CHAPTER SIX

"The Law of Wrath"

Nowhere was the volatile and abusive nature of Fred Phelps more visible than in the law courts. Six years before the bar, the ill-tempered reverend had already discovered the law was a perfect mattock-handle to punish the world outside his walls. Between 1958 and 1964, Phelps filed 14 lawsuits against his employers, his customers, Leaford Cavin (the Baptist minister who'd given him his new church), the radio station TOP (Phelps had paid to broadcast for 15 minutes each Sunday morning, but then had his show terminated as too inflammatory), Stauffer Communications, former friends, and public officials. In addition, according to a local attorney who recalls those early days when Fred sold baby carriages and cribs door-to-door, Phelps flooded the equivalent of the small claims courts with requests to garnish the wages of young couples who'd missed their payments-however briefly.

In one case, Fred Phelps vs. Rattus Lewis, which reached the District Court in 1961, Phelps was accused by Lewis and his wife of tricking them with lies: when they thought they were signing a note vouching for the good credit of another couple, they were actually buying a baby-stroller for a baby they didn't have. The Laces were an uneducated black couple.

Phelps was just entering law school seeking, in his words, "to relieve the oppressed" and to achieve social justice via the courtroom-or what he called "the judicial remedy". There seemed, even then, no limit to the pastor's greed and no grasp of decency in his actions: "I remember we were amazed," one member of the court recalls, "that anyone who hadn't been to law school could be so robustly treacherous." One of those must have been Judge Beryl Johnson, who threw more than one of Fred's cases out of court. And, apparently, the judge would remember the pastor's avarice and utter lack of ethics. To be admitted to the bar, Phelps needed a judge to swear to his good character. The process is usually routine. Not for Fred. No judge was willing to do that. Phelps claims it was the same Beryl Johnson, now deceased, who lobbied the other judges not to sign the young graduate off. Eventually, the pastor was able to gain entry after providing numerous affidavits from other character witnesses.

Phelps is still bitter about that today. He claims 'they' were closing ranks against his Bible message and against his stated intent to use the courtroom to attack social injustice. In a 1983 interview with the Wichita Eagle- Beacon, Fred defined the 'they' who tried to keep him from the bar as "the leading lights of the Jim Crow Topeka community...the presidents of the First National Bank, Merchants National Bank, Capitol Federal Savings and Loan, and the Kansas Power and Light Company..."

The pastor states that, though 'they' tried to stop him, he knew what he had to do: "I was raised in Mississippi. I knew it was wrong the way those black people were treated," he says. He also accuses Lou Eisenbarth, a Topeka lawyer, of having led a delegation of attorneys who tried to block Phelps' admission to Washburn Law School.

Eisenbarth just shakes his head in quiet surprise. "Not me." He remembers beating Phelps in one of the pastor's law school civil rights suits, but says there was no delegation to block Phelps going to Washburn. And the judges unanimously refusing to sign off? "If that did happen, it was Phelps' bad temperament and poor judgement that had alarmed community members enough to strenuously object to him practicing the law. It was his litigious and malicious behavior-not fear of any future civil rights work." A few months after Phelps told Capital- Journal reporters, 'I was raised in Mississippi; I knew it was wrong the way those black people were treated', the following incident occurred: A black woman, having to walk through the anti-gay pickets outside the courthouse and minding her own business utterly, politely asked Jonathon not to thrust the camera in her face. Pastor Phelps, unaware a member of the press had come up behind him, screamed at the black woman so loud the pavement should have cracked: "YOU FILTHY NIGGER BITCH!" Once inside the bar, within two years, the young esquire provided his elders' fears were not unfounded. As the court-appointed attorney from October to December, 1966, for a man arrested in a forgery case, Phelps received $200 from the defendant's ex-wife to bond the man from jail. Several days later, the ex-wife hired Phelps to handle a divorce she now sought from her current husband. She paid the pastor $50 to do the legal work. The divorce was granted. Phelps kept the $200 for himself, preparing court records to show he had been paid $250 for the divorce. Meanwhile, the lady's ex-husband remained in jail. In the year prior, there had been more unethical conduct. Phelps had been hired to represent another woman seeking a divorce in March, 1965.

Before firing him as her attorney a month later, the woman had paid the pastor $1,000 of the $2,500 fee he was charging her. Phelps had filed an attorney's lien for the balance of the unpaid bill. But a Shawnee County District Court judge had ruled Phelps' services weren't worth more than the $1,000 already paid by the woman, and disallowed the $1,500 lien. So Phelps had filed a lawsuit against the woman in the same court, seeking the $1,500.

The Kansas Supreme Court said that amounted to harassment of his client. It stated Phelps' conduct in the case "demonstrates a lack of professional self-restraint in matters of compensation." Assistant Attorney General Richard Seaton would later observe that Phelps had shown a pattern of conduct illustrating "an uncontrollable appetite for money-especially the money of his client."

The pastor didn't agree. In May, 1966, he filed for the Democratic nomination to the Kansas House, 45th District. "As a Democrat, I am liberal in my thinking," he announced, "but conservative in spending the people's money." Meanwhile, behind the walls of Westboro, the pastor lay up for days in bed, addicted to drugs, beating his wife and helpless toddlers, and sending seven year-olds to fetch his hot apple pie. A potential public servant perhaps-but one straight out of ancient Rome. In l969, Phelps was brought before the State Board of Law Examiners on seven counts of professional misconduct.

Seaton and then Attorney General Kent Frizzell argued that the Westboro minister's conduct as an attorney "is one of total disregard for the duties and the respect and consideration owed by an attorney to his clients. Where money is concerned, the accused simply lacks any sense of balance and proportion. Whatever the reason for this, it appears to me a permanent condition."

Frizzell and Seaton wanted Phelps disbarred. Instead, State Supreme Court Justices chose in 1969 to suspend the pastor for two years. Phelps landed on his feet however: the children's candy sales took up the slack in family income-and then some. But the court's sanction did trouble him. It was on the first anniversary of his suspension that Phelps decided his wife wasn't in proper subjection to him and shaved her long hair down to a bad crewcut. Mrs. Phelps later told the children: "He's just upset; it's been one year today since he was suspended." Nine months after he was released from the penalty box for cheating and exploiting his clients, Phelps had the temerity to place his name on the ballot for District Attorney of Shawnee County.

At the same time, not only had he just been disciplined for his lack of professional ethics, but he was also being sued by three different candy companies, having stiffed them for almost $11,000. To make matters worse, he had also just eluded criminal charges for beating Nate and Jonathon, and danced in front of his children at the news his oldest son's fiancee had committed suicide.

One can only imagine what new turns the pastor's hate would have taken, invested with the power of the D.A.'s office. Because no one else had filed in a race against a popular Republican D.A., Phelps ran unopposed in the August Democratic primary. However, the D.A. was required to have practiced law in the county for five years prior to holding office. As a result of his suspension, Phelps had those years cumulatively but not consecutively. He held he qualified. The State Contest Board held he did not. Phelps appealed first to the District Court, then to the Kansas Supreme Court. He lost. He was disqualified September 28, 1972, leaving the Democrats only five weeks to find another candidate. They lost.

Since then, the pastor has maintained bitter relations with a succession of D.A.s-none of them Fred Phelps. Having stumbled at the start of his public career, Phelps returned to private practice and quickly confirmed his colleagues' fears: the angry reverend's working preference was for largely unfounded lawsuits which the defendants would settle out of court to avoid the nuisance of litigation.

"I was waiting in the Denver airport with him. We were working a civil rights case," remembers Bob Tilton, a former Democratic state chairman and an acquaintance of Phelps. "He told me had to file 20 lawsuits to get one judgement. I said to him, "But what about the other 19 people you sue? It costs them a lot of money and heartache to defend themselves.' He just laughed at me." Phelps sued Kentucky Fried Chicken for $60,000 when a female client claimed she'd discovered a 'bug' in her breadroll; at the same time, he sued a restaurant owned by Harkies Inc. for $30,000 because the same woman claimed to have dined there and found abone in her barbecue. The client admitted she hadn't eaten either the bug or the bone, and that she'd sought no medical treatment, yet she claimed personal damages totaling $10,000 and punitive damages of $80,000.

KFC settled out of court for $600. Harkies likewise for $1,000. In a third case (all three of which were first described in the 1983 expose of Phelps by Steve Tompkins of the Wichita- Eagle Beacon), Fred sued a Denny's restaurant for $110,000. He claimed slander against his client when the man was accused of palming a dollar bill lying beside a register.

The restaurant settled out of court for $750. For the most authentic taste of the law according to Pastor Fred, however, one must turn to Sylvester Smith, Jr. versus Kevin P. Marshall. Excerpts from the opinion of the court, delivered by Judge J. McFarland, tell all: "On May 30, 1975, the plaintiff was a passenger in a car driven by the defendant. The defendant drove his vehicle to the left curb of a one-way street in Topeka, Kansas. Plaintiff exited the vehicle from the passenger side and walked in front of the vehicle. Defendant attempted to put the vehicle in reverse, but instead put it in neutral or drive. The defendant's vehicle moved forward. The plaintiff's lower right leg was caught between defendant's vehicle and a parked automobile. These facts are not in dispute. The residual effect of plaintiff's injury was a discoloration of a small area of skin on his leg."

The discoloration was the size of a quarter, and the plaintiff's skin was black. A chiropractor, called by the plaintiff to testify, made a gallant attempt: "That is a scar right here. If you hold it just right, you can pull it and see a scar."

In effect, Phelps had tied up first the District Court, then the Court of Appeals, and here, the Supreme Court of Kansas over a bruised shin-a quarter-sized scar the pastor insisted constituted a $100,000 disfigurement. To garner the real flavor of civil litigation behind the looking-glass, the lay reader is invited to listen in on the court's discussion of the point at issue: "The record should show that the Court did observe the right leg of Mr. Smith. The parties should also note the Court's observations, the Court did run his finger on the leg in the area that Dr. Counselman described. And the Court's observation, from just a visual and from a touch indication, was that there was no scarring as we understand broken skin with a lesion over the scarring. In other words, it was a smooth feeling.

"That area that the Court did observe was ascertainable, discernible, it being more of a, at least to the visual view of the Court, it was more of a discoloration of Mr. Smith's leg. "The record should show Mr. Smith is black. The area in question was darker. It was more of a dark brown area. It was about an inch and a quarter in length and in the middle point running North and South on the leg toward the center, as Dr. Counselman indicated, and toward the center of the area. It extended to, perhaps, about a half an inch. But I would say it would be East and West across the leg and about an inch and a quarter long. Now that is what the visual observation indicates..." That Phelps could get a bruised shin all the way to the Supreme Court certainly testifies to his persistence. It also reveals the predatory, surreal and parasitic nature of civil litigation in our society.

