That's right. That's the way it was. I mean, nothing went right for them after a while. There were all these sporadic, isolated fights, and they got ridiculously outnumbered, and it dragged on and on, and the best any of them could do was give up. But because so few of them did, the whole thing dragged into the night, so yes, if you enter the fourth phase of the game, it becomes a little like when there are just a few checker pieces left on the board. The side with less of them can evade capture for a while, but it's all inevitable.

You can somehow destroy the Worship Center. You can get the Resistance Intent to disrupt the barricades.

And again, that's the point. It's not a game for one side to win. It's what really happened. They never did get to the Worship Center on time, and Kojo Kendi betrayed them, so even though it could technically happen differently in the game, Kendi will almost certainly keep betraying them throughout eternity. You have as much chance to really change history as you do getting in a time machine and doing it for real. Not many people have ever truly played this game from beginning to end that I know of, or any of the other games. There's almost nothing to play. You have to look at it as a simulation of death, with different possible permutations. In the end, it will always be death.

You can go on for hours if you're smart. That's just what the Spiders almost did.

I heard this from someone, so I don't know how reliable it is, but then I swear I read something about it, and the name was the same, so maybe it's true. Anyway. They, the police, were going through one of the buildings and right in the middle of the hallway there was this old woman, just standing there as if nothing was happening. This was after everything was blowing up everywhere, everyone was shooting and so forth, that they came across this woman. And she said to them, You just keep doing what you think you have to do, I won't cause you any trouble, I'm just going to sit right down in my apartment and stay out of the way, things like that she said, like her being there was the most normal thing in the world. Only then she started talking about how they should hurry up and find the man who killed the president, he was probably getting away, and they realized that she thought it was the day they shot Kennedy. The woman had Alzheimer's and she had moved out a few days before but she had come back to the Joke and gone back into her building, no one knew why. They didn't know how she'd gotten back. It was one of those cases where a person with Alzheimer's wanders off and doesn't come back and finds their way somehow. So she was there through the whole thing. One of the SWAT people stayed with her in the building and just sat with her and kept her safe through the night, and she kept talking about how it was such a shame, that they would kill Kennedy right outside on the street. And it turned out that she had been there in Dallas fifty-some years ago, her granddaughter told the police it was true. She lived through both those things. I remembered her last name, Deck, otherwise I would have forgotten the story. But it might be a made-up story. You heard all kinds of things.

They started burning the place as they went, didn't they? Wherever they went they would pour gasoline and they all had matches, they had matches when the whole thing began, I think that was the whole plan all along, and they figured, Well, the more fires there are the less they'll be after us, so a lot of the buildings got burned up. That was it, right? Those buildings were old and terrible and the sprinkler systems were all busted up, so they just went up and down the halls and set the place on fire. Wasn't any different than what the state was going to do to it, they were just gonna bulldoze the entire place, so it didn't make much difference. But that must have been some fire, when they did that.

We all took a walk around the street out there, when we stopped watching TV, and oh, you could see these fires from about three or four of the buildings, but I guess because of the rain they didn't spread so well. We just stood out there and watched them. The wind would go this way and the fire would go this way, and then the wind would go that way and the fire would go that way. And some people started to point up at one of the buildings, it was a good long way away but they could see something in one of the buildings, one of the buildings that was on fire. And it was a man, we could see him pretty clear, he was sitting on one of those window ledges on the top floor. You couldn't tell what he was, if he was black or white or good or bad or whatever, he was just sitting and leaning back like he was watching things, you know, like he didn't care what was going on on the other side. But there was a fire in that building. There was fire, goddamn, it was on the same floor as he was, but he didn't care. And people on the street started waving up at him, everyone around me was doing that. He didn't do nothing, though, and I honestly can't recall what happened to him after that. I forget if he stayed there and I left or if I stayed and he left. But everyone was real excited, they kept saying they could see that he had a gun and he was wearing the gang clothes, but I couldn't see that, my eyesight wasn't so good even then. The police were right there, they didn't do a thing, they were just watching him too, the whole block was. There were even people out there shouting, "Burn it down, burn it down!" A lot of people were happy to see the buildings burning. They hated that place, it was the ugliest thing you ever saw.

