Case No. 4262

Cicily Bennion
Feb 1, 2024
18 min read

“For now we see through a glass, darkly.

—1 Corinthians 13:12

It was a sweltering Texas afternoon when the court documents came in the mail. I’d been checking daily, walking to the mailbox with my young son. He was only fifteen months old, but he, too, was prone to restlessness in our small apartment, and so these daily trips to the mailbox had taken on a sort of adventurous quality. That sense of adventure was amplified by the fact that I was expecting something. I was pleased when I opened the box and found the plain manilla envelope sitting among the flyers and adverts. It was big but not as hefty as I’d hoped. I carried it back to the apartment, anxious to begin reading.

Weeks before, when I’d called the clerk of court in Park County, Wyoming to request these documents, my inexperience had been apparent, my voice climbing through the octaves as I spoke. I was playing journalist, something I’d never done before.

“What’s the name on the case?” she asked. It was near the end of business hours. She sounded tired.

“Kenneth A. Wiley was the defendant,” I said. “It would have been in the spring of 2000.” I had practiced these words before calling, writing down the name and date.

The court records were not digitized that far back, so she had to look through the files herself. Before putting me on hold, she braced me for disappointment. “I’ll see if I have anything. But we only keep records of cases in Park County. If it was tried anywhere else, I won’t have any record of it.”

I told her this was fine, thank you for looking. I didn’t tell her that I was sure it happened in Park County––that I had been at the church that day, a six-year-old playing on the lacquered maple floor of the gym just minutes before Ken Wiley drove his truck through the building, shattering two sets of glass doors then tearing through the foyer before he careened across the gym and came crashing to a halt at a cinderblock wall. Somehow, I’d missed it. Just moments before the destruction, my parents—done setting up the classroom for the next day’s lesson––called for me, said it was time to leave, and we drove the mile home. When we walked through the door, the phone was ringing and my father answered to hear a voice saying, “Dan, Dan! Somebody drove through the church!” At the time, my dad was serving as the bishop of the local Mormon congregation, so he’d been among the first people notified, but my parents were confused. Impossible, they thought. We’d been there just minutes before.

In Exodus 19, God descends upon Mount Sinai in the form of thunder and fire. Once before, Moses had spoken to God in a burning bush, but now the entire mountain was aflame. Thick clouds descended; lightning cracked. The voice of God rang out like a trumpet.

I was an adult before I read this story with any real sense of wonder. As a child, miracles and extravagant displays of power seemed like a given, but now I balk at the thought of a God chaotic and incandescent enough to cover Mount Sinai—a towering, dusty summit––in lightning and flames. Moses and his people balked, too. They stood before the mountain. They’d been told to prepare for this visit, to wash and sanctify themselves, but in the face of a fiery mountain, their preparations must have seemed laughably inadequate. In a booming voice, God called Moses up to the top of the mountain. In the Mormon book of Moses, we’re told that God spoke to him there, saying, “I am the Lord God Almighty, and Endless is my name: for I am without beginning of days or end of years; and is not this endless?”

I feel weary when I consider the question. Isn’t this endless? Think of the fatigue of an endless God, how far-reaching and all-encompassing it must be. This is the same God who is described again in Mormon scripture as having looked upon the wide expanse of eternity before the world was made. Imagine what it might mean to look out on the wide expanse of eternity, if you can. I cannot. I am resigned to my little portion of time in which tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day.

When the clerk of court hopped back on the phone, she didn’t sound as weary as she had a moment earlier. The search through the files hadn’t taken her long. I guessed that she’d seen the smattering of felony charges and wondered what I might want with this twenty-year-old case.

As I write, I, too, wonder what exactly I want with this twenty-year-old case. It kept me occupied most of the summer. During a visit home, I interviewed my parents. After twenty years, their recollections were remarkably clear. The incident was something that lived on almost as a legend in my family. My father remembered Ken, recalled talking with him on a few occasions. He described Ken as strange. Once, Ken told my father that’d he’d seen Satan in a vision, that he’d looked into his eyes and seen pure evil there. Stories like these are unnerving, even for members of a church that believes in visions and revelation. About that conversation, my dad said he didn’t know what Ken might have been struggling with at that time, but when Ken told him what he’d seen, my dad thought, “Well, I don’t imagine that happened. But people have dreams. People are on drugs, on alcohol.”

