Chapter One Chapter One
Samantha Sally was fresh out of a bad marriage when she met Chris Hammer at the Route 66 car rally near Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was the summer of 2004 and she was nineteen years old. George W. Bush was on his way to reelection and Mark Zuckerberg had just launched Facebook from his dorm and “If I Ain’t Got You” by Alicia Keys was being belted from every teen bedroom across America. Sam was living with her parents and younger sister in backwater Oklahoma, desperate to escape. Richard and Lisa Sally had raised Sam and her sister, Lori, in nearby Arkansas as devout Jehovah’s Witnesses, a millenarian Christian denomination that believes in an impending Armageddon and rejects most earthly pleasures, like holidays and pop culture. The problem for Sam and Lori was that they liked earthly pleasures—Gorillaz, Titanic, birthday parties—and they didn’t want to live in the lusterless version of the world in which their parents had raised them.

The sisters had come to the realization over the past few years that the Jehovah’s Witness teachings of their childhood weren’t for them. Sam had tried to leave the religion once, when she was sixteen, for a marriage to a non-Witness man named Robert. But the relationship ended violently, and it was only a couple of years before she ended up back where she started, stuck with her sister and her overzealous parents in a forest-green log cabin in a remote area of Oklahoma. Though they were young, both sisters had already endured a series of bad relationships: Sam with her ex-husband, Robert, who was violent and abusive, and Lori with an ex-con who’d gotten her pregnant. Now the two were sharing a room at their parents’ house while Lori waitressed at Denny’s and Sam stayed home. Sam was seeking a new way out—and Lori, younger by thirteen months and eleven days, was ready to go with her.

Chris was 6'5" and broad, with dark blond hair and an easy smile. He was a few years older than Sam, twenty-three, and had a steady job as an account manager at White Cap, a national construction material supplier. Like Sam, he hailed from Arkansas, and the two shared certain pleasures, like racing cars and drinking cans of Bud and blasting country rock. Chris was outgoing and made friends wherever he went, but he was also sweet and inexperienced—a departure from the kind of guys Sam usually dated. He was laid-back and easygoing, and in Sam he saw a breezy confidence that he found both attractive and terrifying.

From the moment their mutual friend Cody introduced them at the racetrack, Sam knew she’d reel Chris in. Sam was beautiful—pale-faced, with round, denim-blue eyes, an aquiline nose, and a bow-shaped mouth—and quick with a comeback or sarcastic comment. She was feminine but not girly; though her personal style veered tomboy, she took great care with her appearance, always lining her eyes with dark pencil. There were some men in whom she could cultivate an almost desperate sense of desire, a desire that blinded them to the ways in which she could be cunning and manipulative. Sam’s flirtatiousness and innate charm, her ability to seem simultaneously wounded and tough, the way she could make you feel like you were the only person in the room: These qualities were potent aphrodisiacs for men like Chris, who found themselves wanting to save her without realizing Sam would never let herself be saved. In Chris, the desire to please Sam was so strong that not long after they met, he sold his prized race car to buy her a Honda CBR600RR motorcycle.

Chris lived in Springdale, a small industrial city in the northwest corner of Arkansas that serves as the world headquarters for Tyson Foods. Even if, like Chris, you didn’t work at a Tyson plant, which the majority of the city’s residents did, the company’s influence was evident everywhere you turned: The school was the Helen Tyson Middle School and the highway was the Don Tyson Parkway and the park was the Randal Tyson Recreational Complex. Even the air—especially downtown near the poultry farms—carried the slight scent of chicken shit. The city, Arkansas’s fourth largest, was at the time in the midst of a population boom, driven primarily by its abundance of blue- and white-collar jobs. A significant portion of the new population were Spanish-speaking immigrants who flocked to the area for work at companies like Walmart and Tyson. The city was much more diverse than other parts of Arkansas, and its proximity to the University of Arkansas, only twenty minutes away by car, meant it was home to a handful of academics and white-collar workers.

Springdale was only fifteen minutes from where Sam and Lori had grown up in a little Arkansas town called Lowell. Lowell was tiny, less than ten square miles, and nestled along the old St. Louis–San Francisco Railway on a plateau in the Ozark Mountains. Five thousand mostly white residents lived in split-levels and farmhouses separated by rolling pastures, on streets with names like Cow Face Road and Apple Blossom Avenue. The town itself was run-down but the nature that surrounded it was immense and breathtaking; Lowell is on the edge of Arkansas’s largest state park, packed with hiking trails, shooting ranges, campsites, and lakes. The Sally family’s small farm (or lot), where the girls lived with their parents until their late teens, occupied more than an acre of flat grasslands fed from the east by the snaking White River. The farm sat at the end of a dead-end road, which during rainstorms had been so notoriously treacherous to travel down that the homesteaders who settled there in the 1840s nicknamed it Mudtown Road. Sam and Lori grew up digging for snakes in that mud, the mud that trapped mail-carrying stagecoaches and stuck to Confederate soldiers’ boots during the Civil War, and later, when the J.B. Hunt Trucking Company relocated its headquarters to Lowell in 1969, the mud that caught and hardened in the wheels of their father’s truck.

