ABSTRACT

Two years to the day after the 19 April 1993 conflagration at the Branch Davidians’ Mount Carmel compound near Waco, Texas, a bomb destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing at least 167 people and injuring hundreds more. Two years after that, in April 1997, jury selection finally began in the trial of Timothy McVeigh, the man eventually convicted of the bombing. Anticipating the upcoming trial, The New Yorker magazine’s “Talk of the Town” section led with a piece where Scott Malcomson (1997) recounted his visit to “Elohim City,” a dirt-poor white-separatist Christian fundamentalist community in the Ozarks. Over supper after church on Sunday, the sect’s founder, Robert G.Millar, mentioned to Malcomson that he had met a Pastor Jones in the 1950s, “a good pastor,” he called him. Did the New Yorker writer remember Jones? “Oh yes, the man in Guyana,” Malcomson replied, ending his piece, “Yes, I remembered him.”