However, before the reader loses all faith in a fast-fading institution, we hasten to point out that reason did prevail. The Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeals and affirmed the decision of the trial court which had found in favor of the defendant: "Assuming it to be permanent, I cannot believe it is the type of 'disfigurement' intended by the Legislature to support this plaintiff's claim for $100,000 in damages. It seems to me this is a prime example of those 'exaggerated claims for pain and suffering in instances of relatively minor injury' the Court recognized in Manzanares, and just the type of 'minor nuisance' claim the Legislature intended to eliminate." The appellation of 'minor nuisance' may, in the end, sum up the life, law, and ministry of Fred Waldron Phelps.

Perhaps the most ridiculous example of the pastor's apparent obsessive need to chisel for chump-change is the $50,000,000 lawsuit filed against Sears and Co. When Mark and Fred, Jr. placed a color television on Christmas layaway in September of 1973, they didn't realize it had been set aside on paper, not actually taken off the shelf and held in the stockroom. When they paid the balance in November, they were told their TV would be ready at Christmas-as they had originally contracted. Three days later, the pastor filed suit in his sons' names and those of 1,000,000 other Sears' layaway customers. "We didn't have anything to do with it," says Mark. It was strictly his idea. In fact, when I left home that year right after Christmas, it put him in a bind. He had a case that was missing a plaintiff."

Court documents show Sears called the Phelpses and told them the television would be available later in November. The two Freds chose not to accept it. Instead, they pressed their suit. Nearly six years of litigation followed. Motions and counter motions were filed. Lawyers argued aspects of the case in front of judges. A judge threw out the class action section of the suit.

Finally, after countless hours of legal work and an original request for $50,000,000, the case was settled in favor of the Phelpses for $126.34. The boys had originally paid $184.59 for the set, but they never received it. These are not the files that will one day inspire a new Earl Stanley Gardner. By 1983, according to the Wichita Eagle- Beacon, there had been "more complaints filed against Phelps, and more formal hearings into his conduct, than any other Kansas attorney since records have been kept." If in fact he did lead the judges' conspiracy to block Fred Phelps from the bar, few would fault old Beryl Johnson today.

In 1976, the reverend-esquired was investigated by the Kansas Attorney General's office. In 73 percent of the pastor's lawsuits, the inquiry discovered the defendants had settled or agreed to settle out of court. In the 57 cases already settled, Phelps had demanded a total of $75,200.00-but then taken an average of only $1,500 per case to walk away. Litigation would have cost his adversaries far more. It was naked extortion, nothing more. Phil Harley, the Assistant Attorney General who led the investigation, now an attorney in San Francisco, confirmed to the Capital-Journal a statement he made to the press 10 years ago: "Based on my experience with him, I reached the personal conclusion that Mr. Phelps used the legal system to coerce settlements and abuse other people." In an opinion filed in a 1979 civil rights case, Federal Judge Richard Rogers-no stranger to the pastor's ways, a significant portion of his docket was taken up by Fred's lawsuits- supported Harley's conclusions: "I feel Mr. Phelps files 'strike suits' of little merit in the expectation of securing settlements by defendants anxious to avoid the inconvenience and expense of litigation." In fact, when those sued by Phelps did not blink, but forced him into court, the angry pastor lost 75 percent of the time-an astonishing record that explodes the myth of the invincible Fred Phelps, a myth which intimidates his community even today.

On November 8, 1977, the state filed a complaint seeking to have Phelps disbarred in its courts. The complaint centered on the pastor's behavior in a lawsuit filed against Carolene Brady, a court reporter in Shawnee County District Court. Phelps sought $2,000 in actual damages and $20,000 punitive damages, alleging Brady had failed to have a court transcript ready when he'd asked for it.

According to court documents, prior to filing the lawsuit, Phelps allegedly told Brady "he had wanted to sue her for a long time". During the trial, the pastor called Brady to the stand, had her declared a hostile witness, and cross-examined her for several days. Phelps not only attacked Brady's competence and honesty, he also attempted to introduce testimony about her sex life.

The Kansas Supreme Court would later observe: "The trial became an exhibition of a personal vendetta by Phelps against Carolene Brady. His examination was replete with repetition, badgering, innuendo, belligerence, irrelevant and immaterial matter, evidencing only a desire to hurt and destroy the defendant." The Supreme Court went on to comment, after the jury had found for Brady and Phelps sought a new trial: "The jury verdict didn't stop the onslaught of Phelps. He was not satisfied with the hurt, pain, and damage he had visited on Carolene Brady." In asking for a new trial, Phelps prepared affidavits swearing to the court he had new witnesses whose testimony would weigh in dramatically on his side. Brady obtained affidavits from eight of those witnesses, showing they would not testify as the pastor had claimed, that, in fact, Phelps had lied to the court.

The formal complaint against Phelps would not be for harassing Brady, but that he had "clearly misrepresented the truth to the court". Phil Harley, the same Assistant Attorney General who had investigated Phelps in 1976, represented the state in the 1979 disbarment proceedings. Harley wrote:

"When the attorneys engage in conduct such as Phelps has done, they do serious injury to the workings of our judicial system. Even the lay person could see how serious Phelps' infractions are. To allow this type of conduct to go essentially unpunished is being disrespectful to our entire judicial system. It confirms the layman's suspicion that attorneys are 'above the law' and can do anything they please with impunity." Harley continued: "Phelps has now been given two chances to show that he is capable of conducting himself in a manner that is expected of an attorney. On both occasions, he has flagrantly violated the oath he swore to uphold. He should not be given a third opportunity to harm the public or the judicial system. Fred W. Phelps should be disbarred." The Kansas Supreme Court agreed, adding: "The seriousness of the present case, coupled with his previous record, leads this court to the conclusion that respondent has little regard for the ethics of his profession."

The date was July 20, 1979. Even so, the vindictive pastor would have his revenge cold, however small the portion: When Mark Bennett, the attorney chairing the state grievance committee originally recommending Phelps be disbarred died, the aggrieved Fred came to the wake and signed the guestbook. Beside his name, Phelps wrote the numbers of a chapter and verse from the Bible.

When the shattered widow looked it up, it said 'vengeance is mine'. Based on his state court disbarment, Phelps was banned from practicing law in federal courts from October, 1980 until October, 1982. Amazingly, the pastor was back in trouble almost immediately following his return. Demand letters sent in 1983 to people Phelps planned to sue brought him right back up for disciplinary charges in federal court. Initiated by Wichita lawyer Robert Howard, the complaint charged that Phelps sent letters to businesses and individuals he intended to sue, informing them of litigation unless they paid money to the pastor's client.

Called before a panel of three federal judges barely two years after he had returned to the law, nonetheless Fred and his family of flyspeckers had been busy: Phelps Chartered had almost 200 lawsuits pending in the U.S. courts. In one, the pastor was suing Ronald Reagan for appointing an ambassador to the Vatican. In others, he was demanding an injunction against moments of silence in schools; suing a local teacher who had criticized the doctrine of predestination' and asking $5,000,000 in damages for libel from the Wichita Eagle-Beacon for the story it ran in 1983. All of these suits would come to nothing. The sheer number of cases generated out of Phelps Chartered, and the family's genius for antagonization set the stage for the next conflict:

Fred on the deserted platform, waiting to stare down the federal judges arriving on the noon train. Too late, Phelps would learn that, in a staring contest with a federal judge, one should be a fish if they expect him to blink first. The hard lesson would soon take the 'esquire' out of the irascible pastor. Of the five active federal judges in Kansas, two of them, Earl O'Connor of Kansas City and Patrick Kelly of Wichita, had already voluntarily removed themselves from hearing any cases involving Phelps Chartered. Lawyers from the family had filed motions accusing them of racial prejudice, religious prejudice, and conspiring to violate the civil rights of the seven Phelps attorneys. At first, the judges were only too happy to comply: they were as eager to be rid of the Phelps brand of tawdry courtroom hysteria as the pastor and company wanted to be done with them. Kelly, in fact, even told the pastor "good riddance" to his face during a special hearing the judge had called to upbraid Phelps-a hearing for which Kelly would later be reprimanded. Believing he had intimidated them, Fred made his fatal, final mistake as the bad boy of the Kansas courts: he went for a third judge. The pastor publicly accused Richard Rogers of the U.S. District Court in Topeka of racial prejudice, dislike of civil rights cases, engaging in a racially motivated vendetta against the seven Phelpses, and conspiring against them with Judge O'Connor. Rogers counter- charged the Phelpses had launched a campaign to disqualify him from hearing Phelps litigation in an attempt to go 'judge shopping'. Even if Rogers had wanted to remove himself, his hands were tied. Almost 90 of those 200 lawsuits generated by Phelps Chartered had been assigned to Rogers; court-approximately one-fifth of his entire caseload. If Rogers bowed out, it would leave only two federal judges, Dale Saffels of Kansas City and Sam Crow of Wichita, to handle the swarm of 200 Phelps suits, as well as their dockets from the rest of the state. "I'll grant you it creates a logistics problem," admitted Margie Phelps at the time, "but I didn't create the problem. If it takes going to the other end of the United States...to get another judge and bring him in to hear our cases, that's what the law requires." When Rogers refused to acquiesce to the pastor's demands, Phelps began a campaign of innuendo and wild accusations that Topekans today will recognize as pure Fred. An article in the Capital-Journal, January 16 of 1986, describes this early forerunner of the Phelps' fax campaign:

"The judge has disputed affidavits filed by Phelps clients who say he has made derogatory comments about the Phelpses at the Topeka County Club, the YMCA, in an elevator at the First National Bank, and at a judicial conference last September in Tulsa. "For example, the Phelpses accuse Rogers of telling Chris Davis, a Topeka man who attended the Tulsa conference, "You had better not plan on practicing law with the Phelps firm in my court, because I intend putting them out of business before much longer'. "They also quote an affidavit given by Brent Roper, a Topeka man who said Rogers became angry at the conference banquet when a band leader drew attention to the Phelps attorneys. Rogers is said to 'stalked from the ballroom', saying, 'Those - - Phelpses, they're everywhere showing off,' and 'It will be harder now, but I will destroy them.'" The irony here is that both 'Topeka' men quoted as apparent uninvolved bystanders were, in fact, Fred Phelps' sons-in-laws, or soon to be. Chris Davis was one of two families, the Hockenbargers and the Davises, that remained in the Westboro Church. He married the seventh Phelps child, Rebekah, in 1991. The other "Topeka man", Brent Roper, joined the Westboro community as a homeless teenager, was put through law school by the pastor, and married Shirley Phelps. The image of a federal judge stalking from a ballroom uttering darkly, "it will be harder now, but I will destroy them," it seems, on its face, a rather amateurish dip in slander. These are lines from the movies, from a Lex Luthor, and not a Richard Rogers.