I thought it was the National Guard that attacked the slum, then someone told me it was the police and a SWAT team and the FBI. So I've never gotten the straight story on that. You see these pictures of it and it looks like a whole army was in there. I first heard about it on TV, I was flipping through the channels and on PBS they were doing a show about it on the anniversary of it, but I was like ten years old and for some reason I thought that it all happened in England. I swear to God, I thought it happened in England till I was like fourteen and we read about it at school. Then I realized it had happened in the state I lived in. But I had never seen a slum, when we went to the city we never saw anything like that. Then when I was sixteen we moved here, and I was excited because I thought, Wow, I'll be able to see all the places where everyone was shooting each other, but there was nothing left. The only way I could prove that this is where it happened was that I saw on video some old footage of it, and I remembered this one shoe store on Chalice Street from that footage. The store was still there and the street pretty much looked the same. Otherwise you'd have had a hard time proving it to me. Then last year I saw a show that had a lot of video shots that the FBI or the ATF or whoever had taken on that night inside the slum, and it just blew my mind. I kept thinking, that was here, I'm right in the place where all this was. All these shots of the police going through the dark and the rain, and you can hear shots on the tape, and once in a while you see an actual body on the ground. One guy, a gang guy, was wearing headphones and he was lying in a hallway, dead. You couldn't see a thing most of the time unless someone had a flashlight, or the police were moving past a place where there was a fire, then it got real eerie, there was this creepy glow around them. The one part that kind of shocked me was this part I didn't think they could show on television. Some guy from one of the gangs was face down in the middle of the street, and two cops were beside him, waiting for the medics to come or something, there wasn't anything they could do, and when they tried to turn him on his side you could see all this blood spurting out of his neck. And one of the cops was trying to take the gun out of his hand, this big scary looking gun, but either the guy was totally unconscious and couldn't let it go or he just wouldn't. You never saw his face.

Something else they showed that kind of shocked me was that on the side of one of the buildings every member of the gang had put their name and their tag or whatever it was called all together, every single one of them, even before the fight started. I mean it was like that for a while, it had nothing to do with the fight. This list of names ten feet high. They said not one gang member's name was left off that wall. When the night was over, even before the dawn of the next day, a bunch of cops took a photo of themselves standing in front of that wall, and I zeroed in on one of those guys for some reason and I noticed he was just smiling away. They had a light set up and everything so the photo wouldn't be too dark. Some of the names on the wall, those people were dead obviously, but they found time to take this snapshot, this souvenir. That struck me as being really sick.

One guy I heard about, I know he was in the army for a while before the siege, and he got called to Iraq, and he wouldn't go, he went AWOL, he just ran from the army because he refused to go to Iraq, and later on he joined the gang and wound up fighting that night, and would up getting killed. So by refusing to go to Iraq, he basically bought himself a couple of years of freedom, and then wound up fighting in the streets and dying anyway, except it was here and not over there. So not much point in him going AWOL after all.

That man's name was Martin Dole. He was in the army, and he did go to Iraq, and he was there for eight months, and when he came back he was discharged, honorably discharged. Things didn't work out for him after that and he sort of drifted into the Spiders, he moved into the Joke and eventually wound up associating with them, but he never actually joined them. He was the only one in the Joke who kept a written journal during that year, and it was found much later. That's a real rarity, that someone of that relatively low educational level would do that. He may have adopted the habit from his time in the army. It's almost illegible, most of it, really tough to read, and it doesn't say much, and it says absolutely nothing about the siege. The last entry he made was a couple of months before it. He wrote one entry about talking to a friend of his who he calls Bus Driver and says he feels bad he lied to this man because when Bus Driver asked him what Iraq was like, he told him he had felt absolutely nothing there, positive or negative, and he didn't feel anything about it still, he told him that all it was was a year of his life gone and he wasn't changed by it at all. And apparently Bus Driver had said to him, "Man, if it didn't change you at all, how'd you wind up living here, with no job, and hanging out with the Spiders?" Dole died of gunshot wounds to the stomach in the hospital on December 11 or 12.

