One Doctrine From Murder

James Carson had what seemed like the idealic life in the late 70’s. He was a stay-at home dad to his only child, Jennifer, while his wife, Lynn, worked as an elementary school teacher. Jennifer remembers him as a doting father who would braid her hair, make her lunch and was very kind and loving. James was a part of the hippy culture in the 60’s and met his first wife, Lynn, at college where they were involved in war protests and the counter culture movement of the time. Drugs were a part of that culture and James partook. James also had a dark side, though from his peace-loving hippy ways. He would lose his temper and would say he was going to kill people who angered him. Those around him didn’t take him seriously, assuming he meant it like, “I’m so angry, I could kill that guy.” As the years passed, he became more rageful. In one incident, after saying he was going to kill someone, he actually went and retrieved a gun and headed towards the door like he was on his way to do it. Lynn was able to get the gun away from him and she began to question his dangerous behavior. But things only escalated when James increased his drug use which seemed to egg on his violent behavior. His recreational drug use became more of a controlling force in his life. His thoughts became more convoluted as he started talking about his beliefs that certain politicians needed to be assassinated and the government needed to be violently overthrown. Almost as if he were making a kill list. More concerning were the bizarre stories he began telling like one about how in high school he had killed someone with his mind. Lynn finally got fed up with his outbursts and she began arguing with him. When Jennifer was about 4, the couple began screaming and yelling at each other constantly. The last straw was when a glass was thrown during an argument and cut little Jennifer’s knee. She decided to take her daughter and leave her increasingly violent husband. After their break up, James meets Suzan Barnes, a wealthy divorcee, at a party. Suzan is almost a decade older than James, she’s beautiful and flirty. After meeting at the party at Suzan’s house, he never ends up leaving. The two have an instant connection. Suzan was an eccentric, outgoing woman and James is instantly drawn in. When she met him, she asked, “isn’t your name Michael?” He replies that, no, it’s James. She tells him… no no no – I think your name is Michael. Like the archangel who kicked Satan out of heaven. She said that was his true name from God. Suzan claimed she was psychic and she easily convinced James that in their past lives, they were lovers in ancient Egypt and later in medieval Europe. The couple shared a love of psychedelic drugs and bonded even more over that. The two fall deeper and deeper into drug use and farther and farther away from reality. Lynn, Jennifer’s mom, and James, now Michael share custody of their 4 year old daughter. Jen did have to go stay with her dad and Suzan. On her first visit, she came to what looked like a normal house, but when she went in, it was filled with hundreds of potted plants and trees and very little furniture. She said as a little girl, it felt like she was walking into a dark, haunted forest. She said when she met Suzan, she thought she was a Disney villain. While Michael and Suzan drug out, 4 year old Jennifer is left to fend for herself. If she asked her dad for anything, he was usually passed out so she’d have to try to get things for herself. She had memories of climbing on counters to search cabinets for food and saddest of all, she remembered dialing zero on a rotary phone and asked the operator for “mommy.” Of course, she dreaded her visits to the couple’s drug den. Michael’s obsession with violence began to take on a strange religious tone. Suzan claimed to be able to tell who was a demon and that God was talking to her. It wasn’t long before Jennifer became a target. She had asked her dad to rub her back before bed and Suzan came in, telling Jennifer – this little girl – was a demon who was going to hell. She used her own jagged nails to scratch hard down Jennifer’s back, leaving marks. When little Jennifer got home to her mom, she told her how she wasn’t fed. Lynn took that to mean she didn’t get something she had wanted like a cookie or something. She did tell her mom about some of the weird things the couple was saying while she was there. It was when she told her mom that her back hurt, that Lynn lifted Jennifer’s shirt and saw the claw marks down her back and she believed what her little girl was telling her. Lynn had some really disturbing phone calls and letters from Michael and she became convinced that she and Jennifer were in danger. She was worried that Jennifer would be kidnapped and herself harmed. She went to the police and friends, but she was treated like a bitter ex wife. In one phone call Lynn got, Michael and Suzan said they were going to fly around the world and before they left, they were coming to get Jennifer. They even asked for her birth certificate and said to have Jennifer ready to go because they’d be there in an hour. Lynn packed Jennifer up, but instead of waiting for the creepy couple to arrive, she took off with her daughter in their car and headed to Southern California where she hoped they could disappear into the crowds. Lynn had to leave behind a stable teaching job and a nice house for a life of poverty and when they would visit relatives, Jennifer was instructed never to tell where they lived for fear it would get leaked back to her dangerous father. Michael and Suzan had gone on an overseas trip and when they got back to the states, he tried to make contact with his daughter. Since he didn’t know where they were living, he sent the letters to relatives, hoping they would reach her through them. But Michael hasn’t gotten better than he had been, he’s actually escalated