It is noteworthy here to mention that Roper is also the author of a privately published book that argues AIDS was first introduced to the United States by Truman Capote, following a book promotion in South Africa. According to Roper, both JFK and Marilyn Monroe contracted the disease simultaneously from Capote during a touch football game in the White House Rose Garden. The CIA was forced to kill the fab couple, he says, to keep them from spreading the deadly virus to the rest of the nation.

Copies may be difficult to find. After Rogers remained stubborn despite the slanderous attacks, he claimed the Phelpses threatened to sue him on behalf of a client Rogers didn't know. It was not an empty threat. In August, 1985, the pastor Phelps and his daughter, Margie, had brought a suit against Judge O'Connor on behalf of a former federal probation officer. Though the man had been removed from his position by a vote of the full court of federal judges, the suit named O'Connor. At the time, O'Connor was under pressure from the Phelpses to disqualify himself (and did) from a 30-judge panel that would rule on the pastor's 1983 demand letters. The family Phelps had started a shooting war in the wrong neighborhood.

On December 16, 1985, a complaint signed by every federal judge in Kansas was lodged against the Phelps lawyers. It called for the disbarment of the seven family attorneys-Fred, Fred, Jr., Jonathon, Margie, Shirley, Elizabeth, and Fred's daughter-in-law, Betty, and the revocation of their corporate charter. The 9 angry judges accused the Phelpses of asserting "claims and positions lacking any grounding in fact", making "false and intemperate accusations" against the judges, and undertaking a "vicious pattern of intimidation" against the court. "Time and time again," says Mark Phelps, "I can remember something would happen in the way of actions or lawsuits being filed against him or one of his clients. He would fume and cuss and strain and spew and carry on. Then, he would come up with his plan of attack.

"He'd get real excited after his deep depression, and he'd carry on around the law office crowing about the cunning, brilliant strategy he had come up with. He'd put it into action, and he'd just thrill over it. "He'd say: 'Do we know how to deal with these types? You bet we do. We goin' to sue the pants off of them. We goin' to slap them with the fattest lawsuit they ever did see. We goin' to frizzle they fricuss and burn all the lent right out of they navel. When they get this, they goin' think twice about messin' with ol' Fred Phelps.' "He'd have a ball thinking about how he was going to get even-and even better than even-and then he'd go into action. "Next thing you knew, they'd respond with some action. And I guess he always thought they'd be like his won family-willing to take anything he dished out. I guess he just naturally expects people to roll over and play dead. So, when they'd come back with a logical, predictable response to his behavior, he'd go crazy: "'These heathen! These Sons of Belial! These enemies of God and His Church! God's gonna get them! He won't let them (get) by with this!' "My father would complain and yell at God, and throw a fit at Mom, and carry on at the kids."

In September of 1987, the federal judicial panel investigating the demand letters sent by Phelps found evidence to sustain two of the four charges against him. The pastor had been accused of demanding money and other relief for claims he knew to be false. The panel of judges issued a public censure of him.

In layman's terms, Pastor Phelps had attempted to strong-arm money from the innocent and been caught. And, come high noon, there would be one less Phelps at the bar. When the nine judges first entered their complaint in 1985, Margie, the spokeswoman and courtroom representative for the family in the matter, said: "The bottom line is we will fight every charge, every way."

But, upon hearing the extent of the evidence collected against them, the Phelpses asked the judges and investigator to find a way to end the case without resorting to litigation. They agreed to the punishment specified in the consent order. Margie signed the order, acknowledging her family accepted it voluntarily and waived any right to appeal.

The resulting compromise singled out those who, according to the investigator, were the three worst offenders: Fred, Jr. was suspended six months from practicing in federal courts. Margie received a one-year suspension, in part because she had maliciously misrepresented a conversation she'd had with Judge O'Connor. Having been suspended from the state courts for cheating his clients, and then barred from them for lying to a trial judge, having been censured in federal courts for pursuing claims he knew to be false, the angry pastor was now barred from them forever because he had lied about the judges in an attempt to impugn the integrity of the court. The leopard may be older, but it still has its spots.

The federal disbarment deprived Fred Phelps of his last arena of legal abuse. Unless he could find a new outlet for his hate, the defrocked esquire from Mississippi was now just an angry eccentric, no lawyer, not even a pastor-except in the fear-conditioned eyes of his family. Nonetheless, Fred Phelps has always held that all the bad things happened in his law career because he was a tireless Christian soldier, battling for black civil rights. A careful examination of his more salient cases, however, reveals once again how, with such odd regularity, some men of the cloth seem to confuse community service with lip and self-service. The hallmark of a devoted civil rights reformer who is also a lawyer ought to be a record of court decisions that, taken together, create legal precedents influencing future cases and, therefore, future society. Sadly, close inspection of Phelps' civil rights record shows he followed the same greedy star he did in the rest of his cases. Lawsuits were filed, but rarely went to trial-and even more rarely reached a decision. Instead, Phelps practiced what he always had: 'take-the-money-and run'. A settlement out-of-court has zero impact on legal precedent. Both sides continue to maintain they were right, only one party pays the other a little money to shut up and go away. In what are probably Fred Phelps' three most famous civil rights cases, he did exactly that each time. In the multi-million dollar Kansas Power and Light case, Phelps filed a class-action on behalf of 2,000 blacks who had accused the utility of discrimination in their hiring and promotion practices.

Fred settled out of court for the following: *Two black employees received $12,000 each. *$100,000 was paid out to the other plaintiffs. If one counts the original 2,000, that made for 50 bucks each.

*Phelps scooped $85,000 in attorney's fees and expenses. *KP&L admitted no wrongdoing and suffered no coercion to alter its allegedly racist policies. KP&L officials claimed they'd settled to avoid an expensive legal battle. "It's unprecedented what we just did," the pastor crowed.

Certainly it left no precedent. In the American Legion suit, which stemmed from a police raid on a Topeka post with a largely black membership, again Phelps settled for small cash outside of court.

Perhaps his most publicized case was the Evelyn Johnson suit, touted as son of Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation case filed against another Topeka USD 501 school in 1955. Brown vs. Board of Education, along with the Selma bus case, became the basis for the civil rights movement in the sixties. In 1973, Evelyn Johnson's aunt and legal guardian, Marlene Miller, sue the Unified School District, number 501, a state entity which contained the Topeka area public schools. Miller, represented by Fred Phelps, claimed the district had failed to comply with the ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education. It had not provided the same educational opportunities and environments to the black neighborhoods as it had to the white areas of the city. Phelps boosted Miller's complaint into a 200 million dollar class action suit. When that was tossed out, he pressed on with the individual action on behalf of Mrs. Johnson. In 1979, the pastor agreed to settle out of court with the district's insurance company. Phelps accepted the company's condition the settlement be sealed from public scrutiny to discourage others who might have been inclined to sue for the same reasons. Hardly the act of a hard-knuckled civil rights reformer. When the contents of the settlement were revealed later, it turned out the pastor had collected $19,500 from the insurance company- $10,600 himself, and $8,900 in a trust for Johnson. If the attorneys for Brown had settled for cash outside the courtroom instead of a decision, there would have been no legal grounds for the federal government to pressure a segregated America to conform to the new social standards, and quite possibly no civil rights movement. In light of that, it is difficult to understand how $8,900 in trust to a 15 year- old, uneducated girl was going to remedy either her or her school-mates' problem. After the settlement, Evelyn Johnson attended Topeka High School, rated one of the best in the nation. She performed poorly and dropped out without graduating. Certainly her life and prospects, and those of her peers, remained generally unchanged by the out of court pay-off. Since no ruling was made and no precedent established to reinforce Brown vs. Board of Education, nothing came from six years of Phelps' litigation except $10,600 for himself and a reputation, however undeserved, as a civil rights hero.

In other instances, the issue of civil rights was so flimsily connected, and the case so absurd, that any serious interest in social change on Phelps' part has to be questioned: In 1979, the pastor sued Stauffer Communications, owner of WIBW-TV, for over $1,000,000 on behalf of a 23 year-old black man, Jetson Booth, who had appeared in footage aired by the station. Booth was shown surrounded by police during camera coverage of a shoot-out involving the officers and two unidentified men. "If plaintiff had been a white man, defendants (WIBW-TV) would not have treated him in this fashion," Phelps asserted in the suit. The case was dismissed for lack of cause shown. In 1985, Phelps Chartered was order to pay attorney's fees amounting to $7,800 for police officer Dean Forster after the firm had sued him for civil rights violations of a client. It turned out Forster had no connection to the incident in question, and, furthermore, the Phelps lawyers had known that from the beginning of their litigation. In an astonishing number of his cases, it would seem the pastor thought 'civil rights' was an open sesame to the good life-for himself. In 1979, Phelps was sued by a Wichita law firm that claimed he had "tortuously interfered in the lawyer-client relationship". Three black women and two of their children had been grievously injured in an auto accident. One of the women was in a coma for years. Allegedly, Pastor Phelps learned about the case through local black ministers. He also somehow discovered that the liable insurance company's coverage was not the $100,000 they were claiming-but 1.1 million, of which the lucky attorney representing the victims would scoop up 35 percent . The aggrieved law firm protested Phelps had wooed the clients with his erstwhile reputation as a civil rights advocate. Because of his interference, they asserted, the goose of the golden eggs had fired its midwife attorneys and taken their 35 percent to Phelps Chartered. Phelps responded the other law firm was "all white", and that, in part, they'd lost their clients because of their "racially biased and overbearing treatment of said black people." In the final settlement, however, the judge awarded $644,000 to the victim and $366,000 to the lawyers-of which only $122,000 went to Fred.

Disappointing work for one who'd chased his ambulance with such laudable ethnic sensitivity. Probably the most bizarre and ludicrous example of Fred Phelps exploiting the title of 'civil rights crusader' was in 1983, when three of his children failed to make the cut for Washburn School of Law.

