The mystery of Alvin Lee King
To dramatize his sermon against Communism last year, Minister Jim Powell had several uniformed men rush into the First Baptist Church in Daingerfield, Texas, and fire blank cartridges. Thus most of the 350 worshipers in the church last week thought it was just another example of play-acting when Alvin Lee King III, 46, burst in as the congregation was singing More About Jesus. King was wearing Army fatigues, a flak jacket and helmet, and carrying an arsenal: an AR-15 rifle with a bayonet, an M-1 rifle, a pearl-handled .22-cal. pistol and a .38-cal. pistol. Slung over his shoulder was a pack stuffed with 250 rounds of ammunition.
"This is war!" he shouted as he opened fire with the AR-15. He killed five people, including a seven-year-old girl, and wounded eleven before fleeing to a nearby fire station. There he critically wounded himself with a shot in the forehead from the .22-cal. pistol. When policemen went to his isolated farmhouse eight miles from Daingerfield (pop. 2,800), they discovered his wife Gretchen bound to a kitchen chair with rope and telephone cord. On a table was a note: "Jeremiah says the King is the King of Kings." In the basement, the officers found a letter from the Soviet embassy in Washington informing King that he could not become a Soviet citizen, plus records of about $300 deposited this spring in a Swiss bank and passports for King and his wife. Said Deputy Sheriff Emit Kennedy: "He definitely had something planned."
But what? No one could say. And, even more puzzling to the people of the northeast Texas farm town was Alvin Lee King himself. Raised in Corpus Christi by parents who owned a liquor store, pawnshop and jukebox leasing company, King came to Daingerfield in 1966 with Wife Gretchen, Daughter Cynthia and Son Alvin Lee King IV to teach high school math. That same year, while King was visiting his parents in Corpus Christi, he was examining a 12-gauge shotgun when it somehow discharged, killing his father. The coroner ruled the death accidental.
At Daingerfield High School, King was considered brilliant but an oddball. He refused to sign an oath, required of all local teachers, acknowledging God. His teaching methods were somewhat bizarre. For instance, he let students whose marks fell between Bs and Cs cut a deck of cards to determine their final grade. In 1972 he quit rather than teach retarded students, then became a truck driver.
Five years later, his house burned down under mysterious circumstances, and King moved his family to the 100-acre farm, where he raised peas and cucumbers, collected guns and practiced judo. As far as most people in Daingerfield were concerned, the Kings had dropped from sight until Cynthia, 21, showed up at the police station last October and complained that for ten years her father had been forcing her to have sex with him. She told the officers that she had finally decided to file charges of incest against him at the urging of a friend, Stanley Sinclair, 20, son of a Methodist minister. The following month Sinclair was stabbed to death in Houston. King, who was scheduled to go on trial for incest last week, asked several townspeople who happened to be members of the First Baptist Church to testify as character witnesses; all refused.