the furious and bizarre thoughts. He and Suzan changed their last name to Bear and transformed themselves into new people. They decide they’re muslim, seemingly without following anything having to do with the Islamic faith and they continue their drug-fueled adventures. They felt they were on a religious quest and combined bits of Islam with mysticism, basically trying to make up their own theology. They loved the idea of a religious war – of Jihad- and they became vegetarians and radical environmentalists. They decided to make their money by growing and selling weed. They hitchhike up and down the pacific coast looking for people like themselves. In 1980, then end up in San Francisco in the Haight Ashbury area. They blend right in with the 60’s hippy vibe that persisted at the time in that area. They soon make a friend, 23 year old Karen Barnes. Karen grew up in Georgia where she had been an extra in the movie, smokie and the bandit. She had met Bert Reynolds on set and he told her he thought she had what it took to make it as an actress. On that advice, she had moved out to LA where she became Jane Fonda’s housekeeper. She was a bohemian, artistic woman and she decided to move up to San Francisco, feeling she’d fit in better there. Suzan and Michael were there, preaching their weird-ass religion, the Bears decided Karen was their acolyte. She was kind of drawn in under them because they too liked talking about art and philosophy. Karen’s friends actually warned her to stay away from these weirdos, but she seemed to get sucked into their bizarre doctrine. She rented an apartment with money from her social security checks and the trio move in. Michael started to become attracted to young Karen, making Suzan increasingly jealous. Suzan believes because of her self proclaimed psychic energy, she herself is vulnerable to witches. She began to believe that Karen is a devious and cunning witch. Karen, meanwhile, began to become troubled by the beyond eccentric behavior of the Bears and she started telling friends about it and that she was becoming frightened. Suzan felt like her psychic and yogic powers were being drained and that Karen, the witch, must be the cause. Michael, feeling it his duty to protect his wife, agreed to kill Karen. On March 6th, the Bears took over Karen in the kitchen. Michael grabbed a frying pan, bashes Karen over the head with it and then hesitated, kind of freezing. Suzan took over, grabbing a paring knife and started stabbing Karen. Michael snaps out of his haze and takes the knife from his wife, but instead of stopping the attack, he carries on the stabbing. Karen had 13 stab wounds to the face and throat in total. Michael and Suzan left Karen where she had fallen and died. Not in the least remorseful, in fact, convinced they’d rid the world of an evil witch, the couple left San Francisco to continue their holy quest. Meanwhile, Jen and her mother continue to move around, staying on couches. Lynn is afraid to get a job where she’d have to present her social security card which could be tracked. So she took low-paying jobs, working sometimes 3 different jobs at a time. She was willing to do anything to keep her daughter safe, but it wasn’t without struggles. Possibly the hardest part of the ordeal was that Lynn was certain she and her daughter were in danger but no one believed her. It would be maddening. Lynn had instincts about the couple that were spot on. Had people listened, they could have prevented more of the horrors to come. BREAK On March 7, 1981, police found Karen Barnes’s body. Police interviewed people in the Haight Ashbury community in San Francisco and they found out that Karen had been living with a couple named Michael and Suzan Bear. With nothing else to go on other than these two people with fake names, who disappeared after the murder, police were left to wait for more leads. Michael and Suzan spent the next year traveling up and down the pacific coast highway up to Oregon and back. In May of 1982, the couple gets work at a pot farm in Humbolt County, in Northern California. Michael does security and he carries a gun with him to protect the farm The couple’s weird behavior scares others on the farm. They were doing weird self defense drills and constantly talking about violence and jihad. Clark Stevens, one of the other workers at the farm didn’t get along well with the Bears. What started out as a disagreement on how to properly manicure pot plants, became a full-blown argument. Clark himself wasn’t one to let others push him around and was a bit abrasive. Suzan soon decides he must be a witch and should be eliminated. One day, while alone at the farm with Clark, Michael shot Clark Stevens in the head, killing him. They take his body out to a pot field, cover it in gas and light it on fire. Then they buried the charred remains under a pile of manure and fled. They were out of money with nowhere to go, they began hitchhiking in nearby Trinity County. They saw a line of police cars racing towards them and thought the cops must be chasing them. Actually, the cops were searching for a missing hiker when they spot these two crazy looking people, running off screaming. Michael and Suzan drop their backpacks and run off into the woods. Had they acted normal, the police probably would have raced right past them, but because of their weird behavior, they stopped to check out the backpacks the couple had left behind. In the packs, they found a gun, fake id’s, and a whacked-out manifesto called a cry for war. Michael wrote the manifesto which called for bombings and political assassinations. It was gibberish and tried to lay out justification for killing people. There were detailed plans to kill witches and they had a list of witches like Johnny Carson, the California governor and Ronald Regan. Two weeks after the shooting of Clark, police were called to the farm. Workers had seen a