The pastor filed suit in federal court on behalf of Tim, Kathy, and Rebekah, claiming his children should be granted minority status because of his civil rights work. Furthermore, Phelps argued, Washburn Law's record on affirmative action was inadequate. They needed to accept more blacks into their freshman class each year.

"It is important to note this case is brought by white applicants who are asking to be treated as blacks," observed Carl Monk, dean of the law school. "They would not be asking to be treated as blacks unless they felt such treatment would help them." That case was still in court the following year when Washburn allowed Timothy in but again denied admission to Kathy and Rebekah.

The reverend filed suit once more, but this time with a twist. In the second suit, he offered his children were the victims of reverse discrimination because they were white. He complained the law school had admitted blacks in 1984 who were far less qualified than his own offspring. So much for the family commitment to affirmative action. U.S. District Judge, Frank Theis, was not amused. Ruling on the 1983 case, he stated first that, "the plaintiffs simply were not qualified for admission to law school," and second, that the new 1984 case weakened the case before him from 1983. The judge told Phelps he could not argue the school discriminated against blacks, and then sue again, saying it preferred blacks over whites, and be taken seriously. Katherine and Rebekah eventually got their law degrees down at Oklahoma City University. Phelps Chartered got spanked with a $55,000 assessment by the court to pay Washburn's attorneys' fees. It was negotiated down, and Pastor Fred signed the check over at $12,000 in restitution for bringing a 'frivolous suit of no merit' against the college. In Phelps' eyes, it had been another blow against empire for the bold pastor. There is an interesting sidebar to this story. When the Phelps children were first turned down by Washburn in 1983, they appealed to the law school's internal grievance committee. It found no race-based discrimination in the rejection of the three Phelps. However, one of the panel members, Karl Hockenbarger, a Washburn University employee, filed a dissent, stating it was clear to him the three had been "denied admission to the law school because of their identification with Fred Phelps Sr., and the cause of civil rights for blacks." Hockenbarger went on to add: "Blacks in Kansas generally depend on the Phelps family and firm as their last and best hope for attaining equal justice." He is, of course, the same Karl Hockenbarger who daily pickets with the Phelpses, and one of the few non-family members who still attends the pastor's church at Westboro.

Mr. Hockenbarger's shared concern with his pastor for the plight of Kansas blacks may not be as deep as it appears: Police surveillance of the Westboro community has allegedly tied Hockenbarger to white supremacist groups like the Posse Comitatus and the Ku Klux Klan. "Civil rights lawsuits presented a vast opportunity to make money back then," says Nate Phelps. "My father used to say he had a huge target and all he had to do was shoot. I don't blame him for choosing a lucrative area of the law, it's just that he was not motivated by some noble, altruistic desire "to champion the case of the downtrodden." Asked if he filed "nuisance lawsuits" once, Pastor Phelps replied: "They think it's a nuisance if you call a black man a nigger. That's just trivial to them, bit it's not trivial to him, and it's not trivial to his children."

During their teenage years, both Mark and Nate worked as law clerks in their father's office. "When a black client was in there," recalls Nate, "my father would play the 'DN' game with us. It stands for 'dumb nigger'. We would all try to use the acronym as often as possible in the presence of the person involved." In the 1983 interview with the Wichita Eagle-Beacon, Phelps intoned, echoing Abraham Lincoln: "The air of the United States is too pure for racial prejudice to keep going, and the nation can't long endure half-slave and half-free. There is not any doubt that the problems of this country derive, in my humble opinion, from the way this country continues to treat black people." But according to his sons in California, part of the theology of the Old Calvinism Fred taught held that blacks were a subservient race because they were the sons of Ham, the son of Noah. Cursed for ridiculing Noah's nakedness, Ham's children were born black, according to the Bible. Some scholars attribute apartheid in South Africa to the fact that the white minority is predominantly Calvinist and takes the Ham story to heart.

Mark definitely recalls that his father taught the Ham story and took it to its Calvinist conclusions: the black race was cursed and meant to be the "servants of servants" - i.e., subservient to whites. Nate agrees. "He taught that in Sunday sermon many times while we were growing up." Both boys recall their father used to tell black jokes.

"And he'd imitate them after they'd left our office," remembers Mark. However, the piece-de-resistance in the ongoing saga of Phelps hypocrisy is the pastor's relationship with the Reverend Pete Peters of La Porte, Colorado.

Peters is the guru-philosopher of the Christian Identity Movement. Known simply as "Identity", the movement believes the white race is God's true Chosen People. They assert the Jews are animal souls that rewrote the Old Testament to give themselves the Chosen's birthright. Blacks are "mud people" who also possess animal souls-meaning they are not immortal and cannot go to heaven. According to Identity, blacks and Jews want to eliminate the white race and rule the earth.

Randy Weaver, the man arrested in the Idaho mountaintop shout-out with F.B.I., was a member of the Posse Comitatus and a follower of Identity. Peters broadcasts his shortwave radio program, "Scriptures for America", around the world, calling for death to homosexuals and warning against the international Jewish conspiracy. Fred Phelps has done broadcasts on "Scriptures for America", and tapes of his anti-gay message and offered for sale in Peters' mail order catalogues. When asked about it, Pastor Phelps only smiles enigmatically and offers that Pete Peters owns the rights to those broadcasts and can sell them if he wants. But Peters, reached by phone at his church in La Porte, says: "If he (Fred Phelps) didn't want them out, even if I had a right, I wouldn't put them out. I have the greatest respect for him." The militant white supremacist then adds ominously, "He's got the support of god-fearing people across this country that are not afraid to back a man who tells it like it is. "And he's got my support if he needs help-whenever he needs help." Not empty words.

Though Peters himself was cleared, it is still widely believed by Klanwatch and other groups monitoring extremist activity that the right- wing hit team that killed Alan Berg, the Denver talk radio host, came from or were associated with Peters' congregation. Reverend Fred Phelps, friend of the struggling black?

Listed next to one of Fred's tapes in Pete Peters' catalogue is one by Jack Mohr, a man who describes himself as the "Brigadier General of the Christian Patriot Defense League", but whom the F.B.I. has identified as a weapons instructor for the Ku Klux Klan. Why in the world would a person with these associations proclaim himself a civil rights' crusader?

In the words of 'Deep Throat', "follow the money." And in those of Richard Seaton, the Assistant Attorney General who led the first attempt to disbar Phelps back in 1969, the pastor had "an uncontrollable appetite for money-especially the money of his clients."

CHAPTER SEVEN

"Nightmare of Twelfth Street"

"Since no one else would join, my father sired us for congregations," observes Mark. "We were the only members because we had no choice. When we got old enough to make our own decisions, choose our life's work, and our life's mates, did you think he'd permit that?

"Without his children, my father had no church and he has no income."

Fred Phelps' bizarre behavior toward his children as struggled to become adults is as disturbing as it is revealing.

Growing up in the pastor's family meant going from door-to-door sales, domestics, and wage earners to lawyers and tithe payers. To Phelps, adulthood for his children meant soldiers for his wars. To accomplish this, he would attempt to arrest and redirect each child's path to fulfillment. They were not to leave his nest, nor learn to fly: "The Bible may say you're gonna be the head of your house. But I'm tellin' you right now, goddammit, that ain't gonna happen! I'm gonna be the head of your house! And you better start gettin' that through your head right now!" Mark pauses at the memory. "You know, he couldn't say, I desperately need you; please don't leave me." His heart was too closed off by some devastating unknown injury, and his mind was so sophisticated, so intelligent, he could weave a steel cape around us we couldn't get out of.

It was emotional. And it was the use of religion." But how could Fred Phelps maintain control of the lives and dreams of his children? Against his desire for a family that would be an extension of himself were arrayed some formidable forces: the adolescent's yearning for independence was one; the pull of hormones and the heart of another. In addition, the harshness of the children's upbringing left them with little genuine respect or love for their father. Then what wrought such conformity? Two obstacles, both too high for 9 of the 13 to surmount. They are the twin secrets of Pastor Phelps' sway over his troubled flock. First, and most important, while they may not be overly enthusiastic about his job as a father, the Phelps' children still accept, respect, and obey him as the head of their church. Since, in their belief, the Elect may reach heaven only through the portal of The Place, he who runs The Place holds the keys to the gates of Paradise. The children weren't afraid to disobey or argue with their father when, in later adolescence, they didn't seize the hand beating them or leave the place holding them. Rather, they were terrified to oppose the will of heaven's gatekeeper and imperil their souls. Literally, to was the fires of hell and not the mattock whose heat they felt in all their choices. "My father established early on the expectations of each child in the family for their entire life," says Nate, "and the consequences if those expectations weren't met. According to him, each of us would finish college, get your law degree, work for him, and marry whom he chose, when he chose. By no means were we allowed to leave that situation, or it would be seen as 'abandoning the church'. If we did that, we'd be excommunicated." Besides being groomed as lawyers, Mark says he and his siblings were constantly told they were different. "We were taught we were abnormal from the time we were able to learn," he says. "That the rest of the world out there was evil. That we The Place. And inside The Place, people were good and going to heaven. "Outside The Place they were all damned and going to hell. And, if that other world ever got us down, we were taught to find strength by imagining the terrible horrors that would happen soon to everyone outside The Place."

'The Place' was how his father referred to the church, add Nate. "If you left, you were forsaking the assembly and you were delivered to Satan for the destruction of the flesh. He had his repertoire down. "Of course, he justified it by manipulating various passages in the Bible. "One passage refers to a child 'leaving his father and mother and cleaving to his wife'. He interpreted this to mean a child was not to leave his parents until he was married. But, since he decided who and when we were to marry, he controlled this. "Another passage mentions 'not forsaking the assembling of yourselves together'. Since he had long ago established in our minds that his church was where the Elect came to assemble, that it was 'The Place', he could lead us easily to the belief that to leave home was to 'leave' the company of the Elect, to join the innumerable multitude of the damned." And the second of the twin secrets? "To cast the world beyond The Place as evil and fatal to the soul. Then manipulate the local community so they would react with hostility and aggression whenever a kid would venture out. It's why my father insisted we go to public school, you know. Thanks to him, we were hated before we even got there on Day One. And people were so mean to us, that, when we came home, Fred could say, 'See, I told you so. They're evil and reprobate. They're not like us.'" The family does not believe in Christmas, states the Pastor Phelps, because there is no mention of it in the Bible; nowhere does it say Jesus Christ was born on December 25. (The date for many Christian holidays, in fact, derive from pre-Christian Europe: Christmas from the winter solstice on December 21; Easter from the vernal equinox on March 21; All Souls for Halloween from the Feast of the Samhain or the Day of the Dead, on October 31.) While accurate, if somewhat unnecessary theology (since Christmas in America is really a shopping, not a religious, holiday), as sociology, Fred's 'bah-humbug' to the season of comfort and joy did significantly add to the burden of 'otherness' that caused the world outside to repel his children and grandchildren back to The Place.

