thanked Chad for the update and told him I’d buy him lunch. As we ate in the Oaxaca Restaurant and Cantina in the uptown area, I had a new perspective of those eating lunch around me. Some of them might be pagans or witches or even druids. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. I had the nagging feeling that someone was watching me, and I now felt uncomfortable in my own town. Although local Buddhists had a meeting place and the New Agers had an impressive religious structure on the other side of Oak Creek from where we were having lunch, Sedona has the normal number of churches and nothing much in the way of a heathen temple or pagan shrines. I wondered if Sedona would ever seem quite the same to me.

  CHAPTER 11

  When we returned to the office, I found four messages from Arizona reporters. The word was out. I did not have the OK to talk to the press yet, but I was actually glad the word was getting out. We couldn’t do a good job on this investigation if we weren’t permitted to ask people anything that would give them an idea of the method of the murder. Once the story was out, I’d not be bashful about asking about Druid cults and Jesuit researches. I was too restless to spend any more time reading this afternoon, so I made an appointment with the one person who already knew the story, Father Antonio.

  Father Antonio was anxious to learn if we had anything new on the case. I drove to the tan stucco church out on Coffee Pot Road. Since Margaret and I attend St. Paul’s, I knew the church and its priests fairly well. The church is dramatically situated on a hillside with a nice view of the Wilson Mountain area. I supposed that a replacement for Father Sean would be here soon. The parish was too large for a single priest. I wondered if they would send another Jesuit.

  Father Antonio poured some coffee as we sat at the small kitchen table. The kitchen window looked out onto the empty parking lot and the sunny afternoon. He told me about the preparations for tomorrow. “The church parking lot will be too small for the expected crowd. Bobby Wall will drive the church bus along Coffee Pot Road to pick up the people who park out there. Bishop Kelly will conduct the requiem mass, and I will assist. Father Sean’s only sister decided that he should be buried here in Sedona because he loved it so much. I didn’t even know how much he loved Sedona until I spoke with her this morning. It’s still strange that we shared this parish, and I didn’t really know him well.”

  The coffee was weak and stale, but I sipped it while I updated Father Antonio on what we had learned and asked him if he knew anything about Father Sean’s research. “Yes, I knew that Sean was here on a project of some sort. I thought he might be writing a book on the New Age folks. He read a lot of their books, and he met many of them for discussions. He could speak their language much better than I can. He understood a lot about the history of their cults. I believe that he was trying to bring them back to Christ.”

  “Father, can you give me any of the names of people that Father Sean met with?”

  “I’ll make you a list. Give me a little time to think about it. I’ll have something for you tomorrow. These New Age believers are mostly nice people who are seeking something that they have lost in traditional religion. Mike, when you were a kid did you play at being Superman?”

  I nodded, and he said, “They are very much like children playing at having superhuman powers. They fantasize that they can do magical things through their vortices and rituals. They have black cats and ritual crystals. It is a very human thing to want to have power over our environment through magic. It is a shallow, empty, and a poor substitute for true faith. When faith is missing people will look for the next best substitute. I don’t see much of this problem among the His
panics in Sedona. It’s an affliction among the rich and idle.”

  I thanked Father Antonio for the insight and said that I‘d let him know of any progress we made. He should call if he thought of anything new. I mentioned that I’d pick up the list from him tomorrow after the funeral.

  Back at the office, I found Chad had taken Father Sean’s laptop to Mailboxes, Etc. to send it by overnight shipment to the FBI lab. “Chad had made a copy of everything on the drive,” Rose explained, “so he’ll be able to work on it when he gets back. Also, Sheriff Taylor called, and I have this whole stack of call notes from newspaper reporters. That cute reporter, Jim Wadley, from Channel Five in Phoenix called too. If he comes up here to interview you, I would love to meet him.”

  I mumbled agreement and took the stack of phone messages back to my cube. I called Sheriff Taylor immediately.

  “Mike, our switchboard has fielded thirty calls from news organizations about the murder of a Jesuit priest on Halloween night,” the sheriff said. “Some of them know Father Sean was an expert in cults and pre-Christian rituals. They know he was a Jesuit who’d been a college history professor before moving to Sedona. The New York Times guy had already found copies of both textbooks that Father Sean wrote. We have no choice but to have a press conference tomorrow. I would like you to be our exclusive media contact.”

  Perhaps the sheriff could sense my frown right through the phone. “Now Mike, you have this assignment because you’re a very experienced homicide detective. No one else in Coconino County has anything like your experience. It will look much better that a guy with your background is on this sensitive case. Even the bishop said he was pleased when I explained your background.”