Their father, Richard, was a long-haul driver and their mother, Lisa, worked long hours as an office secretary, so the Sally sisters were left to their own devices for the majority of their childhood, tasked with feeding themselves and getting themselves to and from school. On the rare occasions Richard was home, Sam liked to help him work on the truck, throwing on a pair of too-big Carhartt overalls, eagerly fetching his tools or tagging along to the auto-parts store. Richard was six-foot and burly, and when they were kids he’d had a dark full beard, a mustache, and the shaggy black hair of the Cherokee and Seneca ancestors that made up part of his lineage. Lori and Sam used to call him “the Gorilla,” but his friends just called him “Blackie.” Lisa, by contrast, was reserved and quiet, prone to crying spells set off by domestic inconveniences like a lost sock or a dirty plate left in the sink. She’d been raised to put her husband first: It was Richard’s needs she was primarily there to serve, and her devotion made him ferociously protective. They never fought, especially in front of Sam and Lori, who grew up thinking marriages never had arguments. If they did, they were resolved in secret, with the woman submitting to the man.

As kids, the sisters would go hiking or possum hunting with their cousins, who were also Witnesses, and on days when it rained, Lori—much quieter and more studious by nature—would curl up on the floor with a book, while Sam watched the few movies her parents allowed. She loved Wishbone and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and The Lion King, and her favorite was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the 1962 western starring John Wayne and James Stewart. But even the most innocent-seeming entertainment could prove problematic in the Sally household. Once, when the girls were in elementary school, their mother Lisa became so worried the house was being haunted by a demon that she called the local church elders to come inspect it. When the men arrived they tore through all the family’s books and movies before they settled on the source of the evil: an old VHS copy of Dances with Wolves, and one of Field of Dreams. “You have to burn these movies,” they told her, apparently not fans of Kevin Costner. “Then you’ll get rid of the demons.”

Demons, wickedness, the end of the world—it all loomed large in the Sally sisters’ childhoods. Earthly happenings seemed to concern their Jehovah’s Witness community only when they affected the afterlife. Their day-to-day lives were simply meant to be endured until the battle of Armageddon. According to the Pew Research Center, 79 percent of Christians believe in the second coming of Christ, but four in five Christians don’t believe that coming will happen in their lifetime. For Jehovah’s Witnesses like the Sallys, however, Armageddon can happen at any moment. Until then, life was essentially a waiting game that felt at once impossibly urgent—the world could literally end at any second—and frustratingly stagnant—yeah, but it hasn’t yet. As the Sally parents saw it, the only thing worth doing in a world facing certain doom was warning other people of that doom, so they spent much of their time preaching to their neighbors. The other kids in their town, mostly your run-of-the-mill Evangelicals, were allowed to participate in extracurricular activities and academic pursuits, but the Sally sisters were sequestered from all that, discouraged by their mother from even doing homework, as it distracted from proselytizing.

As kids, the sisters spent several hours each week worshipping at the Springdale Kingdom Hall, a squat brick building just a short drive down Route 265 from their farmhouse. There are more than 8.5 million Witnesses worldwide, but the Sallys were one of only a handful of Witness families in Arkansas, where less than 1 percent of residents identify as Witnesses and the vast majority are Evangelical Christian. Every Sunday a public speaker would deliver a lecture based on scripture, followed by a discussion of an article chosen by the elders from the Watchtower magazine. Sam and Lori would sit beside their mother, Lisa, in straight-backed chairs upholstered in brown wool, and Sam, who was always less interested in religion than her sister, would try not to squirm with boredom as congregants discussed the upcoming Armageddon, a final war between human governments and God predicted by the New Testament. When that final battle was over, the Witnesses believed, God would prevail and the earth would be cleansed of nonbelievers. Jesus Christ would descend from heaven to create a heaven on earth for Witnesses, who would be granted immortality. Since 1914, the Witnesses believe, humanity has been living in the “last days,” but—after a series of failed predictions of Armageddon’s arrival—they now believe that it’s impossible to predict exactly when Armageddon will come and the last days will end.