"From kindergarten, we were not allowed to stay in the classroom if there were Christmas activities going on,: says Nate. "We always had to go to another room, usually the library. My father threatened to sue the schools if they did not remove us during those times." The man pauses, remembering the sorrows of the boy: "Our humiliation was constant."

Even so, from suing the schools to shooting his neighbor's dog, Fred Phelps' personal and litigious behavior would have ensured his children a cool reception in their community-without an encore as the pastor who stole Christmas. "We weren't allowed to participate in any activities at school," adds Nate. "Not through most of our childhoods."

"No sports, not even track," says Mark. "Until my senior year. "And no outside friends. No one was allowed to visit, and we weren't allowed to go anywhere. To birthday parties or anything. Then, shave our heads. My father wanted the world to reject us. It would drive us right back to him. To the Place. The world-within-a-world. The one that was Fredcentric." Spouses were not welcome in such a world-except as a last resort to hold the child. There were to be no girls for the boys. And no boys for the girls. "If my dad had his way," confesses Shirley, "none of us would have gotten married. He'd just as soon keep everyone away, thanks."

"Kathy's was my father's favorite," remembers Margie. "She had blue eyes and dark hair. She was very pretty and he would spoil her. He used to bounce her on his knee and sing 'The Yellow Rose of Texas' to her. But after she was about 15 or 16, they had nothing to say to each other. She'd be home, but she kept her distance from him. "And she was a bitch throughout her teen years. She was very mean to the rest of the kids. Kathy became very self-destructive back then, and she's stayed that way since." Concludes Margie: "I never understood why." Perhaps her brothers on the West Coast have a clue: "Then came a time when suddenly Kathy got in my dad's doghouse," relates Mark. "A boy had called once or something. From that time on, he commenced to beating her, and he stayed on her and stayed on her rear end that wouldn't l; because of how often and how severely she got beat. "He'd beat her routinely in the church, against the foundation pole. He'd beat her with mattock and then twist her arm behind her back. She'd be screaming- bloodcurdling screams-and all because someone had called her up on the telephone.

"Later, it got so if the phone rang and they hung up, he'd assume it was a boy looking for Kathy, and that she was 'doing' him, and then she'd get beaten for that. "And, on top of that, she and Nate were getting beaten several times a week for their weight. "Later, when Mark and Fred were in college," says Nate, "Mom would take everyone out to sell candy, but she'd leave Kathy home alone with Fred. She'd get beaten during those times, just like I had." Kathy tried to escape the nightmare called 'home' at the Westboro Baptist Church at least three times between the age of 17 and 18. Each time, the pastor found out where she was living and led a Phelps' quick-reaction team to literally snatch her away from her life and bring her back. In one incident, Kathy was living in a quiet Topeka neighborhood and dating a boy Mark knew from high school. "It was the summertime, about 6:30 in the evening," Nate recalls. "Her boyfriend pulled in to pick her up on a date. We'd been waiting for her to come out of the house, and when she did, we just swooped in. We had two cars. Mark was driving one and my dad the other. It was real 'Starsky and Hutch'. We blocked off the departing vehicle, and pulled her out of the car while her date just sat there stunned." "At home my father beat her terribly," says Mark. "It was then she was locked in her room for 40 days on nothing but water." Mark remembers one of the 'parental intercessions' was actually a kidnapping: Kathy was 18 when it occurred. Though she eventually finished college and graduated law school, according to some of her siblings, Kathy has yet to find resolution to her anger and self- destruction. In recent years, she has allowed her active status at the bar to lapse, waitressed at Topeka's Ramada Inn, been laid off, gone of public assistance, and been convicted on passing bad checks.

"My sister, Kathy...," reflects Mark, "...everything my father's done to her...she's just been so deeply hurt as a human being, I don't think she can cope out there..." Nate has one memory that sticks in his mind. Once, while she was going to college and living in the compound, Kathy went jogging late one night, as was her habit. But, this time, the sight of a woman running through a darkened residential neighborhood after 1 a.m. caught the attention of a patrol car. When the officer tried to question her from the rolling vehicle, Kathy turned and ran the other way. When he overtook her on foot, humped ahead of her and tried to block her passage, she kept on him like a wild animal. Other officers were called and Kathy fought them with the same grim ferocity. She was finally subdued and arrested. When the case went to court, Nate was there: "The judge asked why she fought when the officer tried to stop her. She turned to him-and I was shocked by how hate was in her face-and she almost spit out the words: 'I can't stand for a man to touch me!'" Continues Nate: "That face full of hate I'll never forget. My sister was very, very angry about something."

In high school, says Mark, "I couldn't grasp the concept of career day." The only one he and his brothers and sisters were told they could consider was the law. Says the pastor with a groan: "Hell, I think everybody today should have a law degree. You need one to defend yourself. Yeh, got to have one now or you can't take care of yourself or family."

Adds Mark: "His attitude was always that school was bullshit, but you had to get As and get out so you could have the law degree. With that you could support and defend the church. "To say 'no' would have been the same as drafting-dodging during WWII: it was every kid's duty to enlist in the bar and protect our homeland against the evil that threatened from without."

But Fred Jr. wanted to be a history teacher. "Ever since he'd been a kid, he wanted to do that," Mark says. "At Washburn he was a masterful history student. He wanted to teach it, and he held on to that. He'd say: 'I have that right', and my dad would try to beat it out of him. My father would make it clear to Fred Jr. that he wasn't going to teach history. He'd yell: 'You guys are mine and you're never gonna leave me!'" "Then always follow with: 'And you better start gettin' it through your head right now!' "I can remember my father beating Fred when he was 19 or 20 about that. I couldn't believe my brother would even try to argue with him! My father wouldn't hear of it. Fred Jr. was going to be a lawyer. "Eventually, I think, my brother's spirit was broken and he became one. But it wasn't the beatings that caused him to lose heart-it was Debbie Valgos." What follows may be the saddest tale found during this investigation. It is a profound and tragic example of the fruits of hatred when it is directed by the angry against the innocent. Says Mark: "He was deeply in love with her, a girl from St. Vincent's Orphanage several blocks from our house. They were just crazy in love... "She was a free spirit. And a great looker. Noisy. Loud, hearty laugh. She was very warm, and friendly, and loving."

"She was cute, thin, blonde, and sexy," laughs Nate. "That name...," sighs one of the nuns from the orphanage, "is like a punch in the stomach..." Debbie was not an orphan. She lived with her mother, Della A., and her stepfather, Paul A., on Lincoln Street in Topeka.

When she was 11 years old, for reasons undisclosed, Debbie was placed in St. Vincent's. She went to Capper Junior High and later attended Topeka West High School. When she was 14, Debbie sent this poem to her mom: I settled down west from town, though no one knew I was a clown, My face was clean, and all around were children, though I heard no sound. She signed it, 'Mom, I love you very much!' with seven asterisks for emphasis. Bernadette, an older sister who still lives in town recalls: "She sang. She had a beautiful voice. And she played the guitar. She was a pretty little thing." Debbie's mom has an album of photos taken by the nuns of her daughter while she lived at the orphanage. Pictures of her as a cheerleader at Capper; smiling on a dock at the Lake of the Ozarks with some other girls from St. Vincent's; clutching her pom-poms, watching the players; pictures of her 15th birthday party at the orphanage.

They met at the skating rink. Sometimes Fred and Mark would trick their father. When he thought they'd gone out on their obligatory 10 mile run, instead they'd go skating. Or if they'd had a good night on candy sales, Jonathon, Nate, Mark, and Fred would knock off early and hit the rink before going home. "Debbie was a good skater," remembers Mark. "She came to the rink with other kids from the orphanage. She skated fast and reckless." The voice over the phone sounds as if it's smiling at the memory. "At first my brother saw her secretly, during stolen moments. Then he'd go by the orphanage when the four of us boys were out selling candy."

Mark stops. "You should know, when I was 9 and Fred 10, we began to hear degrading, insulting sermons from my father about how no good it is for boys to have girl friends: "You'll meet a girl someday and she'll start saying things like, "Aren't you cute; aren't you handsome; ooooooh, you're really something", and like some kind of ignorant, stupid lamb being led to slaughter, you'll fall for it, and the next thing you know, she'll want to kiss you or some bullshit like that. I'm telling you now, I'm not going to put up with it. If you think you're going to have some whore coming around sniffing after you, you better know right now that I'm not going to put up with it. You better start gettin' it through your head right now. You just have to trust the Lord to provide you a good woman who will subject herself to the authority of the church...'" Mark clears his throat. "They met, I think, in the fall of 1970. On the candy sales, Fred would drive and I'd ride shotgun, with Jon and Nate in back. We'd pick Debbie up on the way out and she'd sit between us. "When we got there, the rest of us would sell candy, and Fred and Debbie would stay behind in the car. "Boy, did they kiss. Every time was for the last time. Like Bogart and Bergman at the Paris train station.

"She was cute, but it wasn't only sexual. Those two were very, very much in love. I was there. I saw it. I watched them together-kissing, walking, being together. Fred and I shared the same bedroom and I knew my brother. "It was obvious they were meant for each other. That romance had so much voltage, it could have lit the city."

Fred and Debbie's special song was "Close to You", by the Carpenters, but that didn't keep them from fighting. Says Mark: "Debbie had a hot temper. She was very intense and dramatic. So they kissed and fought, kissed and fought. But they loved each other terribly hard-none of us doubted that." Debbie also got a kick out of hanging around with all of Fred's brothers, remembers Mark. "She used to say it was her instant family." Many of Debbie's teachers still remember her vividly. And they remember her long-lasting romance with Fred Phelps. "She was craving a family environment, with all the emotional outlet and loving she imagined went with it," recalls one. "When she was dating Fred, she thought she'd become an adjunct member of his family and she wanted to be a part. When she thought she was, she was very happy."

"She was such a warm, sweet girl," remembers another, "it's just a shame what happened to her." "In the car on candy sales and at the skating rink was the only time they could see each other," says Mark. Apparently Debbie was either narcoleptic or suffered from epilepsy.