Whether Ken really was abusing drugs or alcohol, I do not know. There was no indication of that in any of the court records or news reports I read. But he was certainly ill. When I asked my dad if Ken had seemed unstable, he said yes, and added, “But to be quite honest with you, there’s a lot of people that are not completely stable. Not very many of them drive through the church.”

In the corner of the dining room in the house where I grew up, there sat a curio cabinet. Glass on all sides, it displayed miniature tea sets my mother collected. The intricately painted saucers and cups sat on glass shelves. When I was five or six years old, I liked to imagine that they were floating there, suspended in midair. The back of the cabinet was mirrored, so when I sat and stared at the tea sets, I saw my own face, too—my nose made piggish as it pressed against the glass, my lips like melted wax. I didn’t dare open the cabinet, not after the first time. I’d pulled the little cups from the display and spread them out on the floor in front of me and sipped at nothing until my mother found me there, the teacups displaced but unbroken. What had she said? I don’t remember the specifics of her reprimand, only that it stung. Given the way children, even as adults, tend to imitate their parents, I imagine she scolded me in much the same way I chide my own son today: in shrill exasperation punctuated by sighs. So, I learned not to open the door, but from time to time, I still knelt before the cabinet with my face against the glass, peering through the fog of my breath at the delicate things within. These were my first encounters with unattainability, that which was just out of reach. As an adult, this, for me, has translated to a fixation on the unknowable—a propensity for dwelling on endless, alternate timelines and doubts about the nature of reality. When I was a girl, my mind was simpler, occupied only with the shine of porcelain in afternoon light and a love for what I could not have.

I look now at the court records. When they’d arrived, I was disappointed to find that there was little there that hadn’t been reported in the local newspaper. But I am fascinated now by the language of these documents, their careful repetition as they list again and again the charge that “the defendant on or about April 10, 2000 did attempt to cause bodily injury with a deadly weapon to another person, namely––”

This is the place where each charge differs, listing the names of everyone there: Cody McNiven, Leon Sanders, Daniel Kelsey, Kelli Hoffman, Brandon Preator, Rachel Christie, Rebecca Davis, Brooks Robinson, Amy Page. Of those nine people, I know three. Cody McNiven owns the local Subway franchise. Brandon Preator was my high school Spanish teacher. Brooks Robinson was a few years ahead of me in high school––we sang in choir together. Each charge is “a felony… against the peace and dignity of the State of Wyoming.”

Early in my research process, I found an obituary for Ken Wiley dated August 15th, 2019 telling me that he’d died peacefully at his home in Fromberg, Montana. The announcement of his death features a recent photo of him with unkempt hair, wearing a red T-shirt. He smiles at the camera––a mouthful of beaming, white teeth. It’s a great smile. From the obituary, I learn that Ken and I share a birthday, that he was exactly forty-one years older than me. The obituary also tells me that Ken is a Montana native who “loved anything in the outdoors, fishing, hunting, camping; he really wanted to live in the mountains. He was also an excellent carpenter and handyman. He was also an excellent pool player.”

I find these details tender. I love how they come to us with such rapid succession, how they run into each other on the page. The obituary makes no mention of the incident at the church, though I don’t know why it would. It’s clear to me that it was written by someone who loved Ken, a mourner eager to put forth something other than what Ken may have been best known for––to place on the record details that were not his illness. He was also, he was also, is the obituary’s refrain.

In the Mormon book of Moses, we read that after speaking with God, Moses fell to the earth and lay there for hours, trying to regain his strength. While there, Satan appeared, saying “Moses, son of man, worship me.”

But Moses scoffed at the request, saying, “Where is thy glory that I should worship thee?” He then commanded Satan to leave and “Satan cried with a loud voice, with weeping and wailing, and gnashing of teeth; and he departed hence.”

