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Almost 24 hours later, after a 275-mile trip and an $800 cab fare to Las Vegas, Furrow calmly turned himself in to federal authorities and allegedly heralded his shooting spree as "a wake-up call to America to kill Jews." In a year in which mass killings have ravaged every place from high schools to stock-trading floors, Furrow exposed a new area of vulnerability: day-care centers. Furthermore, he refocused attention on America's geography of violent intolerance, one that emerged from the shadows after the attack on Oklahoma City and this time came out of the woods of Washington and Idaho, where a religion of hatred lurks.
Experts who track that shadowy faith warn that anxiety over the approaching millennium, the power of the Internet and a new emphasis on independent action rather than group effort may contribute to a kind of domestic terrorism that is harder to track and impossible to anticipate. At its heart are an unknown cohort of largely disgruntled white males, many of whom, like Furrow, have failed so many times that they've given up trying to succeed in the mainstream of American life. Spurred on by the rhetoric of a handful of racist high priests, they are turning increasingly to violence. Says Danny Coulson, the 31-year FBI veteran who arrested Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh: "They are basically a bunch of losers who have to find someone they hate more than themselves."
That about sums up Furrow. Acquaintances recall the son of a career Air Force enlisted man as a bookish, nerdy, chubby kid with few friends and a first name that drew plenty of scorn. "He would not be called Buford," says neighbor and classmate Merrill, who says Furrow preferred the name Neal. At Timberline High School in Lacey, Wash., she adds, "he was kind of like a shadow. He didn't make an impression." Still, by Merrill's account, Furrow was curious and bright enough to go on to community college after an aborted stint in the Army (he was honorably discharged because of a bad knee). He studied engineering and then landed a series of solid jobs, including a stint at a Northrop Grumman plant near Rosamond, Calif., 40 miles from Granada Hills, where the shooting was to take place.
And then, in the early 1990s, Furrow was drawn into a club that was perfect for someone who had never really fit anywhere else. He joined the Aryan Nations, an organization of neo-Nazi white supremacists founded in the mid-1970s by former aeronautical engineer Richard Butler near Hayden Lake, Idaho. Butler based the group on the religious doctrine of Christian Identity, established in Los Angeles in the late 1940s by an anti-Semitic rabble rouser named Wesley Swift. Christian Identity holds that white Aryans are the authentic lost tribes of Israel, the true descendants of Adam and Eve. Jews of the modern world, on the other hand, are impostors--the spawn of Satan's union with Eve. Thus Jews, in the words of Swift, "must be destroyed." All other non-Anglo-Saxon peoples are beasts, "mud people."