"Periodically she'd pass out. I saw it happen 10 to 12 times. Suddenly she'd stop talking and when you looked, she'd be limp, her head back and eyes closed, though still breathing." Debbie told Fred what it was, but Mark's brother never revealed it. After they'd been stealing time together for several months, Fred Jr. somehow found the resources to buy Debbie a gold band with a tiny diamond.

Mark remembers her showing it off proudly in the car that day. Fred was 17, she was still 16. They began to talk of getting married. "Before you jump to conclusions about another teenage marriage," Mark observes, "remember my family didn't believe in dating around. We believed God would send us our mates. That it would just happen one day, and we would know it in our hearts. When it happened, that was it-whether you were 16 or 66. "Of course, my dad thought he was the god in charge of that. But I wouldn't assume Fred and Debbie's union would have been another miscast teenage marriage-and therefore my dad was right to do what he did." Why not?

"Because my wife of 17 years, and my best friend for 22, is the same Luava Sundgren I met at the rink that May of '71. We've been together since I was 16 and she, 13, and we're still totally nuts about each other. "You see, I think God has a hand in these things. And maybe it's naive of me, but I think all that we went through as kids made us a lot wiser about people than most grownups."

Mark estimates the passionate romance was kept from their father through the New Year of 1971. Sometime shortly after, however, the Pastor Phelps caught wind of his son's happiness. "After that, my father forbade Fred to see her. He tried everything to get Fred to stop."

Though Mark's brother was only a few months shy of 18, the pastor regularly took the mattock to him to stop his 'slinkin' with that whore'. In February of that year, Debbie left the orphanage and moved back in with her mother and stepfather in the house on Lincoln Street.

The boys would swing by and pick her up there. Shortly after she moved, Fred and Debbie moved again: they made their bid for a life together free of their burdened pasts. They eloped. Mark remembers they took one of the family cars, a '66 Impala wagon. "And I had a pair of top-notch skates. They cost me a hundred bucks. I was a serious skater back then, and I carried them around in a slick black case and felt very professional. But my brother Fred took them along for gas money. He sold them at a rink in Kansas City for ten bucks. Fred's next younger sibling sighs. "I missed my skates, but I wasn't mad at him. Back then, we had no sense of personal boundaries. If you needed something, you just took it. Besides, I wanted them to get away." He laughs: "Just wish he'd gotten more for those skates. Ten bucks was insulting." With a borrowed car and a tank full of gas, the intrepid couple hit the great American highways-though not with that era's open agenda of 'wherever you go-there you are!' To Fred Jr., the available universe consisted of two addresses and the highway that connected them. One was on 12th Street in Topeka, the other was the home and church of Forrest Judd in Indianapolis. "My dad and Judd met at a Bible conference. Forrest was a Baptist preacher and they hit it off. They used to come to Topeka and visit a lot. He and my dad were doctrinally alike, but Forrest was a very different personality. He was a jolly fat Santa type of guy-a factory worker and a really neat fella. He had three sons of his own, but he'd become sort of a 'good' father figure to a lot of us kids.

"His church was the only one my dad approved of-and the reason that was important to Fred Jr. is the same reason he's-they all-have been unable to escape. "You see, no matter what differences we had with him as the head of our house, none of us questioned his authority as head of our church. It was a certified gathering of the elect, remember. And the only way to get to heaven was to do that, to assemble with the elect. "My dad interpreted that, and we accepted it, as membership in a physical congregation certified by him as elect...The Place... "And there was only one Place besides his-Forrest Judd's. "So my brother had nowhere to run, you see. Not if he wanted to get to heaven. To a believer, even the most wonderful love in this world isn't worth an eternity in the fires of hell. "As long as we accepted my father had the power to so that-send us all to hell-he had the trump card in any showdown over our choices." After Judd and the Pastor Phelps conferred by phone, the father figure convinced Fred Jr. there'd be no room on the Indy bus to heaven. If he wanted to get there, he'd have to go back to Kansas. A member of the staff at Topeka West remembers the pastor called the school to rage at them, holding them responsible and threatening to sue: "As I recall, the father stopped the marriage; and he was demanding the school go and get them. He wanted returned separately so they wouldn't 'fornicate' on the way home.

"School officials tried to point out to him that Fred and Debbie were teenagers, and they'd been alone together for over a week-the damage was done." From the moment the disappointed lovers started down the road they had came, the clock began to tick toward tragedy.

Back in Topeka, Debbie moved in with her mom again, and Fred counted the weeks till his 18th birthday. Though his father did everything in his power to separate them, "those afternoon candy sessions went on just as they had before," says Mark. In May of 1971, the pastor changed his strategy. It would be OK for Fred Jr. to see Debbie, but only when she came to services on Sunday.

By this time, Mark had met his future spouse, also at the skating rink, and Luava was convinced to come to church as well. "The only way we could see his sons officially," says Luava, "was if we came to his church for Sunday service. They had no social life; they weren't allowed to date." So they came to service. Luava remembers that first Sunday: "When I arrived, Debbie was already there, sitting in one of the pews, waiting for it to begin. She looked back at me and smiled. I was nervous and her warmth touched me. She was quite radiant and seemed very happy that day." Luava fared better than Debbie under the pale-hearted pastor's basilisk eye. She had long hair and was shy-a quality the pastor mistook for subjection to her man.

"My father took an instant dislike to Debbie," Mark recalls. "She had all her signals wrong: she had short hair; she was vivacious, passionate, and fiery; she was direct; and she had an open, honest laugh." That day, and forever after, the good pastor called her a 'whore' from the pulpit, in person, to Fred, and the family. "She didn't argue," says Mark. "She looked shell-shocked. She started to cry, but did it quietly. After the service, she disappeared. "After that, he preached to Freddy she was a whore from pulpit every Sunday. "Then one day," says Mark, "my father announced that the entire family was going roller skating. Even mom. He said we'd have some 'fun' together."

The voice on the phone laughs. "It was a very peculiar experience. You have to realize, in all the time we were growing up, our family never did that. We never, not once, went on an outing together. We'd go sell candy, or to run. but never to have fun. He never took us to the zoo, the movies, out to eat, to the park, on a picnic, vacation, Thanksgiving at the relatives, to see the fireworks on the Fourth of July-none of these things.

"Now you can begin to understand what a selfish man our dad was. We spent our entire childhoods and adolescence waiting on him and working for him and getting beaten up by him. The idea of parenthood or fatherhood is an alien concept to that man. "So we were suspicious when he announced he was taking us all skating. Sure enough, it turned out he'd caught wind of what was going on down at the rink." Fred and Mark had made plans to meet Debbie and Luava there that day, and now the pressure had the drop on them. Though she'd already been to services at their church, Mark only nodded to Luava as if she were a passing acquaintance. When the pastor made fun of her parents within earshot of Luava, Mark felt forced to laugh.

Fred and Debbie skated together briefly, but they didn't hold hands. Everyone was watching the good Pastor Phelps. Fred Sr. strapped on a pair of skates and storked out on the floor looking like a new-born calf on ice. "I wanted to show off for him," Mark recalls, "so I started skating backwards and doing jumps when I knew he was watching. Do you think he liked it? No way. My father went into a seething rage. He said he could see I'd been spending all my goddam time down there, trying to get my dick wet. What a guy-by the way, both Luava and I were virgins when we were married...five years after we met." Possibly due to the stress of the unexpected confrontation, Debbie had another seizure. In a gloomy portent of what was to come, none of the Phelps boys dared go to her aid. She lay unconscious and abandoned by the good Christians of Westboro Baptist before 13 year-old Luava noticed and rushed to her side. At that, the pastor glared at Mark. "Someone should tell that girl we don't associate with whores," he glowered. Then, as the steadfast teenager revived her friend, Good Samaritan Phelps wobbled past on his skates and muttered, "whore" at Debbie while she was recovering her feet.

The charitable timing of his comment caused Fred Jr.'s girl to burst into tears. Luava helped her off the floor and into the ladies' room. "I don't know why Fred's old man hates me so much," Debbie sobbed. "You're lucky that he likes you." Luava never forgot the bitterness of those sobs: SOS from the threshold of a soul's despair. Debbie went to services at the Westboro Church several times after that, and, each time, she was called a whore from the pulpit. Then why did she go? "The hope of having Fred Jr. was greater than the pain of his father's words," says Mark. "She even came over once and asked my father what it was he wanted her to be. He told her she'd have to get an education and amount to something if she wanted his son. That she'd have to go to college and law school first, and, while she was doing it, she'd have to stay away from Fred Jr. 'But right now,' he told her, 'you're just a whore'. "Debbie said she could do it-she just needed a chance to prove it. I remember my father laughed in her face and said she'd always be a whore. "Another time, Debbie had been riding along with us on the candy sales, and afterward she and Fred intended to sneak out to a movie. Fred Jr. asked her to wait in the candy room while he changed clothes. You see, my dad never went in there." The pastor chose that time to fly into one of his rages with Fred Jr.

"Of course, whenever my father started beating someone, the rest of the kids would run into the candy room. It was sort of our bomb shelter. They'd be pacing nervously, waiting for it to end, like a herd of cows from the candy boxes to the laundry dryers and back. "My father was beating on Fred and screaming things like, 'You son-of-a-bitch! You got your dick wet! And now you're sniffin' after that whore!' It made them both feel dirty for what was really the best thing that had happened to them so far in their lives-their first love. "Debbie got hysterical when she heard those things. She ran out crying." Mark pauses. "And we were very nervous because she wasn't supposed to be in there. I remember several of us followed her out to ensure she didn't make a scene. That's where we were back then: nothing mattered except keeping my dad cooled off.

"Outside in the street, Debbie was crying her heart out. She kept asking, 'why does he say those things about me?'" Mark isn't sure of the timing, but he believes shortly after is when Fred, how 18, decided to move out. The pastor vehemently opposed it, but Fred stood up for himself.

Finally they compromised: the son would go and live with one of his father's business associates. Bob Martin was a retired army officer who ran Bo-Mar Investigations, a private detective agency. After Fred, Jr. had been staying with Martin for a week in his house, Mark remembers his father got a phone call. It was Martin.

"Let's go," said the pastor to Mark, who'd become the squad leader in his father's schemes. While they drove to the detective's place, the pastor explained the plan he and Martin had for Fred Jr.: wait till he was in the shower and then confront him; a naked man feels vulnerable and powerless.