Most children think about death as something far-off, a distant horror that can be buried under the immediacy of the present, but for the Sally family, death was happening now, all around them all the time, and if you didn’t follow the words of the elders, you would never make it to Paradise.

Chris lived in a brick duplex in Springdale with three bedrooms, a full garage, and a private backyard; not long after he met Sam at the rally race, he agreed to let her move in. A few months afterward, Lori began staying some nights at Chris’s as well; he had an extra bedroom, and being with her sister and her boyfriend was a welcome escape from the confines of her parents’ house. Sam got a part-time job at the White Cap where Chris worked, and Lori started working the overnight shift at Walmart in Bentonville, splitting her time between her parents’ house and Chris’s. She paid rent and helped keep the place clean, so Sam and Chris were happy to have her.

Sam had stopped attending Witness services when she was sixteen, and Lori followed suit a year or two later. To Sam, who’d never really bought into the doom and gloom of her parents’ religion, it was almost a nonevent, but Lori had been a true believer, so losing her faith affected her tremendously. The two sisters were excommunicated from the congregation—officially known as “disfellowshipping” in the Witness faith, a punishment based on a verse from Corinthians that reads, “Stop keeping company with anyone called a brother who is sexually immoral or a greedy person or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or an extortioner, not even eating with such a man.” Their congregation was informed at its weekly meeting that first Sam, and then Lori, were no longer Witnesses, and as such were to be shunned by their community. According to Witness literature, Lisa and Richard weren’t even supposed to say hello to their daughters, because “a simple ‘Hello’ to someone can be the first step that develops into a conversation and maybe even a friendship. Would we want to take that first step with a disfellowshipped person?” Despite these rules, Lisa maintained a cordial relationship with her daughters, though always secretly, so that she herself didn’t risk being disfellowshipped.

Once the sisters moved in with Chris in Springdale, he and Sam started throwing parties almost every night at the duplex, but since Lori worked the night shift, she usually skipped them. When she did attend, she usually only drank a beer or two before retreating to her room. Sam easily ingratiated herself with Chris’s friends from the racing world, but Lori found it hard to relate to them. She wasn’t good at making small talk, and she didn’t have Sam’s innate social grace—being around other people often left her exhausted. Ever since Sam had left to be with her first husband, Robert, when Sam was sixteen, Lori felt like Sam had put a wall up between them. Sam loved Lori, but she didn’t want her being the third wheel all the time. She was embarrassed by Lori’s lack of social skills—her sister talked too much at the wrong time and not enough when it was called for. Sam also felt that Lori was jealous of her, especially of the fact that she had a boyfriend. When they were children, the Sally sisters seemed built to function as a complementary pair: One sister’s strength was the other sister’s weakness. But the older they got, the more their differences seemed like a burden instead of a balm, as if they were two magnets turned against each other, attracting and repelling in equal measure.

Lori, for her part, was grateful to Chris for letting her stay with them—it was certainly a better living situation than staying with her restrictive parents full-time, who since her disfellowshipping barely spoke to her except to enforce their archaic rules—but she often wished she could afford her own place. Usually she spent her meager time off working on crochet projects, experimenting with new hair colors, or going for long walks. Lori felt lost. Even though she had disavowed many tenets of the Witness faith, she was still deeply influenced by the effects of her religious upbringing, whether she wanted to be or not. Lori felt guilty that she’d been disfellowshipped and believed that her parents were good Christian folk, and she was an inherently evil person who didn’t deserve stability and happiness. She wasn’t sure, yet, what exactly it was that she wanted in life, but she felt like she had already failed to become the person she’d been raised to be: a God-fearing Witness wife and mother.

Chris knew about the sisters’ religious past, but to him it was only outwardly evident in Lori. He had trouble relating to her and found her clueless, socially awkward, and eager to please, but with no idea how. Chris had let Lori move in for help with the rent, and to please Sam, but the two weren’t really friends. Sam had told him once that she thought Lori was the pretty one, but Chris didn’t see it. Mostly he considered Lori to be Sam’s awkward little sister, and though the two seemed to genuinely love each other, it seemed like Lori was living her life in Sam’s shadow. He thought maybe Lori resented Sam for how easily things came to her. But even though Sam appeared confident, she suffered from low self-esteem and self-doubt and constantly sought approval and validation from others, her loyalty always seeming to lie with whoever complimented her last.

