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 Identity compound has been making a big point of how Jesus ministered to outcasts. "My king ate with publicans and sinners and had a prostitute wash his feet," Millar told TIME last week as he sat in a black Lincoln Continental near Elohim City. The reason for these scriptural lessons may be that Millar has also been "fellowshipping," as he would put it, with disreputable characters, including an errant government informant who may become a wild card in the Oklahoma bombing case.
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 the Oklahoma bombing. Some reports link him to former Elohim resident Andreas Strassmeir, a mysterious German weapons buff with neo-Nazi ties. And up a wooded slope in the settlement, marked by a simple white cross, is the grave of Richard Wayne Snell, a fanatic who allegedly conspired to blow up the Oklahoma City federal building 12 years earlier. He was executed the night of April 19, 1995, about 12 hours after the explosion. Kevin McCarthy, who has admitted his role in the Aryan Republican Army's Midwest gang of bank robbers, stayed in Elohim several times, where he was visited by many of his co-accused.
One of the 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 him in the spring of 1993. "She wrote that she was 23, pure Aryan, considered beautiful and wanted to fight for her race and culture," says Mahon. "So, hey, I sent her some tapes." Mahon says he was soon sexually involved with Howe, and he started taking her out to Elohim City in early 1994. By the late summer, though, their relationship had soured, and Howe filed a restraining order accusing Mahon of threatening to "neutralize" her when she tried to leave the movement.