We lived a few miles away but my parents put me in the car and we actually drove over there as close as we could get. They really knew it was some kind of history that was happening. All I remember really is getting out of the car and hearing this enormous thundering sound, and getting really scared, they told me I started to cry, and what it was, was a helicopter going overhead and hovering over the area. I looked up and saw this big bright light shining down. But for some reason they didn't take me home right then, they wanted to stay and watch it all. After that I just remember one helicopter after another, they were circling in the air and hovering and making these huge noises, and I stopped being scared and I really liked it after a while, or so they said. We were there for like two hours, and all I remember is the helicopters. It felt to me like one long, buzzing, echoing sound run all together. My mother was holding an umbrella over me and every minute or so I would peek out from under it and see another bright white light. It was like an eclipse, I would move my head forward and the light would get strong, and I would move my head back and I would slowly make it disappear. My memory is one bright light up there after another, they could have told me the stars had gotten close to the Earth and I would have believed them. They finally took me away when it got too cold to keep standing there. Then we were stopped at a stoplight and my mother shouted, "Look, Angela, look!" And I looked out the window and one of the helicopters buzzed over us to the left, and I could actually see the lights and the markings on the side of it as it went by, it was so low. That's my most vivid memory of the night. I had no conception of people dying. To me it was a big light and sound show, and it felt like the world was ending, but I guess because my parents were there I didn't mind, it was an adventure.

We did what we could but me and Tom Tom got so damn wiped out, our legs were getting cramps from running, and we were totally wet, so we took some cover and just wound up kinda paralyzed. We were in F for like a half an hour. He kept saying he knew what we were gonna do but we kept not doing anything. We saw a total of two guys go past on 11th toward the quad. I wanted to go out there just 'cause I was so nervous but Tom Tom was like, "No no, we gotta figure out what's going on instead of running around 'cause we're gonna get wasted." His eyes were getting real wide and spacey, not like before when he seemed all right. Meanwhile we kept hearing shooting and three or four trucks went past. We just watched 'em, we were out of sight. Finally I said I was going out there no matter what, and he said he was gonna cover me from above. That sounded like bullshit to me, he just didn't know what to do and he didn't want to go out there again. I took maybe three steps out and I just couldn't go any further, you know? I had that feeling like if I got surprised by something I'd get annihilated, like the whole population of cops in the whole country was right there waiting. So I listened for a while. All the action sounded like it was kind of moving away from us. I went back in and I went over to the steps near the elevators and Tom Tom was lying on his back with his eyes closed. I said, "What are you doing?" and he said, "Man, this is all over, there's nothin' we can do, we lost. We messed up, they got us dead to rights." His voice was weird and slurry, so I asked him why, and he said, "I'm goin' to sleep. I wanna be asleep when they come." And for a second I thought he OD'd. My eyes bugged out of my head. But all he did, I swear to God, was take some sleeping pills you could get from CVS, just a few of 'em, like you'd take if you were just knockin' out for the night. Nighty-night, I'm goin' to sleep. That's all he wanted, was to sleep. Right there on the stairs. He must've had 'em when the night started, maybe he had trouble sleeping or something, the stress. He turned his head away from me like he didn't want to see anything anymore. That was so crazy, but it wasn't much crazier than anything else. He didn't care anymore what happened. So I left him there. I didn't say a word, and I was gone.