In my personal set of scriptures there’s a note I left in the margins, dated June 3, 2008. I would have been fourteen. About Satan’s dramatic and pathetic departure, I wrote, “Is it really sick for me to feel sorry for him here?”

In the verses that follow, Moses is again caught up in a vision with God.

April 10, 2000 was a Monday. Only a handful of people were at the church that afternoon when Ken arrived. He was looking for a friend––a quiet, polite physician’s assistant named Greg Clark, but Greg was not there. Instead, Ken found some kids who attended the local community college. They’d just held a small baptism and were still milling about, chatting. My parents and I were there, too, though we did not see or interact with Ken that day. My parents were setting up a classroom in one of the far-flung wings of the building and I was playing in the gym. I have many memories of playing in the peculiar quiet of that church building. In the middle of the week, without all the Sunday churchgoers, the stillness could sometimes feel eerie, but we were there often enough on days other than Sunday that I grew accustomed to the hush. These midweek visits were necessitated by the fact that my father was the bishop and my mother taught seminary, which was, in this case, not a college for priests but an early morning scripture study group for high schoolers. Both of these jobs were demanding and required that my parents be at the church often. While they worked, I would perform for no one on the stage at the back of the gym or teach myself to dribble on the basketball court.

That, or something like it, is what I was doing on April 10, 2000. When Ken entered the building, he was smoking a cigarette—a fact that caused a lot trouble. While smoking in any church building might be frowned upon, it was especially unwelcome in the Mormon church Ken had just entered. Mormons, after all, follow a strict religious health code which includes, among other things, a ban on tobacco.

From reading the police report and the witness statements there, I’ve been able to get a good idea of what happened next. Several people asked Ken to put his cigarette out, which was something he did not want to do. He wandered the building, walking through the chapel and into one or two classrooms. He cut through the kitchen toward the baptismal font. At every turn, he was met by another person. Each of those people did nothing to help him find Greg Clark but asked that he put his cigarette out or leave. Ken became agitated. He told people he was allowed to smoke in the building. When two men cornered him by the back door, Ken threw up his arms and yelled, “I declare myself the high priest of this church!” and at that point they shoved him outside and locked the door behind him. Then they ran through the halls of the building, locking every door so that he could not get back in.

Ken walked to the front of the building to the big glass entry and found that those doors, too, were locked. The people who had forced him out stood on the other side of the glass, watching him struggle. Ken turned, walked away, and climbed into his dark blue Ford F250. Just inside, one of the college kids used the telephone mounted on the wall by the front door to call the police and report Ken as a disturbance. He asked the others to see if they could read Ken’s license plate number. It was while they were peering through the glass, trying to read the plates, that they realized Ken was not driving away but driving toward them. He stopped, reversing to line the truck up in front of the doors. He idled for a moment before hitting the gas.

I, too, will idle here. Instead of ploughing ahead, I’m choosing now, as I so often do, to circle back––to consider again my own propensity for dwelling on endless, alternate timelines and doubts about the nature of reality. I am fascinated by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and his treatment of time. In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Borges brings us face to face with a multiverse, imagining a world in which every decision point creates several simultaneous and alternate realities, an infinity of worlds playing out on separate planes, no single reality more valid than another. Borges wrote these ideas into “The Garden of Forking Paths” in 1941. The physicist Hugh Everett wouldn’t begin to theorize about such things until 1954.

I am similarly consumed by another theory that Borges presents in his essay, “A New Refutation of Time.” In it, Borges plays elaborate thinking games, imagining that linear time is nothing but an illusion. Instead, we lead lives in which we fall through the same moments over and over again, not so much living as reliving. Mormon scripture contains similarly weird and mysterious ideas about the circuity of time, with verses declaring that God’s course is “one eternal round.” And so, I am always drawn in by Borges, giddy to read and reread his refutation, to imagine that rather than walking the straight line of time, we are cradled in loops and folds of it. When I return to Borges’s new refutation, I work to keep up, to follow his meaning. The essay is full of carefully repeated passages, repetitions some scholars have called “aesthetic persuasion.” By repeating himself, Borges models for us the lived repetitions he theorizes about, a version of non-linear time. With each reading, my mind spins. I am drawn in and then pulled up short by the ending—the beauty and sorrow of it when Borges suddenly stops playing games and finishes the essay with this confession: “the world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”