On weekends the sisters enjoyed drag racing on the backroads of Arkansas, reveling in the feeling of being free from their parents’ rules. Sam had always loved racing, and Lori got into it because of her. One day after the two had gone shopping and were heading back to Chris’s house, Sam proposed a race—Lori in her Hyundai sedan, and Sam on her motorcycle. Lori took an unexpected detour and beat Sam through a light. Sam was incensed; she sped up to over 100 mph and blew through the next green, but by the time she reached the following intersection the light had turned red. Sam was going too fast to stop, so she panicked and laid her bike down across the intersection as Lori, behind her, watched in horror. Sam skidded across moving traffic, her head barely missing the metal crossbar of a dump truck, and miraculously slid through to the other side unscathed, finishing by heroically standing her motorcycle up like she was the star of a Fast and Furious movie. Slowly she used her shaking hands to peel off her helmet as Lori pulled up beside her in her Hyundai, screaming and crying. The sisters were breathless, pumped full of adrenaline. “Don’t ever do that again!” Lori screamed, the two of them laughing maniacally.

Sam was like that—impulsive, stubborn, and as reckless with her body as a teenage football player. In Springdale that summer, she was feeling especially brash, keen to outrun the mounting troubles and disappointments she’d accumulated ever since she’d gotten married three years earlier. Her now ex-husband, Robert, was nineteen when they first met in an internet chatroom, and Sam was sixteen, temping part-time as a receptionist at the air-conditioning company where her mother worked. He was broad-shouldered and short—only an inch or two taller than Sam—with a mouth that turned down at the sides and a freckle beside his nose. He lived in Indiana, an eight-hour drive through the Ozarks from the Sallys’ home in Lowell. Sam had never been to Indiana, but to her, a girl who had never lived outside of the four contiguous states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas, it must’ve sounded exotic. Indiana was close to St. Louis, and not that far from Chicago, but most importantly it was not Lowell, where she was feeling increasingly suffocated by her parents’ rules.

Back then, Sam had thought it was Robert who would be her savior, a ticket to a new life. Marrying him at only sixteen had meant she’d been officially disfellowshipped from the church, so no more weekly trips to the Kingdom Hall, or forced proselytizing, or arcane rules about what music she could listen to. But Robert was cruel—a predator, really, who became abusive not long after they started dating. He was a nineteen-year-old ex-sailor who found Sam, a vulnerable teenage girl, on the internet. Chris, by contrast, had no temper and was happy to just go with the flow. He was so nice, Sam thought, but the trouble with niceness is that it is also, sometimes, boring. Even after what she’d been through with Robert, Sam was looking for adventure, for another thrill-seeker—she was young, after all, and just starting her adult life. She didn’t crave stability the way her sister, Lori, did; often when she found it she moved on before it could really take root.

Though Sam was the one with more dating experience, eighteen-year-old Lori had also become intimately acquainted with the unique cruelty of which some men were capable. In elementary school, she and Sam had been sexually abused by a family member. The sisters didn’t tell their parents what happened, fearing that Lisa and Richard would take the matter to the church elders instead of the police. Jehovah’s Witnesses have a “Two Witness Rule” established by the congregational judicial policy and based on chapter 19, verse 15 in the Book of Deuteronomy: If the accused has not confessed to the crime, at least two witnesses—both Jehovah’s Witnesses—are needed to corroborate that the crime occurred. This can make child sexual abuse, to which there are rarely ever two witnesses, especially hard to tackle. If a member of the congregation is somehow found to have committed child abuse, the Watchtower Society—the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ main governing body—has a peculiar process for reporting. Local elders are instructed to write a report answering twelve specific questions, such as “Does anybody else know about the abuse?” and “Did the abuse happen more than once?” and mail it in a blue envelope to Watchtower headquarters in New York. Sometimes the Society will suggest a specific punishment for a perpetrator—typically temporary shunning, or extra Bible study.

Over the last few decades, lawsuits filed against the Watchtower Society across the globe have revealed a long history of sexual abuse allegations, resulting in millions of dollars being paid to complainants as part of settlements. As kids, Sam and Lori saw these dynamics play out in their own family when one of their family members accused her husband of sexually abusing their child. But the local elders vouched for her husband’s character and told her that she couldn’t possibly be telling the truth. Their family member was eventually shunned by the family and the congregation, and Sam and Lori didn’t see her again until they were adults. As kids and young adults, the sisters didn’t want the same thing to happen to them, so they kept the secret, not talking about it even with each other until their early twenties. Even then Sam was cagey about the abuse depending on her mood, sometimes talking openly with Lori about it, and sometimes denying it happened altogether. Pretending it never happened was easier than admitting that it had, and it had changed her, whether she acknowledged it or not.

