Word: elohim
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Travel six miles up a dirt road in Oklahoma's Ozarks and you will reach a 400-acre, semi-religious encampment called Elohim City. There you will find a vine-covered structure roofed over with polyurethane foam, looking oddly like the cottage in the tale of Hansel and Gretel. This is the Worship House. Within it Elohim's spiritual father, Robert Millar, 71, preaches a mix of Christian Scripture and heterodox tales of Germanic, Celtic and Scandinavian tribes--the true Israelites who will provide God's terrible soldiers at Armageddon. Lately, though, the elfin, white-bearded patriarch of the Christian...
Millar was born in Canada and raised a Mennonite before "heeding a call" to the U.S. in the early 1950s. In 1973 he moved to the Ozarks with 17 followers, including his four sons, and founded his city, giving it the name Elohim, which means God in Hebrew. His religious retreat has its own liturgy, its own calendar (the year begins with the spring equinox) and its own clock (the day begins at noon). The city's guest list over the years has been a veritable Who's Who of the radical right. Tim McVeigh called Elohim two weeks before...
...most tantalizing mysteries of Elohim City, however, is the controversial notion that a young visitor named Carol Howe heard advance word there about the Oklahoma City bombing and warned the Federal Government. Howe, a former honor student at Tulsa Metro Christian Academy, fell in with Tulsa's Skinhead set. Before long she found herself at the side of Dennis Mahon, leader of White Aryan Resistance and the purveyor of Tulsa's Dial-a-Racist phone line. Mahon, 46, who until recently kept his Airstream trailer at Elohim, claims that his first contact with Howe was a letter she sent...
Sources in the Federal Government admit that Howe was a paid ATF informant in Elohim City from August 1994 until March 1995, but they say her 38 surreptitious tapes contained no evidence of a bombing conspiracy in the works. Only when she was debriefed two days after the bombing, government sources say, did she claim that Mahon and Strassmeir had discussed bombing government buildings. Agents familiar with the interview considered her answer speculative; in any case, she offered no additional details...
Government sources say that Howe's tapes didn't even provide evidence for busting Strassmeir or Mahon on weapons charges. In autumn 1994, Howe invited Strassmeir and other Elohim residents to her apartment in Tulsa. She asked them to paint three unarmed grenades orange and green like Halloween pumpkins. They obliged. But when she asked them to help her arm the grenades, they refused, as Mahon says he later did too. "I knew she was bent," he says. "She was the one always talking about killing and bombing," in an attempt, he contends, to entrap others at the compound...