farm dog running around with what they thought was a ball, but when they were able to look at it, it was actually a human skull. Police searched the area and were able to dig up the remains of Clark Stevens. Workers told them about the Bears who had taken off right around the time Clark had gone missing. But, because the names Michael and Suzan Bear weren’t legal names, a search for them lead nowhere. When Michael and Suzan ran off, they got separated. Apparently, they had a safe house in LA planned out were they to get separated, so, attempting to make it down to LA, Michael is hitchhiking along the road. A passerby recognized him as a guy who had also worked on the same pot farm. The driver knew about the murder and he went and called them, telling them he’d seen the man they were searching for. Unfortunately, a pretty new police officer was dispatched to check him out and he mistook Michael for a different suspect. He is taken in, but not for the crime he actually committed. Michael actually had a gun when he was arrested, but the officer didn’t spot it and he was able to hide it in the back of the police car. At the station, he uses the fake name of Richard Orrata that was on the fake ID he’d left in the backpack that the police had found. He’s polite and seems upstanding somehow and actually convinces police that he hasn’t done anything wrong. Police take a photo of him at the station to show to the victim of the other crime he’d been wrongly picked up for. The victim of course said that wasn’t the guy, so he’s set free. Police do find the gun in the back of the police car, but Michael was already long gone and had reunited with his crazy ass wife, Suzan. Because he used the name found on the ID in the backpack, the police realize this is the guy they’d been searching for for the killing of Clark. They hand over the manifesto to the Trinity county authorities and to the feds. When they had been questioning Michael, he had given police the name of suzan’s ex husband. This turned out to be a fantastic lead. They tracked down the ex-husband in Scottsdale, Arizona and he gives them Suzan’s real last name and Michael’s real name of James Carson. In 1982, men in black showed up at Lynn and Jennifer’s door. These guys were the secret service, dispatched because of the threat against President Regan in Michael’s manifesto. Lynn instantly asked, “how did you find us?” And they just brushed the question aside, more interested in her ex-husband. Lynn was questioned and authorities are now aware, finally, of how dangerous the couple is. In 1983, the couple are still on the road hitch hiking when a man named John Hellyer stopped to give them a ride. The couple had hitchhiked at this point maybe 2 or 300 miles and they were cold and exhausted. At some point in the ride in John Hellyer’s truck, Suzan accused him of touching her in a sexual manner. Suzan turns to Michael and tells him she can tell the driver is a powerful witch. A physical altercation breaks out in the truck and John Hellyer pulls out a gun. Michael got the gun away from John and pointed it at John’s head with Suzan yelling to shoot him. John stops the truck and the fight continues outside of the vehicle. Michael overpowers john and ends up shooting him in the head in plain view of passing cars. A police chase ensued. Eventually they crashed into a ditch and when police caught up with them, Suzan turned to them, asking how impressive her driving had been. News of the couple’s arrest reached the now 9 year old Jennifer. She was of course terrorized by the thoughts of what her father had done. After his arrest, Michael was disappointed in the lack of attention his story was getting so he wrote the San Francisco Chronicle. He wrote, how many people do we need to kill to get attention? They want the opportunity to share their bizarre philosophy on the witches they believed they killed. They agreed to tell the police all they wanted to know as long as the press was there. So, they held a kind of press conference. They spend 5 hours rambling about their weirdo religion and bragging about how they rid the world of these witches. They claimed to be vegetarian muslim warriors. They confessed to all 3 murders, happily on tv. Police suspected them of more murders, and when walking up to the mic, Suzan could be heard telling Michael, “remember, we’re only talking about the ones in California.” According to Richard D. Reynolds, who wrote a book about the case, the Carsons were suspects in nearly a dozen other deaths in the U.S. and Europe. They’re dubbed the San Francisco Witch killers and put on trial in 1984. It was a terrible circus style of trial. Their expert defendants were witches and warlocks and during the trial, the couple made out at the defense table. They’re unsurprisingly found guilty of all 3 murders and receive 75 years to life. Michael wrote Jennifer from prison. She was horrified, feeling like she’s getting communication from a boogeyman and serial killer. Eventually, to try to get closure, she decided to visit her father and say goodbye for good. She thought there’d be glass between them, but instead walked into a room like a lunchroom and Michael came up and hugged her. He assumed she came to establish a relationship with him. When he realized she had come to cut ties, he sent mean, rageful letters which frightened her even more. In 2014, everyone assumed they’d be serving 75 years to life, but because of prison overcrowding, Michael and Suzan were allowed parole hearings. They now will be eligible for parole every 5 years. Jennifer has made it her mission to make sure they never get paroled. Book by Reynolds, Richard D.. Cry for War, the Story of Suzan and Michael Carson, Wikipedia, AZcentral.com, dailybeast, hellhorror.com,filmdaily.co, ranker.com, Error! Filename not specified. I Lived With A Killer | Season 1 | Episode 19 | The San Francisco Witch Killers