“Hang on,” I said. “I hate to keep sounding so ignorant, but you’ve lost me again.”
Miranda grinned at me from across the table. “I’m so glad you talked me out of trying to do this by phone,” she teased.
I gave her a halfhearted scowl, then turned back to Laurie. “What kind of priests?”
“Phineas Priests. Self-proclaimed priests. Followers of an Old Testament character named Phineas.”
I was almost afraid to ask. “And what did Phineas do that these people find so inspiring?”
“He ran his spear through a mixed couple—a Hebrew man and a non-Hebrew woman. In the Christian Identity movement, the title ‘Phineas Priest’ can be claimed by anybody who kills or beats up a mixed-race couple. Or a homosexual couple. Or someone who’s considered a traitor to the white race.” She moused around on her laptop for a moment, then displayed a close-up image of an embroidered shoulder patch. At first glance, it looked almost like one we’d used on our Forensic Response Team jumpsuits until recently, featuring a white skull and crossbones stitched on a shield-shaped black background. Looking closer, though, I saw that this one was captioned PHINEAS PRIESTHOOD, and what angled down beside the skull was not a bone, but a spear shaped like a lightning bolt. Underneath the skull were the words “Yahweh’s Elite.”
She clicked again, and the shoulder patch was replaced by a photo of a sneering young man proudly displaying a leather jacket emblazoned with the words “Phineas Priest” across the back. “This is Daniel Lewis Lee. I took this picture of Danny at a white-power rally in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1992. Back then, we didn’t know what ‘Phineas Priest’ meant yet, but we could tell he was mocking us with it. In 1996, Danny Lee and two buddies robbed and killed a gun dealer—a guy named Mueller, which they thought was a Jewish name—along with his wife and eight-year-old daughter. They suffocated all three by putting plastic bags over their heads.” Across the table, I saw Miranda wince. “Before they killed the girl,” Laurie went on, “they tortured her with electric cattle prods, asking about hiding places for guns and money. When they finally threw the bodies in a swamp, they joked that they were putting them on a liquid diet.”
She showed us another person—a handsome young man with close-cropped dark hair and a well-groomed mustache. He wore an orange jumpsuit, a bulletproof vest, and waist shackles. “Another guy strongly influenced by Christian Identity. Eric Rudolph. Remember him?”
“The guy who set off a bomb in Atlanta during the Olympics?” I ventured. “Back in, what, 1996?”
“Bingo,” she said. “He also bombed two abortion clinics—one in Atlanta, the other in Birmingham—and a gay bar in Atlanta. His bombs killed three people and injured more than a hundred. He said all the bombings were motivated by his opposition to abortion and homosexuality.”
“I’m having trouble connecting the dots,” I said. “What does bombing abortion clinics have to do with Christian Identity and hating Jews?”
“Remember that conversation we had about logic? My guess—and it’s just a guess—is that Identity hard-liners don’t give a flip about black women having abortions. But white women having abortions? They’re killing God’s Chosen Babies. So those white patients—and the doctors and nurses in the clinics? They’re not just murderers, they’re ‘race traitors,’ too, to folks like Rudolph.”
“Rudolph’s the guy who hid out in the mountains of North Carolina?” said Miranda. “For a really long time, right? Like, a year or two?”
“Like, five years,” Laurie corrected. “Despite the best efforts of the FBI and ATF and U.S. Marshals. He probably had help—maybe from other Identity members, maybe from antigovernment militia types. The Identity movement helped spawn the militia movement of the 1980s and 1990s.”
“Of course,” said Miranda. “Speaking of the devil’s offspring.”
“Any other reason you think the Christian Identity movement could be linked to our dead guy?”
“Maybe,” Laurie said again. She seemed to like the word “maybe” quite a lot. “For one thing, we’ve found Christian Identity groups in several parts of East Tennessee. Madisonville. Sevierville. Sweetwater. James Wickstrom—‘Wood-Chipper’ Wickstrom—came down for several gatherings at a farm in Sevierville. She shrugged. “Sow enough seeds of hatred—at a Christian Identity meeting or a presidential campaign rally—and sooner or later, some of those seeds will sprout, and violence will follow.”