As accusations of sexual abuse against Jehovah’s Witness elders were cropping up in communities across the country, throughout the ’60s and ’70s, the nation was in the midst of an awakening about the existence and frequency of child sexual abuse. In 1962, pediatrician Henry Kempe published “The Battered Child Syndrome,” a research paper that outlined the symptoms and impact of child sexual abuse. The paper, for which he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, helped establish child sexual abuse as a growing concern within the medical community, and spurred state and federal governments to enact a host of laws aimed at protecting children from mistreatment throughout the ’70s. But despite increasing public awareness around the issue, until the 1980s, there was little information around just exactly how prevalent child sexual abuse was. Dr. David Finkelhor wanted to—and would—change all that.

A graduate of Exeter, Harvard, and UNH, by the mid-1980s, Finkelhor was already on his way to becoming one of the most well-known and respected experts in child sexual abuse research. In 1979, he conducted one of the first surveys of child sexual abuse, interviewing New England college students about its prevalence and discovering that 1 percent of women and 9 percent of men reported experiencing CSA. He soon joined the Family Violence Research Program at the University of New Hampshire and continued his research into the subject.

In 1985, the year that Sam was born, Finkelhor and fellow researcher Angela Browne proposed a new organizing framework for understanding the impact of childhood sexual abuse. At the time, victims of sexual abuse who suffered symptoms like flashbacks, insomnia, and depression were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder; Drs. Finkelhor and Browne wanted to drill down into the specifics of child sexual abuse, arguing that its differences from traumatic events like war and violent rape meant it deserved a separate, more precise symptom model.

“The literature on child sexual abuse is full of clinical observations about problems that are thought to be associated with a history of abuse, such as sexual dysfunction, depression, and low self-esteem,” they wrote. “However, such observations have not yet been organized into a clear model that specifies how and why sexual abuse results in this kind of trauma.” Their model proposed four “traumagenic dynamics,” which would forever shift the way the psychology community thought about the repercussions of sexual assault. The dynamics—traumatic sexualization, betrayal, powerlessness, and stigmatization—gave doctors a vocabulary for symptoms that had previously been grouped simply under PTSD and helped them better understand the specific challenges child sexual abuse survivors faced. It was the beginning of a boom in psychological research on the impact of what would later be termed ACEs—or Adverse Childhood Experiences—and how those experiences, like sexual assault, neglect, and abuse, affected people later in life.

The ways in which the Sally sisters would react to the world as adults would, in part, be shaped by the ways in which they reacted to the abuse they’d experienced as kids. Depression, lack of trust, feelings of guilt and shame, revictimization: They would manifest in the sisters’ lives in very different ways, leading them down two diverging paths. While Lori would eventually choose to acknowledge and confront what had happened to her, Sam chose a different coping mechanism: pretending it hadn’t happened at all.

Trauma, especially trauma experienced as a child, when the brain is still developing, can deeply affect memory and even rewire the way our brains react to stress. If an experience is particularly traumatic or overwhelming, the brain can purposefully wall off that memory, keeping it from being accessed to prevent the victim from being retraumatized. Multiple studies have analyzed the way trauma interacts with memory, and found victims often have memory deficits when it comes to list-learning tasks and narrative recall. Other studies, including one published in 2010 in the peer-reviewed journal BMC Neurology, pushed this theory a bit further, finding that “physical neglect and emotional abuse might be associated with memory deficits in adulthood, which in turn might pose a risk factor for the development of psychopathology.”

Some kids cope with trauma by becoming stuck in an obsessive loop, constantly replaying what happened to them in their heads, unable to move on or think about anything else. Another common path for survivors is denial and dissociation. Research collected by the American Counseling Association has shown that some survivors disassociate to protect themselves from recurrent abuse, which, once the abuse is over, can lead to “feelings of confusion, feelings of disorientation, nightmares, flashbacks, and difficulty experiencing feelings.” Others deny that it happened altogether, or convince themselves that if something did happen, it wasn’t all that bad and they should just get over it. These two survival mechanisms, dissociating and denying, can continue into adulthood, creating an unhealthy pattern that survivors may fall into when encountering difficult life experiences—experiences like those Sam and Lori would soon confront.

A few months after the sisters moved to Springdale to live with Chris, Sam and Lori met Juan Servantes at a training program for a multilevel marketing company called HYLA. Juan was broad-shouldered with a narrow waist, thick eyebrows, and light brown skin. He had just gotten out of the navy, where he’d served two tours in the Persian Gulf as a navigator. He and his brother, Tony, rented small apartments next to each other in nearby Fayetteville while Juan did HYLA training for extra cash and worked occasional paint projects for a local contractor. The girls introduced themselves and exchanged contact information, promising to invite Juan to the raucous Halloween party Sam and Chris were planning.