Mark's father told him Fred Jr. had just come in from work and gone into the bathroom. "When he comes out, we'll be waiting," chuckled the guardian of one of the two portals to the Kingdom of Heaven. And so they were. As Fred Jr. came out, towel around his waist, he was confronted by his father, by Mark, and a suddenly hostile Bob Martin.

"Get your clothes! You're going home!" snapped the pastor. The eldest son complied without argument. "The next part I'll never forget," says Mark. "When we got out to the car, I was in the back, my father was behind the wheel, and Fred was in the front passenger seat. Bob had followed us and he opened the door on my brother's side. "Through the space between the front seat and the door, I could see him place a revolver against my brother's knee. And he said: "If you run away again, I have orders to come after you. And when I catch you, I'm going to shoot you right here." At the time, 'knee-capping' had spread to the United States from Italy and France as the preferred punishment in underworld circles. It left its victim crippled for life. This article does not imply Fred Phelps Sr. has underworld ties. It only remarks that anyone who dresses badly, who lives handsomely off the work of urchins hustling in the streets, who disciplines subordinates by beating them senseless, who fosters filiar piety by threats of knee-capping, who knocks his wife around regularly, who surrounds himself with lawyers, and who is apparently beyond the long arm of the law could have made a very respectable gangster. Certainly not a pastor. Fred Jr. enrolled at Washburn University that fall and Debbie returned to Topeka West. Though the pastor had forbidden them to see each other outside church, they continued to do so.

"My brother was struggling with his love for Debbie and his very real fear of hell. A lot of non-Christians might find that hard to believe. But if you grew up with your imagination open to Fred Phelps, believe me, hell was a concrete reality." The battle inside Fred Jr. would last until the following spring, but the war had been lost when he turned back from Indiana.

In late September, Debbie dropped out of high school and moved in with girlfriends at a house on Central Park Avenue. It was just a few blocks from the Washburn campus. "We went there a lot when we were out selling candy," says Mark. "That lasted into December, probably, because I remember being there when it was very cold and we were wearing winter coats."

But the pastor was relentless. And not only with the mattock. "He knew Fred Jr. was still seeing Debbie, and he hit heavy, heavy on him from the Bible. From things they said, I think my brother and Debbie had probably become lovers at some time in the relationship, and I'm sure Fred Jr. felt guilty about that.

"So, he was vulnerable to my father's framing of the situation as 'Debbie the Whore...the Agent of Satan sent to lure him into temptation and directly down into the gaping jaws of hell'." Says Mark: "He'd spend time with her, then try to avoid her. In addition to the guilt he was getting some pretty bad beatings. While Fred Jr. drifted in fear, Debbie fought to hand on to the man she cherished and the only person who'd ever cherished her. Margie Phelps remembers Debbie would wait for her brother outside after his classes on the Washburn campus. She would beg him to come back to her in Play-Misty-for-Me scenarios, where a mentally ill woman stalks her former lover. "If she did do that," says Luava, "it was in hurt and frustration that he would betray the love we all knew he felt." "And, besides, it always worked," Mark adds. "He always went back to her, at least while he was at Washburn." "I don't think he ever stopped loving her," agrees Luava. "He was just more scared of hell than he was of losing her."

Sometimes in December, 1971, events turned murky, fast. and fatal. Apparently willing now to give Debbie up, but afraid he wouldn't be able to do it while they lived in the same town, and also furious at his father for forcing him to leave her, Fred Jr. ran away again, despite Bob Martin's threat to find him and kneecap him if he did so. From late December till mid-February, the following events are known:

Fred Jr. disappeared and no one in the family knew his whereabouts. One night in January, shortly after Nate and Jonathon had been shaved and beaten and the school had notified the police, Fred Jr. stopped by the house without his father knowing. Nate remembers he asked to see their heads and then commiserated with them about their embarrassment at the police station.

About the same time, Luava's father saw Fred Jr. at a Washburn basketball game. He had a K-State jacket and a rash on both arms. The other man became concerned about Fred's welfare, and, with nothing to go on but the jacket and the rash, he was able to track the troubled youth down working at a produce business in Manhattan, where the state college was situated.

Fred Jr. turned down all offers of money or help. At the time, he was living in the basement of a young married couple. Whether Debbie visited him or even joined him up there is unknown. What is known us that, on Valentine's Day, Fred Jr. showed up in Topeka with a new girl for his father to meet.

"Betty," says Mark, "was a lot closer to what my father demanded. She was another Luava-or at least who my dad originally thought Luava was- she had long hair, and she was very quiet and submissive. She had also been raised Methodist. A lot of Baptists started out as Methodists, you know. "Debbie...was a Catholic."

A few weeks after Valentine's, Debbie came to see her mom. Della A. remembers they went for a walk in the small park near where Debbie had lived with her friends. Her daughter's spirits were very low, she recalls. Debbie confessed Fred had given her an engagement ring and they had eloped, but that Fred's dad had made them come back. She admitted bitterly that his father had told her she wasn't good enough for his son, and the younger Phelps had been forced to obey him. "Now Fred's found another girl," she told her mother. As they walked, Della remembers her daughter took off the ring and threw it in the bushes. "He's never going to marry me, Mama," she said, "but I know I'll never love anyone else."

The mother says she tried to cheer her up, and later, thinking Debbie might regret it, she returned to search for the ring in the grass. She never found it, and even if she had, Debbie never would have received it. The mother and daughter's walk in the park that afternoon would be their last time together. The remainder of Debbie's hopeful life can be found, not in the memories of those who knew her, but in the dusty, impersonal files of the U.S. Army Intelligence Criminal Investigations Division. After seeing her mother that day, Debbie went up to Junction City, an army town that served nearby Ft. Riley. It was also only a 20 minute drive from Manhattan, where Fred was living. Whether they saw each other during that time is not known. From the part of her life that has been documented in the Army's investigation of her death, it seems unlikely. During her final days, Debbie Valgos touched a match to her longing soul. She flamed up in a white-hot blaze of self-directed violence, anonymous sex, amphetamines, heroin, and rock and roll. All the things Pastor Phelps said she was, she'd be.

She moved in with a soldier. She shot smack. She partied for days without sleep. The speed she was constantly on burned through her body till she'd gone from 130 to 87 pounds. In less than a month the 5'7" girl had become a walking corpse with the wide, burning eyes of the starved. Perhaps that is when her face could at last reflect her heart: faltering into despair after a lifetime without sustenance.

Because the effect was so striking, Debbie's new acquaintance nicknamed here 'Eyes'. But 'Eyes' had stared into her abyss, and she knew. At the end of all worlds. Was a single lost soul. The last days of Debbie Valgos' life, those few weeks in Junction City, were one long suicide...a death dance through the Army bars...a soul signing off. When she lost Fred Phelps, Debbie must have felt she had forever lost her way...that she was never coming back...and so she touched a match to her despair. Her new friends told CID agents she had tried to commit suicide four times in the weeks prior to her death: by jumping out a window, rolling off a roof; and twice by drug overdose.

Each time they had stopped her or brought her through it. The came the night of April 17, 1972. Debbie was in the Blue Light, a soldier's bar. Though she had a soldier waiting at home, that hardly mattered. She let two more pick her up. When they invited her back to their barracks to 'party', she said 'yes'.

As they left, a girl who lived in Debbie's house insisted that she come along. She'd been there during Debbie's earlier attempted suicides, and she worried that the frail runaway might try it again. They were spirited past the gates of the fort, hiding on the floor of the car. The soldiers parked in an alley and had the girls crawl through a window into their barracks room. Once inside, one of them offered Debbie some speed. It was a bottle of crushed mini-bennies, according to CID reports. Debbie took it, and the soldier turned to put on a record. When she gave it back, the boy was amazed. "You took way too much!" he said. "You'll be up three or four days!"

Debbie only smiled at him. What might have been a four-day problem for a 180 pound man, Debbie undoubtedly hoped would solve all her problems at 87 pounds, less than half the other's body weight. Shortly after, "Eye started to have a 'body trip'," states the girl who had accompanied her. "She shut her eyes and just started moving with the music. She did that for awhile and then she started to act dingy. She called me over and said she felt like little needles were poking her all over her whole body and she was tingling. I told her I would stay with her and not to make any noise in the barracks." When Debbie started rolling around on the floor and mumbling, her friend worried she might hurt herself, and so she sat on her.

The other girl, who apparently was quite obese, continued drinking and talking while she kept Debbie pinned beneath her. The party went on. Debbie was babbling incoherently. After almost another hour, everyone became alarmed at Eye's grotesque physical contortions. They pulled her back through the window, loaded her in the car, and smuggled her off base. Returning to her new boyfriend's house, they woke him and ran the tub full of cold water. By then, Debbie had passed into coma. She would not be taken to Irwin Army Hospital At Ft. Riley until 5 a.m., nearly five hours after she'd ingested almost half a bottle of crushed benzedrine. Debbie lasted 20 hours unconscious in ICU, just long enough for her sister, Bernadette, to find her. At 1 a.m., her heart stopped. Her spirit had flamed up and was gone. She was 17. She was sunny and loving and only wanted to be loved. After all she'd been through, Debbie Valgos thought she'd found safe haven with the family Phelps. She died for her mistake. In that spring of 1972, one of the Top 40 songs playing on the rock and roll radios Debbie no doubt listened to while riding her dark current of heroin, amphetamines, and despair was a tribute to Janis Joplin, sung by Joan Baez: "She once walked right by my side I know she walked by yours, Her striding steps could not deny Torment from a child who knew, That in the quiet morning There would be despair, And in the hours that followed No one could repair... That poor girl... Barely here to tell her tale, Rode in on a tide of misfortune Rode out on a mainline rail... But the Pastor Phelps, devotee of a hateful god, had made up a song of his own: "I remember getting home from school the day it appeared in the papers," says Mark, "and my dad came dancing down the stairs, swaying from the knees and clapping his hands, singing: 'The whore is dead! The whore is dead!' "He paraded around the house, singing and laughing with that maniacal giggle he has, 'the whore is dead!'" Mark pauses to let the horror of the scene settle in. One is reminded of the warning from the first epistle of John: "He who has no love for the brother he has seen cannot love the God he has not seen..." Margie Phelps remembers shortly after Debbie's death Fred Jr. came to visit their mom secretly. Margie says she didn't know he was in the house. She came into a room inadvertently and saw Fred Jr. and her mother sitting in chairs, facing each other. The eldest son had his head in her lap and she was stroking his hair.