There was kind of an artist who lived there, and he was a member of that gang. Oh God, I can't remember the name of the gang now, it'll come to me. The one that fought. But he was the one who did all the graffiti, all the really interesting graffiti, in the slum. Ali Krebbs was his name. See, that I remember but not the name of the gang, it's strange. He was killed that night, he got shot. They showed his funeral on the news, they focused on his funeral in particular one night, because he'd painted those giant candles on half the buildings. You know how the news is, they would highlight certain people who died in the siege and try to find the human interest angle. Now if you go to the Outsider Art Museum in Cincinnati, they put one of those walls back up, one that he painted, they saved the bricks, it's in there, so you can see what these things looked like. Then a few years ago, this is sad, someone drew a big chalk outline of a couple of candles that looked like his on the street, the one that crosses East-West Street. No one found out who did it. And the paper ran the story and then this pathetic little urban legend started about how his ghost walks Glen Elm, and he's mad because we took all his buildings away, and he can't ever rest. I learned this from my son, he's seven. This legend went around his school. So that's how they know the name Ali Krebbs.

By seven-thirty or so, eight o'clock, Elias Snowden knew they were doomed, just by the numbers. The lower ones in the ranks were giving up, actual arrests were being made. He must have been trying to contact his other soldiers by radio, but by then they were most likely dead. Actually, Ali Krebbs was definitely dead I should say, because his body was pulled from underneath a car at the barricade, he died trapped under there. So Rod Baker was nowhere, all their contact was useless, the snipers who could have just held the police at bay long into the night had abandoned their places, or had to leave because they were rooted out. They did a lot of damage. They did more damage than anyone running through the Joke on foot, more damage than even the ones who fought at the barricade. But they couldn't bring themselves to sit still for that long, not without someone commanding them to do it. All Elias Snowden had was five of his men in Building G, and they all still had their guns. One of the men with him, a man named Anthony Toney, Toney T they called him, had been all around the Joke that night, he'd been absolutely everywhere and he'd managed to get back to Building G and connect with Snowden again. And they had about five minutes of breathing room. They knew it was only a matter of time before they got caught in a shootout, all six of them together.

Elias was wild, he was like an animal, he was pacing around, trying to figure what to do and be a leader. We were on the first floor, and there was like no sound outside. You could hear shots once in a while, but where we were it was real quiet. That just made Elias more agitated. You couldn't even hear any choppers except once in a while. We couldn't even see each other in the dark. If you weren't against a window, you weren't even there. Then he said he had an idea. We were just going to run for Parks Avenue, right at them. And I said, "What are we gonna do then?" And Elias was like, "That don't matter, see, we're just gonna run right at 'em." I told him I'd been over there, I told him they had cars and cops everywhere to make sure none of us got out, especially not out that way because that was Merrifield, in that direction. You know they had more cops on Parks than anywhere else because that way was all the white people in their townhouses and all the nice stores out that way. He had me tell him exactly what I saw, how many cops there were and where, and what they were doing. He still didn't care. He was like, "That's where we gotta go, we can break through, and if we break through, we're gonna tear that place up, and they can come get us." He wanted us to just get together and we'd all run all the way to Merrifield, we'd just run as fast as we could, and we'd just go right at the cops there. And there wasn't even a second of talk about it. I said yes, Spy Plane said yes, Groper said yes, everybody was in. We were just gonna run right at them. We were just gonna unload everything we had left right in their face, and then get on into Merrifield. Not even for a second did we hesitate. It was just move, move, move. And we were out the door and onto the street. It was like God was causing us to move. I don't how we did it on our own.

They decided on what was basically a suicide mission. Charge the ones waiting at Parks, take them by surprise. If they got through, then past that was Merrifield, where they'd get away however they could. Why not? They were past reason by then, obviously. A third of the gang was dead. You'd see the same thing in a military battle, there'd be no difference. If a platoon gets cut down to almost nothing, then here comes the enemy, charging at them, outnumbering them twenty to one, what would they do? If there was nowhere they could go? They'd go forward. They'd go forward. Not back. Because there's something literally burning inside them, to meet the end head on.