Lori was curious about Juan, but also wary. He was twenty-two—four years older than Lori, three older than Sam—and hailed from a large Spanish-American family in Florida. He was stocky and strong—he loved elk hunting and fishing—but, like Sam, he had an underlying sensitivity. Though Juan doesn’t have much of a public internet presence, the Twitter account he started years after meeting the Sally sisters is littered with messages that efface that same dichotomous personality: Vulnerable tweets about how much he misses an ex, perhaps one of the sisters, are spliced between ones about how much he loves Fight Club, steam punk, and drinking beer.

Lori felt safe with Juan. He was tough and exuded an aura of protectiveness, but he was also sweet in a way that calmed her. A few weeks after meeting, Sam, Chris, Lori, and Juan decided to head to a HYLA convention together in Joplin, Missouri, still hoping they might be able to join the program and make some money in addition to their day jobs. Sam and Chris drove in Chris’s car and Juan went with Lori in her Hyundai Elantra. The group raced the entire way there, shooting at 130 mph up I-49 while Lori and Juan talked and flirted for the whole hour-long journey.

After that, Lori was sure that she was developing feelings for Juan. He offered the stability she craved but was also able to let go and enjoy himself in a way none of the Witness men she’d encountered could. She decided she’d go for it. Unbeknownst to the sisters however, Juan saw Lori as a friend—and was much more interested in Sam.

A few days after the convention, Sam and Lori were in Sam’s room getting ready for the Halloween party Sam and Chris were throwing at the duplex. Chris and Sam had invited a bunch of their friends from White Cap and from the racing world, fellow twentysomethings who, like the majority of people their age, were more concerned with drinking and having a good time than finding stable work and starting a family—things many of them, including the sisters, weren’t set up economically or logistically to do. Lori, who usually hung by herself or with Sam and her friends, was tagging along. The sisters hadn’t been allowed to celebrate Halloween as children, and now that they were adults, Sam in particular took pleasure in celebrating the holidays she’d missed as a kid. Though her interests skewed traditionally masculine, she never missed an opportunity to get dressed up; when she was a teenager, Sam would borrow her popular friends’ clothes, the clingy halter tops and miniskirts her parents would never let her wear. She’d leave the house in her regular jeans and T-shirt, a backpack full of her best friend’s outfits slung over her shoulder to change into as soon as she was out of sight.

As Sam leaned in closer to the mirror to apply another coat of mascara, Lori started to talk. “Juan is really cute,” she swooned. For the last few days, her sister hadn’t shut up about her budding crush on Juan, and it was starting to grate on Sam. “I think I really like him,” Lori admitted. “I think I’m going to make a move on him tonight.”

Sam leaned away from the mirror to look over at her sister. She knew she had to tell Lori what she’d been thinking, but she also felt sheepish and worried Lori would judge her. Recently she’d been secretly considering breaking up with Chris, but everything was so complicated. He was a good guy, generous, and a pleasant companion; he wasn’t motivated by money the way Sam was, didn’t have that constant need for more, and was content to make whatever he needed to pay the bills and enjoy his youth. They spent weekends road-tripping and camping, and every Saturday night they went to the local track races. Chris thought she seemed happy, but Sam already felt ready to move on. Perhaps she thought their life together had become conventional, and as a young woman who had just broken free of lifelong strictures—from a conservative, religious childhood to an abusive first husband—she didn’t want to be trapped in new ones.

As they were getting ready for the Halloween party that night, Sam put the mascara down and looked hard at Lori. “Don’t ask Juan out,” she said. “Please. Don’t ask him out. I really like him.”

Lori laughed, incredulous. “You like him?” she asked. “You have a boyfriend!”

“Oh, I know. But I really like Juan,” Sam admitted. “I’m going to break up with Chris soon, it’s just not the right time now. Please?”

Lori eventually agreed, as Sam knew she would. Lori had learned early on that when her sister wanted something, nothing could keep her from having it, and any attempts to intervene would only make things worse. When it came to boys, the two sisters had always been competitive with each other—once, in middle school, Sam had gone out of her way to charm a boy named Ruben that Lori liked, just because she could—but usually Lori would give in and let Sam have what she wanted, because she didn’t want a man to get in between them. The pattern was usually the same: Lori would identify a guy she liked, and then Sam would use her beauty and wit to charm him, eventually telling Lori that actually she wanted that guy. Lori would retreat, feeling like she couldn’t compete with her older sister’s charisma and sex appeal. Ultimately, Sam always got what she wanted, because Lori always let her have it.