The 911 dispatcher later told police that on the other end of the line, they’d heard glass breaking and people screaming. The few moments Ken Wiley had taken to reverse and straighten out the truck gave the college kids on the other side of the glass enough time to run down the hall and out of the way as Wiley drove his truck through the building, shattering two sets of glass doors then tearing through the foyer before he careened across the gym and came crashing to a halt at a cinderblock wall. I’d just missed it. The newspaper reported that on the stage at the back of the gym, a young couple had been dancing. At their feet, Wiley emerged from his (now totaled) truck, yelling “Satan, Satan, release these people.” The dancing couple ran from the building.

The police came quickly after that, but still I wonder about the few minutes that must have passed between the accident and their arrival. Wiley, apparently, did not try to run. Or if he did, he didn’t get far. The local news report showcased photographs of Wiley being pinned and handcuffed on the grass outside the church. In several photos, policemen carry large rifles as they scout the area. In another, Wiley is hauled away by a policeman who holds him by the back of his collar. Wiley looks not quite at but toward the camera. His brow is furrowed and expression difficult to read—one might expect him to appear angry, but when I search his face, I find only concentration, as if it is with great difficulty that he walks to the squad car.

The article mentions me and my family: “Bishop Dan Bennion told The Tribune that his wife and children were in the church just moments before the incident occurred, and that his little girl had been running around in the exact area the truck passed through.” They go on to quote my father who said he was just happy nobody was hurt. “Bricks and mortar can be replaced,” he’d said. “We’ll have her back together as good as new.”

The state of Wyoming brought ten felony charges against Wiley a few days later. In the following months, Wiley underwent psychiatric evaluation. Those who evaluated him agreed that he’d “experienced a psychotic episode that briefly rendered him incapable of judging the effects of his actions.” None of the records I found offered a more specific diagnosis than that. The paper reported that Wiley had no clear memory of what happened that day. The ten felony charges were later reduced to two misdemeanor counts of reckless endangerment to which Wiley pled no contest. He was sentenced to nine months in prison and charged with $32,877.10 in restitution payments. The court records I received didn’t indicate whether Wiley served the full sentence or made the restitution payments. Already these details are lost in time.

When I encountered Borges’s “Garden of Forking Paths” and his idea of a multiverse, the concept was a comfort. It was, admittedly, an unsettlingly vast idea, but I felt a sense of affection for the other versions of myself that may exist. The ones making better or worse choices. The ones who are dead by now. The ones who will survive me. Like old friends I’ve lost touch with, I take comfort in believing that they’re there, going about their days, living their discrete versions of this life.

Perhaps I wouldn’t need to imagine so many other versions of myself if this one, the self that I happen to be, did not matter so much to me. I recoil at the thought of death or even the nearness of it. I go through my days downplaying and denying my own mortality––choosing to believe that on this day, at least, death will pass over me. I know that someday, it will not. When that day comes, I’ll pray that there might remain other worlds in which it did, in which I remain. It’s a flimsy immortality, but it’s the best one I’ve got.

I have told you what I know Kenneth Wiley did. I have not told you what I do not know that he did. This memory, if you can call it that, is murky at best. When I think back on it, I feel as though I’ve lost my footing in reality, that I am suspended in some realm between fact and fiction. It slips away as I write it, and each time I pull it back, it’s shifted again. I’ve struggled to place this memory in time, but if it happened, it would have been just a few weeks before Ken Wiley drove his truck through the church building. This is what I recall:

Church had just let out and I was leaving the children’s primary class when a girl stopped me. She must have been fourteen. I would have been six. She told me to come with her. “Your mom and dad had to leave early,”she said. “You’re supposed to go home with me.”

“Who are you?” I’m sure I asked. She smiled.

“Don’t you remember me? I babysat you a few weeks ago.”