They would go at the police full speed, taking any of them out if they could, and get across the Green Rose Parkway into Merrifield somehow. Somehow, on foot. They knew what was waiting for them when they got to Parks. But if they somehow got past them, made it past the cordon, then God help everyone in Merrifield. They could cause enough mayhem there to make the world remember them for years and years. First was escape, but then Elias Snowden was urging them to kill someone, the people sitting at home a mile away watching it all in comfort. He was very specific about this, "kill them all." From the testimony of the people who were arrested, we learned that he figured on everyone there cowering in fear of them, which would allow the Spiders to tear through, and he wanted to make a statement there, do something shocking. But getting past the cordon was the ultimate goal, that was the last one they really had left. There just wasn't much of anything else to want.

So the six of them began to run.

The Spiders who decided to run for the cordon on Parks were spotted right away. We had about two dozen men shifting in that direction because there really was no one over there to speak of, there had been so much moving around to respond to the flare-up areas that about a third of the outside cordon could have been penetrated at any given time after eight o'clock. It was just something we had to deal with, there was only so much personnel we had. But the ones who ran never would have made it anyway because we were coming at them from three different sides. They never would have gotten close.

It was the skinheads, they attacked them, there was this big battle in the street. The gang was coming out and the skinheads were going in to find them.

There were five of them, they had baseball bats, knives, no guns, they had wandered around for two hours looking for a way in on the east side and there it was, over near an underpass that went below the Green Rose Parkway. Absolutely no cops there at all because of the Worship Center mess, they needed everyone they could get. A few of the skinheads were drunk. They'd been watching the TV all day and Drew Gamble had them thinking revenge, and here finally there was something they could do, they could take advantage of the gaps. They saw the Spiders going down 14th, they had slowed down, maybe because they were confused because it seemed like it was going to be an easy way out and they were thinking Well, it's a trick. Then the skinheads started screaming at the tops of their lungs and charging at them from out of nowhere.

I had to go on desk duty for a month after that night while the investigations started, and after that I resigned, and for a lot of years I was fine with everything that happened, I didn't think about it all that much, even when someone called me for an interview or something like that. They would ask me for all these details, what I saw, and I would just sort of recite them. I slept all right, it was all okay. Because I guess I'd seen a lot of things up till then. But then about ten years ago I was on vacation with my wife and my kids in L.A., and we were driving down to Disneyland, and we got lost and we wound up in this nasty area of Anaheim, just really bad. Guys standing around on the corners, checking us out, all the businesses with cages on the windows. And we went down this one street with all this graffiti on all the buildings, and I tensed up real bad, and I could feel all this adrenalin shooting through me in a really negative way. It felt like someone turned on a switch inside my spine and started pumping me full of electrified acid. I had to pull over and I said it was to look at the map, but that wasn't it. We got out of there okay but that night I started seeing all that writing written on the buildings, I saw it all in my mind again, and then clear as a bell it hit me, after all those years, I thought My God, all the things I saw during the siege, they happened right here in this country, the buildings were just like the ones I saw in Anaheim, no different. Obviously I knew it, but I'd never really felt how horrifying that was, that this was America it happened in and I could see those kinds of slums anytime I wanted. When I came around the corner back then and I saw the skinheads and the Spiders fighting there wasn't any time to absorb it, we just had to get in there and do what we could, and it wasn't until after I left Anaheim that I began to see it all again. My doctor told me Yeah, that could easily have been triggered by going down that one street in Anaheim. From then on I couldn't go into the city, I mean any city. I just can't do it. I get close to anywhere there's tall buildings and traffic and I feel that adrenalin going through me and if I'm in a car I have to pull over. It doesn't matter who's driving. So I live out here now. My family knows about it, they understand. If I hadn't seen that last fight, I think I would have been all right. But that kind of broke me up. What they were doing to each other, to see that, and the fact that it wasn't in Vietnam or anyplace like that, I don't know why but it got into me too deep. It can happen to anyone. A guy I know came onto the scene a half hour after it was all over and he had nightmares for six months because he saw the guy that had his head almost cut off. It was that bad.