Sam spent most of the Halloween party flirting with Juan, while Lori sulked nearby. But a few days afterward, Juan invited Lori over to his apartment to hang out. When she arrived, a guy Lori’s age was perched shirtless on the kitchen countertop, his dark brown hair slicked back. Juan’s younger brother, Tony, was 5'10" and muscular and covered in tattoos, mostly of skulls, though he also had a large cross inked on the inside of his right forearm. Before the brothers settled in Arkansas, Tony—who was much more of a “bad boy” than Juan—had been arrested in Florida for grand theft in the third degree, though the case had been dismissed due to lack of evidence. He loved horror movies, bowhunting, and drinking, and like Juan he was looking to make money doing odd contractor jobs so he could maintain his lifestyle. In the apartment that night, Tony’s legs dangled off the counter with a casualness that made Lori shiver. He was sexy, she thought. And if she couldn’t have Juan—a promise she’d already made to her sister—then maybe Tony would do.

Lori and Tony hit it off, and soon they started dating. Lori liked that Tony was always either looking for a fight or a friend: If he couldn’t fight someone, he’d befriend them. Sam was relieved by this new development—this meant she could have Juan all to herself. One afternoon, after Chris got home from his shift at White Cap, Sam broke the news: She was moving out and leaving him for Juan.

Chris was shocked. Though Sam had a habit of breaking up with him to flirt with or pursue other men, until Juan, she’d always come back. He knew this time was different—she was actually moving out of the house and leaving him behind. Chris assumed Sam thought Juan could offer her more—money, cars, weed—and traded up. He’d always thought Sam was clever but not smart, cunning but also surprisingly gullible. When they’d first met, she’d told him that when she was younger a psychic had told her she would never have kids, so she’d decided not to because of that. Chris thought that was a strange way to make family planning decisions but chalked it up to Sam’s gullibility; she seemed to trust people blindly and believe they had her best interest at heart, even when they showed her time and time again that they did not. She trusted Juan just as easily, even though they’d only known each other a few weeks.

Sam’s abrupt decision to break up with Chris for Juan left Lori with nowhere to go, except the cabin her parents had moved to in Colcord, Oklahoma, where they had begrudgingly agreed to let her stay in spite of her disfellowshipping. The cabin was remote enough that Lori could sneak in and out of the house without other Witnesses knowing she lived there. But Lori didn’t want to go back permanently. Juan and Tony had apartments in a small two-story sandstone brick complex on Nettleship Street, near the University of Arkansas. They were tiny—each a one bedroom with a minuscule living room and kitchen—but in a nice area, a stone’s throw from the University of Arkansas Stadium and close to lots of restaurants and bars. Not wanting to return home for an extended period of time, Lori and Sam decided to move in with Tony and Juan after only a few weeks of dating. The brothers, infatuated with the sisters, were happy to oblige.

It was the third live-in relationship Sam had had in four years. Ping-ponging between relationships and living situations wasn’t unheard of within her social milieu: undereducated, underemployed Ozarks kids struggling to make a living while also living it up. To them, and so many other impoverished Americans, frequent moving was the norm, whether due to inadequate housing, eviction, or neighborhood violence.

Juan introduced the sisters to some of the friends he’d made during his short time in the area, who, like Sam, enjoyed smoking weed and drag racing. Lori believed many of the men were loosely affiliated with a local gang, which wouldn’t have been surprising given Arkansas’s history of gang violence. Since the ’90s, cities like Little Rock had struggled with increasing violent crime, attributed largely to an explosion in gang activity all over the state. Though rates of gang affiliation had begun to decrease in the state in the early aughts, many young people with few resources or family support were still drawn into gangs.

Not long after they met, two of Juan’s new friends—a tall Black man named Hector, who Lori purports was the gang leader, and his friend Joseph—asked Sam if she wanted to be initiated into the gang. She didn’t hesitate: She said yes right away. Even if they were dangerous, Sam didn’t think they posed any danger to her. That night, Sam and Juan sat in Juan’s tiny living room with Hector and Joseph, a short, wiry man who’d recently moved to Arkansas, and one of the many girls the two of them always had around. It was sparsely decorated, with just a couch and a TV, and tons of empty beer cans scattered on the kitchen counter. In order to officially be initiated into the gang, Hector said, they would have to prove their loyalty through an act of violence. Juan would have to beat up Sam in front of the group, and Sam would have to accept being beaten.

Sam’s heart fluttered, and something like panic arose in her throat. She wasn’t sure if they were serious. Juan didn’t want to hit Sam, he told them; he couldn’t. But before Juan could protest too much, Joseph began to punch Sam, hard, in the face—instead, watching her be hit would be Juan’s initiation. Each time Sam began to recover from one ringing blow he would land another. Her head was throbbing and she was so dizzy she could barely stand. Suddenly Hector was dragging her into the bedroom, and Juan was screaming while Joseph restrained him. She was bleeding from her face, and she didn’t have the strength to fight him off. He was big and she was small, he was strong and she was weak. In the bedroom, Hector raped Sam, while a girl whose name she didn’t know stood over them, laughing and encouraging him.