This was almost certainly a lie, something I know now and would have known then. Having older siblings in middle school and high school meant that my parents never had to call a babysitter to come watch me. But she took my hand and I followed her to the foyer where her parents were. A discussion ensued and they spoke of me as if I were not there.

“Dad told me to get her,” the girl said to her mother, answering a question I didn’t hear or don’t recall.

“What do you mean he told you to get her?” she asked, but instead of looking at her daughter, I seem to recall her turning to her husband, her gaze somehow both confused and confrontational.

“We’re taking her home with us,” he answered easily.

Their voices were low. As more and more classes let out, the foyer filled with people who milled about, chatting. I recall the green of the carpet beneath my feet, the white shoes and lacy socks I wore. Or perhaps I simply remember both of those things as objects from that time.

“Take her home? And what are we going to do with her there?” said the woman.

His wife tried to talk him out of what she seemed to think was a hare-brained idea. Why would you do this? They’ll find her. Everyone will see her leave with us, she said. Not if we’re quick, he said.

Looking back on it, I have the sense that he wanted to take me not because of who I was but because of who my father was. As the bishop, my dad was the most prominent figure in the congregation. While they argued, I slipped away in the crowded foyer then ran to the parking lot, to the black Suburban my mother drove and found the rest of my family waiting there. On the ride home, I called from the back seat to my mother, “Was I supposed to go home with someone else?” She didn’t know what I was talking about.

After forty days at the top of mountain, Moses joined his people again at its base. He found that in his absence and out of fear of the thundering, flaming God they’d witnessed, the Israelites constructed a golden calf to worship instead. Naturally, they’d presumed Moses dead. I wonder if time worked differently for Moses as he spoke with God, if he realized that he’d been gone for over a month.

It’s an intriguing question, but this is the portion of the essay in which I stop philosophizing on time. Weeks ago, I read for the first time about Occam’s Razor, the idea that the simplest explanation is the most likely one. And so, I’ll admit it: the simplest explanation is that I am in the here and now, dragging myself through the straight line of time, that there is only one of me, that this life is all I have. In “Forgiving God,” Clarice Lispector writes of pragmatism, saying “I’m not someone who needs to be reminded that inside everything is blood.” I, on the other hand, am someone who needs to be reminded that inside everything is blood. I need, daily, to be told again that this––the pounding flesh that I am from one moment to the next––is my reality. How depressingly fragile; how hopelessly finite.

In my research for this essay, I considered trying to find Ken Wiley’s daughter but ultimately decided not to—after all, the only real question I have for her seems speculative and strange whenever I think for very long about it: did your dad ever ask you to come get me from class? Was he trying to kidnap me? And if so, why?

How do you work towards a question like that? How would I brace his grieving daughter to confront my own ugly memory? I’m not angry, I’d assure her. I just want to know. I’d never be able to tell her the whole truth—that what I really want is someone who can enable my own fixation on one particular alternate reality: to help me imagine how my life might have been different if I’d gone home with them that afternoon and how that might have frightened or broken or ended me.

What if the memory is real? The man is dead now. He never laid a hand on me—in fact, this slippery half-memory is the only memory I have of him at all. His daughter, certainly, was guilty of nothing—at fourteen, if any of this really happened, she would have been a victim too, not an accomplice. For me, learning that this story is true would bring only the shock of confirmation and a sense of latent terror. I imagine that for his daughter, admitting this happened would bring pain: resurfaced, increased, multiplied.

And what if the memory is not real? Then my question would be wildly inappropriate. There is the distinct possibility that my recollection is a false memory, something crafted by my subconscious. Have I created a scene in which my narrow escape from harm does not come down to fate, chance, or timing––as it did that April day Wiley drove through the church––but from my own instinct for self-preservation, my decision to leave and never look back? To approach his daughter with any of this would reveal my subconscious as an entity that forges memories in which I am a victim and her father a predator. How, then, could I deny that her father—the beloved, smiling man in the obituary who loves the outdoors—to me, embodies evil or something like it?

I didn’t dare open the cabinet. Not after the first time.

This essay was originally published in issue 26.1 of Iron Horse Literary Review.