I really had to go on medication when the other thing developed, where I got nervous and upset if I saw any kind of handwriting on things where it shouldn't be. Like if I see something painted on an overpass, but worse that that. I can have a bad episode anywhere. I was in Goodwill and someone had scratched a bunch of words into a dresser that was in there, and I actually felt an attack coming. For a month I didn't even want to go out because I might see that kind of thing anywhere. But then I got the medicine, and it's still a problem but I can muddle through. I had a bad time just a few months ago because somebody had written one word, just one lousy word on the back of a road sign a mile from where I live, like it was some kind of a statement. I was stopped in the car and I saw it and for a couple of days I didn't even know what it meant, I just knew I'd seen it or heard it somewhere and it made me feel sick, it messed up my sleeping. I was afraid to ask anyone where I'd seen that word before. Finally I realized what it meant and I went back myself and covered it up with paint so I'd never have to see it again.

"Chapelwaite."

I don't like to think about Elias because it gets me down. It wasn't that he got out of there somehow and never got caught. That's unbelievable, the Lord must have touched him, He must have wanted to protect him so he could get out and be changed and then do good in this world. He was surrounded and he got out without a scratch, so that to me is the only explanation, it was a divine action by the Lord. Why I get down is because I had a couple of ways I could have turned out all right. If I was there and I got killed there, that would have been one way, or I could have stayed out of jail and done like Elias did, that was another way. But I don't get how he did it, I mean, sometimes I'm lying there at night and I'll pray. I'll just pray, and I ask God to give me what Elias got, he got this thing where he could forgive people and change. I mean, I know there's all kinds of ways of looking at things that happen, and nothing is anyone's fault totally, but I guess I'll never get it. I don't forgive things like he did. Maybe if I could I wouldn't be in here. He loves those kids he works with, he told me, and I just can't love anybody. Nobody ever showed me how to do that so I figure now it's too late. I mean, where....how am I gonna learn how to do that now? So I ask God to give it to me if it's not too late, but you know, that's just dreaming. So I wind up crying like a little kid and wishing I had just been there and died with my boys. I don't want to wind up dying in here because then that's dying for stupid stuff, like I got in here to begin with because of stupid stuff. Me dying won't mean anything if it's in here. It could have been good in the Joke, that's the only place I feel like it would have. Instead I'm probably gonna be just some guy who died in jail. I missed it by a few days and that changed everything for me. If I had just been there, then whatever happened after that, all right. Instead here I am. I had a chance to get back a long time ago, but then I fucked up bad, I got into some things with some people here, trying to set myself up when I got out, and that just added more to my sentence and messed up my parole. My chance at parole. Stupid, I mean brain dead stupid, that's what I was. I don't even believe it, how dumb I was. And I'll tell you, if I ever do get out, that's the first place I'm going. I have to, I know it's not even really there anymore, it's all a bunch of houses. That's all right because I'll still know where I am. If I have the chance I'm gonna blow my head off right on the street.

Two men broke off from the fight on 14th Street. One of the skinheads, Buddy Harris, started to chase a Spider named Helton Dillon. Harris had already stabbed Dillon once, in the ankle, and they got away from the crowd right as the police got there, and they were a little late in the chase, they couldn't catch up. Harris started chasing Dillon on foot, both of them running as fast as they could. Harris was about twenty feet behind him. Dillon was just running blind, he didn't care where he was going, he had no gun anymore and he was going to be killed by Harris if he stopped. Harris had a hunting knife, Dillon had nothing at all anymore. In all the chaos nobody radioed out that they were coming, that they had to be stopped, or if somebody did make the call, it didn't do any good. Or the chase took a couple of turns nobody could follow. Nobody claims to know for sure. The chase lasted eight blocks and no one got to them until it was too late.