From her apartment next door, Lori could hear it all: the banging and crashing, her sister’s yelling. But Tony didn’t want her to see what was going on, insisting he wanted to protect her. Tony, who like Lori was the shyer sibling, had warned Juan against hanging out with these guys. Lori sat terrified in the dark of their apartment, listening to her sister suffer.

Even when they were kids, Lori had always tried her best to shield Sam—from the boys in Lowell who she’d sneak home, from their parents when Sam did something sure to draw punishment. But Sam never wanted her protection, even when she was in real danger. In the summer of 2002, not long after they’d gotten married, Robert and Sam temporarily relocated to a trailer on the Sally family property to give themselves a break from living with Robert’s parents in Indiana. Sam hadn’t yet officially been excommunicated from the Witness faith, but she also wasn’t practicing. One night, Lori was eating dinner on the picnic bench near the trailer when she heard her sister start screaming. She sprinted to the trailer, and found Robert straddling Sam, pinning her down on the ground, his hands around her throat. Lori grabbed Robert from behind, yanking him away from her sister. He was shocked; he wasn’t very big, but he also wasn’t used to people fighting back, especially women. Lori took a step back into the trailer doorway, and Robert followed her until they were standing nose to nose. He was panting, hard.

“If you’re going to hit someone, you better hit me,” Lori said, in that faux commanding tone she used when she was trying to stand up for Sam. She braced herself for Robert’s blows, but he just stood there, staring. He refused to touch her. Sam, still visibly shaken, inserted herself between her husband and her sister.

“Get out of here, Lori,” she’d spat, as if it was Lori who’d started the whole thing.

Back at Juan’s apartment, Hector and Joseph told Sam and Juan they were going to come back with a gun and kill them both for failing the initiation. Sam lay on the bed where they had left her, drifting in and out of consciousness. Juan zigzagged around the apartment, screaming that they had to leave. It made no sense; they had all just been hanging out, drinking beers, and now this?

Juan was insistent that they had to leave Arkansas, that if they were there when Hector and Joseph came back they’d surely be dead. Still dazed from the beating and the rape, Sam began throwing whatever clothes she could find into an overnight bag. Soon Tony was standing in the doorway, closely followed by Lori. When Lori saw Sam’s face, the blood crusted around her nose and the sallowness of her skin, she shrieked. “What happened?” she asked, crying and running to Sam’s side. But Sam had no time for her dramatics, or to comfort her sister about what she had been through. “They beat me, and they’re coming back to kill us,” Sam said. “We have to leave. And you and Tony should leave, too.”

Lori could barely comprehend what Sam was saying.

“We’re leaving right now, and if they come and find that we’re not here, they will kill you,” Sam told her sister. “You need to leave with us.”

“But why are they coming after you? What’s going on?” Lori cried, as Sam flew around the room, throwing her makeup and shoes into a bag. “We can’t just leave,” Lori continued. “We have nowhere to go! And Tony and I aren’t part of this anyway.”

Sam took a deep breath and looked up from her luggage. Lori didn’t get it. “It’s your life,” she said. “We can’t force you to do anything. We’re just telling you that you need to leave.”

When Sam and Juan were finished loading up the car with everything they could possibly fit, they told Lori they were leaving for Florida. They would stay with Juan and Tony’s parents for a little bit, at least until things calmed down in Fayetteville. They were genuinely scared of the gang, and running was better than calling the cops, Juan decided. Who knew what Hector and Joseph would do to them if the police got involved?

It only took a few hours for Lori and Tony to decide they were leaving, too. The two couples—Sam and Juan, Lori and Tony—had only been together for a few months, but they were all aimless and unmoored: young enough that everything in their lives felt temporary, their housing and their jobs and their friendships transitory and makeshift enough that picking up and leaving last-minute wasn’t a big deal. As long as they had enough money to make it to Florida, they’d be okay.

Tony and Lori loaded up Lori’s Elantra with everything they owned and took off. The sisters were starting over, again, in a new place. They had lived in large cities like Fayetteville and in tiny towns like Lowell, but never away from the Ozarks, which felt familiar and comfortable to them. Growing up on the farm, they’d been backcountry girls, raised on sandstone bluffs and alongside freshwater springs to be good Witnesses, and now they were zooming off to Florida with two brothers they barely knew. It was terrifying—especially with a dangerous gang on their heels—but also, in the moments where they could forget their fears, almost exciting. Possibilities stretched out before them like the asphalt of I-40 east, and at least, for now, they would be together.

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