"Fred was crying," says Margie. "I heard afterward it was for Debbie." "There's no question that my brother wanted to spend his life with Debbie," says Mark. "She was who he loved. And I knew her well enough to say my brother was the first light of hope she'd had in her life. When he left her, that light went out."

The phone voices, bouncing along microwave relays from California, cease. The ghostly dishes wait, sentinels in the wheat fields, the mountain passes, the desert, and the ancient western forests beyond. "We think of Debbie sometimes," says Luava softly. "We know Fred does too." "She'd had a hard life before, but all she really needed was someone who would value her," Mark observes. "If my dad had allowed that, Debbie and Fred would have really blossomed. "You know in Matthew 12:20? Where Jesus says, 'the bruised reed I will not break; the flickering candle I won't snuff out; instead I will be your hope'? With the evil and the hurt he's caused during his life, my father has no right to the name of 'pastor'-nevermind 'guardian of The Place."

Della A. is more direct. She has a message for the pastor: "You tell Fred Phelps I'll wait in hell for him." Margie remembers Debbie's sister, Bernadette, knocked on their door one day. "She went on about how we were responsible for Debbie's death." Bernadette admits doing that. "I do blame them," she says. "My sister had a tough enough time without those people. If she hadn't met them, she'd probably be alive today." "We thought she was really coming along," reflects a former staff member at Topeka West. "Of all the kids there who had difficult backgrounds to overcome, we felt sure she'd be one of those who would." No one who knew her has forgotten her. Not the sisters at St. Vincent's, not her teachers, not even her dentist when she was a child. "I was just thinking of her," admitted one. You were? Why? "Oh...your thoughts return to someone like that...so young and full of promise...a really sweet girl...and then to die before her life ever had a chance to start...yes...Debbie comes to mind from time to time." "Valgos?" Fred Jr.'s voice sounds eerie and distant over the phone. "That name isn't familiar." Silence. "But then I had lots of girlfriends. At least five or six in high school."

No one else remembers that. "Oh...oh, I remember now. The little girl at the orphanage?" Two years later, Fred Jr. married Betty, the woman he'd brought home that Valentine's Day. Betty was approved by his father.

She was the second woman he'd ever dated. For the moment, this article shall abandon cynicism and consider beginner's luck in the search for mates. After all, Mark Phelps is quite happy with his first date of 22 years ago. So is Luava. And, if Fred Jr. and Debbie were destined for each other, what happy chance they met on his first date. However, the odds that Fred would then meet Miss Right directly after he met Debbie begin to gnaw at the suspension of disbelief in this fire and brimstone fiction of predestined characters. "I think not being able to have Debbie, and her committing suicide, I think that just broke my brother," observes Mark. "After that, he submitted totally. He'd lost his thrill for life. He went to law school, like his dad wanted; he married a girl his dad approved; and he shouldered a role in The Place. "And that's where he is today. He just turned 40." Betty was a music major at K-State when she met Fred Jr. She had perfect pitch and played between eight and ten instruments. However, she transferred to Washburn for her last two years of college, and went to law school on command. Mark remembers a time in 1973, when Betty was visiting Fred Jr. in the kitchen and the pastor started beating Nate savagely with the mattock in an adjoining room. Betty had been eating a cantaloupe and she shoved her spoon all the way through it and screamed: Stop it!" Says Mark: "The old man came in from the church where he'd been beating Nate, and he said to Betty: 'You got a problem with this?' Then he turned to Fred Jr.: "If that girl has a problem with this, then I'm not going to put up with it! You better get her under subjection, or you're not gonna be marryin' her!"

In one of his fax missives, the pastor has stated: "Wives who have strayed too far traditional family values of home and children need to be whipped into godly obedience. Sparing the rod and sparing either the children or the women is a strategy that fundamentalist Christians reject. Complacency and misplaced 'equality' notions produce tormented, social misfits like (here Phelps names several female city officials) who are hormonally and intellectually incapable of rational thought. Like the termite, these so-called modern ideas promulgated by Satan's servants are destroying the studs of the family unit." Nate remembers: "Betty was put in her place, both by the old man and Freddy. And she was the butt of numerous comments from the pulpit over the following months until she finally displayed the 'proper spirit of obedience'.

Luava recalls that, some time after Debbie's death, Betty and she were talking when suddenly Fred's new girl started crying. "He still carries her picture in his wallet," she sobbed. "He's in love with a dead girl." The Phelps family forbade reporters from asking Fred Jr. about Debbie Valgos during interviews, and threatened to sue the paper if it printed the story of the couple's broken dreams.

"That child was very precious to us," says the former director of St. Vincent's, Sister Frances Russell, who refused to give an interview, "and all my instincts are to protect her-even in death." Sister Therese Bangert came to the orphanage the year after Debbie died, "so I didn't know her," she says. "But I remember her because of the impact her death had on everyone who was there. Even today, mentioned the name of Debbie Valgos around some of the sisters would be like knocking the wind out of them." Just as he threatened to shove the blind runner off the track when the old man was in his way, charitable Fred Phelps toppled Debbie Valgos into her abyss when she threatened to lure one of his Chosen from The Place. "He was scared of her He knew she'd take Fred Jr. from him," says Mark. "My father saw Debbie's weak spot-her self-esteem-and he did everything in his power to drive a sword through it...right into her heart. "Debbie didn't hate life like my father. She loved it. He knew she'd never fit in there. Eventually she'd leave and pull Freddy with her." The pastor's second son adds: "If, during the course of your investigation, you'd discovered my father had something to do with Debbie's death, I would not have been surprised. That's how far I think he was willing to go to keep us on as adult servants to his ego." This chapter focused on the torture, kidnapping, and later troubles of Kathy Phelps and the tragedy of Fred Jr. and Debbie Valgos because these facts provide a clear insight into the horror coming of age held in the house of the good pastor Phelps. It has been an inquiry into a man who gathers a following wherever souls are writhing in agony from the evil done to them. It is a look behind the veil of a false prophet who, with investigation, appears more and more as a new type of serial killer: Pastor Phelps is too clever, too cowardly, and too lawyerly to kill the bodies. His life is a trail of murdered souls. And his worst victims have been his own family.

No man or woman living on the Phelps block has been allowed to become the plant foreshadowed by the seed. This chapter has revealed the betrayal and murder of three spirits by Phelps, would-be prophet of the subdivided prairie, hopeful John Brown of religious radio.

Kathy Phelps' life remains at the level of subsistence and self- destruction. Her brother, Nate, has been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It is quite likely that Kathy suffers from it also. Today, but for the statute of limitations, the brutal beatings and torture this pretty teenager experienced would bring a long jail sentence to their perpetrator.

Fred Jr. never became a history teacher. Recently, he left the law profession and works for the Kansas Department of Corrections. Debbie Valgos died of a broken heart. A quick survey of the curricula vitae of the Phelps children shows his astonishing success in their conforming to his wishes. In fact, the Phelps Plan because a sausage factory for loyal and legal support of one man's ambitions: *Of the 13 children, 11 got law degrees-nine of those from Washburn University *Of the nine loyal offspring and four approved spouses, all but one took law degrees; eight have undergraduate degrees in Corrections or Criminal Justice. One can only wonder why the pandemic fascination for prison among the Phelps loyalists. For the nine kids who stayed with Fred, God provided only three spouses from within the church. Fred Jr. and brother Jonathon had to provide for themselves. They became Westboro outlaws to find mates among the damned.

When they eventually returned to the fold, these 'tainted women' were only accepted after a long probation and apprenticeship at being a wife- in-subjection. Six of the Phelps daughters remain the compound. Two of the, were betrothed to Chosen already residing in The Place. The rest grow old. Perhaps bitter. Alternately resentful and desperately dependent on the one man in their life. To chronicle the failures of others among the loyal Phelps children in their youthful attempts to escape over the wall of their father's fear and ego is to compose a litany of unhappy and sordid tales, ones that would burn the ears of the listener. "You know she's admitted she's a whore," says Phelps of Shawnee County D.A., Joan Hamilton. "She hasn't admitted she's a whore," replies ABC's John Stossell. They're taping for 20/20: "She admitted she had a one night stand." "Then, if you believe the Bible, she's a whore," insists Phelps. "Shackin' up with some guy one night or a thousand nights, she meets the Bible definition of a depraved, adulterous, whorish woman."

Pastor Phelps would be wise to take a quick poll of the home team, especially his daughters. He might find his glass house full of mischief. The misadventures of the clan Phelps can be pursued into allegations of adultery, fornication, illegitimacy, and abortion without fear of libel.

However, since it is also the thesis of this article that his children are actually the principal victims of Pastor Phelps, it is not appropriate to expose the rest of these embarrassing stories in detail. Despite their strident condemnation of others' equal and lesser sins, it will suffice to point out the foibles of his children would make as interesting reading for the pastor's fax gossip as anything he's printed. If those without sin shall toss the first stones, the grim clan at

Westboro will have to keep a tight grip on theirs. With his private genetic following, Pastor Phelps has found a world perhaps he's always sought. One where they care for him and do his bidding and never leave him. To make that happen required the promise of their youth be devoted to the unsettled scores of his past. Fred Phelps crushed the innocence and joy, the dreams of all but three of his children. His reputation as a civil rights advocate is perhaps ironic. The pastor's chains are subtle, but stronger than the iron ones worn by the ancestors of those he often brags he's helped free. The children who were raised in the nightmare of 12th Street carry their shackles in their hearts. It is their fear of their father's key to hell, and their view that the world is hateful and hates them, that, like the elephants in India, keeps them serving the will of a man who, by now they must realize, is much smaller than themselves. The vulnerable pastor hoards his hell- stunned flock close around his own flickering candle. He pulls them like a threadbare cloak about his old wounds, huddling against the cutting hawk of a cold soul wind blowing from somewhere out of his past.

Sitting in her mother's house, the sinking afternoon sun pours through the screen door, casting its soft gold across the widow's tattered carpet. Della A. offers, a little reluctantly and her eyes bright with guilt, the last moments of her daughter: a First Communion veil; a dried corsage from an Easter Sunday get-to-together, and the photo album Debbie kept at the orphanage. On its cover, printed in the awkward, block letters of a bruised but hopeful new reed, a flickering candle not yet quenched, are the words:

I LOVE FRED PHELPS

"Debbie Valgos was a whore extraordinaire," snaps Margie. But the father's words sound empty and formulaic on the daughter's tongue.