All right. We were on the bus, it was me and my mother and my father, we were sitting sort of near the front of it, stopped in traffic, I think there was a lane closed up ahead. We wouldn't have even been on the bus except our car was being fixed. It was pretty crowded. I was looking out the window to the right and here came somebody running right at the bus, right at it. The people in front of us kind of gasped. I could see the guy was black and pretty big, wearing a jacket, and behind him, pretty close behind him, was a white guy, he was bald, he was wearing jeans and a Colorado Rockies T-shirt. He had a knife. The black guy was going so fast he slammed into the side of the bus, he collided with it. My mother grabbed me out of instinct and some people backed away from the windows, I'm sure some of them thought we'd gotten hit by a car, that was how big the slam was. I closed my eyes tight for just a second. Then I heard a noise from the front of the bus, and the driver had gotten out of his seat to see what had happened, he opened up the doors with that handle and he took one step toward getting out and I saw the head of the black guy appear, he was trying to get into the bus. He sort of dove in, and the white guy was right behind him. The black guy was screaming for help. We were in the third seat from the front so we saw it happen right in front of us. The white guy collapsed on the black guy's back and he started stabbing him in the back with this knife he had, right below the neck, and everyone was screaming, the driver shoved himself against the driver's side window, the people in the seat ahead of us were already up and people were pushing like crazy to get away from it. Everyone was out of their seats and backing away. But my father had thrown his arms over me and was pushing me down into the seat while my mother was just screaming. I could still see what was happening for about three more seconds. I saw the white guy stab the black guy about nine or ten times, the black guy's body wasn't moving at all after the first couple of stab wounds I saw the guy inflict, but he was still trying to scream for help. That was so scary, that he couldn't move except for his....his voice still worked but nothing else did. I didn't see any blood for some reason. The white guy said nothing, he just whipped his hand down again and again and then someone grabbed him from behind, someone from the outside. Everyone who hadn't forced their way out of the side doors of the bus was crying and shouting, and then my father was getting up to help the guy who was stabbed to death, and it was too late of course. This is the third time I'm telling the story. I had to tell the police, then they made me see a psychologist and I had to tell her, and now it's been twenty-two years and now I guess I'm finally done. So that was my part in history. I saw the last person die. Or maybe he wasn't the last person, maybe there were more after that. And where do I live now? About six blocks from where that murder happened. It's a small world.

My God, though, how the whites and blacks hated each other after that night. This country was pretty messed up for a while.

But it's like they say, you know, time heals all wounds,

and now,

obviously,

everything is fine.

He would never meet his autistic son Damon, and would in fact die months before the boy's mother gave birth to him. In looking back over one of the transcripts at the beginning of this book, however, I notice that Charles Le Beth took his hope for Damon's destiny as a train conductor and curiously made it his own for one very public moment, during the live taping of Here and Now on December 2, 2007. Whether this was just a meaningless mistake on his part or a sudden rise of primal memory exposing the humanity of a notoriously secretive man, I doubt anyone can really say. Split second glimpses into souls are all I have managed to find. Standing at the edge of Glen Elm where the wisps of the train tracks peek in a twenty-foot section through the dirt, you can feel how gone everything really is. Summer, winter, spring and fall keep burying it all deeper and deeper, so that in about one more decade, not even the hint of tracks will be visible, and the people in Glen Elm will still be thankful for all that they have, and Damon Le Beth will be thirty-one years old.

When I do get out of here maybe Ill take you to where I grew up, it was a lot better than where I was before I got in trouble. Its in Wolcottville. You should go there when youre a little older if you have time and see if maybe you want to live there, I think its better than being near a city, in a city theres lots of crime and you cant do things like walk near a river and play baseball anywhere you want. In the country you can sit down and just look at things and like the quiet. The more people that youre around the more crazy ideas get into your head too, remember that. Anytime you think you know whats right for other people or what theyre really about youre always going to be wrong. Thats the good thing about being alone. If you sometimes pretend that theres no one else in the whole world but you, and it feels nice, dont be sad about it. It would be happier that way.

—Convicted skinhead Andrew Gamble in a letter to his son Keith, sent from the Indiana State Penitentiary, March 19, 2012.